Botts was usually at war with his boss about his goals, his methods and his expense reports, and managed to get himself fired and hired many times. He was described as “an indomitable (though sometimes deluded) fellow American well acquainted with the sweet uses of adversity and adept at the fine art of plucking victory from the jaws of defeat.” The Botts stories are stories of the American dream; of hard work, of salesmanship, good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity (In one story he gets across a flooded river with heavy equipment by digging a new channel for the river behind the equipment and closing the old channel, thus getting across the river without having moved the equipment) and making good starting from nothing.