Autobiography, Chapter 7

Bob Langston worked in Personnel when I was hired at Vickers.  He told me that they were really looking for a graduate engineer with three years of sales experience but, since they were only paying $590 per month, they would take me.  That really made me feel loved and wanted.

Pres Whitson was the Personnel Manager, Bob’s boss.  Pres interviewed me as well and kept asking me if I would transfer if the occasion arose.  I kept telling him that, of course, I would.  I found out later that he was against hiring me because he was convinced that I would not move.  A year later I proved him wrong.  On June 4, 1970, I went to work for Vickers.

Louise and I had moved into a very nice house at 43^rd St. North and Cincinnati Ave. in Tulsa when we first moved there.  It was much better than we had expected to be able to afford and, sure enough, we couldn't.  After about 90 days, I had to tell our landlord that we couldn't afford to make the $125 per month rent and that we were going to have to move.  We moved into an 8’ by 46’ trailer house  at 6619 East King Street.

Before we moved, however, we had one experience which was somewhat funny.  Kenneth Moser, the guy I had tried to join the Police Department with, had a beat which covered my home.  He called me one night and asked if he could come by and drink a cup of coffee.  I told him I would be delighted and he said that he would bring one of his cohorts by.  In a little while, Kenneth showed up in his black-and-white and his partner followed him in in another black-and-white.  We all went inside and sat there for about 30 minutes drinking coffee when Kenneth announced that they had to go back to work.  When we opened the front door, the yard was full of people!  All the neighbors saw the police cars and thought that these white people had done something terribly wrong!

My first job at Vickers Tulsa Division was inside sales.  This company had started out in 1929 as the Tulsa Winch Manufacturing Corporation by Mr. Harley Pray.  It had been on the east side of downtown Tulsa for many years and had moved into the former Hale-Halsell warehouse on East Pine Street in December, 1968.

Mr. Pray started Tulsa Winch by making winches out of the rear ends of Model T trucks.  The gears used on those rear ends are very similar to the gears made today by Tulsa Winch.  When he ran out of used gears he had to start making his own.  The company grew and prospered and, in fact, won the U.S. Navy’s coveted “E” award for excellence during World War II.

In 1946, Mr. Pray decided to retire and sold the company to Vickers Hydraulics, a division of Remington Rand Co.  Harry Vickers had pioneered automotive hydraulics in Detroit and had built Vickers into the World’s premier hydraulics company.  Later Remington and Sperry merged and formed Sperry Rand Corporation.  Sperry Rand was most noted for building the World’s first true computer, the Eniac.

Enough of company history.  My job was to answer phones, take orders, expedite customer shipments, and field complaints.  There were four inside guys at the time: Garry Strouse, Fred Lamar, Bill Lewis, and me.  We had a supervisor, Johnny Kirk, and two secretaries, Janice Bain and Sherry Richardson.  It took me about two weeks to get up enough nerve to start answering the phone but I caught on quickly after that.  I’m convinced that having a farm background really helps in learning mechanical things.

There were three outside guys who worked out of that office as well.  They were Bernie Jiles, Jack West, and Chuck Bookout.  Bookout probably knew more about the technical aspects of our product line than anyone else.  When I would get a tough call, I would ask him to take it and he would always refuse.  It infuriated me but it did cause me to have to go to engineering and find out the correct answers for myself.  I became a better salesman because of his attitude.

Our general manager at the time was Russ Dupuis, an old-school manager who came into our sales office every day and looked at the sales sheet on Garry Strouse’s desk.  Russ had been with Vickers for many years and at Tulsa for about 10.  He retired in 1971, just a year after I went to work there.  The Marketing Manager was Chet Lenik, a Polish guy from Detroit.  When I first went to work at Vickers, he called me into his office and told me that if I heard any good Polish jokes he wanted to hear them.

Louise and I really enjoyed this time in our lives.  We were newlyweds, out on our own, and having a good time.  Louise worked at the Braum’s Ice Cream Store just around the corner from our trailer and I was having a good time in my new job.  We also met our good friends, Jerry and Marlene McCain, while living in the mobile home park.

Like us, they were just good country people, he from Jackson, Tennessee, and she from Jacksonville, Florida.  Jerry had been in the Navy and had met Marlene while stationed in Jacksonville.  After they married, they moved to Tulsa so he could attend Spartan School of Aeronautics.  He wanted to get his A & P (airframe and powerplant) license so he could become an aircraft mechanic.

We had a wonderful time living next door to Jerry and Marlene.  One Sunday morning, Louise made some biscuits from scratch and they didn't come out quite right.  In fact, they were terrible.  Well, I called Jerry and told him to meet me out in the yard.  We played a game of catch with the biscuits and not one of them ever broke!

Eventually, an opening in outside sales came up, this time in Detroit.  This was a major promotion and most people would have killed for it.  Of the four of us, one, Garry Strouse, had made it clear in the past that he would not transfer.  For some reason, the company didn’t want to offer Bill Lewis the job, so that left Fred Lamar and me.  Fred had seniority on me so they kept offering the job to him.  I wanted it badly so I kept badgering Estill Sherrill, the Sales Manager, for the job.  Finally, they decided that Fred just was not going to move, so they told me I had the job.

Being transferred from Tulsa to Detroit meant a raise from $690 per month (I had gotten a couple of raises) to $850 per month.  All of our friends told us that we would hate living in Detroit but the job opportunity was too good to pass up.  In early June, 1971, while the company was on strike, Louise and I moved to Detroit.

We found a small apartment at the corner of 14 Mile Road and John R., in Troy.  If you are familiar with Detroit, you know that the northernmost boundary of the city is 8 Mile Road, so we were six miles north of there.  Troy was a fairly young, growing suburb, and we were happy to be living there.  There was a giant mall across the road from our house, Oakland Mall, and just about everything you could think of was within close proximity.

Louise quickly got a job at a card shop in the Mall, Memory Lane, and developed a bunch of new friends.  I am convinced that this was the reason we liked Detroit so much.  We both had new jobs and were meeting new people and everything was right.

The apartment complex we moved into was named Canterbury Square.  It consisted of several buildings, each with eight units in it.  The day we moved into our building, not a single neighbor knew any of their neighbors.  However, within two weeks, Louise and I knew everyone In the building and, within six weeks, everyone in the building knew everyone else.  I really don’t give us credit for anything except being stupid enough to want to meet everyone.  Some of the neighbors included Chuck Schiff (our accountant friend who lived upstairs), John and Mary Bone, and Chuck and Sue Mowat.  Mrs. Cooper, a lonely widow, lived next door to Chuck Schiff.

One problem we had was that Louise did not know how to drive.  I’ve kidded her forever saying that the next time I get married, the first question I’m going to ask the prospective bride is whether she has a drivers license.  Louise did not want to learn but I wanted her to.  We set a practice time for every evening at 5:30 p.m. when I was in town.  After about 90 days, she was ready and took her test.  She passed it with flying colors.

I was in outside sales and my territory was Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.  I worked out of an office at the Vickers Warehouse in Ferndale, about five miles south of our apartment.  I was assigned to train under a fellow by the name of Dick Karr, who had been in outside sales for Tulsa Winch for several years.

In retrospect, I was a very poor salesman at this time.  I was definitely not assertive, which you need to be, and I didn’t know the product line as well as I should.  I was reluctant to travel much, because I didn’t want to spend the Company’s money so I didn’t see my customers as often as I should.  In spite of all this, my bosses thought I was doing a good job so they were happy with me.

After about a year and a half, we had a reorganization in Tulsa and Jack West became my new boss.  Jack called me up one day and said he needed to talk to me and would meet me at the airport that evening.  Well, if he was going to fly over 1000 miles just to have a meeting with me at the airport, it had to be important!  When I met with him that evening, he told me that I was going to be transferred and had my choice of Chicago or Tulsa.  Inside I was screaming “Tulsa” but I played it cool and told him I would have to talk to Louise.

Of course, Louise wanted to move back to Tulsa as well so we took the transfer home.  In October, 1972, we moved back to Tulsa, into an apartment building on Harvard just south of Pine Street.