Never mind nepotism, employees’ kids claimed hiring priority. Three months away from my first college classes, I needed better wages than the library offered. And my father’s twenty years with Farmer’s Alliance Insurance Company recommended me. Sherfys might be a little dowdy, prudish, intense, but we buckled down. And, I’d passed both years of Mr. Rickner’s high school typing class handily.
I walked to work with my dad that first June Monday morning in 1964, Pomp and Circumstance still singing along my spine. I’d grown up watching him head up the same route, had run to meet him at the end of his work days, listened to his descriptions of office snarls over supper. We knew his desk and coat rack and heaped in basket from growing-up summer Sunday afternoons, when my sister and I staged chair races through the company’s cool darkened corridors. Now, I treasured being his colleague, being grown up.
Once inside, he headed for his cubicle. I joined the line of “girls” punching into the time clock. 45-year-old Elizabeth, the supervising Alliance girl, walked me to a metal desk, Underwood office upright anchored dead center in its own shelf.
Left of the typewriter, Elizabeth had already stacked the days’ work: two dozen auto policy manila folders each paired with a blank renewal form—four carbons dense. My job, as Elizabeth explained, was to type each renewal—and leave the completed forms—in their files–on the right side of my desk at the end of the day. Questions? Elizabeth, sleek in heels and hose, straight suit skirt (jacket hanging on the back of her chair), white blouse and paper cuffs, walked the rows of gray desks waiting to help.
Year-around girls typed more complex, new policies. Sometime in the night, Elizabeth proofed our work and placed yesterday’s corrections and the next day’s policies back in a perfectly aligned, left side stack.
The Farmers Alliance Insurance Companies was McPherson, Kansas’s second biggest employer, after the oil refinery. It had started as a fire insurance company in the late 1880s and over the years branched into auto, business and farm policies. We didn’t sell insurance directly, but through independent agents scattered across several Midwestern states.
By the time I positioned my fingers over the Underwood keys, the company occupied one of the town’s newest, ugliest, air conditioned office buildings. Kansas Flint Hills limestone faced the show-front Main Street side. Employees entered back doors, under horizontal windows framed by pink aluminum panels.
Company president E. C. Mingenback— Stingyback to my childhood ear—occupied the huge southwest corner office. His deputies—the managing guys—were lined up next to him against windowed outer walls in descending order of influence–secretaries immediately available in front. Claims adjusters and underwriters—like my dad—occupied the next ring of space—in lines of metal, frosted-glass-topped cubicles. In turn, their secretaries—who placed calls and spun out letters from Dictaphone cylinders—sat next. The sizeable typing pool to which I belonged ranged across the interior space.
Sufficiently skilled, childless and well-liked typing pool girls—aged 30-50–advanced to become secretaries. Sufficiently well-liked, company-player men moved ever so slowly toward the outer offices. My dad was judged on his underwriting decisions. Paid to find the line between bringing in business for the company and weeding out bad risk applicants—the ne’re-do-well farmers too quick to submit a storm-based claim when the real issue was negligence, the drivers too likely to drink heavily at their local country clubs. Paid to second-guess the agents’ enthusiasms, weigh the company’s exposure, decide whether to apply the era’s prejudices.
We were all, of course, working the pure post-World War II office cliché. Maybe McPherson’s Mad Men and Women—dimmed, contained, constrained by the mores of the mid-continent. Maybe more Sinclair Lewis “Main Street” than the high stakes, high drama 60s New York. I can’t remember office tantrums or even quiet sobs. Whatever murmurs circulated about affairs, we witnessed no dramatic fights or improper assignations. Mr. Mingenback graciously gave every salaried employee–not the hourly-waged girls– a round red tin of Texas fruitcake for Christmas and exactly two weeks of vacation. We took 15 minute breaks in the smoky break room and went to the bathroom on that schedule.
United by that walk to work for three college summers, my dad and I saw the rest of the day differently.
I thrived. I figured out carbon paper correction tricks, turning o’s and a’s into e’s without detection; unscrambled scrawled signatures and caught agents’ mistakes in calculating coverages. I loved occasional trips to the huge basement file room to find answers in yellowed policies. I was at home in the tides and weathers of an office day: the upsurge in typewriter chatter at eight; rising curls of pipe smoke from outer offices; overheard new-to-me testosterone-fueled jokes over cubicle glass; the sixties’ office scent of paper and metal, recycled air; the far-away vibrato of giant genie computers. And I understood the gift—especially in the welcome lulls between college semesters—of routine, visibly and tangibly accomplished work that ended at five.
My dad struggled. In contrast to my easy, predictable routine, he made decisions—all day long every day. And whatever he decided might be seriously wrong. Nothing in his growing up or in a 1960s small-town, small-time Kansas company taught him to let go, to trust his considerable insight, his good judgment, himself.
Most mornings he got up at four, dressed in the dark—good wool suit from Morris & Sons, white shirt, wide tie, overcoat, rubbers over polished second-best shoes if it was rainy, hat. He’d tiptoe out and walk those two blocks north for the first of three trips. By the time he came back for breakfast at seven, he’d put in the easiest hours of the day: quiet, unobserved, free from the false bonhomie and relentless competition. At noon, home for lunch, he’d stretch out on the living room floor hoping a nap would ease his headache. He’d fall asleep over the paper at night. Wake at 2:00 am to worry.
He was glad for the work, for its steadiness, and its support of a family that mostly he’d never thought he’d have. Like many contemporaries, he’d known his own brand of childhood deprivations, joylessness especially. He’d been taught that God valued sacrifice more than frivolity. He’d counted on a painfully earned college diploma, to bring him—-stature, security. He wasn’t the high school science teacher he trained to be or the minister his parents expected him to be or the banker his best friend Delbert was. He might be more white collar than Lew, the flour mill’s accountant. We were eating in a world where so many didn’t, but he expected more of himself. He was living the human story where food and family support ruled life’s equation. He didn’t see choice.
I could. In no small measure on the platform of his dreaded days, the blind luck of timing and chance. And the inscrutable wizardry of respect and rebellion by which we learn to be our parents and to be anything but them. ©
