CHAPTER 142. AN END TO SOMETHING 1976 -1978
The announcement came sudden and unexpectedly. 1976 had been a record year for Welded Tube, $80 million in sales. 1977 started off looking like it would be even better, but then as we crept toward 1978 things went the other way.
It was a shock and Lou Bailis could not have been happy about his own decision. The Philadelphia area had been his home and it was here that he founded and built the company. We were told by the end of the year this location would be gone. I had been called upstair to the main office where they offered me a 47% raise to stay with the company and go to Chicago with them. It was a difficult decision.
I was torn, but my wife was adamant that she didn’t want to move. We had lived all our lives in this area, our families were here as were all our friends. She did not want to move, and honestly, I didn’t either. But not to do so meant we would face that old bug-a-boo, unemployment and the challenge of finding a new job. Not only that, it wasn’t just us anymore. We had a baby now. A new crisis to take to Laurel Hill Bible Church for prayer.
Two week before Halloween the phone rang. It was Jim Schlief (left), who I had been reporting to at Welded Tube. He had left there a month before the announcement was made. He had seen the handwriting on the wall and obtained a new position as CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for Mercy Catholic Medical Center. He had called to see if I would consider coming there as the Budget Manager.
Of course I would.
Welded Tube know I wasn’t going to Chicago with them and in fact was giving them my two-week notice. They were upset by my decision and tried to dissuade me, but couldn’t.
It was a relief to know I wouldn’t face unemployment when Welded Tube closed up come January, but there wasn’t time to dwell on my good luck, if you could call it that. I didn’t know what I was in for at Mercy Catholic. We did know we would have to change addresses. The headquarters for the Medical Center was on Main Street, Darby, Pennsylvania.
Actually, it sat just outside the town proper and behind Holy Cross Cemetery at the border of Yeadon. Main Street had been South Lansdowne Avenue until the street crossed West Providence Road. There was irony in this for a decade earlier we had lived in The Lansdowne Towers, which sat along West Providence Road within walking distance of Mercy Catholic.
We weren’t in walking distance anymore. Between Chalet at Ski Mountain and my new workplace was a distance of 24 miles. If you look it up on Google Maps its says a 35-minute trip. Yeah, right, if you’re the proverbial crow. I’d be traveling during rush hour up Route 42 out of Jersey, crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge onto the Schuylkill Expressway until I turned off on Route 291. This would take me through southwest Philadelphia, pass the airport, eventually through Darby to the Hospital, and then reverse it every evening. Maybe you could do it in 35 minutes if everybody else died and the highways were clear, but not in that daily traffic and certainly not on Friday evenings and Monday mornings during the Jersey shore season. No, the only sane thing to do was move and do it quickly. So we were heading back to Pennsylvania.
Lois did not want to go into another apartment, but we didn’t have enough money to afford a down payment on a house. We drove over to a Realtor Office in Springfield, Delaware County and we told the Real Estate Agent we were looking for a house to rent. I told her we wanted to stay in it for a good while, we didn’t want any place where the owner would sell it out from under us. We wanted to rent from somebody who only wanted to rent their property long term.
My mom and grandmother were down on the 16 to help Lois unpack. They brought dinner with them. My dad got there in time to eat with us. They thought the house was nice. We had Christmas at our house that year. My parents gave Lois a washer and drier.
Bipolar Disorder. I recall the house as being fairly decent, but she saw it as a decrepit dump, falling apart with the bathtub coming through the ceiling (not true), a place she feared would collapse about us at any instance. (Photos of 338 Rambling Way’s interior line the sides along these passages.) It certainly wasn’t perfect, but it also wasn’t ready to collapse. I have no recall of the bathtub legs sticking
through the kitchen ceiling. Age bathtub was fine. The basement was somewhat spooky, but most basements are. It had a furnace like they used to terrify Kevin in “Home Alone”, but otherwise I didn’t fear for my child living there.
was conveniently situated, sitting less than a block back from Baltimore Pike, the main drag through Springfield. It had easy access to stores and restaurants, yet when you walked away from Baltimore Pike it was a quiet, peaceful stroll.
The house still stands 40 years since we lived there and looks the same as in this picture, except for a picket fence about the yard. (It did not collapse)
drive to the headquarters of Mercy Catholic Medical Center (MCMC) and my new job as Budget Director. MCMC consisted of, besides the administration building, two major Philadelphia Hospitals, the 204 bed Fitzgerald Mercy in Darby (on the left) and the 157 bed Misericordia Hospital in southwest Philadelphia (on the right). Since I was there they have changed the names to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital and Mercy Philadelphia Hospital.
That is okay, I always thought Misericordia was a terrible name for a hospital; sounds too much like misery. Actually, Misericordia is the Latin word for mercy. The Medical Center also included a nursing school and several ancillary clinics scattered about the area. It was owned and operated by the Sisters of Mercy (a misnomer if ever there was one).
never been a budget manager before and wasn’t at all familiar with hospital accounting, but I was also looking forward to working with Jim Schlief again. I would soon be rudely awakened to a different reality.
I walked into a disaster. First of all, the fiscal year, as it is for many non-profits, ran from July 1 through June 30, not by calendar year. I began my new job in early November and learned right away that the 1978-79 budget was not yet in place. We were better than a third through the year and no budget had been completed, which means it was all ready 5 month late. The former Budget Director, the man I was replacing, was still on board. He was a nice guy and a jovial sort, and he didn’t see this situation as very serious at all. He laughed it off. “We didn’t get a budget set last year until almost May” he told me,”so we’re actually ahead of the game. It was even worse the year before that.”
No wonder they were bouncing this guy. He showed me around both hospitals, introducing me to department heads, but he showed no sense of urgency about inquiring where they were in the budget process. Well, I knew where they were, almost five months behind.
He left after another week and the department was all mine. I didn’t hardly know where to begin, but I knew it had to be quick. I personally began visiting every cost center manager and I issued a memorandum that all budget paperwork needed to be in my hands within two weeks. That is when I discovered a lot of these managers had never received paperwork in the first place or if they had, couldn’t understand it. I therefore carried extra paperwork with me and sat down with each and every manager to explain it. Now frankly, this stuff was new to me too and I was learning it as I taught them, but we got her done. Before Christmas came we had a budget in place and at the end of December we were comparing budget to actual. It wasn’t totally accurate, but it was better than nothing and I had made myself known to every cost center head in the system.
My second shock came as I was finalizing this budget. One of my biggest reason to be excited about my new employment, besides being employed, was the opportunity to work for Jim again. It was not to be. Jim was the Chief Financial Officer, which meant he sat up top. He wasn’t the guy giving the day by day instructions. There was an in between management position of Finance Department Vice President. The new boss started sometime that December.
He was new, too.
It was hate at first sight.
He was a short man named Simons, a New Yorker with a heavy Bronx accent full of curses. The first thing he said to me was I should fire my secretary/assistant. My secretary, Sue, was a nice middle-aged lady who had worked for the Medical Center forever. She took orders well and did her job without mistakes and was very dedicated to MCMC. She had to type up all those monthly budget reports and did so without complaint and with efficiently. Why should I fire her?
I asked him that very question.
“Because then the other employees will fear you,” he answered.
That was his management philosophy, and he did fire a number of long time employees and people did fear him. I didn’t show the same fear. I refused to fire Sue. He didn’t like me from that time forward. Unfortunately for him he had to walk cautiously where I was concerned. He knew that Jim Schlief, who was his boss, and I had a prior relationship and friendship, and Jim had hired me. He would have to have real cause to fire me and that he didn’t have. I had done something the last two Budget Managers had failed to do, pull a budget together.
He would never speak a kind word to me, in fact usually sneered when he had to address me, but for the most part he stayed away from me. Like it or not, he had to put up with me,
My home life during 1979 was fairly normal, no big traumas. Our old friends had dwindled down to basically two couples, the Rubios and the Ernests.
Joe and Linda Rubio had their first child in 1973 and named her
Meredith after me. In September 1978, shortly after having their second child, another girl whom they named Kristen, they visited us at 338 Rambling Way. The photo shows Laurel, Meredith and Kristen playing together.
ARCo headquarters, L.A. in 1970s). Unlike myself, he went with his company to the West Coast, buying a home with a swimming pool. We corresponded for a while, but that drifted off. I do not know where Joe or any of his family are today.
Victor and Marsha Ernest continued their friendship with us a couple more years, but with the closing of Welded Tube he moved on elsewhere as well. By 1982 they disappeared from our lives. I heard from Victor a year or so ago, but nothing since. Both of he and his wife were now having serous health issues.
In January 1979 I had to go take a driving exam to get a Pennsylvania Driver’s License to replace my New Jersey one. On February 3 we dropped Laurel off at my parents and they took her to a birthday party for her cousin Kelly, who had been born a month before Laurel. (Left, Kelly and Laurel.)
Meanwhile, Lois and I went to a party at the Ernests.
On March 3 we had a intimate party for Laurel’s first birthday. My mother, father and grandfather were at our place for dinner, as was Mr. Heaney and Evelyn Weinmann, Lois’ lifetime friend, who we now referred to as Aunt Evelyn,
We were to my parents for Easter Sunday, as usual.
Mother’s Day. We took them to the Longhorn Ranch Restaurant on Baltimore Pike in Glen Mills. We enjoyed that eatery and took Laurel there often. It had a Western theme with live country bands performing in the dining room. We had a table ringside and one of the bands fell in love with Laurel and kept directing their music at her. This was a different place from the chain restaurants using the name Long Horn today.
It eventually closed and a nightclub called Pulsations was built where it had been. This was very popular for a couple years, drawing long lines, but it too closed and disappeared.
In August was the Wilson family reunion. We also received the bad news in August that we would have to move again. Despite the assurances of the Realtor when we rented 338 Rambling Way and that the lady owner had no intensions of selling it, she did just that. She offered it to us, but we couldn’t afford to buy and thus it was sold out from under us and we had to be out by the end of September.
On October 1 we were moving our stuff once more. This was a nicer, if smaller house, on Congress Avenue in Springfield. The owner hadn’t wanted to rent to a family with children, but the Realtor assured her we were a very nice family and talked her into it. The Realtor felt guilty because she had told us the first home would never be sold and it was. Boy, were we getting tired of moving. This was the ninth time since we married. That was nine times in less than 20 year
Thanksgiving was at my parents, but once again we had Christmas at our home and this would be the pattern for years to come. I didn’t think it was fair to pack the kids up after they opened their gifts and hauling them several miles away for the day. Let them be home and enjoy their new toys, and boy did Laurel get new toys.
You could say 1979 was a typical family year, little drama on the home front, other than the unexpected moving to a new home. The turmoil remained with Mercy Catholic Medical Center and then the years immediately ahead.
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