Working for G.E.C.C.
My First Collection Call
After I graduated from Warner Pacific College I did the job search thing. Because I was a college graduate I was eligible for the corporate "Management Training" programs. I interviewed with a number of companies and my final two were IBM and General Electric. I chose GE and went to work for their financial company, General Electric Credit Corporation.
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What I found out very early in the G.E.C.C. management training program was that the training program involved nothing more than going out and doing the work everyone else did. This meant that I had two main tasks.
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The first was the fun part. It involved what we called "floor checking." G.E.C.C. did what is called flooring for G.E. dealers. That simply means that GECC financed GE appliances and radios and TVs for their dealers. We financed these for three months and a third of the total outstanding flooring amount was due each month. I would go out to the dealers with a list of appliances, etc. that had been financed and would check the floor to see if the appliance had been sold or was still there. It was very boring work, but most of the dealers were very nice people and welcomed me and offered coffee and donuts and helped me find the appliances. In all it was a good day's work.
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My second task was to be the legs for the inside delinquent debt collectors. The inside collectors were people who made calls to delinquent customers. If they had trouble contacting the customer I was sent out to the address on the account to see if I could contact the customer and collect the money.
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Before they would send me out on my own I needed to be trained in just how outside collections worked. I was replacing the current collector named Tom Dusik and so it was his job to train me. Tom had been promoted to branch credit manager, a full time job (and then some). But he took me under his wing and he took me out on collection calls twice a week.
The first collection call we made is one of the most memorable calls I ever made. It was finding a "skip" account from Los Angeles. The customer had left the area without telling GECC where he was going. He had also not paid his bill for six months and therefore it was being worked by an experienced collector.
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Professional bad debt collectors have a number of contacts, and credit and financial information, at their disposal and the collection rep in LA had found out where the skip customer had moved and had sent the file and the new address to the Oakland office and Tom and I were standing on the porch having just knocked on the door.
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A young woman opened the door and Tom introduced himself and told her why we were there and asked if her husband was home. It was his name that was on the account. She said he was home but was asleep because he worked nights. Tom told her we needed to speak with him and she refused to wake him up. Tom kept pushing, gently and professionally, and finally the woman broke down in tears and turned and ran back into the house. Now I must say at this point that at no time was Tom mean or harsh with the woman. It was very much like listening to a physiologist talking to a patient. He was very good at his job and very professional.
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We looked at each other and shrugged not knowing what was going to happen next. In my mind I was looking around and to find the best way to get out of the area. I was not going to get into a brawl with an angry customer. Then he appeared and I was ready to hightail it if he took one step in my direction.
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He had on a pair of levy pants and nothing else. He was six feet tall and had a fifty-inch chest and what looked like 18-inch biceps. And he looked like he was a biker. He stopped short of the doorway and asked what we wanted. Tom gave him a business card and told why we were there.
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He invited us to come in and I was still looking for my escape route in case he decided to get physical. But he didn't and he turned out to be a very nice person. He said he had lost his job in LA and had finally found one last week at a steel mill in Novaro which is just east of Fremont. We worked out a payment plan that would bring him current in three months and he was to mail the payments to me at the Oakland office and I would process them. He never missed a payment and I wrote him a thank you letter after I received the last of the catch up payments that made him current.
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Tom and I worked together for six weeks and then I was out on my own. I believe I learned more about how to do a job from Tom Dusik then from anyone else I've ever worked with.
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Moving to Fremont
When I went to work for GECC we lived in a small house in Oakland that was owned by a friend of my mother. It was cozy but we both wanted a home of our own. The main problem was that I did not make enough money to qualify for a decent house.
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A few months after we were married Ruth had became pregnant. We were both very happy. But during the fourth month Ruth lost the baby. She had two more miscarriages and her doctor told her that she would not be able to have a full-term pregnancy. This meant no children.
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As I have said before, major events in life always have some good and some bad associated wit them. In this case the good was that because Ruth couldn’t have a full-term pregnancy, the FHA would count her wages when calculating how much money we could borrow to buy a house. The doctor had to write a letter stating that she could not have a full-term pregnancy before her wages could be considered for a loan that was large enough to buy a house for us. The doctor wrote the letter and the FHA funded the loan on our first home in Fremont, south of Oakland.
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Two week after we got our loan Ruth became pregnant again and the doctor said, “I’ve got a new procedure I’d like to try.” The pregnancy went full-term and his name is Kent. So we got both a child and a home. We went on to have two more children, both girls and many more homes.
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Kent
The birth of Kent was one of the times when my emotions cracked through the granite barrier I had created to hold down my emotions when my dad died as I stood and looked at the tightly wrapped bundle of person that would be my responsibility for the next twenty years – or so.
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As Kent grew and started to eat solid food it became apparent that he did not like eggs. He simply would not eat them. So one evening I was home alone with him and I had to feed him. I decided that he needed the protein eggs provided so I was going to trick him eating them. I took a piece of scrambled egg and put a nice piece of Jell-O on top of it and he was eating the eggs with no problem.
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Until! He started to gag and I was sure he was going to throw up. I pulled him out of the feeding table I had built for him and held him straight in front of me, facing forward and headed for the back door. We didn’t make it. He started to projectile vomit as soon as I hit the family room, which luckily had a tile floor, and continued until we were in the back yard and his stomach was empty. As it turns out Kent is very allergic to eggs and even today has to watch dishes at restaurants to make sure there are no eggs in them.
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As an infant Kent knew the truth, it was I who was didn’t have a clue. One for Kent , zero for Dad. He’s now 41 and I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.
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Anne
It was 6:00 AM on Monday morning May 27, 1968 when we merged onto the Nimitz freeway in Fremont headed for Samuel Merritt Hospital in North Oakland. Traffic was light enough that we would make it by 7:00, Ruth’s check in time. Last Friday her obstetrician had said since she was two weeks over due he would induce labor on Monday.
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The day before, the 26th, had been Ruth’s birthday and we were a little disappointed that the baby couldn’t be born on her birthday. But one day off isn’t that bad. They would share the celebration down through the years.
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We did arrive at the hospital on time and got her checked in and the doctor started the process and I was allowed to go into the labor room and be with Ruth. A little after 2:00 that afternoon things were getting serious and I was told I had to leave and that they would move Ruth into the delivery room. In those days the fathers were not as involved in the entire delivery process as they are today. Thank God!
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It was 3:41 that afternoon that a baby girl was delivered and Ruth had picked out the name Anne Lynn for a girl. She had had a friend in high school named Anne Lynn and she liked the name very much. But it wasn’t to be. She has been Annie all her life.
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Creating the Payment Processing Center
I spent about a year as a collector for the Oakland branches. At the end of that time I had literally worked myself out of a job. At the end of one month (I don't remember which one) I had only 24 accounts not collected. Even with the new accounts that would come in the first of the month I didn't have enough accounts to justify keeping me in that position.
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At that same time GECC decided to create a consolidated collection center in Fremont. The payment processing center was in the same building as the collection center. Because I had had the experience at the computer center for First National Bank of Oregon I applied for the manager position for the processing center and I got the job.
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I had to create a plan for implementing the center, the procedures for operating it and defining the people I would need to run it, and hire them. I did this and got the center up and running smoothly.
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Once the center was running I was told that I was being transferred back to the Oakland branch.
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The Oakland Branch Again
The transfer back to the Oakland branch was a promotion for the good work I had done bringing up the payment processing center. My first job was as branch salesman.
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The Salesman
As the branch salesman I had two different jobs. The first was to find new customers who would use our services. We provided credit for appliance store customers. Sometimes it was done as GECC and sometimes it was done in the client's name. At that time I wasn't very good at this type of thing. I hadn't come into my "sales" persona yet. That would come later.
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The second job was to check on the inventory that GECC was flooring. Again. What a bore.
I was bad as a salesman and bored as a flooring administrator but I did my job okay as far as the branch manager was concerned. He planned to grow the Oakland branch and he needed a credit manager/officer manager to help him and he chose me.
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Credit Manager
The credit manager had to analyze each credit application and Accept or Reject it. I had five woman (yes they were all woman) who took the applications as they came in and called the credit bureaus (we used more than one) and got a credit report on the applicant. There were no "credit scores" in those days. We got back a complete history of the applicant's family, job and credit payment history. There were other things, but those were the main items I would look at to make my judgment. I had a staff of five who did the calling to the bureaus except on Mondays when I had eight because we had a large number of applications waiting for us for sales over the weekend.
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The branch manager was a real go-getter and he was determined that we were going to build the Oakland office into one of the largest in the country. He went out and got the clients and I handled the build up of credit apps. My staff grew as the business grew and I handled every app myself.
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As it turned out we built the Oakland office into the second largest office in the US. Second only to the Atlanta office. What about New York you might say? Well, I think there were seven or eight branches in New York City. We were number two in the nation. I'm proud of that accomplishment.
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Managing the Collection Center
Then it happened. A woman who worked in the Northern California Collection Center, where I had been a collector for the Oakland branches (which were combined when I was transferred up there) filed a complaint against GECC saying that she had been told that she was in line for a promotion to supervisor, and that she had been taking work home and she and her daughter were doing it night so she would look good and get the promotion. But there was no promotion to be had. It was all a lie. When the Federal Labor Relations Board completed its investigation it found GECC had violated federal law and fined the company $25,000. That was a big fine in 1967. The manager was not fired but moved to another division. He was an insider. Plain and simple.
A new manager replaced him and he wasn't able to mange the office and the delinquency soared. I was then asked if I wanted the promotion to the job. I took it. Morale in the office was at the bottom and the delinquency was four or five times as high as it should have been.
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I went in and made some very drastic changes to the way things were done and I got results. Within six months the delinquency was down where the company expected it to be and morale in the office was high.
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Leaving GECC
I knew that the two men who, one caused the problem, and two, couldn't get it under control, made half again as much in salary as I did so I went to the district manager and explained this and asked for a raise. The answer was, "Well George, you have come too far too fast and I can't give you any more money at this time.” So, I quit.
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