IBM

In the mid 1960s IBM had become cash poor and had borrowed $50 million dollars from Prudential Insurance to complete the IBM 370 Mainframe computer. There was an audit by one of the big-eight accounting firms and IBM was told that it didn’t need to borrow any money. The fact was it had well over $50 million dollars in its accounts receivable. The company had never had a collection program for its accounts receivable because it had been so cash rich for decades. But in 1968 it was looking for people who had heavy A.R. backgrounds and I fit the bill.

My Interview

After I got things straightened out with GECC I started looking for a job again. One of the first ads I answered was from IBM for a sales position. I went to the sales office just a block from Lake Merritt and introduced myself to the secretary (yes they had secretaries in those days) at the front desk. She looked at her calendar and said I was to talk with the branch manager but before the interview I needed to complete a written test that she handed to me. Well, blow me down, some days are far more lucky than others. The test she gave me was the same test that I used to test applicants at GECC. I had graded that test somany times I knew it by heart.

When I finished the test in what was probably record time, she reviewed my answers on an answer sheet and graded the test. She looked at me in amazement and said that I was the first person she knew of that had a perfect score. Well blow me down. All companies tested applicants back in those “old days” before equal opportunity and the test that GECC and IBM used was one of the most common ones. But I wasn’t going to be the one to spill the beans. I’d just let them think I was the smartest guy to come along. Worked for me.

And it did work for me. I interviewed with the branch manager and we hit it off very well. I was a very confident guy and had very good interview skills. I had done quite a lot of it from both sides of the desk. In this particular situation IBM’s attitude toward other companies was a big plus for me. In those days IBM was the king of the jungle and its basic policy was that if you had not been a manager within IBM you had never been a manager.

Well, I had been the manager of buildings and grounds for a college, the branch office manager for the largest GECC office west of the Mississippi river, I had started, and recruited all of the initial personnel, for the G.E.C.C. Northern California payment processing center, and had managed the G.E.C.C. northern California collection center, but as far as IBM was considered I had no management experience.

My knowing the pre-interview test and my collection experience turned out to be of great luck for me. As I said, at the time IBM was having big cash flow problems. It borrowed the money from Prudential Insurance Company and Prudential had one of the big eight CPA firm run an audit on IBM’s books and they found that IBM has more than 50 million dollars on the books in accounts receivable but had no working program to collect the money. IBM was so successful and made so much money that it merely accepted the payments of those customers that decided they would pay their bills.

By the time I hit the scene in 1968 IBM was in the process of putting together a collections program. The problem was that no one within the company had any experience at collecting delinquent accounts and executive management wasn’t going to bring in an outsider to create such a program. But if a branch manager with the smarts could get a person with my experience to handle his accounts receivable more power to him. So, as we talked the conversation drifted from sales into my past experience and finally he told me that he didn’t think I fit what he needed in the sales area but that he wanted me to talk with one of the other managers in the branch that had the need for someone with my background.

The bottomline is that I was hired that day and started the next day on my career at IBM.

The Oakland Branch

As I reviewed the manner in which the delinquent accounts had been handled I was astounded. The only thing that was being done was sending out monthly statement. I asked the guy who had been handling the accounts why he hadn't contacted the customers by phone and he just stared at me and said why?

I put into place a good solid collection system, which I'll not expand on here, and within six months the delinquency was down to where it should have been.

The regional manager was very impressed and asked me how I had done this. I told him and I said that IBM ought to open a collection center in the region where all accounts over thirty days delinquent would be transferred to be handled by professional collectors.

I said I was going to write it up and submit it as a suggestion to the company. IBM had a suggestion program where an employee could submit a suggestion to make something better or save cost and they would receive 10% over the yearly savings. He asked me not to do that but to send the paper to him and he would review it. I was new at IBM and didn't know how thing worked so I did as he asked.

A few months later a collection center was opened in our region. I was given no credit for it. After I left IBM I had a friend who worked at the collection center and he said that the man who opened the center and managed it had a paper that he referred to often that told how to open and run a center.

Shortly after that my boss, the office Administration Manager, moved to the Anchorage, Alaska branch office. In November of 1969 I got a call from him asking if I would come to Anchorage and spend a couple of weeks assessing his accounts receivable. I went up the week before Thanksgiving and spent that week and the Thanksgiving week looking over his accounts receivable listing.

On Thanksgiving day I ate with the family of the Engineering Manager. He was a musher and had a four-dog team and a nice sled. He asked me if I would like to have a ride on his sled. I jumped at the opportunity and we went out for a fifteen to twenty minute ride. For a kid from California riding a dogsled was a big deal.

Before I left Anchorage I gave the Admin. Manager a review of his A.R. and gave him a plan to put in place that would turn around his A.R. problem and left to go home.

Anchorage, Alaska

Within a month I got another call from my old boss asking if I would consider moving to Anchorage for a two year special assignment. It seemed that the Anchorage office had the worst delinquency in all of IBM. The office had been open for 10 years and it had never been off of the “Worst 10” delinquency offices in the company. My special assignment was to put in place a collection program and bring the office’s A.R. delinquency to within the company’s acceptable range.

I talked it over with my wife and we decided that it was a great opportunity for me and it would be a great chance for us to see a part of our country that we would never otherwise have seen. So my wife and children went to Washington State to stay with her sister for a while and on February 28 1969 I went to Anchorage to start my two-year assignment and to look for a house for my family.

Homes for sale were very scarce in Anchorage and it took about two weeks of looking before I finally found something I could afford and that would fit my family – myself, my wife and two small children. I bought a new house that had an unfinished basement and had not had the cement poured for the driveway. I got a written agreement from the builder that the driveway would be poured during the next summer.

Now I’m a California native but I did go to college in Portland, Oregon so snow and ice were not completely new to me. But Portland is not Anchorage. In what was suppose to turn into my cement driveway that next summer was six to twelve inches of ice and snow – ten feet wide forty feet long. It took me all day to hack the icy mess down to the dirt so the moving van could back up to the walkway that lead to my from porch. The thing that saved me was a friend had introduced me to insulated boots and my feet stayed nice and warm through the whole day.

Once the furniture arrived and I had it placed I called my wife to fly up and we moved into our first brand new house. Our first shock was to come when we visited the grocery store. IBM had given me a 25% cost of living increase for my two-year assignment, but that did nor cover the cost of the normal milk, bread and other “stuff” we were used to eating. I figured it out later and it was more like a 35% cost of living increase. So we had to cut back on many things and Ruth had to make many things from scratch. The very lucky thing is that Ruth had grown up on a farm and had learned to make things from scratch from her mother. She is a very good cook. We settled in and it seemed to me that we ate and lived pretty well. But if you ask Ruth about the Anchorage days, her eyes glaze over and she shutters.

Fixing the Yard

As I said I bought a new house that had never been occupied It also didn’t have a yard. That is a planted yard. We moved in in March so I had a little time to wait before I could start working on smoothing the dirt and then planting the lawn. The house had a carport on one side and had twenty-five feet to the house next door on the other side. So I decided to build a device like farmers use to smooth fields. It had 2x6s on the side and slanted 2x8s that went from one side to the other. And, I pulled this nifty device with my car.

When I knew I was going to go to Anchorage I decided I needed a car that would be suited for city driving. There is only one road that goes north out of Anchorage to Palmer and a road that goes south to the Kenai Peninsula. That meant that we would not be taking many road trips. I bought a new Austin America that is very much like the MINI Cooper that is popular today.

I attached the leveling device to the back bumper and started the car up and slowly moved around what would be my front lawn. It was about 50’ by 50’. The device worked far better than I had anticipated and it only took me about a half day to go from totally rough, lumpy bare land to a fine, a smooth yard that was almost ready to plant seed on. Then I went to the back yard the next day and it took me a little longer because the back didn’t have the driveway and so it was about 50’ by 100’.

The next Friday night I smoothed that dirt with a fine lawn rake and made it as smooth as possible. When I finally finished I went in the house and sat down by the front windows, with no lights on and read the paper when I realized that I was very tired and I looked over at the clock and it was 11:30 PM. So I went to bed and planted my lawns the next day.

Let me say one more thing in regards to the lawn. As you may have heard, Alaska has a very intense growing season. By that I mean that there is more sunlight which is hotter because it is closer to the sun. It’s closer to the sun because the tilt of the earth puts the northern hemisphere closer to the sun in the summer and further from the sun in the winter.

What, you might say, does that have to do with my lawn. When I said intense growing season I mean that things grow like crazy. They grow the largest vegetables in the world in Alaska. And the grass grows so you have to cut it two and sometimes three times a week. Once I had to let it slip because I was traveling and my grass was six inches high. Now that really took a lot of work. I had an electric reel mower and I had to push a little and pull back and do it again. I took me all day to cut the front and back lawns that day. Hurray for California summer days!!!

Tundra and Bogs

Most of Alaska is composed of tundra and peat bogs. Tundra is wasteland that has a little scrub growth and it is not good for much. It has permafrost that is from two to three feet below the surface. Permafrost is ice that never melts. I had permafrost at my house and when I decided that I was going to put up a chain link fence in my backyard so the kids could go out and play I hit it at 2 ½ feet when I was drilling my fence post holes. This type of landmass covers over 188,320 square miles, mostly in the northern, western and southwest flatlands.

Permafrost has another big effect on most of Alaska – small forests. There are entire forests that are no more than ten feet tall. It’s quite a sight when you first see it. Now if you were to take a cruise to Alaska you would go to the Alaska Panhandle, also known as Southeast Alaska. This includes Ketchikan in the south and goes up to Juneau in the north. There’s very little permafrost in this area, which has great, tall forests.

Alaska is also covered with peat bogs. There is a very interesting thing about peat bogs that I didn’t know until I lived in Anchorage. There are always fires burning in the bogs. They may go underground for years and then all of a sudden they come to the surface and become roaring fires that can’t be put out. That’s what happened the first summer we lived in Anchorage.

There was a peat bog northeast of Anchorage. It had a fire that came to ground level about May and it burned the entire summer. It was not a clean burn and the sky was filled with peat-fire smoke and the sun was no more than a dull orange disk in the smoky sky. This lasted for three months. We didn’t see the sun all summer. You think LA has bad air. You don’t want to be around a peat fire. It makes LA air seem pure as South Pacific air.

So, the first year in Anchorage was a total catastrophe because Ruth had two small kids in the house and was not able to get outside. From Ruth’s point of view that was strike one for Anchorage. She does not have good memories of the place.

The Alaskan Days

Living in Alaska was a real different experience. The days are from one extreme to the other. The longest day in the summer has over 19 hours of sun above the horizon and it never gets dark. That’s a real problem for parents with small children. Our bedrooms had blackout blinds that made the rooms totally dark. But you could see the daylight if the door was opened. When we told the kids it was time to go to bed our kids always argued that it was still day.

Our son gave us the hardest time about going to bed. This continued into his teens. We have found out that it was legitimate because he is a night person. He’s now 40 and he still stays up very late even if he has to go to work early – and that’s every work day because he lives in LA and has a two hour commute.

The one thing that I discovered is that the sun never goes overhead in Alaska as it does in Southern California. It rises to about where it is at 8:00 AM in the summer in Southern California and then it circles around the sky and sets for a few hours. During midsummer there is never any darkness. The sun sets but dusk prevails until dawn. As I mentioned before I once worked until 11:30 at night and then went inside and read the paper by the light from a corner window.

But it is the winter days that are amazing. The sun may not rise until 10:30 but the light starts at 7:30 or 8:00 and goes from deep purple to bright yellow showing beautiful reds and oranges and shades of yellow before the sun finally come over the mountain. I set my desk facing the east window in my office and I watched those sunrises for hours each winter day. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have seen.

The other thing about winter is that it never really has the amount of dark that you would think. I have a picture taken from the front porch of my house on Christmas eve. It is 1:30 in the afternoon and the sun is shown on the horizon. The thing is that it didn’t get dark that day until after 4:00PM. And with the snow on the ground things are lighter all around. I finally figured that you get more light time in Anchorage than you do in San Diego. Always long dawns and sunsets meaning that the days are longer than reading the printed sunrise and sunset figures would conclude.

Amber

When we moved to Anchorage, Kent was 20 months old and Anne was 8 months. Ruth really had her hands full keeping up with them. In March of 1969 Ruth became pregnant again. Things went along and in December both Kent and Anne got Chicken Pox. We had found a young couple who had agreed to keep the kids while Ruth was in the hospital. On a Sunday morning, two week before her due date, Ruth started labor pains. I quickly called the young couple and asked if they would be able to take the kids early and explained the Chick Pox situation and explained that this would mean that they would need to keep the kids after Ruth and the baby came home.

The Chicken Pox situation played itself out but that was not the reason the kids stayed with the young couple for two extra weeks. Ruth had complications with her delivery and she and Amber, our new daughter, had to stay in the hospital for two weeks.

It was great to finally bring them home and introduce her to her siblings. They loved their new little sister. She was a jewel. She still is.

The Plane Problem

I had a friend, Dean Rickerson, who owned a Beech Craft Bonanza. It was a nice small plane and he used to take me for rides in it. Dean had grown up in Arizona and had move to Alaska after he left the Army Biathlon Team. He had spent a couple of years in Alaska and when he got out he decided to stay.

Dean and his wife decided to go down to Arizona and they rented another plane that had a greater range than his Bonanza. A few days after he got back Dean asked me if I could take a flight with him on the weekend. He said the plane that he had rented to go to Arizona had been crashed a couple hundred miles northwest of Anchorage. It seems a couple of airline pilots had rented the plane and gone north with it. They had found a moose in the woods and had chased it but didn’t make it out of one of their dives.

Dean wanted to go up to the site and film the plane before it was stripped and left as a hulk. Dean had a student pilot that he wanted to do the flying and he asked me if I would use his 8mm camera to film the plane as the pilot made runs at it.

I agreed and we took off on Saturday morning. The flight up to the spot was great. Went we got there we could see the plane down in the trees. The student pilot made two beautiful passes and I got some great shots of the plan. Dean said he wanted to make one final pass and we did. But as the pilot started to pull up the plane shook a bit and Dean immediately said, “I’ll take the stick.”

Dean is a great pilot and I trusted him with my life. And this time he pulled us out. He eased the plane up and we started to fly south. He checked the instruments and finally said the he believed that we had lost a Magneto. For those who don’t know about engines, the magneto is an electrical device that creates the spark for the spark plugs. Dean’s Bonanza had two spark plugs for each cylinder. The cylinders of the Bonanza’a engine were horizontal rather than vertical as most car cylinders are. The really bad thing about our situation was that we had lost the magneto that supplied the spark for the top spark plugs. The bottom plugs always fowl far more than the top plug and so we had only one plug in each cylinder and it was the most fowled plug. The engine shuttered if Dean tried to accelerate too fast.

So there we were, two hundred miles northwest of Anchorage with a faulty engine and absolutely nowhere to land. Dean said he had to take the plane up to ten thousand feet on the flight home because Cook Inlet was to the north of Anchorage and he needed to know he could glide over it if the engine quit. He said there were many planes down in the waters of North Cook Inlet and he didn’t want to add his to the lot.

He managed over the next hour plus to get us up to ten thousand feet and we all put on small oxygen masks. Dean had to get up high enough to glide over Cook Inlet because Anchorage Intl Airport is on the south side of it and we had to go over it. Dean made mayday call the airport tower and the tower answered and asked the problem and Dean told them.

When he told them the air traffic controller said that they would close the airport to other traffic and he could come in as fast as possible.

As we flow over Cook Inlet and the plane didn’t cough or die and we made it across. I could see the airport right in front of us and we were at 10,000 feet. Dean said that we should not be disturbed by the method he had to use to get us down fast. He said it was called the Maple Leaf and that we should just hang on and trust him.

The next thing I knew he had tipped the plane with the right wing down and we were falling straight down, fast. He then turned the plane to the left and we continued to fall. I don’t remember how many times he turned the plane but I do remember that when he landed the plane he hit the center yellow line on the runway dead-center. And slowed the plane so we left the runway at the first turnoff. During this whole landing there were six airliners lined up ready for takeoff watching this small plane fall out off the sky with perfection.

Our Back Door, the Porch and the Wind

One of things that we had to get used to when we moved from Oakland, California to Anchorage, Alaska was the cold winters. My wife, Ruth, had grown up in Minnesota so she knew all about cold winters, but I was a California kid and while I went to college in Portland, Oregon I had never gone through prolonged cold.

Our house in Anchorage was a Gold Medallion Home which meant that it was all electric, even the heating. I had had electric baseboard heaters in my dorm room in college so I was familiar with this type of heater. It provides the most constant heat without hot air being blown in on a constant basis. But there would come a time when it would be tested.

The contractor who build the house put in a sliding glass door at the back of the dining area which was on the backside of the house. The problem was that it was made of wood, not steel or aluminum as most sliding doors are. I believe that he made the door frames himself to cut costs.

The door consisted of a siding door that was 7’ by 4’ and a window that was the same size. It turned out that there was a wide crack between the door and the window part of the mechanism. In the winter cold air would rush between these two parts and the window part would condense water drops on the surface and that would eventually freeze to ice on the glass. Within a month the entire structure would turn to into an ice sheet. So, in the winter we kept the drapes closed and let them partially block the cold. The heaters did a fine job keeping us warm.

In the fall of 1970 I decided that we had put up with enough of the cold coming into our house through the crack and I decided to insulate us from that condition. We had a nice back porch. I decided to cover the open spaces with Visqueen and give us a barrier to the wind and cold. Visqueen is the clear plastic sheeting that you see on construction sights. It comes in black also. But I had to use the clear plastic so light would not be blocked out entirely. But as it turned out it was the first part of January 1971 before I was able to get the job done. Fifteen days later the storm hit.

In January 1971 Anchorage was hit with a windstorm that hit 65 mph. Our baseboard heaters were really challenged. The heaters had two settings Low and High. In the two years that we had lived in the house I had never used the High setting. In fact I didn’t even realize it was there until we could not get enough heat during the storm. It was between 5 and 10 degrees below zero and with the 65 mph wind that gave us a wind chill factor of about 70 degrees below zero. Even with the heaters turned on the high position we could not get the house over 65 degrees. So we all bundled up and stayed fairly warm. The storm lasted four days as I remember. We had a fireplace but the wind was blowing so hard and swirling so radically that we were advised not to use the fireplace. Because the wind could blow down the chimney and blow fire onto our living room carpet or furniture.

The worst thing that happened was that the Visqueen that cover the open spaces on the porch was ripped to shreds. It had only been up in place three weeks before the storm hit. When it was all over we were ready to leave Anchorage and we did one month later.

Renton, Washington

The move to the Seattle, Washington branch office was a promotion for me. I was a Staff Assistant, a member of the management team without any employees reporting to me. I handled various projects for the branch such as the Equal Opportunity Employment Program, the moving and living program, sales territory realignment program and the branch petty cash fund. We kept $25,000 in a local bank to be used to pay local bills for all our programs.

The EOEP was a big thing at that time. The federal government was on IBM to get minorities into management positions because IBM was a government contractor. I had to keep all of the statistics for the Seattle area and complete government forms and submit them on a monthly basis.

In 1969/1970 the U.S. was going through a recession. While this is called the 1969/1970 recession its effects lasted for two more years within IBM.

IBM had had a rule that it did not lay off employees since it started business. During the 1969/1970 recession the company spent millions of dollars moving people around the country to find places where they could be better used. And this moving last through 1972.

The company would have an employee's house appraised and it would manage the sale of the house. If at any time the employee decided he/she wanted to take the appraised value IBM would buy the house from the employee. During 1971/1972 I managed this program for the Seattle office. We had up to a dozen people moving in and out at a time. I had to visit the houses and make sure they was up to par to sell at top dollar and fix anything that needed fixing. I was the interface between the realty companies and employee on any sale. I also had to maintain the houses and yards until they were sold. It was a very time-consuming job.

But my biggest job was managing the petty cash fund. As I said I had to maintain the homes of employees who had moved to other branches, and there were many other bills that had to be paid. Balancing this cash fund at the end of each month was one of my big challenges. I always did.

One of the fun programs I was responsible for was buying Christmas gifts for the branch employee's children each year.

The Christmas Gifts

It was an IBM tradition to buy the children of every employee a Christmas gift. It was my responsibility to go out and find these gifts. I found a large wholesaler (five story building) that I approached with this program. I had to divide the children into age groups and sexes and then find a gift that fit each group. The owner of the company was very happy to have me as a customer as you can be very well aware, and did everything he could to help me do this breakdown and help me pick the right toys for each group. It was a big program, probably his biggest single sale of the season. I did it for two years. What fun!

Anaheim, California

At the end of 1972 I was offered a position as a trainer. I would teach two seminars, credit management and branch administration of human resources. In February of 1973 IBM moved me to an office and training center in Los Angeles, California.

Ruth and I took a trip down to southern California to look for a house and we settled on a home in Anaheim which is in Orange County, south of Los Angeles. I had about and hour commute both morning and evening. It wasn't that bad because I taught my seminars in Los Angels, Chicago and New York City. I was on the road a great deal of the time.

Finding the Beach

It was December of 1974. Ruth and I talked about our Christmas dinner. Kent, our oldest was in first grade, Anne was in Kindergarten and Amber was attending a Montessori preschool in the mornings. These kids would rather go to MacDonald’s than be forced to eat a big holiday meal. We had just gone through Thanksgiving and Ruth had been very disappointed at the way the kids reacted to her great Turkey dinner.

So we talked about what we would do for Christmas. We were in Southern California and the weather was awesome. The skies were clear and the temperature was in the high 70’s so we decided we would have a picnic. We looked around and we decide that we would go out into the desert and find a park and have our picnic dinner out there. We did this and it was fun.

The next year the weather was also great and this time we decided to go to the beach for our Christmas picnic. The family had a great deal of fun on that trip. We discovered the beach. It was the start of a family tradition that last ten years. We went to the beach for Christmas dinner every year. Our kids were instantly attracted to the beach and each would become a beach person it their own right. Kent became a surfer, something he still does. A few years ago he and group of friends went to Baja California to some of the best surfing places on the West coast.

The Bancroft family became a beach family in December of 1974 and have been one ever since.

Becoming a Celebrity at IBM

It's tough being a celebrity, especially when you don't know you are one. It turned out that my position as a trainer had ramifications far beyond anything that I could imagine at the time. As I saw my new job I taught people new skills. It was that simple. But as my students saw me, what I said was the law. I spoke directly for IBM. Everything that I said was IBM fact.

I had a couple of exchanges with students during the first few months. I gave them my opinion on particular subjects and incidences and that was how I saw the job to be. The problem was that what I said was my opinion not the opinion of IBM. But my students, at least some of them, took what I said as what IBM said.

These occurrences went back up the management line and my boss was called into her boss’s office and asked about them. I have to say at this point that I had a very good person for a manager. One I respected and still respect. She responded in my favor and said it must be a misunderstanding. I won't go into the exact situations because you "had to be there" to understand. When she confronted me about the situations it was very understated and merely a series of questions about the incidents.

The bottomline is that she told me how I was viewed and that I had to be careful what I said because my students were interrupting me as speaking for the company – at all times. I was a bit shaken but I assured her I would not make that kind of mistake again and I didn't. It's tough being a celebrity.

On the Road

When I interviewed for the job I was told that I would be on the road about 30% of the time. But as one thing lead to another my time on the road rose. In the fall of 1975 IBM was going to nationwide computer system that would have a big impact on credit checking and account receivable management. My job was going to be to hold weekend seminars for IBM branch management tell them about the new program. As I looked at my schedule, with seminars I taught and this new one on the weekends, I was going to be on the road all but two days in the first quarter of 1976. And they were one Saturday and one Sunday, and not even in the same weekend.

Leaving IBM

Ruth sat me down one day and said that Amber, our youngest daughter, who was five at the time had asked her "why doesn't daddy love me?" Ruth asked her why she said that and she responded, "He is never here to play with me." That set Ruth and I into a serious discussion about my job and the family and which was more important. We both agreed that the family was the most important and that I should start looking for another job.

Shortly after Ruth and my talk about job versus family my manager was giving me my yearly evaluation. She said she thought I was doing a great job and she had a new job she would like me to take on. She wanted me to become the head trainer and train all new trainers. This would mean that I would have to hold my credit management seminar and go with the new trainers to their seminars until I felt that they could handle them on their own.

There was a second part to this new position and that was that I would move to division headquarters in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. As I look back I can see that she was setting me up to take her job. She needed a qualified replacement if she could get a promotion and I was it.

But this new job would mean that I would be on the road all the time and that my family would be moved into a completely new environment and away from the beach that they had come to love.

It was time to look for a new job.

I shared an office in Los Angeles with a young woman who had a sister who worked for a company named Basic/Four Corporation. It was a minicomputer manufacturer and they needed someone in their marketing department. The bottomline is that I interviewed and got the job. Basic/Four was in Irvine, just thirty minutes south of my home.