None of the three Wilcox/Pattillo partners was a native Texan; the
senior partner, Mr. Frank Wilcox, was a native Oklahoman,
Pat Pattillo was an Arkansan, and Fred Pearson came from Nebraska. All
three were nice men to work for and with.
Wilcox, Pattillo & Company offices occupied about half of
one floor (the 8th, as I remember) of the Liberty Building in
downtown Waco. Each partner had a
private office, the three non-partner CPAs were stuffed in a single office, and
support staff, duplicating equipment, and client files occupied remaining rooms
of the suite. My space was half of a
large 6’ x 6’ double desk which once belonged to the late Pat Neff, who was (1) Mr. Wilcox’s
father-in-law, (2) former president of Baylor University and (3) ex-governor of
Texas.
The experience I gained working for a small CPA firm was both broad and
valuable, but wasn’t the kind I wanted to repeat year after year. Auditing tended to be boring, and preparing
for/doing tax-related work was time-consuming.
(The partners and CPA staff members met at six o’clock each Saturday
morning during tax season to study the tax code and Internal Revenue Service
regulations, using the Prentice-Hall Tax Service as our guide; the six of us
rotated leadership of the Saturday sessions.
We broke up in midmorning each Saturday, then spent the rest of the day
preparing tax returns. Night work was
also often required at the height of tax season.)
Several memories (other than those from the workaday world) come to
mind as I think about our time in Waco:
·
We purchased a new two-bedroom house (3804 Belmont Drive, at the southwest end of
town), built by Harry Kidwell (owner of the truck used in moving our belongings
from Austin), for $8,250. I got a
30-year VA loan, with payments of $54 per month.
·
Arlette and I joined Third Street Baptist Church when we first arrived in Waco, because its pastor was Doyle Darwin, a friend who started
college with me in 1943 (his wife, the former Patsy May, attended HPC in the
late ‘40s). We attended Third Street
until I was asked to lead the music at a new church (Mount Olivet) near our house; I
enjoyed the job, but at least one man in the congregation was better qualified
than I, so I think the pastor (Joe Dossey) probably erred in asking that I
serve as music director.
·
After one Sunday’s evening worship activities at Mount
Olivet, most of the congregation stood in small groups outside the building,
chatting. The group of which I was a
part included a young wife and mother who was upset over recent court decisions
regarding racial integration of public schools (e.g., Brown versus Board of
Education, decided May 17, 1954 in the United States Supreme Court); she didn’t
want her children to attend integrated schools, nor did she want any form of a
racially mixed society. I asked her
what she was going to do if, when she reached heaven, the Lord assigned a black
person to live next door to her – to which she replied, “If black people are
going to be there, I don’t want to go,” eliciting my counter-reply, “Well
everyone’s going to be charcoal-colored at the other place.”
·
One weekday evening several men from our church attended a
revival service at a small rural church some miles outside Waco. We wore suits and ties, our normal
churchgoing attire, but the men of the church we visited wore overalls, with belts around their
waists to “dress them up.” I hadn’t
seen overalls worn to church since my childhood days in Acton.
·
I taught in
Baylor University’s evening college.
I didn’t want the task, having had no pedagogical training, but (1) the
Wilcox/Pattillo partners wanted me to do it (presumably because of the status
accruing to the firm) and (2) I was the only CPA in Waco with an advanced
degree who wasn’t already teaching, so was needed badly. I succumbed to the pressures and taught
Intermediate Accounting and Cost Accounting (in different terms, not
simultaneously). As I remember, I
taught two evenings per week, three hours per evening; I also spent many
evening hours preparing for classes and grading papers.
·
I ate lunch
fairly regularly with Bill English, at a cafeteria whose barbecued polish
sausage he really liked, and he ate at our house from time to time.
My salary went from $325 to
$400 monthly, the top of the scale for staff accountants, during the nineteen
months I worked for Wilcox/Pattillo. I
began considering another job search after reaching the $400/month maximum,
but, before I did anything on my own, I learned (through John Peterson, the man whom I’d replaced on Baylor’s staff of
evening school instructors) about an opening in the Internal Audit group at
Fort Worth’s Convair division of
General Dynamics Corporation. Mr. W.E.
Guinn, manager of Internal Auditing at Convair-Fort Worth, came to Waco to
interview me, then called a day or two later offering me a position on his
staff at $500 per month. I accepted the
offer, we listed our house with a real estate agency, and I went to work for
Convair on October 1, 1955. Arlette and
the girls stayed in Waco and I lived in a Fort Worth motel for a couple of
weeks while (1) our house was on the market and (2) we found a place to move
into.
Arlette and I thought we would prefer living in a nearby town, rather
than in Fort Worth itself, but found nothing suitable before our Waco house was
sold, so rented a house at 6540 Ascol Drive, then engaged movers to
transport our belongings from Waco to Fort Worth.
Our new residence was one of several hundred adjacent to Carswell Air
Force Base built/managed by Bucco Homes, Inc. and rented to
either Carswell personnel or Convair employees. With nothing
but a tall chainlink fence between our house and a B-36 maintenance hangar, we
could hear big engines droning day and night.
Bucco
Homes tenants were mostly couples with young children, several of which
congregated regularly at Vicky’s swing set in our back yard. One afternoon she and another little girl got
the two swings going too vigorously in the same direction at the same time,
causing the set to capsize (even though I had buried its supporting legs
several inches in the ground and pegged them down). The top crossbar landed across Vicky’s back, but, fortunately,
didn’t hurt her.
The Bucco Homes area was just west of River Oaks, so we attended River Oaks
Baptist Church, where Archie Fray, a student at
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, was minister of music. We became friends with Archie and Judy; both
were from Arkansas, so we had many good-natured arguments about the relative
merits of our native states.
Writing
about Archie and music reminds me that residing in Fort Worth offered an opportunity
for musical pleasures Arlette and I had never before enjoyed – a “Battle of
Songs,” featuring
southern gospel music groups, presented the second Saturday night of each month
at Will Rogers Auditorium. We attended
most concerts during the two years we lived in Fort Worth and Weatherford (and
several after moving to Abilene). The
price of admission was two dollars, which wasn’t bad for entertainment that
started at seven o’clock in the evening and lasted until after midnight.
The
Blackwood Brothers and Statesmen quartets were featured every other month; we
seldom missed their performances. But I
also enjoyed the “off” months, when people such as former Louisiana governor
Jimmie Davis, the Florida Boys, the LeFevres, Smiling Joe Roper and the Melody
Boys of Little Rock, the Blue Ridge Quartet, the Harvesters, the Stamps
Quartet, the Chuck Wagon Gang, the Plainsmen, the Rebels, the Speer Family, or
the Imperials were featured.
Most
groups used a piano for accompaniment; others (e.g., the Chuck Wagon Gang) used
a guitar. I remember none with more
than one accompanying instrument, but singers often used their voices to
imitate instruments (trombones/ trumpets/bass guitars). [Although I enjoy the larger instrumental
groups that accompany 21st century performances, and wouldn’t
advocate a return to the days of a lone piano on stage with vocalists, I also
liked those performances when pianists did it all; some of them could get more
out of a piano than I would have believed possible.]
Our
kids sometimes went to Battles of Songs with us, but we often took them to
Tolar, because they liked being with Ruth and Virgil, and R & V seemed to
enjoy having them. We usually invited
Sherry (my cousin, Ruth’s and Virgil’s daughter) to
accompany us, and she often went along.
Because
the “Battles of Songs” occurred on Saturday nights, we could nap on Sunday
afternoons to catch up on lost sleep.
[After moving to Abilene, we sometimes drove back home after the
concerts, so had only an hour or so of sleep before getting up to get ready for
Sunday School and morning worship activities.]
◊◊◊
Our house on Ascol Drive wasn’t air-conditioned – no problem through
fall, winter, and early spring, but hot in summer. We owned an evaporative cooler, but Bucco Homes didn’t permit the
use of “swamp boxes.” We could have
purchased and installed a window-mounted air-conditioning unit, but we still
hoped to find a suburban residence, so began looking again for a rental house
outside the city.
We were
also prodded toward a move away from Bucco Homes by the presence of a puppy left on our doorstep. Dogs weren’t allowed in the Bucco Homes
area, but Vicky and Terry wanted to keep him.
How can one resist two cute little girls and a cuddly pup? We named him “Butch.” By hiding him in our garage, then boarding
him with Arlette’s folks in Odessa for several weeks, we managed to keep him
until we found other housing. [Butch was seemingly predestined to add excitement (trouble?) to our
lives; I’ll have more to say about him in the next segment, which relates
events of our years in Abilene.]
We wanted to live in Weatherford, an easy thirty-mile drive from my
workplace. Several unfruitful
house-hunting attempts were followed by our placement one Saturday of a “rental
house wanted” ad in the Weatherford newspaper.
Early the next week I received a call at work from Jeff Martin, another Convair
employee, who mentioned our ad, said he lived in Weatherford and owned a rental
house (his former residence) at 1406 South Brazos, and invited us to come see
it; we looked at the house, rented it, and moved in within a couple of weeks.
Jeff
became a friend, as well as landlord.
His family (wife Virginia, son Donnie, daughter Dianne) attended
Weatherford’s First Baptist Church, which we joined; Jeff, Virginia, Arlette,
and I were in the same Training Union.
We received a letter from Bucco Homes’ management about the
time we moved away, telling us dogs weren’t allowed, and we would have to
leave. Inasmuch as we were moving on
our own initiative, I was reminded of a popular country song of the time,
“Before You Call, You’ll Hear Me Answer.”
I did write to tell them, in effect, “You can’t evict us, we’re moving!”
◊◊◊
Terry turned two shortly before we moved to Fort Worth, and was nearly
three when we moved to Weatherford; her “twos” and “threes” produced several
memorable events:
·
Terry had known only the green 1950 Ford Tudor sedan we
purchased shortly after her birth, so didn’t want us to leave “our car” when we
drove off in a new two-toned blue 1956 Fairlane Fordor we purchased on October
20, 1955.
·
Arlette was sitting in the dining room of our house on
Ascol Drive late one morning, talking on the telephone, when Terry toddled into
the kitchen and got a package of crackers.
Arlette told her it was too close to lunchtime – she should take the
crackers back to the kitchen. Terry returned
to the kitchen, but soon came back through the dining room, still holding the
package of crackers in her left hand while shielding her eyes from Arlette’s
view with a child’s book in her right hand; she obviously thought that if she
couldn’t see her mother, her mother couldn’t see her. (Oh, yes – she got to keep the crackers!)
·
Terry was shy
and afraid of strangers, particularly men.
One day, while we still lived in the Bucco Homes area, Arlette kept our
car so she could run some errands, then she and the girls came to the plant to
pick up a neighbor and me at the end of the workday. The girls were standing in the back seat (a common practice among
kids in those days before child safety seats were invented) as Joe, the
neighbor, opened a back door and entered; he Terry-fied our
little girl, who screamed to high heaven.
·
Terry and Vicky stayed at Tolar with my aunt and uncle
while we moved our belongings from Fort Worth to Weatherford. When we picked up the girls and took them to
the new place, Terry said, upon entering the house, “These people have
furniture just like ours!” Later, in
the kitchen, it was, “These people have cookies just like ours!”
·
The change
from familiar surroundings at River Oaks Church in Fort Worth to those at First
Baptist in Weatherford were apparently too much for Terry’s timid nature, so
she wouldn’t initially join the other toddlers at play in the nursery. Instead, she insisted on sitting in the lap
of a patient gentleman worker (an exception to her usual fear of men) – through
the Sunday School and Training Union hours each Sunday, plus Wednesday
evenings. Two or three months passed
before she adjusted to the change and began playing with the other kids. (Arlette learned later that the patient
gentleman wasn’t even a regular worker with the toddlers – he volunteered his
services when Terry “took up” with him.)
[Mentioning
Whitney reminds me of three residents of Fort Worth’s Lake Como area (one of
whom cleaned the office in which I worked) who drove to Lake Whitney most
weekends, placed a one-hundred pound block of ice in a large insulated carrier
in the bed of their pickup, caught fish until the box was full (I suspect they
seined the lake’s backwater inlets to gather the quantities of fish they
brought home – which was probably illegal), then drove home and distributed
their catch among their Lake Como neighbors.
The area was populated by people of relatively low incomes, so the
truckload of fish each week probably provided a substantial portion of their
protein intake. (I was offered fish if
I would come and get them, but I never did so.)]
◊◊◊
I arrived at work one morning to find an office full of shocked
co-workers. Early-morning newscasts on
local radio (which I hadn’t heard) had reported that Ken Miller of Weatherford (there were two of us) had been struck and
killed by a passing vehicle as he stood beside his car along US 80, between
Weatherford and Fort Worth. My fellow
employees were re-shocked when I walked in the door. I met John Peterson in a hallway later in the morning, who, without stopping, said, “I
thought you were dead.”
Arlette received calls from friends asking about me, but she wasn’t
unduly worried, for she felt that officials surely would have contacted her had
I been involved in an accident. Also,
she seems to remember my calling to assure her I was alive. Further, had she heard the radio report
herself, she would probably have thought to wonder why no mention was made of
the passengers who rode to work with me each day – and would have reasoned that
the other Ken Miller from Weatherford must have been the person involved in the
accident.
Jeff Martin, our landlord, and three
other Weatherford residents rode with me to and from work each day; each paid
me three dollars per week. Jamie Barnes, my successor at the TEA
in Austin, whom I had recommended for employment at Convair, was one of the
other three, as was Thelma Moorman (a neighbor, wife of Jack Moorman, and
fellow-member at First Baptist Church).
The third was a young lady who lived nearby, but whose name I don’t
remember.
Thelma
and Jack became 42-playing friends, usually coming to our house where it
was easier to care for our kids (they had no children). Terry liked to sit in “Felman’s”
lap as we played, and Thelma seemingly enjoyed having her there.
Arlette delivered a baby boy, Marty, shortly before midnight
on Wednesday, June 26, 1957 at Weatherford’s Campbell Memorial Hospital, giving
me a fourth reason to pursue excellence. He weighed exactly eight pounds, the
smallest birth weight of our three children.
Inflation
had become more serious; our doctor charged $121.00 for prenatal care and
delivery, and the hospital charged $83.70 for its services. The $204.70 total for Marty compared to
$166.80 for Terry in 1953 and $165.00 for Vicky in 1951.
Six weeks after Marty’s birth my mother and dad came north (from
McAllen) to join our family on a vacation trip. We first traveled to Fort Branch, Indiana, where
Twila and her family were then living; Arlette, Marty, and I dropped off my
parents and the girls in Fort Branch, then traveled southeastward across
Kentucky and Tennessee to Chattanooga, northeastward to and through the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, passed through Gatlinburg and Knoxville, then
angled northwestward through Louisville and on to French Lick, Indiana before turning southwest toward Fort Branch
and our relatives. We did little but
drive for three days, just seeing country we hadn’t seen before; Marty fussed
little, if any, swinging happily in his “Snuggle-Bug,” a baby-transporting
device usable either as a bed or car seat.
[I had
never heard of French Lick, Indiana before we drove through on our roundabout
tour, but remembered its unusual name, so identified quickly with that city’s
Larry Bird when he attained national prominence as a basketball superstar at
Indiana State University and with the Boston Celtics.]
After a few days in Fort Branch, we all returned to Weatherford. My parents went back to McAllen, and I
returned to work.
The main fabrication and assembly building at Convair-Fort Worth was about
4,400 feet long, and was said to be the largest air-conditioned room in the
world; it was open from end to end and side to side; several diesel engines,
similar to those used in diesel/electric locomotives, powered air conditioning
compressors. The building was
constructed in 1943, to be used by Consolidated Aircraft Corporation in
building B-24 bombers for the Army Air Force; Consolidated, which had a sister
plant in San Diego, merged with Vultee Aircraft in 1943, to become
Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Corporation; the shortened name, Convair, grew
from the merger name. Both Consolidated
facilities produced B-24 bombers – the twin-rudder Air Force model was built in Fort Worth, the
single-rudder Navy model in San Diego.
Consolidated produced 10,708 B-24 bombers
during World War II and developed the B-32 “bigger-bomber,” but lost the
production contract to Boeing and its B-29 Super-Fortress (e.g., the Enola Gay,
of atomic bomb fame).
The even larger six-engine pusher-prop B-36
Peacemaker was
also developed during WWII, was first flown in 1946, and deliveries to the Air
Force began in June, 1948. Deliveries
continued until 1954; B-36s flew millions of miles, but were never used in
combat.
Convair
became a part of General Dynamics Corporation in 1954.
General Dynamics was headed by Frank Pace, who assumed its chairmanship after
years of service with the U.S. government, lastly (1950-53) as Secretary of the
Army. The General Dynamics family also
included Stromberg-Carlson, an electronics manufacturer, and the Electric Boat
Division, a nuclear submarine manufacturing facility in Groton, Connecticut.
Convair-Fort Worth was developing the B-58
Hustler, a supersonic delta-winged bomber, when I
was employed, and first flew it on November 11, 1956. The B-58, like the B-36 before it, was never used in combat.
Convair-San Diego built commercial
airliners, plus the delta-winged F-102/F-106 fighters for
the U.S. Air Force. The San Diego and
Fort Worth plants also produced parts and sub-assemblies for other military
aircraft manufacturers.
Convair-Pomona
built Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Those missiles were installed in silos all across the United States, as
an integral part of the MAD (mutually assured destruction) deterrent program of
the Cold War era.
Convair’s
production in Fort Worth and Pomona was all defense-related. Land, buildings, and equipment at
Convair-Fort Worth were owned by the U.S. government; that may well have been
the case at Pomona.
◊◊◊
The Internal Auditing department, of which I was a member, was a part
of the general offices in San Diego, but, except for an audit of a Houston
sub-contractor, I worked only in Fort Worth.
I
discovered several errors and improper charges while doing the Houston audit,
determined the costs thereof, and included my findings in the audit report I
wrote (resulting in monetary recovery).
An Air Force auditor later mildly chastised me for writing up my
findings; I suppose he didn’t feel we should “rock the boat,” although the
errors and overcharges had been costly to U.S. taxpayers.
Most of my assignments within Convair itself were “Operational Audits,”
although I did some of a financial nature (e.g., audits of the Convair Recreation
Association and the plant cafeteria).
The
concessionaire who operated the plant cafeteria owned a chain of root beer
stands. For some years his company also
had the food concession at Fort Worth’s annual Fat Stock Show, which lasts about
two weeks. One year he was reported to
have said he had lost $10,000 during the recently ended show. When asked how that could have been
possible, he replied, “Well, I expected to make twenty-five thousand, but I
only made fifteen.”
Operational audits were designed to determine that operating controls
existed sufficient to insure that products were efficiently manufactured to
specifications, e.g.:
Operational auditing was always challenging
and sometimes interesting. The
challenge resulted from realization that my primary responsibility was to
taxpayers, who paid for everything that went on in our facility. It was interesting because I saw the inner
workings of most aspects of aircraft manufacturing, from design to
flight-testing. However, I was still
doing audit work, and audits can be boring, so I started a new job search by
mid-1957.
Having had three auditing jobs, wherein I
spent much of my time on the lookout for other people’s mistakes, I decided I’d
prefer a job where I could make the mistakes, if any were to be made, and let
someone else find them.
I responded to a newspaper ad telling of the need for a plant
accountant at The United States Time Corporation in Abilene. The company name meant nothing to me, so I
didn’t then realize I was corresponding with the world’s largest manufacturer
of wrist watches; a typographical error (the ad read “Times” instead of “Time”)
led me to think the company might be a publisher.
[The
company’s name was ultimately changed to TIMEX CORPORATION, based on its
primary product – a change I thought should have been made when the product
name was established.]
I was contacted and asked to come to Abilene for interviews with Henry
Orsini, the Plant Manager, and
Jim Barrett, the Plant Accountant for
whom a replacement was being sought; Jim was scheduled to be transferred to a
new facility being built in Bayamòn, Puerto Rico. I was next asked to visit company headquarters in Middlebury,
Connecticut for interviews with corporate officers; that trip, which required
travel by plane, train, and taxi, was scheduled a week or two later.
I was interviewed at corporate headquarters by Mort Goldberg and Bob Morrissey (assistant financial vice-presidents), Les
Brooks (financial vice-president), and Pat McFadden (Director of
Industrial Relations). My time in
public accounting a few years earlier appeared to pay off at this point, for
the financial executives seemed to consider that experience a major plus. I was hired, and agreed to report for work
on November 11, 1957, at a salary of $650 per month.
I resigned my job with Convair when I returned to Fort Worth, giving
two weeks’ notice. Arlette, the kids,
and I made a quick trip to Abilene to rent living quarters, then began
preparations for moving (the costs of which were to be borne by my new
employer, something that hadn’t happened on my previous job changes).