CHAPTER 147.  WHEN THE FLOODS RISE. 1980-1981

 Do you believe in miracles?

If not, then come and speak to me for I have seen many miracles, large and small, in my life. 

I’ve never seen a miracle without God involved in there somewhere and with a purpose. Sometimes the miracle even seems to be a curse, until you can see the purpose. The seven babies that died may not seem miraculous or purposeful, but they were not a tragedy. Those babies simply took a short cut to the Lord, but it was through them I came to Jesus as my savior. I took the scenic route with all its potholes and stormy days. 

 When we left off in the last chapter Death seemed to be standing
in the wings ready to sweep his scythe. My grandmother was in great pain and in and out of the hospital. She couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. She was 81 years old.

At the same time, Lois had given birth on December 12 to a daughter, who was several weeks premature and whose weight quickly plunged to just over three pounds. Today we can read many stories of infants born weighing in at only a pound with good survival chances, one more argument for saying  conception is the beginning of life. In 1980, a newborn as light as ours was at high risk and the doctors who delivered her honestly expected she would be dead by sunrise. If not, they predicted a very bleak life for her, one of blindness and mental retardation.

We hadn’t expected her so had no name planned. We named her Noelle since it was so close to Christmas. We gave her the middle name Suzanne to match the French of her first name. Suzanne means Lily. It kind of ties things together for a Christian, Noelle means “Christmas” and Lilies are often representative of Easter.

 

Noelle was taken over night from Delaware County Memorial Hospital to the neonatal unit at Fitzgerald Mercy. She was placed in an incubator with a dozen tubes running from her obscuring the sight of her. We couldn’t even touch her or hold her she was so delicate. After a few days some nurse would bring her to the window in the door to hold up for us to see.

After several more days Lois was allowed in to hold her in her lap to bond, and finally was allowed to do the same.

In order to touch her we had to scrub, then dress  in a gown and

stretchy hat and latex gloves and surgical mask. It was a stressful time. Every so often a nurse would enter the ward and jab Noelle’s tiny foot with a needle. She was placed under special lights because she got jaundice. It was discovered my wife and I had conflicting RH factors in our blood, resulting in Noelle having to endure a complete blood transfusion.

 

Then her conditions began to reverse. She started gaining pounds. Some of the tubes came out of the incubator and at long last she came out as well into a regular little crib. They let us bring her home on New Year’s Day, 1981, giving her to us in a big red Christmas stocking. The only problem they were concerned about were her eyes.

 On April 29, we accompanied Noelle to Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, where under  anesthesia she was given an intense and complete eye examination. The doctors reported they could find nothing wrong with her eyes. Two of the dire expectations given upon her birth had not come to be, she lived and she would not be blind. Now the only question remaining was mental capacity. She was to be regularly placed in the gifted classes in school. She was awarded the President’s Award for Academic Excellence and Citizenship signed by President Ronald Reagan and was listed in Who’s Who Among High School Students

. I think we can also rule out her being “extremely mentally retarded”.

At the end of 1980, my grandmother was in much distress. She was home from the hospital, where they had her in the coronary unit, but the exact nature of her problem still had not been fully diagnosed. Her daily suffering continued.

On New Year’s Day, 1981, her back was hurting. She slept the entire day of January 2. She was brought down to see Noelle on the third, but went home exhausted. She couldn’t pull herself up on the 8^th. Now she went into a period of being unable to stay awake during the day. On the 14^th, she got herself up off a chair by herself, walked from the kitchen to the living room, then fell and hurt her stomach. A nurse was visiting regularly and told her she needed to drink more. Problem was she didn’t feel like eating or drinking.

She felt better on January 19 and did drink more while the nurse was there, but by the 25^th she was sick again and in lots of pain. A troublesome itching began on February 1, and by February 3^rd both the pain and itching had grown worse. This continued through the 16^th.

And then everything improved until May 7 when she got a new pain in her back She was up and down with pain and sleep difficulties throughout May until the 20^th, then after that she went back to her old self for the remainder of the year. Her  pain and suffering left her as mysteriously as they had first appeared. (Left, my grandmother holding Noelle.)

On March 3^rd, my family, Mr. Heaney and Evelyn Weinmann were at our house for Laurel’s 3^rd birthday. Lois and I began leaving the kids with my parents at times so we could go away or have celebrations  on our own.  We took Noelle to the doctor for her regular checkups on March 30. She now weighted 11 pounds and 9 ounces.

On this same day, President Reagan, along with three others, was shot in an assassination attempt.

 Lois and her father’s relationship had grown more strained than ever. It began to unwind when we moved from his home to Philadelphia back in the late 1960s. He accused us of stealing from him, which wasn’t true at all; meanwhile, he was snooping in our room and through our stuff. In the years after we moved, he began acting more irrational. He didn’t trust anyone and he expressed wishes about seeing the neighborhood kids dead. At the end of the ‘seventies he purchased a .45 Automatic. He kept a loaded clip in it all the time and slept with it under his pillow. “If anybody tries to get in, I’ll shoot first and ask questions later,” he told us.

 By the ‘eighties he had taken Lois’  house key away and half the time wouldn’t answer the door when she came around. By that April he wasn’t answering her calls and she was getting very concerned about him.

On May 3^rd we drove over to his house, but no one answered our
knocking. Lois was scared because she feared if we tried too hard to get in he would shoot us. She went up the street to her Uncle Ed’s and he came down with a spare key and opened the front door. We found her father half unconscious sprawled across his bed. Ed called 9-1-1 and an ambulance showed up quickly. The paramedics took him to Delaware County Memorial Hospital.

He was in intensive care. An operation was performed on May 8 and during the procedure Harry Heaney suffered cardiac arrest and essentially died, but the Doctors brought him back from this death. He was technically alive, but showed no responses. He was hooked up to several machines that performed the essential functions of the body, breathing, nourishment, etc. The doctor informed us he had a number of  lesions on his brain. Her father had emphysema, which was believed to have been caused by exposure to Asbestos when he worked in construction, whether this exposure had also caused the brain lesions, I don’t know.

Mother’s Day fell on the 10^th.

My mom and grandmother came down to watch the kids. In the morning of the 11^th Lois and I had to meet with a lawyer. Afterward, mom took me to Mr. Heaney’s to get his car and Lois to the hospital to be with her father. There was still no response on his part. My grandmother was experiencing back pains again and on the 12^th mom took her to the hospital for back and knee X-rays. There were no broken bones. She was given pills and told to rest.

The doctors basically agreed that Mr. Heaney was probably dead,
but they could not legally turn off life support. That choice fell to Lois. She says I went in and said to him, “The Phillies stink.” When he showed no reaction I said he was dead. I don’t quite remember doing that. I do remember that I went to him and gazed deep into his eyes and then told Lois there was nobody home. At any rate, she told them to turn off the machines during the afternoon of May 13. Mr. Heaney died that evening.

The next day my mom and grandmother babysat  while Lois and I visited both the undertaker and then a lawyer the next day. There was no will and no siblings, so Lois was named the Executer and the estate, what there was, went to her. Apparently, Providence had brought us the house we were never able to purchase.

Perhaps now the bad things were over. 

1030 Cobbs Street looked nice on the outside, but the inside was a mess. For some reason, although he had a garage in the back, Mr. Heaney chose to store most of his yard equipment in the dining room. 

Besides a power mower, electrichedge clippers and assorted other such tools, he also had television parts scattered throughout the home. He also apparently kept every piece of paper that had come his way, including decades of old check registers and passbooks. The interior was also in need of painting. Several walls were covered with dingy wallpaper, too. There was much trash and dirt everywhere.

Lois and I began the job of clean up. In the process I tried shutting a drawer in a chest in the bedroom, but it seemed to be stuck. I pulled it and there were envelopes taped to the drawer bottom, and to the others as well. When I pulled off an envelope  and opened the flap. Money fell out. There was over $4,000 taped in envelopes under the drawers. Boy, we checked everything carefully after that.

Besides work, I was still attending classes at Widener. Now I was spending all my spare time cleaning, repairing and painting at Cobbs Street. I finished this up on the 26^th, but I had classes the next night so waited a day to bring Lois over to see how it looked.  On the 28^th Lois, holding baby Noelle, Laurel and myself stood on the front porch. I unlocked the door. When I shoved it open I heard a strange noise. 

There were waterfalls pouring down every wall. The living room
ceiling lay crumbled on the floor. I dashed in and through the house, down the cellar steps from the kitchen and plunged up to my waist in water. The basement was completely flooded. It’s a wonder I wasn’t electrocuted. I was able to get to the valve that shut off the water to the house. 

1030 Cobbs was a double house. Fortunately, the retaining wall kept all the water out of my neighbors, but our half was a mess. All the
appliances were ruined. The kitchen cabinets were warped. So was the hardwood floors. The wallpaper was either shredded or partially peeling. Basically, the interior of the house was destroyed.

 

Lois flopped in a chair to feed Noelle. Laurel sat on the staircase looking terrified. For years after she would panic whenever it rained hard. 

A water pipe had burst in the bathroom upstairs. It had to happen on the one day in a last couple of weeks when I didn’t visit the house. It was a couple days until the beginning of June. We had to be out of our rental  house by July 1 and here we stood in utter

devastation. 

 

  

CHAPTER 145: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET BABIES AND MORE PROJECT MANAGER 1980

 CHAPTER 145 PROJECT MANAGER.  1980

 When the final curtain dropped at Mercy Catholic Medical Center upon my performance, Sue and a few others who had worked for me came to my office to say goodbye. They gave me the cup pictured, which is still in use. I was appreciative they felt that way, but I never did. I always thought I was a pretty poor boss. I never liked telling people what to do or disciplining those who went astray. I felt I was too softhearted to be a boss. (Laurel, my oldest daughter, tells me this same cup was given to the boss in the TV show, The Office. She thinks I got it from some gift shop.)

 I was on the verge of working for a man who I consider the best
boss ever. I am not alone in that opinion. I think nearly all who ever worked under him felt that way and he had over two hundred people reporting to him. Oh, I’m sure you could find someone somewhere that disagrees, but there are always those who find fault even in perfection, not that I’m claiming Walt Whittaker was perfect. I’d be hard pressed to name his flaws, however.

Oh, I suppose his preference for yellow walls perhaps. Walt suffered from red-green color blindness. The color he saw best was yellow, so he insisted all our office walls were painted that color. I was also warned about his driving. He tended to get the traffic light order mixed up.

I had two great bosses at Atlantic Richfield, John Murray and Don Jones, and I would have two more in the future, Dave Ernst (the first time around) and Lisa Butler, but there will be more about them later in this opus. Probably the only bad thing about having a great boss is you don’t want to leave them and that can prove a handicap, but more about that later also.

There were several things that made Walt so great. He wasn’t a micro-manager always looking over your shoulder. He told me when he hired someone he expected they would do their job and he shouldn’t have to be telling them what to do. He gave me autotomy to run my projects, as long as I kept him abreast of their progress. I never had him second guess me. Sometimes he questioned your plans, but he always let you give your reasons and more than most of the time he would let you do it your way. If he did ever pull rank and want things different you were expected to get on board. Once a decision was made everyone should support it. He would always listen to your suggestions and ideas, and he didn’t mind if your disagreed with him. He did not want yes men around him. 

 I not only was beginning a long relationship with a wonderful boss, I was starting the best job one could wish for (except maybe the paperboy job I had in Downingtown when I was 14). My official title was Operations, Methods and Project Manager for the Deposit Services and Data Preparation Divisions of Wilmington Trust Company. No one knew exactly what that title meant or what I was to do.

This could have been a problem, but instead proved to be very advantages. Walt had only recently taken over the management of the Data Preparation Division. The former head, named Bill Pryor, had just retired. Before he left he had begun looking at equipment to replace the keypunch unit. Walt felt that was a good place for me to begin. 

 He had already gotten approval for the expenditure and signed the
contracts to purchase new keypunch machines from Sperry Rand to replace WTC’s old IBM versions. My task was just configuring how the new stuff would fit on the floor and coordinate the delivery and installation. Pretty easy start. But I was also asked to look into streamlining and automating our Retail Lockbox Unit. Ah, now there was a problem. What in the world was a Lockbox, I wondered?

My familiarity with the term involved that big thing that looked like a padlock that Real Estate Agents put over doorknobs when a house was for sale. You know, they hung there and had a compartment inside where the house keys were stowed so when the Agent brought a prospect around he could get into the house. He or she had a key to this contraption that opened the compartment and allow he or she to remove the home keys. Somehow when they said Retail Lockbox I didn’t think they were referring to these devices.

I had a lot of learning to do.

I had been down the road of missing signposts before. When I started my job at Olson Brothers, the egg breaker, if you recall there was no one there to teach me. The person who I replaced was gone, the man who hired me was gone, the man who was to be the new boss was away. You talk about learning on the job? That was really learning on the job.

But that job did have a history. It had a description. There were some people around who had some idea of what the position was. This job was different. It was a new job and no one there  had a clue what it was supposed to be and what my duties were. I had to make it up as I went along. I had kept my workbook from the Systems Analysis class at Camden County Community College. There were a number of sheets in that workbook for the case exercises. I turned to them, modified them somewhat and these became the framework I built the project manager position upon. Probably the most important thing in there was a scheduling sheet. The next important tool was flowcharting. 

I had even saved my flowcharting template. I even had my RPG Debugging Template, which contained a sample logic flow diagram. It pays to be a packrat, who never throws away things. Suddenly all those jobs and mix of schools came together. Over the course of my having this position I even got to employee my old art training.

The Retail Lockbox was a fair sized project. I had to analyze the work itself because I knew nothing about what it was. The product consisted of processing transactions for a variety of companies, the power company and the telephone company among others. You received payments and charges and had to get these is the customer’s accounts. It was much like the accounts receivable job I had at Atlantic, except nothing was automated.You received the physical checks and bills of each company.

Once I understood the work, I had to investigate available vendors of equipment, visit them, try the machines. I had to do a cost feasibility of one system versus another and develop justification reports to go to senior management to get approval for what I recommended.

 Without getting into the weeds of the thing and boring everyone, I will just say I brought the project on board successfully and once in place it generated an incredible return on the investment. Our profit margin on this service became almost obscene, a fact that became very graphic when I did a follow up audit of the system to show senior management its success and potential. I mean this literally. I used a line graph to illustrate the differences between the old labor intense operation to the new automated system as well as the profit to expense and where break points would occur in expansion. I did not realize until I did my presentation that some of my graph lines formed the image of an erect male penis. 

Eventually the enormous margins of our current operation put greed in the hearts of senior management. They did decide to expand the operation and it became a center to process other banks’ credit cards as well. This was possible because the state government had changed the regulations on credit cards and issuers, so now even if a bank was in Utah, it could base the credit card operation in Delaware and have no limit on the interest charged. In other words, usury laws went out the window. A bank didn’t even have to have a brick and mortar presence in Delaware, as long as they used a local processor, which was going to be us.

It is a funny thing how businesses can find a way to skirt regulation. Delaware has long taken advantage by having very liberal business regulations. There had been a long standing bit of bragging that more companies were incorporated in Delaware that anywhere. Half of all public-traded companies and 60% of the Fortune 500 companies incorporated in Delaware. There were jokes about all the empty offices existing here. These are the official residency address required, but most had no staff, just an empty desk, a telephone and an address 

Anyway, we did begin lining up several giant out of state banks for

our lockbox business. This would eventually prove foolish, but I’ll come back to why later. Myself, I was off to a great start and I even got daring. I was given the Bulk File Conversion as a project.

 Our bank, like many others, filed our customers’ items by account number. (The old revolving fire cabinets on the left) Something banks were starting to do was change to a bulk file system. Bank statements were sent out over the course of a month in cycles, meaning some statements went out on say the 5^th of each month, then others went out on the 6^th and so forth. Cycles had been assigned customers when they opened their account originally not by some criteria such as alphabetic by name. Each customer was then stored in large revolving files in account number order. Clerks would have a pull list from a list of checks for  those accounts within a statement cycle about to me mailed. They would have to go through the files looking for the specific account number and pull all the items to be included with the statement.

With bulk filing, items were sorted and stored by cycle code. When
statements for a particular cycle were to be mailed all the items in that bulk were simply pulled and sent to the sorters to go to the proper statement. This cut down on a lot of labor time.  However, every bank who converted to this system did it over the period of a month, until all the cycles had been run. 

I suggested we do the whole conversion over one weekend. Impossible, I was told. Nobody does that.

Well, we did. It took a good deal of planning on my part, but on that weekend I had everything ready and we used three staging areas. It was pretty cool. No other bank had tried this, but we managed it and it all went smoothly. On the left are my plans, schedules and flowcharts  for the bulk filing conversion.

All the file trays and new cabinets were ordered, received and staged before the conversion began. On the right is a stack of the new trays in staging area one with my oldest child, Laurel, standing in front of them.

 We would have no use for those large, bulky revolving files after
this. All the items would be in trays by cycle. There would be no sorting through thousands of accounts. The workers would simply pull the trays for a cycle and be off with them. Great labor saver. On the left I am getting all the new files finalized to receive the new cycled trays as they came from the sorter. 

We had everyone in that day, all with assigned tasks and areas. People who would pull the items, people to transport the trays here and there and people to stack and verify at the end after the sorters had done their job.

 

I had to have maintenance build ramps over the steps  to facilitate the movement of the tray carts.

By the end of 1980 I was being known, not only around our bank, but in others as well. I was the man who pulled off a Bulk File conversion over a weekend.

CHAPTER 144: IMPRESSIONS OF MY LIFE: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RECHERCHE POET BABIES AND MORE COMING TO A BANK 1980

 CHAPTER 144 COMNG TO A BANK. 1980

 At some point, just at the beginning of Spring, Simons announced he was leaving. He had taken a new job he called a step up with a higher salary, at a hospital in Long Island, if I remember correctly, but I won’t swear to the location. Oh, what a shock that he should leave us so soon. He was a job hopper and as they might say in a Geico ad: “He hopped from job to job, because Simons was a job hopper, and that’s what you do, you hop jobs. When I say he was a job hopper I mean it in the worse way. He wasn’t doing it to gain experience; it was his modus operandi for climbed the ladder of success. He would work a place a short time, perhaps a year, then jump ship for something better build upon his record at the employer he was leaving. How did he build this impressive record? He came in firing people willy-nilly and short-cutting projects. On paper he looked like an effective cost cutter. The trouble was his so-called improvements were surface shallow, ill-conceived and short lived. They often had an immediate appearance of reducing cost and improving the bottom line, yet once he left for greener pastures, problems would flower like weeds, but he was gone and someone else would have to save the ruined garden he left behind.

In this case, however, he may well have smelled something in the wind that I didn’t.

His position was immediately filled, but not by an outside hire or an inside promotion. There were no want ads in the papers or postings on the bulletin boards. He slithered out the doors and one of the Sisters slid out of cloister and slipped into his position.  

It was not much after this I came to work one morning and found
one of those nuns sitting at my desk. She said “Hello” and gave me a message to visit the head of Personnel (this still was not called Human Resources). She was a very cold fish, indeed, not a smile, not a word of kindness leaked from her lips. She was not a paragon of sympathy or hope, just a usurper of my chair with a message of despair.

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone

They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on

And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song

Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been travelling so long. 

Of course, Leonard Cohen was singing about prostitutes, not nuns. I am certain he probably did find more comfort with whores than could be found in these nuns of the same title.

I met with the Vice-President of Personnel. He bid me sit down and he began pacing nervously. He began by telling me how much my efforts were appreciated and what a terrific job I had done. He finished by informed me that Sister Whatshername (I forget what it was) had been assigned to take over the position of Budget Manager.

“You mean I’m being fired?”

He stood a moment looking down at his desk. When he looked back up at me he said, “I wouldn’t call it fired.”

“Oh? What would you call it?”

He looked about the room as if the answer to that question would magically appear somewhere on the walls. He then cleared his throat and said again I wasn’t being what he’d call fired. He sighed and explained the medical center facts of life to me.

The Sisterhood went through cycles on how best to manage their

medical center. Sometimes they would hire various lay  people into key positions because they felt there was a need for professional managers. I had been hired on the tail end of such a cycle. After the lay managers ran the center for a while the Nuns would become nervous. They would grow distrustful and feel they were losing control. They would begin replacing secular managers with Sisters. That was all that was happening here. I wasn’t really being fired. I just didn’t have my job anymore.

Sure felt to me like I was fired.

It was a strange dismissal, I will say that. I was given a private office with a telephone I could use. This was a positive. If I applied at prospective employers for a position, I had a legitimate address and phone number to give them. If they called my number they would be answered by the hospital switchboard. It would sound like I was still gainfully employed.

In a strange way I was. I was certainly gainfully idle. I was expected to come in every day and every two weeks I received my regular paycheck. It was just I had no work to do. I had distributed the fiscal 1980-81 packets just before I was non-fired from my job, but I was never to see the returned data. I had no expected duties. The budgeting was the responsibility of that sister now. I was assigned to limbo and I was told there was no deadline for me to leave.

I didn’t believe that. Eventually they would get tired of paying me and ask me to go whether I had found a new job or not. Of course, their cost didn’t change because they were continuing to pay me. The Sister who took my position was in an order that had taken a vow of poverty. She didn’t get paid. She lived in the convent, received her food and clothing from the dioceses and also a small stipend monthly for her personal use. Those things had existed prior to her being the budget manager so there was no added cost to the medical center payroll. The only thing was they could have been saving my salary and reduced their costs by handing me a typical two weeks’ notice. 

Since they didn’t ask me to leave, I showed up at my office every day, unless I had interviews elsewhere. I had nothing to do there. I sat in my office and perused the want ads and prepared resumes for mailing or called prospects. This did not take up my whole day. Most of the time I read novels and hoped the phone would ring. I took long walks in the Holy Cross cemetery at lunch time. It was directly behind the headquarter building. This got to be somewhat morbid day after day, especially when I began seeking out the number of children graves in the place.

 I would cross over MacDade Boulevard to a Hardees that was
there in those days and buy a burger and fries and I would eat these as I strolled about the tombstones. Hmm, that seems a little morbid as well. I took my time strolling because nobody cared if I got back within the hour. I could come in late or leave early for that matter and no one took note either.

The bombshell that a Nun was replacing me came in April 1980 and unfortunately wasn’t an April Fool joke. I got a job interview shortly after, but not the job. I was told I was too overqualified. I didn’t care about that, I only wanted a job, but I can understand their reasoning. Companies fear hiring anyone they perceive as overqualified because they think the person will jump ship quickly to a better job, Simon says!

My approach to job hunting was to clip all want ads that contained any requirement within their list where I felt I had experience. I would then apply even if there was only one item I had ever done, even If I didn’t have all the qualifications they requested, I believed I could learn them once hired. I sent out many, many resumes, made a ton of phone calls and had several interviews all over the place. I traveled out beyond Valley Forge, all over Chester and Delaware County, in and out of Philadelphia, but with no luck. 

On the home front, we had our big birthday-anniversary dinner at
the Rose Tree Inn on  June 15. On my birthday, June 27, we again went to Dutch Wonderland with my mom and grandmother.

On July 26 I went over to Jersey to play golf with Victor Ernest at the Golf Farm. After playing the course, I accidentally dropped my keys while putting the clubs back in the car and shut the trunk. Oops, my keys were now locked inside the vehicle. I had to call home to Lois, who in turn had to call my folks to bring my spare keys over to me. Everyone came along and we all went to dinner at a diner located just down from the Golf Farm.

That week I got a call from Wilmington, Delaware in answer to one of my many resumes. I was asked to come in to interview for a financial analyst position at a bank. I drove down for my interview on the appointed day, but I had never driven in Wilmington before. I had passed through it on Route 13 going South to other places, like Williamsburg in Virginia, but never pulled into the city proper.  Now I was downtown seeking a place to park near this bank so I could get to my interview. I passed the address on 10^th Street and now sought how to get to some lot. I had seen one coming in, but could not get to it. All the streets were one way, but all took me away from my destination. I kept circling about trying this avenue or that, and the clock was ticking and I didn’t want to be late for my interview. I had concluded you couldn’t get there from here when I stumbled upon a lot entrance some blocks from my destination.

 Soon I was walking through the revolving doors of the Montchanin Building (below) into the lobby of Wilmington Trust Headquarter and getting an elevator upstairs. It was strange to me that in Wilmington the First Floor of buildings usually was not the first floor. This real first floor was called the Street Floor. In this building the First Floor was really the third floor because between the Street Floor and it was the second floor, which was called the mezzanine for some unfathomable reason. The executive suites were all on the 12^th Floor that in reality was the 14^th floor. It was often referred to as the top floor, which it wasn’t. There was another floor above it, but this was not listed as the 13^th floor nor as the 15^th, but as the Penthouse. I wasn’t going to any of those floors yet. I made a stop at Personnel (still not called Human Resources) and then to the 6^th Floor to meet with a Joseph Kammerer, who was the manager of Finance.

Mr. Kammerer sat across from me holding my resume in his hand. “I don’t think financial analyst is the right position for you.” he said.

Ut oh, was this trip a waste of time.

He held my resume up. “But,” he said, “I think there is an opening that you are perfectly fitted for. It is a brand new position in Deposit Services for a Project Manager. Personnel made a study and felt it might be worthwhile to try project management in the clerical departments. Interested?”

Notice how hiring people are always asking if I’m interested?

I nodded.

“I’ll take you down to the manager you would be working for and see what he thinks.”

 I was taken down to the mezzanine and to the front corner office
overlooking both 10^th and Orange Streets. This was my first meeting with Walter H. Whittaker, the Vice-President of Deposit Services (Left). He stood and shook my hand. He towered over me at six foot five. I would eventually learn he once played basketball for the University of Kentucky under Coach Adolph Rupp.

 He also had been in the movie “The Asphalt Jungle” where he stood in for the star, Sterling Hayden. The scouts had spotted him somewhere and felt he had the right body shape to pass for Hayden. He agreed to do the scene. It is a scene near the end of the film. Hayden’s character has been shot and fallen in a farm pasture. Several horse walk over and mill about the prone body, sniffing at it. The film makers did not wish to take the chance that Sterling Hayden might get trampled, so Walt Whittaker became the body. Who cared if some unknown college kid got stepped on?

Anyway, Mr. Whittaker and I began talking. We must have talked for at least an hour. I felt very comfortable with him and he seemed to like me well enough. After our chat he asked a secretary to get his managers together and introduced me to them. It was important they give their approval. We walked into a small conference room and with these additional people gathered we all talked some more. He dismissed them, shook my hand and said he would call  me.

He did call and said his boss wanted to meet me, could I join them

for lunch on such and such a date. We met in the Hotel DuPont and had lunch in the Brandywine Room, a restaurant rich in dark brown wood. It was a favorite of downtown business men and lawyers. (I do not think this room exists in the hotel anymore.)  Walt’s boss was Mr. George Craig, who was Senior Vice President of Operations (latter called Information Technology). The lunch was very good especially since they paid for it. Mr. Craig asked me a lot of questions. When we parted I was again told Walt would call me.

I waited and waited and waited for the call. July passed by and we were well into August and still no word on whether I had the position or not. I did get the word from Mercy Catholic Medical Center on August 16. I didn’t have to come in anymore nor would I receive any checks beyond one more. I was officially laid off and unemployed, and still no call from this bank.

I called Walt. He told me any hiring had to be approved by some kind of committee and he was waiting for it to review my resume and meet. I went back to waiting. On the 19^th I had a job interview with a company in New Jersey and then on August 26 I got the call that I was hired by Wilmington Trust Company and would start on Wednesday, September 3.