George J Noakes, Part 9

This is my dad again in uniform, this time playing on the Electric Steel Company amateur baseball team, circa 1953. 

  He had left his job at the accounting department at Portland's International Harvester Company regional headquarters some months back. The job he held at ESSO was better paid, but it was still offfice work. and this was not a long-term answer for him.   

As he wrote earlier, dad was used to being competitive from his youngest days, and there wasn't much competition at a desk doing the routine work at a regular business.  Being on a baseball team for some of the year probably helped him. but he was eventually "promoted" from the pattern department over to accounts-and-billing.  It was more money, but he was back chained to a desk.  He compared his working life at this time to the character Jack Lemmon played in the Billy Wilder film classic "The Apartment" (1960).  "I was just stuck to a desk and an adding machine, forty hours and then some a week" I remember he told me while we watched the opening of that movie on television once .  "It was dull, dull, and more dull."   

"I had a great office job, but I was not cut out for that type of work. I could not sleep nights for thinking about my daytime work. Eventually I had to go to the doctor. He told me I had a bad case of "nerves".  I had to quit the job for my health."     

Dad put in for a transfer and got himself a tryout over at Sales Promotion at Esso.  It was a turning point in his life. He found he liked selling, going out and meeting people getting to know regular customers, and closing sales.  Wheras Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman" was a guy who chased other man's dream into a lifetime of unhappiness, I think in many ways my father was the reverse of Arthur Miller's famous character.  Dad initally thought the key to success as an adult was to get enough college under his belt to be the best business-type he could be, and evenutally he would do well enough to get a promotion to some big managerial job.  Actually, the rigor and routine of standard American business in the Fifties was literally driving him to a probable couple of ulcers, and then liklely capped off by a big heart attack in middle-age. He saw a new path with selling, but a lot of his work at ESSO was still what we would call today "cubicle work".  After he had a "personality conflict" with his boss, he left the company in 1955.

His next job was at Sears-Roebuck:

"That was when I became a real salesman and never regretted the change in occupations.  For one thing when the end of the day arrives and you have waited  on your last customer. your day is over.  Generally, you don't have to think about the job until the next day and the next customer.

"I sold jewelery at Sears at first.  I sold enough over Christmas the the other holidays to get myself through the lean times.   I wasn't making as much money as before but I I liked people and enjoyed talking and making connections with different people every day.  Of course, I still had to sell the watches and all the other sundry goods but I found I had a knack for it.  And if you can selll jewelery and make decent money at it, you can sell anything!"      (My dad, photographed--and probably caught unawares-- at Sears.)

My dad back at his old house in 1957, the last Christmas he had with both his dad and mom.   His father died at 82 in Feburary of 1958.  His mom lived in the little house her husband had built in MIlwaukee, Oregon, for many more years.  She finally went into a nursing home toward the end of her life and passed away in her nineties.

More from my father's writings:

"I was really enjoying myself. I found that working in a department store had many benefits for a single guy. I met a lot of girls.  In fact, about three years working in a store one of my associates and I decided to get married. A year later my son came along. I needed to make more money.  It was a good thing the store decided I was a good salesman and they put me into one of the "big ticket" departments--major appliances.   I sold washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc.  I found it was no great stress to sell the service policies the store was pushing. I had learned a lot over at my other situation and found I really liked doing this."

Truth was, I think it was hard work for my dad and it was competitive--if not so much at Sears then certainly later on when we moved to California (the San Mateo and later the San Jose area, just south of San Francisco ) and he left Sears for other companies until he became a sales manager in his forties with the WT Grant company and his responsibilities went up.   But i gathered he liked the challenge. 

My mom, alas, had to leave here job as a sales manager in the women's department after she and my dad were married. (Company policy.)  She stayed at home for the first few years with me and in those days the economic conditions on the West Coast were better than now--a family could make it on one good paycheck, at least for a few years in the 1960's.  Eventually when I was old enough she, too, went back to work part-time and later full time.  But we lived in a nice house in a good neighborhood and I never felt neglected because my mom would usually be home soon after I got home from school.    

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My mom and dad's wedding day, November, 1959.   And (below) the full wedding party including my Uncle Mel and his wife Bernice.

 

 

 

(above) This is me and my dad outside our house in Milwaukee Oregon in August, 1961. AS you can see, I was already on my old man's back about something.

Around Christmas, 1962.  I'm sitting with mom and dad.  (There's a deviant look about my eyes already!) This was our last Christmas in Oregon.  The next year we were in San Mateo California in a townhouse apartment near the Sears store my dad had transferred to.  He sold men's clothes and suits there until an opening happened for him back at the appliance department.  We had  moved out of Portland because of my mom's early-on set arthritis, which made living in a wet climate difficult. 

My dad's writings end pretty much at the point where I was born.  There will be more things I plan to write about my family from time to time, but most of the writings will be from my experiences.  As I  said earlier, I was lucky to have such great parents and to have a dad who was around for me for 47 years.  Our relationship improved a lot after my adolescence and I was proud he was both my father and my friend.