Everything I discussed in
the preceding segment took place in the context of (and was financed by) my job
with The United States Time Corporation. I was manager of accounting operations at U.S. Time’s Abilene
plant for just over six years. The job
was demanding, but generally enjoyable, because (1) Bob Speer, my assistant, and the accounting clerks who worked
in my department were proficient and fun to work with and (2) interdepartmental
relations were good. Henry Orsini, the plant manager, set a good tone for the whole
operation.
Bob Speer was an easy-going, good-natured “partner” in management of our
department, and was a major factor in the ability of our office to work hard
and have fun at the same time. He was a
graduate of Abilene Christian College, was an active member of the Church of
Christ, and willing to see (or make) humor in nearly any situation. For instance, he took no offense at the
term, “Campbellite,” a somewhat incorrect
appellation many Church of Christ members considered pejorative, and we often
used the expression banteringly until a clerk of Syrian extraction asked why we
were talking about “camel riders;” Bob and I roared with laughter, and from
that day on his church was known between us as Camel Riders.
Margaret
(our Syrian girl) provided us with another laugh soon after I returned from a
trip to our Puerto Rican plant in 1959.
I said something about having seen “The Ten Commandments” one
evening while I was away. Margaret
asked if I had enjoyed the movie. I
told her I didn’t enjoy it as much as the book, whereupon she asked, “Oh, was
there a book?” Bob and I again couldn’t
contain our mirth.
Bob and I, as monthly salaried employees, were theoretically scheduled
to work 8:00 AM until 5:30 PM Mondays through Fridays, plus Saturday mornings; reality,
however, often demanded far more hours:
I can’t remember the names of all the clerks who worked with Bob and me
on payroll and accounting tasks, but some of the best were Betty Pitcock, Doris
Stewart, Frankie Curtis, Sherry Kinney, Avenell Holloway, Margaret Shaheen, and
the Gibson sisters (Frances Culpepper and Janice Gibbs). (Janice Gibson married Robert Gibbs, a
supervisor in the movement assembly department, while she worked in my
department; her name change indicates she lost a “son” by marrying, but such
was not the case – she gained a husband.)
Betty Pitcock was in my department all of my six years in Abilene
(except for a brief maternity leave) and, at one time or another, worked at all
our activities; she and Frances Culpepper, both of whom had worked at the plant
almost since its inception, knew all its operations and, between them, all our
accounting operations, so were quite valuable people to have on staff.
◊◊◊
Early in 1959 I was asked (by corporate management) to set up cost accounting systems for a new TIMEX facility at Bayamòn, Puerto Rico. Jim Barrett (whom I had replaced in Abilene because he was slated to assume responsibility for financial operations of the Puerto Rican facility) had managed to get himself terminated before that plant opened. Lennie Goodin, a home office accountant asked for the job, but changed his mind soon after arriving in Bayamòn, and returned to Connecticut after only a month. Jim Webb, TIMEX of Canada controller, was temporarily assigned to Puerto Rico after Lennie left, and had set up payroll and general accounting systems by the time I arrived in mid-February for the first of four three-week stays, but had done noting toward setting up systems for cost and overhead accounting.
A permanent controller was the greatest need when I arrived in February – someone who could, after learning the ropes, take over management of the plant’s financial operations. Les Brooks, the corporate vice-president of finance, asked me if I would take the job, but I told him I feared the cultural change would require too many adjustments by my family, and I thought a qualified native of the island would be more desirable. He approved hiring Juan Rodriguez, a young man whom I had located. Juan joined us, got his feet wet, then spent a couple of weeks at Abilene and the Middlebury corporate offices, becoming familiar with TIMEX ways; I kept things going in Puerto Rico while he traveled.
I went back to Abilene for one week between my first and second trips, then for another week between the second and third. I was home for a few months after the third visit, then returned in late September for three weeks, to help the new financial staff work through its first annual budget.
Most of the Puerto Rican folks
with whom I worked were pleasant people, especially those who worked for
me. Juan and the girls in the payroll
and accounting operations couldn’t have been nicer. Therefore, my memories of events during the four trips are mostly
good:
·
I enjoyed the mild climate. I swam in the Atlantic Ocean, at Luquillo Beach, in March – with
Juan Rodrigues and his family. (The
temperature had been two degrees below zero in Abilene the Sunday before I left
home the previous month, so I noticed the contrast.)
·
One day while sitting at a worktable across from Gladys, the
payroll clerk, I frowned about some little problem I faced. Gladys noticed and said, “Meester Meeler, I
don’t like your face.” I replied, “Neither do I, but it was the one
I was born with, so I have to live with it.”
She protested, “That’s not what I meant,” but we all had a good laugh.
·
The company rented a sixth-floor unit in the Darlington
apartment hotel near downtown San Juan, for use of “visiting firemen.” I stayed there during one of my four visits,
with Bill Martinelli and Tony Iacabelli.
The apartment had a small kitchen, a bath, a bedroom with twin beds, and
a living room with a hide-a-bed couch.
Bill and I slept in the bedroom’s twin beds; Tony, who had to leave
early each morning, took the hide-a-bed, to avoid disturbing Bill and me as he
got ready for work. I don’t recall
having been disturbed by Tony, but a mild earthquake one night caused our twin beds to roll around the bedroom,
whereupon Bill yelled, “Tony, stop shaking the bed!” thinking Tony was having a
little early-morning fun at his expense.
[Bill could, and did, sleep nearly anywhere. He would sit down, then be asleep within a few minutes – unaware
of conversations, or anything else, going on around him. Tony swore that Bill could sleep while
walking, but I never saw that happen during our strolls around town.]
·
Henry Rivera, hired to manage the
Production Control department, asked me to help him set up the “block
reporting” procedure, a manual system (in those pre-computer days) for tracking
the flow of work through watch assembly processes. The system for Bayamòn was to be similar to the one used in
Abilene, so I agreed to help; we decided to work evenings, to avoid
interruptions. Henry brought a machete with him when we returned each evening; when I queried him about
his reason for bringing the big blade, he said it was for protection from
anyone who might try to mug us; there were no security forces in the isolated
industrial area. Fortunately, we were
never in danger, insofar as I knew.
[Henry,
now retired, lives in New Port Richey, on Florida’s Gulf coast. We stay in contact via e-mail, exchanging
items of interest through cyberspace.]
Although Henry and I encountered no dangers during our nocturnal visits
to the plant, I experienced one potentially disastrous situation – at the end
of a flight from Miami to San Juan, where heavy rain was falling. The pilot tried twice, in zero visibility,
to land our DC-6 from the south, and was waved off both times. On the second
pull-up all the dishes from our in-flight meal tumbled out of the galley and
skittered down the aisle, whereupon the crew and control tower decided to
change our approach; we flew out over the ocean, turned and came back downwind
through clearer weather, and landed easily, touching ground before moving back
into rain and fog.
◊◊◊
Having succeeded, or at least not failed, in the Puerto Rican
assignment, I drew another “foreign” assignment in January, 1961 when home
office people asked me to set up a factory overhead accounting system at TIMEX
of Canada in Toronto, modeling it after the
system used in our U.S. plants. Having
met Jim Webb, the Toronto controller,
while working in Puerto Rico nearly two years earlier, I knew him to be a nice
fellow, so anticipated few difficulties; it was a generally successful trip,
but different in most respects from my Puerto Rican trips:
·
The weather turned nasty as I made my way northward; snow
was falling when my flight from Dallas to Chicago landed shortly before
noon. The snowstorm worsened quickly
and airlines began routing their O’Hare-bound flights to airports in other
cities and canceling all outbound flights.
Stranded passengers sought refuge in local hotels, to wait out the
storm. I was scheduled to take an Air
Canada turnaround flight out of Chicago (Toronto – Chicago – Toronto);
the Toronto to Chicago flight was due at O’Hare at about 2:30 PM. When I checked with Air Canada’s desk, I was
told that if the plane could be landed in Chicago, their pilot would land it,
so I didn’t join the rush to the hotels.
The plane was allowed to land, arriving passengers disembarked, and
passengers bound for Toronto boarded for its return flight, only to be left
sitting for at least an hour in an icy cabin, with its door open to the winter
weather while maintenance crews de-iced the wings. The ground crew finally finished its work and closed the door,
the pilot fired up the Viscount’s propjet engines, and we taxied toward the
almost indistinguishable runway. We
took off and flew through murky skies for about 45 minutes, during which the
cabin remained frigid. When we finally
broke out of clouds into late afternoon sun, the cabin started warming, and
grew comfortable by the time we landed at Toronto. All available power must have been used to melt ice from the
wings as we climbed through the clouds.
·
Early-morning temperatures fell as low as twelve degrees
below zero during the week I was in Toronto.
Fortunately, I had purchased a well-insulated coat before leaving
Abilene, so wasn’t too uncomfortable.
Jim Webb suggested I buy a pair of “toe rubbers” to keep the icy slush off
my feet; I still have those miniature overshoes, and use them when I have
to get out in our infrequent snows down south.
·
I had never seen or eaten pizza before going to Toronto, so
Jim and John Reid-Weston, the plant manager, took me
to a pizza parlor for a lunchtime treat.
The pizza was great, as were my hosts.
(Jim and John were both neat guys.
Jim was a Canadian who had lived around Toronto all his life. John was Polish; he had emigrated to England
in his youth, had served in the Royal Air Force during World War II, then
emigrated from England to Canada after the war, but had never lost his Polish
accent, in spite of all the time spent with English-speaking people; he sounded
like the Katzenjammer Kids of long-ago comic strips. I don’t know how he got the British sounding name of
Reid-Weston.)
·
After finishing my work in Toronto I had to go by the
corporate offices in Connecticut and show the results of the week’s
efforts. I carried copies of the
overhead analyses I had prepared, and reported to Les Brooks (the vice-president of finance), who, in reviewing those analyses,
perceived some excesses, and acted as if I were responsible for the activities
that had generated them. As the old
saying goes, “The messenger bearing the bad news gets shot.”
◊◊◊
I was summoned to Middlebury corporate offices in June, 1962, to work
several weeks with Dick Longo in Defense Costing (i.e., for military gyros and
fuses). I took Arlette and the kids
with me, inasmuch as the school-year had ended; we left Abilene on a Thursday
afternoon, spent that night at Miami, Oklahoma, Friday night near South Bend,
Indiana, Saturday night at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and reached Connecticut
early Sunday afternoon.
We hadn’t
made lodging arrangements for our time in Connecticut, so stayed at a motel in
Cheshire the first night. The next day,
however, Dick Longo found a perfect place for our family to stay, at a cottage
on Lake Hitchcock, east of Waterbury off the
Meriden Road. The kids enjoyed the
lake, where all three learned to swim.
The cottage was owned by Florence and Arthur Legere, a nice middle-aged couple
who spent their summer months in a second cottage on the property. Mr. Legere enjoyed sitting in a broad-armed
wooden chair at lakeside, and four-year-old Marty often sat on the arm of that chair, stroking his totally bald
head; that, of course, embarrassed Arlette, but Mr. Legere assured her he
didn’t mind.
Although I was unable to see any reason for my being assigned to the
defense costing operation (inasmuch as it was totally different from civilian
costing), working with Dick Longo and his staff was pleasant; he was a likeable
guy whom I had known since his days with Jim Ryan in Civilian Cost Accounting
(i.e., for watches/cameras/timers).
Jim Ryan had a wry wit; had Murphy not been
around, we might have had Ryan’s Law (e.g., “They told me to cheer up – things could be worse; so I cheered up, and
sure enough, things got worse.”)
After about six weeks I learned the real reason I had been summoned to
Middlebury. Les Brooks (the financial vice-president) told me he had intended to ask me
to be manager of Civilian Cost Accounting, but that plans had changed because
the former manager (Sal Mute, who had taken a position at our plant in
Pforzheim, Germany) decided he wanted to return to his old job, so it was no
longer open. I told Les I was glad I
didn’t have to make a decision about moving, and returned to Abilene.
The weeks
away from Abilene were enjoyable. We
viewed sights previously unseen as we traveled, the kids enjoyed Hitchcock Lake,
we visited New York twice, and saw Niagara Falls, Washington, D.C., and Twila’s
family in Georgia on our return trip.
◊◊◊
My final assignment away
from Abilene presaged a transfer to Little Rock. I was
asked, during the summer of 1963, to work with a group planning the financial
aspects of an impending centralization of TIMEX customer service
operations. At that time we had
customer service facilities in conjunction with Arkansas, Connecticut and Texas
manufacturing operations; all three were to be closed and replaced by a new,
separate facility in Little Rock.
The planning group spent nearly three weeks at the job, then, as we
completed our task, I was asked to visit with Les Brooks before I returned to Abilene.
I waited from Wednesday afternoon until Friday before I could get in to
see him, for he had just returned from a trip overseas, and, I assume, was
tying up loose ends and getting caught up with his mail. His purpose in requesting me to stay around
was to offer me the position of controller at the new facility, which was
scheduled to open in January, 1964.
Ken
Margelot, chairman of the planning group, had asked me some time earlier
whether I would be interested in moving to the new plant, and I told him the
conditions under which I would accept a transfer from Abilene. He apparently relayed that information to
Mr. Brooks, for the offer I received met the conditions I had stated.
I agreed to the proposed transfer, and returned to Abilene to spend
most of the rest of 1963 planning for accounting operations at the new facility
and, in consultation with Frank Reilly, its plant-manager-in-waiting, preparing
a customer repair and service budget package for 1964.
I spent three September/October weeks in Little Rock, during which I
(1) interviewed and hired an assistant (George Tribble) and (2)
helped plan new-plant activities that had to be coordinated with those of the
older plant; employees of both facilities would be in the same labor bargaining
units and eligible for interplant transfers, thus personnel and payroll
procedures had to be closely coordinated between old and new facilities.
George Tribble came to work December 1, 1963.
He spent three weeks in Abilene, familiarizing himself with (1)
preliminary work I had done (e.g., setting up the 1964 budget for the new
facility), (2) operations of the Abilene plant, and (3) TIMEX ways in
general. He returned to Little Rock
before Christmas, to spend the rest of December learning about specific aspects
of then-current Little Rock operations with which our systems at the new plant
would have to be compatible.
I stayed in Abilene through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. I had done as much preparatory work for my
upcoming job as was possible before reaching Little Rock, so I helped with
Abilene tasks, such as working with outside auditors doing their year-end
review; I stayed at the plant with the auditors until after midnight on
December 31, 1963, thus enabling them to complete their work and return to
their Dallas homes for the New Year’s holiday.
Seeing them off ended my duties in Abilene.
My last six months in Abilene had been eventful. I spent most of that time planning for the
new customer service facility; that planning required three-week trips to
Middlebury and Little Rock. Our
impending move from Abilene involved arrangements with a realtor, and
making/keeping our house ready for visits by prospective buyers. Adding to our personal stress was the general
trauma associated with the November 22nd assassination of President
John F. Kennedy.
My last day as an Abilene resident was January 1, 1964. I watched the Longhorns beat Navy in the Cotton Bowl, thereby sealing their ranking as the number one college football team in the nation, then packed my bags for a trip to Little Rock, where I’d begin (1) work at a new facility and (2) five long months away from my family.