Jersey Central Power & Light....job #3

Four of us from Lockheed ended up at JCP&L - which we started to call "Lockheed North". We had a lot of fun and the work was easy. The best part is that there was one other girl in the professional ranks. A FRIEND!! Wooo Hooo! She was even a level up from me, so I felt that she had really succeeded! Within a year or so, there was a reorganization and I ended up working for Karmela. For the couple weeks before I started to report to her, the guys would tell me that working for Karmela would be a problem. No one could tell me why and I was getting very nervous. Was she a witch? Would she give me all the grunt work to do? How would I deal with this? There were even whispers of "cat fight"!

I showed up for work that first day as a member of her team to find a huge bouquet of fresh daisies from her garden on my desk to welcome me to the group. I was floored! How bad could this woman be if she greeted me with flowers?? She gave me my assignment which was to fix the problems created and left behind by the (male) buyer who had moved on. His desk was a real mess! Requisitions had been shoved into the back of the drawers like a 3rd grader who didn't want to do an assignment. Internal clients were calling daily to find out why they hadn't received their orders. I didn't want to air dirty procurement laundry and tell them that my predecessor had hidden the requisitions, so I worked quickly and within a few months had the desk running like a top.

At one point, Karmela asked me if I wanted to play hooky the next day and go to north jersey to an amusement area. Wow. Sure! We had fun at work, too. Suppliers just weren't used to women managers or buyers yet. At one point, we (Karmela, a male colleague and I) visited a potential supplier at their offices. The three of us were having a conversation with the supplier but the supplier kept speaking to the sole male with us (who also reported to Karmela). Finally, at the end of the meeting, the supplier turned to the male buyer and told him to "bring the information back to your manager". I couldn't help myself....I looked at the supplier and told him that he'd already told our manager and pointed to Karmela. He paled. Karmela told the supplier that he shouldn't expect an order to be forthcoming.

Another fun experience was when we released an RFP for bathroom supplies, including toilet paper. We asked for samples of the paper the suppliers were quoting so that we could ensure the product was satisfactory. Imagine the two girls sitting at a small conference table with a dozen rolls of toilet paper all around us. How to check it out? Brilliant idea! We gave each of the other buyers on the floor a roll and told them to "go for it" and let us know which one they liked best! One roll was too thin. Another "might as well have had wood chips in it". Like Goldilocks, we eventually found the one that was just right.

Lunchtimes were fun, too. Rousing games of Hearts took place almost daily over sandwiches and sodas. Boys vs girls. Karmela and me against Ron and Herbie. It took a while to get into the groove, but we devised a very complex bidding system that really had nothing to do with normal bidding in Hearts. We had a system going where we knew exactly what cards were in the other's hand. For YEARS we didn't lose a game. It took Ron and Herbie that long to figure out that we were cheating and they finally refused to play any more. By then, we'd had enough anyway. It was too easy to fool them.

Not everything was fun and games, though. One of my managers "forgot himself" (his words), when he smacked me on the ass to tell me to "go to it" on a project. His look of absolute shock was telling and I don't think he meant to do it. It was as if I was one of the boys on the football team leaving the huddle. It was, however, terribly inappropriate.

During this time, the EEOC called me with good news! RCA was making a monetary offer to make my case go away. $1500. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it paid off my car loan and left me a few bucks to go shopping. Done! I had to sign a waiver that "from the beginning of time to the end of time" I wouldn't publically divulge the terms of the settlement. To put this into context, many women in the late 1970s and early 1980s were appearing on the hugely popular Phil Donohue show (think of this as the early version of the Oprah show) to tell their tales of workplace discrimination. RCA was ensuring that I didn't go that route. I took the deal. A few weeks later, some of my former female RCA co-workers called to tell me that they'd received a raise and it wasn't the normal raise time. I felt like a hero!

I'd been at JCP&L for about 2 years when a position opened up in their Materials Management group managing pole/line hardware inventory in two large and about 35 smaller warehouses in the state. I wanted it. I was totally bored by this time in purchasing and was looking for something new. I went to see the hiring manager, Kirk, and told him I was interested. He looked surprised but told me to apply. Also applying for the slot were an accountant and an engineer. Our Hearts playing buddies all put up "campaign" posters to cheer on the accountant (a friend of theirs). They would chant "go Lou go Lou" when I walked by. Kirk interviewed me and the others and I really thought the accountant would win the job. My father said that the engineer would definitely get it (well, ok, he's an engineer, too and was a bit biased). HA! Karmela spoke to Kirk and told him I was the best of the lot and I got the job.

Kirk ended up being my biggest supporter besides Karmela. When he took me to the northern area warehouse to introduce me around, the warehouse manager refused to look at me. He eventually told me at that first meeting that he didn't think a woman could do this job. I asked why. His comment was that women couldn't drive an order-picker vehicle (similar to a fork lift). Of course, my job would never have required that I drive this kind of equipment, but I looked at Kirk who shrugged his shoulders and mouthed to me "are you going to put up with that sh*t"? I asked the warehouseman for the keys and a hard hat. After a quick lesson, I drove the machine to the bin location (of course, near the top of the warehouse) and grabbed the item he had asked me to find. Once I was on the ground again, I handed him the widget, the hard hat and walked out of the warehouse. He was left holding the widget with his jaw on the ground. Kirk told me later that he apologized profusely (to Kirk, of course, not me) and for the rest of my tenure there would bend over backward to do anything he could for me.

This was the beginning of computers in the workplace. 1981. We introduced "business to business" ordering using our computer to access a supplier's computer via a dial up modem that you had to fit the telephone handset into. It was very modern and technologically innovative for the time. The supplier's tech group couldn't figure out how to do this, so Kirk and I went to their shop and handled that side of the set up, too. The biggest problem they had was how to let us see our pricing but not their cost. We had them set up a rudimentary data base with their cost hidden from view.

We then got Wang word processing! Just amazing! It was my job to design, develop, program, write instruction manuals and train the secretaries how to use my new purchasing system. I also had to be the one to take away their typewriters. Several of the ladies hid their typewriters so that I couldn't find them. This was the start of my techie career.

I designed the purchasing system that allowed not only the printing of purchase orders onto custom forms but also captured data for use at year end. How much money did we spend on different items? How much money did we spend with minority suppliers? We could now run a report at the end of the year rather than manually gathering the old purchase orders and manually adding columns of numbers. A real time saver.

Eventually, other departments in our building wanted the same kind of Wang equipment and I was promoted into the Information Technology department. I ran the system, helped other departments program their requirements and even helped the maintenance guys figure out how to run the necessary cables. The only downside was that I had to stay late once a week to manually run back ups of the system. The huge data platters were heavy and I had to open the main server, put in the back up platters and sit at the terminal while it ran. I eventually had a guy to help me by taking a turn every other week.

One morning after Fred ran the backup, my telephone started to ring off the hook! Everyone in the building was upset because they were missing data. FRED!!? What the heck did you do? Ooops. He ran the back up backwards - replacing all of the data on the disks with week old back up data. Erased. One week of work for the entire building....erased. You'd think that Fred would have been fired. Or at least reprimanded. Instead. He was named to be my new boss! NO FREAKING WAY!! Obviously, I found another job outside the company, gave notice and left. Fred was then given TWO people to take my place and a raise. I just couldn't believe it.....

But I was on to my next job. Number 4.

Moving on to Lockheed Electronics....job #2

My new job at Lockheed Electronics was really just a continuation of the one at RCA. I was the only "girl buyer" on the floor among a dozen or so middle aged white men, most of whom just didn't understand the concept of equality. "Hey honey, would you go grab me a cup of coffee?" "Hey miss, bring me an ashtray, would ya?" "What? You don't like the smell of cigar smoke at 8AM? What's wrong wit cha?" I was known as "the libber" or "that girl who thinks she's a buyer". For our Christmas grab bag (we could still have Christmas parties, not holiday parties), I received a pair of mens boxer shorts because I really wanted to be a man. (I gave a tin cup and pencils to the cigar smoking guy who spent all Friday afternoons lining up his breakfast, lunch and dinner dates with suppliers for the next week! I could give out the abuse as well as take it.)

There was a pipe smoking buyer in the office, too. He lit up first thing in the morning and chain smoked his pipe all day. At least he was pleasant to me (like he would be to a lap dog). There was a man who chain smoked cigarettes (Camels) all day hacking up globs of phlegm. That poor guy was hugely obese, was diabetic and shuffled around in bedroom slippers because of the damage that diabetes had done to his circulation.

My manager was a nice guy to me because he had daughters my age. At Christmas, the suppliers asked for our license plate numbers and told us all to leave our car doors unlocked in the parking lot. I received some nice bottles of wine. When I found a gift certificate to Macys in my car (a big no-no), I gave it to my boss, who told me to put it in my pocket book and go spend it because I had put up with a lot of crap all year.

During this time, I called the EEOC and had them start proceedings against RCA for wage discrimination. My father still worked for RCA and as a top executive, had an office at corporate headquarters in New York City. He heard about the EEOC investigation at staff meetings in the city and kept me posted as the noose tightened on the manager who had locked the door and screamed at me. I was still nervous and not altogether sure that there wasn't a super secret black list of problem women in business that my name was on somewhere. As it turned out, the wheels of justice turned slowly and I had moved on yet again before that issue was settled.

One at a time, in 1979, several of my young male colleagues had moved on to work in procurement for Jersey Central Power & Light Company in Morristown. Finally it was my turn to get the call, and I happily gave my two week notice and left.

The First Job - RCA

My first job out of college was with RCA in their Purchasing training program. I would spend six months in four different RCA locations around the country learning the procurement trade. The company paid for one week in a hotel in each location. After that, I had to find my own place to stay at my own expense. I found out later that RCA considered this rotational training program as much a survival test as training in all aspects of purchasing.

The first stop was lower Manhattan at RCA Global Communications. I stayed in my parents house (the price was great!) and I hated taking the train into the city from New Jersey, but I sure did feel like I had finally joined the “real world”. The people there treated me right by giving me real work to do. A small group of us would go out into the Wall Street area for lunch every day to grab a sandwich and walk around. The shopping was great, the work was interesting and, best of all, I got paid!

I thought one young guy was pretty cute and wanted him to ask me out in the worst way. Girls didn’t call boys in those days so I had to make do with some really creative hinting. I remember asking him where the best places were to find some nightlife in the area, hoping, of course, that he would ask me to go with him. It didn’t dawn on me until years later that his answer “most of the gay bars have really good bands” was his way of telling me he wasn’t interested in girls. He was my mentor for my six weeks in NYC and I appreciated his help immensely.

My rotation in NYC ended on a Friday afternoon and I spent the weekend packing suitcases and my car to head out to Bloomington, Indiana – my next stop! Such culture shock! NYC on Friday…Indiana on Monday! It took me two days to drive to Indiana. I stopped at a motel in the Pittsburgh area late on Saturday to find that all hotels in a 50 mile radius were booked to capacity because of a sporting event. I was too tired to trek on, so I called home from a pay phone to see if mom and dad knew anyone there who would let me use their guestroom (they didn’t). I went back into the motel and told them I was going to sleep in my car in their parking lot and could their security check on me once in a while. They told me that they always saved one room for emergencies and they supposed that I was it for that night. The room was next to the elevators and ice machine, but I didn’t notice.

The next day I got to Indiana, found my hotel and got settled. During that first week, I found a room to rent in the home of an older, recently widowed woman who had worked at the plant in the past. She was sweet and taught me how to needlepoint. She even made my bed when I got up late and ran out the door in a rush. She also was insistent that I attend church with her on Sunday mornings, which I did once or twice but soon politely declined. I got to feel that I was an unsuitable replacement for the company of her husband and although we parted on good terms five weeks later, I was very happy to move on.

I was psyched to be working in the facility that manufactured television sets sold under the RCA label! The plant tours were exciting - a real factory environment with parts going in one end and a working television coming out the other! To this day I love to walk into a manufacturing plant and follow the process from start to finish. My role in the production process was to expedite orders. This was no small task since the availability of parts was crucial to keeping the assembly line moving and people working in a “just in time” environment. My one crisis came when a truck delivering parts broke down along a highway. Sending another truck wasn’t an option as it would take too long and the line would shut down. I spoke to my manager to find out the cost of the line shutdown vs the cost of other transportation. I ordered a helicopter to airlift enough parts off the truck to keep the line going while another truck was sent to pick up the rest. Such an adrenaline rush!

Indiana was a bit more backward than NYC on the women's liberation front....I had more than one person ask me “why would a girl want to traipse around the country” on a training program. I was totally confused by this question. Huh? My answer was “why would a man want to do this?”. They didn’t get it. A girl would just end up married and at home with children so why bother. Wasn’t my boyfriend angry with me for doing this? (Why was THAT even a question?? What did he have to do with me being on this training program, anyway??) At the start of this rotation, I met with a manager who gave me some work multiplying columns of numbers with a calculator (yes, a computer now would do this in the blink of an eye, but this was the mid-70s). He then said to me “Let me show you how to use this calculator”. I told him I knew how to use one as I’d been a math major in college but he just smiled that awful paternalistic smile and said “this calculator might be different, honey”. It was the “honey” that really rankled but I bit my tongue and allowed him to show me how to use a simple four-function calculator.

At the end of that rotation, I received a “report card” and I had to rate their program, as well. A big show was made of my final review. My manager called me into his office and asked me how I thought I’d done. I thought for a few seconds and said “well, I would guess that you gave me a “C” since you didn’t give me a chance to prove myself one way or the other”. He turned red and handed me my review which, of course, gave me C’s straight down the line. He then asked me how I rated their program. I told them that I was recommending that no women be sent to Indiana again until they joined the rest of the country in accepting women in the working world. Then I got up and left (amazingly, I was offered a position at the end of my rotation – which I declined).

My third rotation was in Meadowlands, PA at the RCA facility that made mobile phones (a suitcase sized precursor to the cell phone – this plant was eventually sold to Motorola). It was also a manufacturing environment but the managers there were much more open to a single woman in the working world. Maybe too open. My manager was constantly hitting on me and the picture of his ex-wife that was still on his desk looked eerily like me. His behavior would never be accepted in the workplace now, but it was just something to deal with then. At least he gave me real work to do, was pleasant and it was easy to ignore his advances. My living arrangement, too, was fun. I lived in a big rooming house that was rented to young graduate students at one of the local universities. The house was a late 1800’s restored Victorian and my room was decorated with antique furniture (or maybe it was just old…) and old oriental rugs. All in all, it was a good rotation and my manager eventually offered me a full time position later.

The last rotation was in Moorestown, NJ at the Missile and Surface Radar facility. I found a room in a house owned by a woman who rented frequently to young men in this program. I was the first female moving through and she liked to treat me to home made dinners. My rotation was interesting and I started to learn about integrated circuits, “clean rooms” and engineering drawings from my vendors. There were several female buyers employed full time at this location who seemed to enjoy their jobs, so when I was offered a permanent slot, I accepted. The pay was $9800 per year and it was enough to pay rent on a garden apartment and make car payments! Who could ask for more?!

The girl buyers, as we were called by the guys, would have lunch together and plot how to get the men to take down their nudie calendars from the half-walls that separated our desks and how to get the trade magazines to stop using bikini clad women in their ads to sell manufacturing equipment. We managed to do both with a little creativity. While the men were out having a manly lunch of martinis and steaks with vendors, we used black magic markers to put mustaches and other enhancements on the calendar girls (yes, they were angry but we didn’t stop so they eventually hid their calendars in their desk drawers so the lunchtime vandals wouldn’t find them). We cut out the ads from the trade journals and sent them to the presidents of the companies advertised and told them that as buyers for a large company we would boycott their products until they started to realize that women were now in the industry in professional positions. Some of the letter recipients actually responded and said they would stop that kind of advertising. It was the beginning of the end for that kind of unprofessional ads (much to the annoyance of the manly men we worked with).

After six months, I sat down for lunch with three male co-workers who were complaining about their salaries. I was shocked that the salaries they complained about were more than $3000 more than mine! They had each started with the company at the same time as I and each had a degree in a pure science (that they weren’t using in the course of their work). My degree in math was probably the most worthwhile of the lot. Plus, I had the corporate training program and they didn’t! What was going on here!? Yes, I knew that wage discrimination was being talked about on the news but I never really expected that it would affect me. This was the first time it hit me that simply because I was a girl, my income would be affected.

What to do what to do? I tried to talk to my manager. I told him that I wanted a raise to go along with my recent promotion to Sub-Contracts Buyer but his response was that I needed to prove myself before they could give me any money (say what??!). I told him that I knew that “things aren’t equal out on the floor” when it came to salary. He asked me how I knew that and I told him that “people talked and I listened” (I didn’t want my co-workers to get in trouble so I didn’t want to name names). My manager told me that guys needed more money because they had families to support. I saw red. To this day, I’m not sure where my next statement came from or how I had the courage to say it. “I don’t think that their extra appendage is worth $3000.” The manager turned beet red, stood up and told me “this meeting is over”. I knew this incident wasn’t over. The next day, I got called into the big boss’s office. He slammed the door and locked it before turning around to shove his finger in my face and say “you’re nothing but a God damned trouble maker. Who the hell do you think you are anyway?! You’re lucky that I can’t fire you now since you’ve made these allegations. Now get out.” I remember this like it happened yesterday. I refused to let him see me cry, so I sat there taking his crap and not saying a word for fear that my voice would crack. I have never been so angry at work and so sure that I would somehow be blacklisted and never able to find work again.

I left his office and went right to the ladies room where all my female co-workers had huddled to wait for me. They had heard the ranting through the paper thin walls of the office and were there to offer support. Mom called me daily with helpful information (the phone number for the EEOC which was the federal agency handling this kind of complaint at the time). I just wanted to find another job and move on.

I eventually found a position with Lockheed Electronics thanks in large part to the quota system in place for companies with government contracts. I started in January 1978 and was very happy to be out of the RCA nightmare. The young guy who replaced me at RCA called me every day at my new job to ask me how do I do this or that. Where did you put that file? Finally, he called me on a cold winter February day to tell me “Hey! I’m going to Florida to visit that vendor!” This was a trip that I had been repeatedly promised and had repeatedly been postponed by my manager. It was to have been my first business trip and I’d been psyched to get on a plane with a briefcase to travel with the business men (emphasis on “men”….). I was LIVID when I was told that the new guy was taking MY trip! And in FEBRUARY when I was stuck in frozen NJ ! I hung up on him. I picked up the phone and called the EEOC number that my mother had given me dozens of times….

Colgate 1972

There were some issues that went along with being Sweet 18 and never been kissed and one of them was selecting a previously all-boy college. I went to Colgate University in the fall of 1972 and was part of the third class that accepted girls. The male:female ratio was 8:1. And my parents would pay for it because it was also a good school! With that ratio, I couldn’t lose. I even had two dates in one night (only once! Too stressful!). Later on during freshman year, some girls (we were girls then, not women) were asking for signatures on a petition to encourage the administration to admit enough girls to bring the ratio to 50:50. NO WAY!! I refused to sign until I was a senior. Why ruin things while I was still there?!

I didn’t notice that there were missing amenities on campus or that girls weren’t really 100% accepted as students there yet. No girl’s locker rooms in the gym. Just a curtained off corner of the boy’s locker room. Oh sure, I’ll get naked in there. There were no lights on campus at night yet I never felt unsafe walking home alone at 2AM. The dorm bathrooms all had urinals. I never had a female professor in four years (even for gym). My math classes never had more than 3 girls in each. But, I learned how to deal with boys on many levels and much of what I learned helped me later on in the business world.

I took bowling for gym 8 times. I was pretty good by the end of my Colgate years. My high game was 226 in a tournament where the girls automatically got a 25 pin handicap (my 251 was unbeatable). We won the match and, as we were the only girl’s team in the tournament, were the “girl’s champions”! We had to fight for our t-shirts from the administration. All the boys got t-shirts for winning their divisions but we had to fight for ours. 33 years later, I still have mine….

In the early 1970’s at Colgate, the fraternities still bussed in cute little girls from local, mostly all-girl colleges for their parties. The girls would get off the busses in their cute little dresses with their cute little boots in their cute little fur coats, smiling their cute little smiles. We Colgate girls would be watching from the sidewalks in our not so cute, not so little, puffy down coats, flannel shirts, Wrangler jeans and definitely not so cute little hiking boots, watching this parade of imports. No. No more imports. Colgate now had its own girls. We went on strike. No more Colgate girls at Theta Chi parties until the bussing of imports stopped! Remember, we reminded them. Once it snows…no busses get in or out. You’ll be stuck with us and we won’t come to your parties. Victory!! The bussing stopped…….

At Colgate, I was treated like a girl….a smart girl….but merely a smart girl who would probably get her “Mrs” degree along with her Bachelor’s degree, stay home or perhaps, if I was lucky, get an executive assistant job. I could hold my own in most of my classes (not all, but most) and was not intimidated by the boys. Along the way, I learned that I liked living on my own; learned to drive in the ice and snow; that it was easy to get a date; found a boyfriend; learned to drink beer (at 25 cents a glass, I could take $1 down town and return home with change) and, finally, that I would rather work for money then for grades.

On to the business world where, I assumed, I’d be treated as an intellectual equal to the men…..

Why blog??

Laura was in 7th grade. We were chatting over breakfast about something we heard on the news that must have been about women in business. I said that I considered myself a feminist. Laura recoiled. NO! Yes! NO! Yes, I am and I’m proud of it. You know, I told her, feminism is not a dirty word. Well, she said, I’m not one. Ok. Whatever.

Years later, while at work one morning, I received an instant message from Laura, who was now in law school. She asked me if I had seen a story on the morning news about Maria Shriver’s new book. She said I would like it and that I had some good stories to put down on paper, much like Maria Shriver. And, oh by the way, Laura was now a feminist. GOOD JOB!!