As a high school freshman, Robert Meade (MBA ’91, MS ’95) was a farm laborer in New Jersey. His primary task—de-tasseling corn—was important to the farm’s production of disease-resistant, cross-pollinated seed corn varieties. To accomplish his task, he was positioned in a bucket on a piece of machinery. “My job was to reach the tassels that were too short for the blades and pull them by hand,” recounts Meade. “I was hunched over the edge of the bucket, rotary blades whirling close by. It was 1970, and I was paid $1.25 an hour.”
Oddly enough, for a job about which there was little to like, Meade says, “The experience comes to mind often. Specifically, information and observations I collected but could not process at the time, such as business models, technology, global markets, and leadership.” Meade is currently the COO of California PATH, a research and development program in intelligent transportation systems at the University of California, Berkeley.
Workplace realities are encountered for the first time.
Teri Wade (MA ’05) was 15 years old when she got her first job at a Woolworth’s in Queens. Of her duties, maintaining the sales floor was her least favorite. “The area where the inventory was stored was a mess. Consequently, the shelves were labeled with many items that never seemed to be in stock,” she says. So during a staff meeting, prompted by the store manager to share problems, Wade spoke up. For this, she was praised by the manager and taken to task by her supervisor. “I later recognized that this was my very first encounter with workplace politics and learning to follow something called ‘the chain of command.’” Wade is the principal of Mission & Message Communications.
Harry Friedman (’46) had a high school summer job in Hecht’s Department Store as an assistant to the manager of the young ladies’ dress department. “One day a large client came in, and the manager asked me to go to the stock room to get her the ‘aquamarine’ dress off the rack. I came back and told the customer there was none,” Friedman recalls. “She physically schlepped me in, yanked a dress off the rack, and yelled, ‘What do you call this?’ I replied that it was a Smith Company dress. She screamed that what she wanted was not a manufacturer but a color. I was transferred to another department.” Friedman is a consultant with Friedman & Friedman, a Long Island–based insurance brokerage he and his oldest brother founded.
First-job tales can sometimes rise to near-legendary status.
Larry Austin (’57), now chairman and chief executive of Austin Travel, had a high school job making sandwiches and malteds at a lunch counter at Whelan’s Drug Store in midtown Manhattan. “It was a decent job,” says Austin, “and every Sunday at 4 pm Ed Sullivan would come into the store before he did his TV program and request a strawberry malted. My early claim to fame.”
Stanley R. Becker (’55) began working part-time jobs at the age of 15. His favorite—and we suspect his favorite because of this story—was as a 17-year-old clerk at Macy’s. He’d been assigned to Parakeets and Bird Supplies, a hidden-away section on the huge basement floor. One day the assistant manager yelled at Becker and a co-worker for not selling any “’keets.” The manager met Becker’s response of “nobody knows we’re here” with “that’s your problem.” The gauntlet had been thrown. So Becker opened two cages and let two birds loose. “They created havoc. . . But you know what? People found us, and we actually had the best sales ever in the parakeet store,” says Becker. Trouble ensued, however: though personnel laughed when they heard Becker’s story, he was fired. Now retired, Becker was the chief creative officer of the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi.
And first jobs can point us in the direction of our success.
A department store cosmetics counter was where Jeanette (Miller) Neff (’58) started out. Neff enjoyed everything about the job: “I loved interacting with the customers, taking care of the displays, the anticipation of new merchandise.”
Upon graduation, the merchandising/marketing major landed a prestigious spot on Macy’s Training Squad. “In those days, they took kids from Ivy League schools. So my inclusion—as a city kid, a woman, and a person of color—was special,” she says. From Macy’s, Neff went to Paraphernalia, an avant-garde fashion house, where she traveled the U.S. and Europe extensively on business. “This was in the 1960s. Not bad for a girl from East Harlem,” says Neff, now retired and a docent at the Museum of the City of New York as well as a retail and fashion consultant.
Apart from being entertaining and even a wee bit wise, these narratives show how proud alumni are of their professional journey, foibles and all. It’s no secret that, at Baruch, we are proud of their success too.
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