REFLECTIONS OF A LIFE, Chapter 5: First Jobs

Chapter 5

First Jobs

           

            Kresge. --Since I had worked in retailing and majored in marketing and retailing at Drake, retailing seemed the appropriate career choice.  At the time.  Somehow I was myopic about what I might achieve with my life and what dreams I could have beyond the mundane.  In years to come, two old adages were to tantalize and torment me:

                        "Aspire greatly."

                        "Be all that you can be."  

            I sent resumes and interviewed with a number of large retailers, and decided on a career in store management with the Kresge Company (now Kmart).  The starting pay of $215 a month was at the high end of starting salaries, and they had a well-structured management training program. Furthermore, I would be able to begin in the Des Moines Kresge store, although would be transferred later.  The biggest disadvantage would be that the program required trainees to start in the stockroom in order to learn all aspects of the operation.  Well, I could handle that. 

            Another nagging drawback was the prestige of the job:  a low-priced variety store rather than a prestigious department store.  At the time, prestige seemed secondary to a well-paying job with good advancement.  The recruiter, Mr. Baker, was a staff executive of the company and assured Professor Lovejoy (my mentor) and myself that I would be on a fast-track program.

            Well, the fast track was slow in materializing.  I spent ten months in the stockroom of that store, well beyond what there was to learn.  One of the duties of the stockroom was to sweep the sidewalks in front of the store every day.   One older woman asked my mother if I needed a college education to sweep sidewalks.  Another chore was to clean up messes on the salesfloor, these often involving someone vomiting on the premises.  I became quite expert at running upstairs in my blue stockroom apron with a pail and mop to take care of the situation.

            I was at the limit of my patience when Mr. Baker, on another recruiting drive, stopped to see how I was doing and was appalled to find me still in the stockroom.  The situation changed quickly, and I became a junior assistant manager, responsible for supervising 50 to 60 people, mostly female. 

            Over the next four years en route to becoming a store manager, I was transferred to stores in Terra Haute, Bloomington, and South Bend, all in Indiana; Aurora, Illinois; and Mankato, Minnesota.  The company moved my mother and me quite efficiently and uncomplainingly, even though we had a piano that often had to be manhandled up to a second floor apartment or even hoisted through a window.

            In these early years out of college, I increasingly felt something was lacking in my life.  Maybe I needed a wife instead of a mother.  But it was more than that.  Whatever talents I had, and these were mostly academic and writing, I knew these were wasting, were atrophying.  Furthermore, the long hours expected in retailing—six-day weeks including at least two 12-hour days, and more during the Christmas season and sale preparations—left little time for anything else.  I envied other men my age who had Saturdays off and seldom had to work at night.  Something else bothered me increasingly:  the efforts of my work were so transitory, had no permanence at all, were of no lasting contribution whatever.  For example, a window display that I painstakingly created would be removed after one or two weeks; the same for special sale presentations, or seasonal layout changes and decorations. 

            A nagging thought came to me that maybe I should have gone to medical school, that I should still seek to be a doctor, and not a store manager.  I knew I could handle med school, but logistically it seemed out of reach.  I was now the sole support of my mother and we had little savings.  If I had been single I would have pursued this, for the work would have been so much more fulfilling.  In the darkness of the night, I would sometimes berate myself for the direction my life had taken.  If I had only opted for medicine when I first started college. . . I was quite sure Dad would have worked it out, even if it meant sacrifices, to have the pride of a son a doctor.  Now it seemed too late.

            I still remember the nadir of my young life, the lowest point psychologically.  It was a Sunday in Bloomington, Indiana, and I was sitting in the car in a supermarket parking lot waiting for my mother to finish grocery shopping.  A black cloak of depression enveloped me.  I had no social life and was hardly likely to develop any with the frequent moves.  I had a job that gave me no satisfaction and the future seemed just as bleak.  While I could expect to become manager of a small store such as the one in Bloomington in a few years, in my depression that seemed a hollow goal, one of little consequence.  There appeared no way to change this course of life since all my experience had been in retailing and I could hardly afford to start over at my age without traumatic upheaval.  And this was hardly possible burdened with my mother.  The beautiful campus of Indiana University was nearby and I would sometimes walk its sidewalks, envying the students and professors streaming past.   

            I was transferred to South Bend a month later to a bigger store where I did have a little social life, which eased my depression but did not erase it.  I still yearned to go to medical school and become a doctor, and I took a night course from Notre Dame in organic chemistry, this being a prerequisite for med school.  But the years of schooling and interning necessary looked increasingly prohibitive. 

            The instructor was not able to meet one class session, and her student assistant took over.  He was only a few years older than myself, and was a Ph.D. candidate in the biological sciences.  He told me after class that with a master's degree he was able to get on the doctoral program with a full scholarship and also a small stipend that required his teaching a few classes.  Now I knew that going for a Ph.D. was more within reason than an M.D.  Still, with the frequent moves, how could I ever stay in one place long enough to work on a graduate degree?  Yet the idea lurked in the back of my mind for the next decade.

           

            Penney's. -- A few years later when I was transferred to Mankato, a town of about 25,000 some 80 miles south of Minneapolis, I quit Kresge for a job across the street with Penney's.  I thereby sacrificed being soon promoted to store manager, and in the darkness of sleepless nights I would wonder again if I had been a fool.  But this job offered less moving, a nicer kind of merchandising, and other young men like myself who were on the career path to store manager.  But also less salary than I had been getting.

            One of the young men was John Ray, also a bachelor, only better looking, more charming, and more sophisticated.  He had his own apartment and often invited me to hear his records and he would grill steaks and we would drink beer, or perhaps a martini.  We sometimes got together with another compatible bachelor, Jack Kealy.  He was a mechanical engineer who worked in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, about a hundred miles away, but frequently came up weekends to Mankato.  Kato Ballroom was on the outskirts of  town and we would go there Saturday nights after work and meet some girls.  In this environment my social life flourished and I put thoughts of a Ph.D. further behind as an impossible dream. 

            Now another career path interested me:  accounting.  I had taken some accounting courses at Drake and gotten straight A's, and on an aptitude test for accounting scored very high.  I was beginning to think this might be better than the long hours and slow advancement at Penney's.  So I took an at-home accounting program through LaSalle Correspondence School, and completed it in six months.  It must have been so unusual for someone to complete one of these correspondence programs that they offered me a job as an instructor, but I couldn't see much future in being a correspondence school instructor.

            A friend put me in touch with a public accounting firm in Davenport, Iowa, and while not thinking much of a correspondence school accounting degree they still invited me to take an aptitude test in their office.  Using two vacation days, I drove down and took the test on a Friday.  The environment could not have been much worse.  The office was noisy and I was taking this comprehensive test on an old table in one corner of the big room. I still remember part of the letter the senior partner sent me a few days later:

           

In view of your excellent showing on the accounting aptitude test

last week, it is highly likely that we will invite you to come with us. 

More specific information will follow.  Congratulations. 

            A few weeks later they offered me a training job at their Clinton, Iowa office and I took a two-week leave of absence from Penney's to try it out.  The job was primarily auditing local firms, but somehow I found poring over records and numbers all day not as interesting as retailing, and went back to Penney's after two weeks, again wondering if I had made the right decision.  So many crossroads—How could I ever know the best, except long after when too late?

            A few months later I was transferred to a small Penney store in Superior, Wisconsin as acting manager.  The store manager had had a serious heart attack and the company thought my experience would enable me to fill in until he could come back to work. 

            This town of about 35,000 was at the northwest corner of Wisconsin on the western end of Lake Superior.  It was a major port for shipping iron ore, mined in the nearby Mesabi Range of Minnesota, to the steel mills back east.  Just across an estuary was Duluth, Minnesota, a city of 125,000 sprawled across a steep escarpment rising from the Lake, in sharp contrast to the virtually flat town of Superior.  Skyline Drive at the top of the escarpment provided on a clear day a vista of the land embracing this inland sea.  The city streets going toward the lake, even downtown, required trustworthy brakes. 

            The environment was unlike any I had ever known.  There was a wild beauty about this country of rocks, pines, tumbling waters, and the vast expanse of the lake.  At first it intrigued me, as did the stark realities of heavy industry and commerce—ore boats, grain elevators, loading docks, even an oil refinery belching noxious vapors when the wind was the right direction.

            My fascination did not last long.  I soon viewed this as a harsh land.  The weather was partly a factor as Lake Superior was always cold, even in midsummer.  I remember the 4th of July when I played golf at the municipal course.  It was sunny and mild when we started, the warmest day of the summer.  With a temperature in the low 70s, we were comfortable in our shorts and golf shirts as the southerly wind brought the smells of the refinery.  On the sixth hole the wind swung around off the lake and the temperature plummeted to the low 50s.  Throughout the summer, tourists would come into the Penney store wanting to buy long underwear as they fished on these northern lakes.  Winters could drop to 40 below.

            Another factor was the economy, which seemed in a perpetual state of recession, or even depression.  A poor economy cut demand for iron ore, and the ore boats would be mothballed.  When the economy improved, it seemed that some group was always striking—the miners, the ore handlers and dock workers, the seamen, or else the steel workers back east.  All these were strongly unionized.   

            My mother and I found an apartment in a house overlooking a park fifteen minutes driving distance from the store.  The owners, a nice older couple, lived downstairs.  As I recall, the rent was $120 a month, but my salary was only $325. We had thought that with the move my salary would be substantially raised, but it was not.  The Penney Company in those days had a policy of delayed gratification, which meant underpaying management trainees while holding out the carrot of profit-sharing with more seniority and store management.

            After four months we gave up this apartment and moved to a loft in an old building two blocks from the store.  Not only was the rent substantially less, but I would save on gasoline and parking.  The old couple were shocked when we told them we were moving because we couldn't manage the rent on my salary, and they offered to reduce it substantially.  But we had already made the commitment to move.  In what seemed the height of unfairness, a few months later the district manager rebuked me.  He claimed I had given Penney's a bad reputation by publicizing how meager my salary was and moving to a tenement.  (The apartment really wasn't that bad, although it was old and had high ceilings from days when it must have been used for other purposes than housing.)   My mother and I thought it served Penney's right to have its reputation tarnished for being so damned niggardly. 

            After my best friend, Virgil, was transferred to Minneapolis, it was not too difficult to think about leaving Penney's.  Now the thought of higher education again tantalized me.

            The best thing about Superior was that I met Virgil Meyer, another bachelor like myself.  He worked in the marketing research department of Shell Oil Company in adjacent Duluth, Minnesota, and we became lifelong friends.  He was my age but was earning twice as much and had a nice 40-hour week.  How I envied him, and wondered if I could ever do as well.  He was investing in the stock market and got me intrigued with it, and I read everything I could about stocks and investing.  But I had no money to invest, could only read about it.  We got together every weekend and met some nice girls, but I was certainly in no position to get married, and neither of us found Miss Right.

            The manager died about three months after I came to Superior, leaving a wife and two young children.  I hardly expected my seniority with Penney's would be enough to get the store, and I was right.  They promoted the senior assistant from Sault Ste.Marie, Michigan as store manager.  He was a hot shot, a workaholic in his first store management job, and I felt compelled to work even longer hours from his example.   

            With Virgil gone, I investigated other retailing possibilities.  I felt now that the top priority in any move should be to where I could pursue graduate studies without threat of being transferred.  The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul offered the best possibilities with the main campus of the University of Minnesota within easy reach.

            Dayton's and Target. --I took a job as a management trainee with the major department store in Minneapolis, Dayton's.  Before accepting this I had investigated whether I would be able to get an MBA at night school.  The University of Minnesota Business School told me that all graduate courses were presently offered only in the daytime, but next year they would be starting an evening MBA for part-time students.  "Are you sure about this?"  I asked.  "I'm on the verge of making a job commitment based on being able to get an MBA at night school."

            "Yes, it has been approved, and is a sure thing," they assured me.

            Mom and I found a two-bedroom apartment on the edge of downtown within walking distance of Dayton's.  The building was fairly old but not a slum, had three floors and a resident manager.  We were still on an economy mindset.  Had we ever not been?  Would we ever not be?  In any case, I would save bus fare or gasoline and parking fees.

            I found it sobering that after almost ten years in retailing I was still only a trainee.  Talk about a fast career path.  This job, however, was not a career path for store management but for a buyer, which I thought would be far more satisfying and gave promise of escaping the hours and tedium of in-store responsibilities.

            I started in December in the basement men's furnishings department, and quickly wondered if I had again made a bad decision, for I was doing mindless tasks such as keeping counters filled with merchandise.  I felt a little better when I got to know an older man who had had his own store for some years but now was also a trainee like myself, with similar mundane duties.  At Christmas the volume of business made stock replenishment a task of extreme importance—to have merchandise off-sale was a grievous matter.   If the stockroom couldn't get the needed goods to the floor quickly enough, it was up to us trainees to expedite this, even if we had to bring them up ourselves.

            Virgil's office was downtown, and we frequently got together for lunch and afterwards would go to a Paine Webber brokerage office in one of the bank buildings to look at stock quotations flashing across the screen, and pick up whatever literature was available.  Virgil had been in the market since his days in Duluth, and I was no novice but had never bought a stock.  With great frugality, I now managed to save $300, and bought ten shares of some company that I've long forgotten the name of.  It promptly went up to $400, and I thought the stock market was where I belonged.  Well, it took a while to amass enough for further investing, but saving money became a major incentive, a lifelong motivation to be frugal, to spend wisely, and invest as much as possible.  But also to gain more knowledge about investing.  As I began to add more stock to my modest portfolio, I found dividends to be particularly satisfying:  "To have money coming in without my working for it is a real treat," I told my mother.  

            "Just so you don't lose it all in a stock market crash," she warned me.  Well, the stock market crash of 1929 and the years of Depression that followed branded her generation.  It even branded me, since I was a child in the Depression.  To this day I am reluctant to spend money on frivolous pursuits, and even go around turning out lights in our house, something our children never learned to do.

            After Christmas I was transferred to the Hosiery Department on the first floor as the senior assistant buyer.  The buyer had the reputation of being a martinet, demanding and difficult to work for.  He had not yet had an assistant who satisfied him.  But I well met his high expectations. I would have liked to have been more involved in the buying decisions, but his great weakness to gaining higher executive positions was an inability to delegate.  I marveled how this little department, about 20 x 50 feet did $1,500,000 a year.

            One day Mr. Pfeiffer, the manager of the Penney store in Mankato when I was there, came in and saw me fixing a display.  "I heard you were working for Dayton's," he said.  "Are you the buyer of this department?"

            "Only the assistant buyer," I said.

            "Oh," he said, rather smugly.

            "But this department does half again as much as your whole store."  His eyes widened at this remark and he looked around, now impressed.

            I was transferred to several other departments over the next several years, and then offered a buying position with the newly organized Target discount subsidiary.  There were eight buyers, three of us from Dayton's and the others coming from New York City and elsewhere.  We would be buying for all the stores that were soon to open.

            But let me leave more details and the conclusion of my Target experiences until later.  Now I must talk about my dear wife, Dorothy, how we met, and our early years.