Free Republic

When I met him he was 63. He had cerebral palsy and spoke and walked with great difficulty. When he was a young man, the state considered him unemployable and suggested he collect disability payments. He refused. For more than 40 years he earned a living selling Watkins products on routes that took him through Portland's westside neighborhoods. At night, he would return to his small house. Hunched over an old typewriter and with a twisted hand, he slowly banged out orders for everything he'd sold that day. For several years he was Watkins' top retail salesman in all of...

Three days after a made-for-TV movie catapulted him to national fame, Portland's best-known door-to-door salesman, Bill Porter, has found himself knocking on doors at the rate of 80 per second. A nice pace for a 69-year-old man with cerebral palsy who overcame the label "unemployable" to become a top-grossing salesman. This week, following Sunday's premiere of the TV movie "Door to Door," Porter is getting 80 hits a second on his Web site, where he now sells Watkins household products. That's not all. The movie, starring Academy Award nominee William H. Macy as Porter, drew U.S. television's biggest audiences Sunday...