Zooming with the Aces #37 – Work and Jobs, April 17, 2025

First Row, left to right:  Marilyn Tompkins Bellert, Fred Elder, David Robinson; Second Row, left to right: Diane Rusch Zinn, Glenna Stearman Park, Tom Tatlock; Third Row, left to right:  Skip Granger, Kay Ellen Consolver

Topic of the Day: Work and Jobs

Inspired by Fred Elder’s recent website stories about his work and jobs from his youth through adulthood

Fred Elder, Madison, WI – I recently joined a group that is learning to write memoirs. We have a document that gives us specific topics for each month. We write and then read our writing to each other. People comment, and the comments have been polite so far. If you ever wanted to leave memories and stories about your life to your kids, I would encourage you to do something like this. I will be happy to share prompts and suggestions. Think about putting together a group. Doing this is much easier when you work with others who are also learning.

Thinking about earliest jobs, I started my school life in Wichita at Kellogg School.  There was no kindergarten in Oklahoma where my mom and I lived, and Wichita school officials spent time deciding what grade I would be in. The decision was based on physical size, so I went to first grade. In the spring of second grade, we moved farther north, closer to my mom’s job. In their infinite wisdom the school officials decided I should finish the last two months of the school year at Kellogg. My job was to go to school. Every day after that, I went to the bus stop at 1000 N. Broadway. I took the bus downtown, changed buses  and rode to Kellogg School. After school, I reversed the process to get home. Who would do that today with a second-grader?

David Robinson, Wichita, Ks – My first “lovely” job was delivering the Wichita Eagle in the 9th grade. I had to pick up my papers at Hydraulic and First early in the morning, fold them, and pack them front and back into my bag, and start delivering.  My area was not a wealthy one, mainly working class. Most of my customers expected their papers by 7 AM and I complied most of the time. Collecting for the paper was always an issue. Often, the persons would pretend they weren’t at home. Other times, they didn’t have the correct change and asked me to come back another time. Of course, I had to pay the Eagle for my papers whether I collected or not. This routine exhausted me so much that one time my mother allowed me to stay home from school and catch up on my rest. Later on I worked in Kansas City MO doing type setting with my uncle at Robinson Typesetting. I delivered to many agencies and department stores.  My uncle’s secretary, Lee Greene, whose favorite color was green, had a green ’59 Chevy convertible and took me to North Kansas City to get tacos.

Tom Tatlock, Appleton, WI – I’ve lived kind of a non-linear life. One of most interesting early jobs came with my interest in working on John Lindsay’s mayoral campaign. I went to New York with an introduction from the head of the Kansas Republicans and got an interview at Rockefeller Center. Along with the campaign, I got a job as a night watchman at Rockefeller Center. I hadn’t realized that so many big banks and other major firms were located there. One of my tasks was to raise the flags. One morning, a fellow employee, a boxer from Florida, told me that I took the job and myself too seriously. That was probably true. One of the most intriguing parts of the job was walking through the 57th floor and seeing the amazing paintings in the executive offices.

Later, I got a job with the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City. That sounded impressive, but my job was to put routing slips of checks into the right box on a wall of boxes. For awhile, I worked as a transportation agent for TWA in Kansas City. At KU, I started as an admissions counselor and eventually became assistant director of Admissions. That was all before medical school.

Glenna Stearman Park, Montgomery Park, DC – My current job is copying all of my website articles and making notebooks of them for each of my grandchildren. Most women’s first job was babysitting, and I did the same.  I remember being paid 35 cents an hour. However, I quit after one of the little boys I was taking care of threw his pet alligator at me. I tried again in college, but had a bad experience with one of the fathers who insisted on driving me.  He was drunk and kept trying to pull over. I would place his hands back on the steering wheel; he would drive again for a couple of blocks, then try again.  He was a lecherous fellow.  I woke up my dad to get after him. My parents had to talk me down.

When I was a senior in high school, Val Langford’s dad hired Val, me, Brenda Benjamin, and Dianne Pope to work at his stock market research firm. I  continued working for him while attending Wichita U. One of those WU years, I went to Pennsylvania to study art.  My senior year I took off for art school.  When I returned home with a folder of nude drawings, my mother asked me to hide them in the basement so my grandmother wouldn’t see them.  My dad told her that I needed to draw nudes as part of learning figure-drawing. She wanted me to do flowers, which is what I do now, all the time.

Skip Granger, Sun Valley, AZ – I had a lot of good fortune and good jobs that I enjoyed. My first job was at my uncle’s root beer stand. He was strict. Anything we dropped and broke came out of our $1.00 per day salaries. Taking the orders and carrying food and drinks out to the customers was really hard work for a little guy. The jobs I enjoyed most involved magic, wine, and travel.  I loved magic and I never expected to make so much money doing it. Dan Tontz told me that I made as much for a 20 minute magic show tat the Wichita Country Club as Bill Strout’s entire band earned in three hours, and they had to split the money.  On my jobs in travel, I met my wife Mary Ann and we took our kids on foreign trips. We bo=oth love wine and really enjoyed owning Starry Night Winery. When I went to KU, I thought about law school and about becoming a minister. I took a number of religion classes at KU, but decided there were other things for me to do. During 50 years working in venture capital, I understood that the job is to help people take ideas and make them into reality. Seeing that happen was really enjoyable.

Kay Ellen Consolver, Litchfield CN – Of course, my first job was working at Kiddie Land, starting when I was 10 years old. My dad stationed me in the main concession stand where I made snow cones,  popcorn, and cotton candy. For the cotton candy, my dad tallied the sticks they were formed on so he could account for the sales.  I loved cotton candy and sneaked some by using paper straws to make my own.  I made 40 cents an hour. One day, a little girl came up to buy something and didn’t have enough money to pay, so she just left. When I told my dad she had not paid enough, he jumped over the counter to chase her and collect the dime. Generally, he was a good boss and treated all the boys and girls who worked for him fairly. I worked there off and on through high school in many jobs.

Diane Rusch Zinn, Lawrence, KS – My first paying job was babysitting for a family on our street, but I didn’t enjoy the children,  so discontinued that. My next job was when I was at East.  I ran the elevator in the Petroleum Building on Saturday mornings and during one summer.  My dad was the office manager at Aladdin Petroleum there and for two summers, I did some bookkeeping, receptionist part time, and most importantly learned how to operate a bookkeeping machine. This became a valuable skill to have because it enabled me to get a job in Crocker Anglo Bank  in Palo Alto after Dick and I were married, then again at First National Bank in Lawrence when Dick was in law school.  I converted all the bank’s accounts from the large hand ledgers to the bookkeeping machine, then kept their books while I worked there. That was my last paying job. After Dick finished law school, I became a stay at home mom and what I describe as a professional volunteer.

Marilyn Tompkins Bellert, Sycamore, IL –  I also worked in a family business, my dad’s drugstore. He sold a huge variety of goods, including what we now call Over the Counter drugs, some in in little bottles. As a younger girl of 9 or 10, I dusted all the tiny bottles, things like Tincture of Menthol. By 11 and 12, I worked on the soda fountain, making all the food from milkshakes and sundaes to egg salad to sloppy joes. This was hard work.  You’re on your feet for many hours and have to make it all work, make customers happy. Once I was 16, I learned to work the main cash register where people paid for whatever they bought. I learned a lot about reading people while I was selling cigarettes and cigars, watches, candy, house paint, band-aids, and everything the store offered.

Gender differences among customers became an entertaining part of the job. Panic-stricken women would rush into the store and begin running up and down the length of aisles. I knew immediately that they needed sanitary supplies. I tried to head them off and help. They usually allowed me to get them to the right aisle, but most were too embarrassed to tell my dad anything about what they needed.  At the register, sometimes men would see  me, a young female clerk, and suddenly look horrified. I recognized that look and said, “I’ll get my dad.”  Rarely, a man would just tell me what kind of condom he wanted and I knew right where it was. Were these behaviors strictly from Kansas or just the times?

I learned about running a business 24/7/365. All in all, the drugstore was a great work experience.

Adult Jobs and Follow Up Comments

David – I worked in a 100 year old paper factory in San Francisco. I did estimates of wholesale paper costs for printing companies. This was a very traditional work place. Many of the employees had worked there forever, leaving only for Korea or other service. We were required to wear suits and ties and there was no air conditioning.  Only when our boss Mr. Moffitt took off his jacket were we allowed to do so. The hours were 8:10-4:50 to accommodate Mr. Moffitt’s schedule. He was also president of a downtown bank and would take the street car from the bank to the factory, arriving at 8:10, so that was when the day started for everyone. The streetcar left at 4:50, when we could also go home.

Fred – I enjoyed teaching, especially project work. A favorite was making an electric car out of an old Ford Falcon. We removed the insides and inserted a battery system made from parts I got from the phone company where I had once worked. The car actually ran!  The first time we drove it on the  streets, a fire engine followed us in case we set anything on fire. My students  also designed and built a habitat suitable for people living on an asteroid or some other planet. We took it to a NASA competition in Houston and won!

Kay Ellen – I decided to attend law school after learning that an upper class woman in my sorority was planning to go to law school. My dad thought that was a terrible idea because he didn’t have much respect for lawyers. Because I eventually worked with the global side of Mobil Oil, I traveled a lot, even to the third world countries where most of the men were unwilling to go. Some of that work in Asia and Africa was exciting. Once when entering Angola, my passport was taken and I was held all day until being rescued by local Mobil employees. While cleaning recently, I found an envelope of outdated currency from African countries. I’m enjoying the memories.

Tom – After medical school and internship, I went to Wisconsin for a  three-year residency in psychiatry. What I found was a calling as well as a job. About 26 years ago, I fell off a ladder and suffered a traumatic brain injury. That experience redirected me to a quarter century of advocacy for traumatic brain injury patients. Recently, I have specialized in working with homeless shelters. A high % of homeless have experienced brain injuries. There are clinics associated with homeless organizations, but no one was screening for brain injuries because they thought nothing could be done. I knew that brain injuries could be treated.

I worked on this problem at the state level, with the Mayo Clinic, and at national conferences where I made important connections. I am still giving talks on how to diagnose and manage brain injuries. On a recent project working with homeless clients, the organization’s leadership expected that 12% of their patients might have brain injuries. Using a comprehensive diagnostic tool, they found that their clients met the national average of 53% with brain injury symptoms. The result, in addition to improvement for the clients, was a big growth in staff morale. Now that they understood the problems, they were able to help their clients become more functional and far less frustrating. This has been a rewarding post-professional experience.

Glenna – I taught an art course at Bexar county jail with 25 students and one guard. I had been interested in art therapy and had learned from a psychiatrist at the local hospital how to “read” art in therapeutic ways. The inmates at the jail signed up for the classes so they could get out of the “tank.” One day, the priest at the prison brought me a bunch of styrofoam pieces and asked if my art class could make angels for the church. I had never asked them to create art for such purposes but the inmates overheard the priest and wanted to make angels.  One inmate created an angel that was divided into pieces from top to toe and at the neck, the waist, and the knees. Like the other inmates he painted his angel with acrylics, but his was in alternating blocks of red and orange. I told him that was a most unusual angel and asked him to tell me about it. “It’s my wife,” he said sadly. “Can I do another one?”  I slipped out and asked a nun about this inmate. She told me that the angel depicted the way he had murdered his wife. I checked to make sure he was on medication and then went back to the art room to see that he had created more of his angels.

Another interesting job came along during the first year Joel and I were married. We were stationed at an air force base in Ohio, living on a whopping $350/month. I worked as an electronics draft person for the Link Group, cleaning up drawings made by engineers and rendering them in ink. They made simulators for jets and lunar landing vehicles. Occasionally, we all tried out the simulators. My favorite was the lunar landing vehicle. For some reason, the cabin made me feel dizzy and weightless, even though I wasn’t weightless. I crashed that simulator so many times that I permanently gave up interest in flying a plane.  Once my dad had tried to teach me to fly, but I refused. That was the right decision!

Marilyn – I was hoping that we would spend some time today talking about jobs that come without a paycheck, but we are out of time. That may be a topic for another day. As has been obvious during this session, we all developed a strong work ethic when we were growing up. 

Diane and I are hoping that you will write about some of your other interesting careers and share your stories with us.

Diane – We are also hoping that you will all attend our reunion in September. It will be wonderful to see you in person, for real.

Join us for our next Zoom session on Thursday, May 15, at 2 p.m. Wichita time.