BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

This story describes the early days of my employment with SRP. I found myself immersed in some familiar surroundings. 08/10/2017

BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

The year 1967 began tumultuously for me. SRP hired me on January 10 to begin work on March 6. My exuberance waned when news came of my father’s death on January 21. He had spent the last five years of his life living with my sister Helen in White Plains, New York. Unfortunately, he had broken his hip after falling down a flight of stairs at her home. While recovering in a hospital, he contracted a staph infection. After languishing in pain for four months, he succumbed to heart failure at age eighty-eight.

My sister spent countless hours at the hospital with him during those final months, supplementing the nursing services he required on a continuous basis. Living in California with Angie and our six children, I could not help her during his prolonged hospital stay. This anguished me, then and now.

I flew home to attend his funeral. An Irish wake helps ease the pain of death. Relatives and friends came from afar to honor my dad. It made me proud to hear him praised, rightly so. His funeral procession traveled a long distance to reach St. Charles Cemetery, in Pinelawn, Long Island. Upon arrival, the pallbearers put his casket inside an unheated building with numerous other deceased but unburied persons. The Gravediggers Union had gone on strike and refused to bury any of the dead brought there until their demands for higher wages were met. Instead of a graveside ceremony, my first cousin, Monsignor Heneghan, conducted one in this wretched place, leaving me bitter toward labor unions until this day.

Upon returning to San Mateo, we put our house up for sale in February in preparation for my new job with SRP that would take us to Arizona. We both thought our home would sell quickly. The ideal scenario would be for it to remain on the market until May, allowing our children to finish school that June before moving.

I waved goodbye to Angie and my family on Sunday, March 5, and flew to Phoenix. Arrangements had been made for me to check into a motel on the corner of 32nd and Van Buren, conveniently located near the SRP Administration Building. The company agreed to pay for a two weeks stay while I looked around for an apartment to rent.

The aroma emanating from the nearby stockyards caught my attention, too “country” for a city slicker like me. In later years, the State of Arizona bought the motel and converted it into a woman’s jail. I pitied the inmates.

On Monday morning, George Nielsen, Manager of the Supply Department and my new boss, introduced me to Ray Schweiger. George had removed Ray from his job as Purchasing Agent, but retained him in the capacity of Materials Consultant, a job with no description. Ray, a very thin short man, looked older than his years, fifty-nine. He smoked and wheezed while chatting with me. He appeared weak and incapacitated. Perhaps his physical condition prompted George to replace him.

 Poor Ray. How he must have hated seeing me walk in off the streets, taking his job. He had worked 39 years for the company, all of them in purchasing. I felt great empathy for him. I told him I would welcome his support.

Ray accepted his new role with dignity and helped me learn the ropes, despite the fact he had no use for George, as you might expect. Fortunately, Ray liked me and we became good friends. He shared his purchasing knowledge and business philosophy with me. Ray placed great emphasis on vendor loyalty. He said SRP always purchased insulators from Ohio Brass as this firm had supplied them to the company during the war despite a wide-spread shortage.

“Ray, World War II ended a long time ago.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that war. They helped us out in World War I.”

George also introduced me that first day to all three members of SRP’s Legal Department who occupied offices down the hall from his. Leroy Michael, Jr. oversaw the small group. No one could be as closed-mouthed about every aspect of SRP.  Convinced I had graduated from Notre Dame, he often tried to get me to bet with him when they played a game against one of the many schools he seemed to have attended.

The second lawyer, Mike Stientjes, later went to Washington to serve on some Arizona congressional committee and dissolved into limbo.

The third member of the Law Department, Richard Silverman, had only recently joined the firm. I came to know him well. It would never have occurred to me that one day he would serve as the General Manager of SRP.

After meeting the legal eagles, George walked me across the street to the offices of the Purchasing Division located in a dilapidated one-story building on Mill Avenue, a few blocks from Monti’s La Casa Viejo restaurant, where he introduced me to my staff of twelve employees.

After I made a few remarks (pleased to meet you, pleased to be here), George left and my new job began. A secretary dumped the mail on my desk, mostly material requisitions. I had to distribute them to the appropriate Buyer. I called on John O’Malley, Assistant Purchasing Agent, to help me get started.

He explained that each buyer specialized in purchasing materials and supplies within his field of knowledge. He bought transformers.  John Blanchard purchased wire, cable, and related electrical system hardware. Emmit Casey handled all of the Water side of the company’s requirements, including pumps and maintenance parts for SRP’s 250 wells. Jack Cain had considerable knowledge and purchasing experiences. He handled requisitions for power plant parts and supplies, and a wide variety of electronic parts. John Jones bought stationery and other low-value miscellaneous items. It would be my responsibility to purchase (on an annual basis) fuel oil for certain small power plants and gasoline for its fleet of 1,200 vehicles.

Nielsen wanted me to quickly evaluate the buyers, and replace those I thought to be inadequate with more educated individuals. A month into the job, I had a pretty good idea of their individual qualifications. However, I had no plan to make snap judgments about them.

Jones, the least qualified of the group had a severe rheumatoid arthritic condition. To combat the pain, he consumed large quantities of aspirin at work, and drank many martinis whenever he could. A few years earlier, the company chose to transfer him from Accounts Payable to Purchasing where he began working as an expediter. Only recently had he become a buyer. He found it difficult, almost impossible, to make any purchasing decisions and worried that I would fire him at the very first opportunity. The poor man sweated profusely whenever we talked.

Casey knew everything about the Water side of the business, but worked at one speed: slow. He insisted on handwriting new orders for typing, rather than marking up a previous order for the identical materials. He smoked cigars all day long. We had to fumigate his office after he retired in an effort to remove the stench.

Cain had years of purchasing experience gained while working for Bechtel, the engineering/contracting firm that built SRP’s Agua Fria Power Plant, When he joined SRP, he brought with him considerable knowledge of the materials and supplies required for its maintenance, repair and operation. Unfortunately, like Casey and Jones, he sometimes drank to excess while at lunch.

Blanchard, the youngest and fastest worker of the group, would finish his assignments as quickly as possible, and then leave his office to “roam.”  He would visit our warehouses, or go chat with friends in other parts of the company. His previous employment included a stint in the Michigan National Guard after which he became a barber before hooking on with SRP as a warehouseman.

O'Malley’s specialized in the purchase of distribution transformers. He had no knowledge of how such a piece of equipment actually worked, but that didn’t matter. SRP purchased transformers from a limited number of suppliers, making awards based on price, but in fact, Engineering dictated how the order would be split among all the major manufacturers. He simply followed their directions. He handled his job with aplomb and confidence.

O’Malley, fifteen years my senior, befriended me. He invited me to his house for dinner. Many company old timers called him to get his opinion of me. He gave me a “thumbs up,” and that helped make it easy for me to fit in. The old guard accepted me.

As part of my employment agreement, the company promised to provide me with a company car. Their fleet contained hundreds of Plymouth white four-door sedans, most of them quite old. They gave me a very old one to drive, a wreck of a vehicle whose back seat had been removed so that it could serve as a truck. Weeks later they replaced it with a somewhat improved vehicle which raised my morale. The company car came with certain restrictions. It could not be used for any purpose other than commuting to work, but I used it to go house-hunting on weekends. Nielsen and O’Malley knew this but said nothing.

The company agreed to pay my motel bill for the first two weeks of my employment. It only took me a week to find and rent a furnished one-bedroom apartment in a complex near the ASU campus. Not until I had signed the lease did O’Malley inform me the students dubbed this area, “Sin City.”

Despite the proximity of my apartment to the office, everyone else arrived at work before me. I decided to get to work a half hour earlier. None of us worked. We sat around drinking coffee and dunking donuts. One might describe our workplace as laid back.

I lived the life of a bachelor for five months. During that time, George Nielsen treated me like kin. He always paid when we had lunch together. More than once, he said, “I should be working for you,” in front of other employees. He had a great talent for making people believe in themselves.

George had led a remarkable life. A law-school graduate from the University of Iowa, he failed to pass that state’s bar examination. Instead of practicing law, he established and operated a small business for a few years before joining General Dynamics, a large military contractor. For eight years, he traveled around the country helping to purchase sites on which to locate underground missile silos. Along the way, he became an alcoholic.

He joined AA and began a period of recovery that took him to Nevada and then to Arizona where he worked as a traveling sales representative for a plumbing supply house, carting goods in his RV while making sales calls on copper mines and utility companies, including SRP. Some of the buyers recalled meeting him in this capacity, and were stunned when the company hired him to fill the position of Manager, Supply Department.

It happened this way. In 1966, George’s next door neighbor, an SRP employee, told him that an executive had quit the company. George decided to apply for this vacated position. Somehow, he managed to arrange for an interview with SRP’s General Manager, Rod McMullin. To the amazement of everyone at SRP, Rod hired George, not only to fill the vacated position, but to report directly to him.

The Supply Department included four functions: purchasing, material control, material reclamation, and warehousing. The staff numbered close to one hundred, mostly hourly union workers, the rest salaried employees.

Nine months later, George hired me, intent on modernizing the purchasing function. It did not take me long to discover that few SRP people liked Nielsen. He remained an “outsider” during his employment, which ended in late December 1969.

I had only limited purchasing experience but knew that sales folks are almost mandated to entertain buyers, usually by inviting them to attend business lunches. It came as no surprise when Jerry Linderman of the Maydwell and Hartzell Electric Supply Company took O'Malley and me to Scottsdale’s Lulu Belle's restaurant for lunch on my second week of work. The waitress said, "Welcome to Scottsdale, Mr. Finnerty." Had Jerry tipped her off? No, she said she had seen my picture and an article in the paper announcing my appointment as SRP’s new Purchasing Agent. Jerry had three martinis before ordering a round of shrimp cocktails prior to lunch, welcoming me to the Valley of the Sun in style.

This is going to be a fun job.

A parade of sales representatives presented themselves to me during my first few months, anxious to check me out. It forced me to accept many invitations to join them for lunch or dinner, and to play golf with them on weekends. While the habitat had changed, the courting behavior of sales representatives remained the same as it had been in California. Yes, I now found myself on a different ranch, but these cowpokes seemed familiar to me.

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