I had made the University Administration the best performing IBM 360 System in the Midwest and I was certainly not well appreciated for it. I looked for a new job again. After an almost in St. Louis with McDonald-Douglas, I accepted a job at State Farm in Bloomington, Illinois.
The McDonald-Douglas thing was interesting – in its own way. I
had gone through a head hunter in Madison
who referred me to McD. McD was
the ultimately cheap company and they were proud of it. They
interviewed me over the phone and issued me an offer. I said that
this might be good enough
for them but I had to meet them in person.
I drove down to St. Louis and we interviewed for real. The
personnel office laid out the
moving allowance. They would not
even pay for separate driving of my wife and me to St. Louis from
Madison. But the computer system that I would be working with was
beyond
anything I had ever even heard of.
It sounded like a system support dream. I reluctantly accepted
the job. Reluctantly because it has always been my opinion that
Human
Resources/Personnel painted the best possible picture for new hires and
things
would become a lesser reality later.
McD Human Resources had painted a picture that was inhumane in its
cheapness. Anything to get out of Madison. St. Louis might
be interesting.
I got back to Madison and turned down the offer from State Farm. The choice seemed to be between a financial, anal-retentive environment to an aerospace, anal-retentive environment. I have always hated banks and insurance companies. I feared aerospace because I saw what it did to my father’s career.
The State Farm people called me. Three of them: the HR, the second line, and the first line. They did not attempt to be persuasive, they only wanted to know the real reasons for turning them down. I reversed myself – if that many people cared, then that was better than McD. McD, where nobody seemed to care except the group that I worked with and they were slaves to their HR. Now, this is a legal problem as I learned. Once accepting an offer, the head hunter expects to be paid. If you then refuse the job, the head hunter expects you to pay them. I could never have paid the fee with my money. The head hunter was angry but he let it go.
We moved into a hotel room for a month in Illinois while we looked
for a
house. It was a scrawny little run down motel with a refrigerator
about the size of the cooler in the car. This is probably why we
bought the tiny house and paid far too much for it.
We bought the little house on Summit. I forget for how much but as usual we paid too much for a very tiny house. The house was on the north side of Normal, which is the northern suburb of Bloomington. The house had an attached garage but no door from the house into the house. You had to go out the back door to the back of the garage or around the front. In a reasonable climate, this might not be a problem but the central Illinois climate is not reasonable. It is either raining or snowing or it has just finushed and you have to walk through muck. to go from door to door.
In the front door, there is the living-dining room. To the left is the hall with a tiny bedroom on the left. Also on the left is the master bedroom. That is the end of the house. On the right side is the kitchen. Tiny. Then the bathroom. There must have been more but I don’t think so. Oh. There was the stairway to the basement between the kitchen and the bathroom. We had a heck of a time with the house.
I put some floating shelves into the living room. This separated the living room from the dining area and gave us a place for knick-knacks. I put a snack bar in the kitchen since the area could be used for absolutely nothing else. Carole and I drove to Detroit and picked up the dishwasher. A $7.50 seal fixed the leak caused by a few years of it sitting full of water. Carole was happy.
Some fertilizer and care made the lawn presentable. I also put a rec-room in the basement. Just like the Wauwatosa rec-room. It spanned the length of the house with the laundry room, freezer (we bought one), and the furnace. The front had the ping-pong table in the backend and a living area on the front end.
Like the other homes, I spent all of my time working at the office, trying to improve the house, or fixing the car. I never spent enough time nurturing the relationship with my wife.
At our first opportunity, Carole and I went to the dog pound and picked out a puppy. Sort of a husky, shelty/collie mix. We named him George and he turned out to have a great personality. He also became quickly Carole's dog. If we had guests, he would sit between Carole and the guest. One night I left the bed and went to the bathroom. When I returned, in the dark, I heard the growl and the leap. I yelled in ttime for George to close his mouth but not before he hit me. He was stll a small dog and no damage was done. He was very apologetic but I was glad that arole had such a diligent protector. Another time, we were in the back rooms when we heard a noise in the front room. George took off with a growl and ran out the front door and around the block. He returned shortly. We never saw the intruder but with the reaction from George and the fact that the front screen door was not latched meant that there was one.
The State Farm corporate office buildings on the east side were being built. During the interim, the support group, to which I belonged, was housed in an old Kohl’s store. These are long buildings that resembled a long cylinder-half on its side with mostly glass on the entrance end. On the back end is a mezzanine. I forget how the store used the mezzanine. We used it for our group. The main floor held the programmers.
The Dodge dealer in Madison billed us for a bunch of services that they did not perform. I mean everything from repacking the wheel bearings to a tune up to whatever. We had had a running war with this place since we had bought the van. Now that we moved, they sent their bill to a collection agency. The collection agency called me at work. I gave it to them with both barrels. When I hung up, I noticed that the entire programming floor, let alone the mezzanine, was looking at me. I guess my voice had carried from one end of the building to the other. Vere Cottreel, my supervisor, informed me that that would not happen again.
The saga begins.
When we left Madison, Carole gave up her job at the insurance company. I was never quite sure what she did their but apparently she had found something good for her -- she really did not want to leave.
Wen we got to Illinois Carole went through several jobs. Shw
worked
at an employment agency. They sent her back east for
training. She
also signed a note guarenteeing to not work for a competitor for 5
years in exchange for their expense in training her. I was angry
for
her signng such a thing. She did not last too long at the job.
<><><>Carole tried a few other things and ended up working at a hardware store downtown Bloomington. This was a problem with only one car and bad weather. I made adrrangments to show up later for work every day and Carole waited outside the store until the owner showed up. I then worked late and picked her up at quitting time. State Farm was really into punctuality: 8:00 to 4:30 with 30 minutes for lunch. Leaving Carole off at 8:30 got me to work at 8:45. Picking her up at 6:00 meant I left work at 5:45. Presuming I still ate a 30 minute lunch, this meant that they got an extra 30 minutes of work from me every day. It also meant that Carole stood outside the hardware store in miserable weather for a half hour each morning.<>
<>
<>A year after we left Bloomington, I called back into the State Farm office to talk to someone. I got the department secretary. She did not remember me by name -- she did remember me as the person who came in late every day. Life is too short.
<>
I never understood. I never shall. Our life style was
murder on
Carole. She always got the short end of the stick. She
really did not
like me that much but like me she did not give up easily. She did
like
George, the dog. Going through these jobs and hearing about it
from me
did not do her self-esteem any good. My self-esteem was never
very
high.
One morning I was working on the van -- under it. Probably changing the oil. In any case, some big, ugly, woman with a clip board came up and asked me where my father was. Now, if you want to start a conversation with me, "hello" or "good morning" goes a long way. If you want to piss me off, start with "Where is your father?"
In any case, since she would not be put off with an "I don't know", I crawled out. Speaking face to face is always better than talking through two tons of sheet metal. After figuring out that it was me she wanted, it turned out she was the county tax assessor and wanted to inspect the inside of my home. This after she pointed out that I owed property tax on my dog and my van. Not a chance she was going in the house. In Illinois you are permitted one household of property and a car before they start assessing tax.
I pointed out that the van was registered as a car and not a truck and therefore was not additionally taxed. The dog had a license and that was tax -- no more was appropriate. She said she would return with a subpoena. I suggested this was a good idea. Maybe with a manager also. What a way to ruin a Saturday.
When fall came, they marked out the block for sidewalks. They had decided taht the neighborhood kids needed a sidewalk to walk to school on. They also decided to place a walk on only one side of each street. They also decided to place the alk exactly in the middle of the front yard of each home. I mean, they could have left no easement as in Phoenix. They could have left 18 inches like I have seen in a few places with small yards such as ours. They could have left 3 feet. No. They placed the sticks exactly in the middle right down the block. This meant that the kids were coming and going with in a few steps of our front door. I was nto afraid of the kids but I did not trust the general traffic walking that close to the house. Remember that George had scared away one intruder.
The problem I had was the choice of sides of streets. To be consistent with the neighboring streets the walk would have been on the other side of the street. I blamed pollitics for the choice to put it on our side: the was the bank president across the street. Maybe vice-president but they had politcal strength. A computer engineer at State Farm had no political strength.
The end of October came. We were in the new office buildings. Our offices were on the second floor looking north. My desk was against the windows and faced my supervisor. Since this was a new complex, nothing but parking lot and corn fields were north of us. Oh. In the distance was some sort of slag pile. But what made it miserable was the weather: the cloud overcast was depressing. It had been overcast for over a month. I asked Vere when we would get to see the sun again. He said maybe about Thanksgiving for a few days but no real sun again until about Easter. I called the headhunter: honest cold, honest hot but get me out of here.
He had a job with Greyhound COrporation in Phoenix. The company was moving there from CHicago. They had just merged with Armour Foods and had a shiny new building in the middle of Phoenix but the management was still in Chicago.
I interviewed Jack Stoller in Chicago. Not a chance I
would work
for that guy. I try to leave race and religion behind and I am
sort of
naive but this guy gave the Jewish people a bad name. I was
flabergasted when I got a call from Dave Ells in Phoenix: he wanted to
interview me there. Reluctantly I went for the interview.
Dave
convinced me that if I would commit for two years, he would buffer me
from Jack and promise me a management position. What made me
decide?
When I got to Phoenix, the taxi first tried to drive me to Scottsdale
but after multiple requests, drove me to the Doubletree Inn at Central
and Thomas. There is also a shopping Mall there. I spent
the evening
walking around the neighborhood. I saw girls hitchhiking on
Central
Avenue. If the city were safe enough for girls hitching rides, it
was safe enough for my family.
When I got back to Carole, I told her about my decision. I thought she would be ecstatic. She had caught bronchitus twice that year and had several bad job situations.
Come the middle of December we had an ice storm. Not a
blizzard like in normal winters. An Ice Storm. It cut our
power for a week. Our banker across the street had his power back
the next day. Maybe the tax assessor was the one who determined
who got their power back first. I had learned that politics in
Illinois is much more political than in Wisconsin. The freezed
with our side of beef survived down in the basement. I went to
work during the day so I did not see the cold all day that Carole did.
I forget her name. The four of us became friends. He was
a third shift operator at State Farm. I worked too many night
shifts. I do not know. Sex was not very high on my
list. Our first year, Carole and I did fine. After that a
couple of hugs and I was happy. There are lots of psychological
and physical things that relate to this. Susan back in Madison
became pregnant the very first time -- and she had the abortion
mentioned earlier. There was the self-esteem issue. Carole
was a good sport about this. I told her that I wanted to hug and
kiss John's wife. No sex -- just hug. Not an ongoing thing
-- just once. But there is the loyalty that confuses all of
this. I would not cheat on Carole -- sex with someone else would
make me impotent for life. I would not cheat on John because he
was a friend and like the guy said in The WHole Nine Yards movie: you
do not have sex with a friend's wife. Carole said she would
arrange it but itt did not happen. I know John's wife was aware
of this so Carole and she discussed it. If I had mentioned it to
John, he would have punched me.
We scheduled a New Year's Party. We invited both our neighbors
and friends from work. Once the neighbors discovered that State
Farm people were coming, they did not come. Bloomington was such
a company town: you either worked for State Farm or you did not.
The two did not mix. In any case, the party was a flop.
Most people had left before midnight. Since I had already turned
in my notice to State Farm and we were moving to Phoenix the
first week of January, this also turned out to be my going away
party for work: why throw a separate party when I already had one.
A month after we arrived in Phoenix, the house sold. I went
back to Bloomongton to close on the paper shuffling. I talked
with the selling agent. We had gotten our price: $28,000.
When we listed the house, it said that the dishwasher, the drapes, and
the table tennis table would go. The only drapes worth the
trouble were the $50 drapes in the living room. THe others were
mismatches left over from college. The dishwasher was 15 years
old and the table tennis table I had constructed and would never leaver
the basement where it sat. The sales contract required that all
three be left with the house. The agent confirmed what I thought;
she had done a really good sales job and got the price by including
these poor excuses for furnishings. I thanked her.
John Foley and his wife took me to dinner at a nice
restaurant. The restaurant service was miserable. The food
was worse. We did not enjoy the restaurant and left for
home. She and his had something going on I did not
understand. Then I understood. as we said goodbye, she
leaned into the car and kissed me. I shall always remember that
kiss. She put her whole heart and sole into it. I was so
startled that I could not kiss back. John was standing
there. My friend. My wife was in Phoenix. My
wife. I am still embarassed. She did want I wanted to do
and could not. We called them a few times from Phoenix but we
never saw each other again. Probably a good thing.