In the fall of 1942, the Army Air Corps decided that 100 soldiers should attend an Aerial Engineers School at the Embry-Riddle School of Aeronautics in Coral Gables, Florida. Two thoughts come to mind. In 1942, there was no separate air force in the U. S. military; the Army had the Air Corps and that was that. And yes, the Embry-Riddle School was one of the training places where the Saudi hijackers went to school in preparation for the attacks which took place on September 11, 2001.
In the class of 100 hopeful flight engineers, were two Jews from Brooklyn and a Lutheran from Red Oak, Iowa. Nobody – but nobody ever asked about another soldier’s religion or beliefs. It was assumed and rightly so, that most soldiers were Protestants, a few were Roman Catholic and Jews were a distinct minority. You could make this determination from the size of the chapel services devoted to the three major faiths.
The reason that we knew there were two Jews in the class of 100 came from those two men. The first one was Ira Hudas who announced that the Army was not meeting his expectations when it came to working on the Sabbath. Ira also loudly complained about the fact that the mess hall did not serve kosher food. He had some other complaints about not wanting to fly on combat aircraft. After a time, the Army took Ira out of the Aerial Engineers program and no one heard from him again.
The second Jew wanted other people to know that he was Jewish, that he came from Brooklyn and that he worked on the docks there. The term for working on the docks is dock walloper. His name was Jack Botcowsky and I’m here to tell you, he was a tough son of a gun. Jack had no religious hang-ups about the Sabbath and ate Army food just like all the rest of us did.
The Lutheran from Red Oak, Iowa was Doc Groenwald. I knew he was a Lutheran because he was my roommate. At Coral Gables, the Army had taken over some two story apartment buildings to house the men attending classes at nearby Embry-Riddle. In civilian life, the apartments had bedrooms that would house a single person. If that person was married, perhaps two people could fit in the bedrooms provided they had a minimum of furniture. In those days, live-in friends of the opposite sex were unheard of. Nonetheless, the Army had four soldiers in each bedroom by having sort of a bunk bed arrangement. I slept on a top bunk while Doc Groenwald slept down below. Of course, there was another bunk bed in our bedroom, as there were throughout the apartment. Soldiers were rarely free to visit Miami or Miami Beach, so in our out-of-class hours, we spent a lot of time just chewing the fat. The four of us in my room were all Midwesterners. The other three men came from farms in Missouri and Iowa. In spite of the limited space, we got along quite well together. It was in these fat-chewing exercises that Doc mentioned that he was a Lutheran. He of course, was not a doctor. That was just his nickname.
In one of our profound discussions, Doc Groenwald referred to a completely worthless person in Red Oak as a “Spherical Son of a Bitch.” Doc explained that no matter what angle you viewed this fellow from, he was a spherical S. O. B. That seemed to say it all.
On the other hand, there was big, tough Jack Botcowsky. A man who wrestles containers and equipment on the Brooklyn waterfront is no toe dancer. Jack was probably 5’ 10” and weighed maybe 225 pounds. But none of the rest of us ever found Jack unpleasant. On the contrary, he was curious about what life was like on a midwestern farm. Perhaps Jack promised himself that if he survived the war, he might like to visit that far off, exotic land of Iowa.
The Army required that soldiers should walk patrol in front of each apartment building in Coral Gables to ward off terrorists, I suppose. If our classes were at night, we were assigned patrol duties in the daytime. When we attended day classes, we were required to walk patrol until midnight. That is the Army way of doing things.
When Christmas rolled around, Jack and I separately volunteered for patrol duty. Botcowsky said he would walk on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day because he was not a Christian, and maybe the favor would be returned if he ever needed to take some time off. I volunteered to walk with Jack because I had no intention to take part in Christmas religious activities.
While we were pounding the pavement in this holiday season of 1942, Jack told me of one of his water front bosses who was a thief and a lazy thief, at that. Botcowsky referred to him as a “Miserable Son of Bitch.” I had not heard that adjective, “miserable”, being used to modify Jack’s assessment of that waterfront boss. I liked “miserable” about as much as Doc Groenwald’s “spherical.” Those are good usages of the English language.
We’ve had the worthless person in Red Oak, Iowa and the lazy thief in Brooklyn. Botcowsky and Groenwald condemned them mightily. Now I am going to tell you a little about a Vice President of Personnel with AT&T in New York and I will encourage the reader to say whether he ought to be called a Spherical S. O. B. or a Miserable S. O. B. Long ago, I voted 100% for each description.
Before I forget it, I should tell you that the captain of the guard told Botcowsky and me that by patrolling on the holiday weekend, we would not be assigned such duty for at least one more month. What we did not know was that our course at Embry-Riddle was already scheduled to end around January 20th. When the end of the month approached, we were well on our way to foreign duty. Well, some you win and some you do the best you can.
The Personnel Vice President of AT&T Long Lines was J. C. Marsh. Out of Marsh’s earshot, some people said his initials stood for Jesus Christ which is probably how Marsh thought of himself.
At the beginning of the New York, New York series of essays, I told you that a bad apple might sneak in among the New York City roses. Marsh is that bad apple but I have to include him because he played a significant role in the people I met in New York.
When the 1951 contract was finally settled, I learned from Gil Jones, the General Plant Superintendent, that I would be offered a management job in Kansas City in the new Western Area office. About a year after starting the job in Kansas City, it was decided that I should go to work for Harry Livermore in the Kansas City Traffic Office. When Harry went to the Chicago Traffic office at the beginning of 1953, he asked me to join him in Chicago. So the little, new house that I bought in 1951 for $15,000 was sold, with all the improvements I had put into it, for $15,000. Well, you win some and some you lose.
For two years, Chicago Traffic provided me with three different jobs and that’s where I met Dick Dugan, the newly appointed labor executive from AT&T headquarters in New York. Dick asked me to join him as the labor relations manager in April, 1955. So I was going to be sitting on the Company side of the bargaining table dealing with many Union people who had been my colleagues only four years earlier. No one really knew how this arrangement would work out, as the move from union representative to company representative had never been done before. But, everything seemed to work out quite well.
Bevo Swango whom you met in Part 3 of this series, was greatly respected for his warmth in dealing with other human beings. But true to form, when Long Lines had an opening in the Personnel Vice Presidents job, it went to an engineer rather than to Bevo. Jack Marsh became the new Vice President of Personnel a few months before I showed up in April, 1955.
Marsh was not your typical, straight arrow, telco engineer. He was totally a creature of Henry Killingsworth, the President of Long Lines. Killingsworth was clearly the most bigoted person I ever knew in the telephone business. Marsh adopted all of Killingsworth’s bigotry. Marsh was as deeply prejudiced as he was uncouth. He was an equal opportunity hater in that he disliked people of color, Jews, Irishmen, Italians, Puerto Ricans and almost all Catholics. That is only a partial list. His boss Killingsworth disliked Yogi Berra because his salary matched Killingsworth’s own one year. Marsh also disliked Yogi Berra. Probably he and his boss were the only two people in New York who found something in Yogi to criticize. But he reserved his special dislike for Irishmen, Jews and people who belonged to unions. As there were no Jews or Puerto Ricans and few Italians at the Long Lines Headquarters, I qualified for Marsh’s disdain by being Irish and by coming out of a union.
Marsh’s dislike for the Irish stemmed from an incident when he attended the University of Iowa. Marsh said he had seen Notre Dame football players crying after suffering a defeat at the hands of the Iowa football team. So he considered all Irishmen as unworthy of his respect. Marsh disliked living in New York City where he claimed he had to mingle with Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews and other assorted East Coast creatures. And once more he, like Killingsworth, hated unions.
Why Marsh ever approved my coming into his Personnel organization is hard to explain. I was Irish which constituted strike one. As everyone knew, I came out of the telephone union. So that must have been strike two. Perhaps Bevo Swango or Dick Dugan persuaded Marsh to sign off on my transfer. Or perhaps, it had to do with avoiding another Creasey case. In any case, it was done and Marsh set no records in welcoming me into his organization.
Shortly after I arrived to take up my new assignment, I took a room on lower Fifth Avenue at the Grosvenor Hotel. While I was still feeling my way around the new job, Marsh had a surprise, with a time bomb inside, for me. For all the years that Killingsworth was the Chief Executive, he held salaries at the lowest possible level. Long Lines was a regulated business under the Federal Communications Commission. There were years when Killingsworth held salaries so low that at year’s end, he had a surplus. That surplus was returned to the FCC rather than being given to increase the salaries of employees. Employees knew what was happening and were deeply angry over their salary treatment. On top of that, employees were often required to transfer from one town to another. One of the consequences of such frequent transfer activity, meant that Long Lines people had to rent housing because it made no sense to buy a house for only one or two years. In several cases where employees had bought a house, they wound up carrying two houses in a slow real estate market in the 1950’s. So the employees were angry at upper management and when Marsh became the Vice President of Personnel, he reaffirmed all of Killingsworth’s policies.
Not long before I moved to New York, the company, under heavy pressure from Bell System management at 195 Broadway, had sent an employee attitude survey to its management employees. Long Lines was simply joining all the other units of the Bell System in the survey of employee attitudes. I suspect that Long Lines joined the survey reluctantly because they had to know that they were stirring up a hornet’s nest.
I had only been in New York for a week or so when Marsh himself called me into his office and unloaded about 3200 responses to the management employee attitude survey. The survey had four pages, as I recall it. So here I was holding 12,000 pieces of paper which Marsh wanted me to see what employees had to say. I worked on the attitude survey at night and on weekends at the Grosvenor Hotel. I had hoped to use that time for house hunting, but the attitude survey came first.
In point of fact, Marsh had set me up because any fool could have told the management that the employees were angry. So I struggled with all this paper. I knew what was going on, but I could do nothing about it. The comments on the survey were often acerbic. There were few if any kudos in the survey for upper management.
The survey was mostly adjectival. There were few boxes to check. Employees had to write what they thought of Company policies. The people were so angry that many signed their names to the survey.
If Marsh had wanted an evaluation of the survey, he should have given it to an outside organization to summarize. I did the best I could with the survey trying to pick out neutral comments to balance unpleasant ones. But the outcome was clear. The employees resented their treatment by upper management almost to the point of hostility or even hatred.
I put the best face on the attitude survey as I could but no one could hide the fact that Long Lines employees actively disliked upper management, including Killingsworth and Marsh. I did the best I could, but there were no saving graces.
What I thought would happen did happen. Marsh and Killingsworth shot the messenger, namely me. They did not want to concede that Long Lines people were anything less than deliriously happy. And so with being Irish and coming from a labor union background constituted strikes one and two. Now with the attitude survey, Marsh had strike three. Don’t be concerned at this late date by the unfairness of it all; that’s the way that some organizations are constituted. All I ask in the spirit of this essay, that you give thought to Marsh being a miserable S. O. B. or a spherical S. O. B.
A couple of other thoughts occur about J. C. Marsh. Until 1955, the union always came to long Lines Headquarters at 32 Sixth Avenue to conduct bargaining sessions. In 1955, CWA said this was an unfair advantage for company negotiators. So they asked that negotiations be moved away from the company headquarters building, perhaps to a hotel. Marsh insisted that an expensive hotel should be picked. The idea was to break the union financially. Marsh knew nothing about New York hotels, but the name “Number One Fifth Avenue” struck him as an appropriately expensive place. As it turns out, that hotel catered mostly to long term guests and the rates were not so bad. Marsh never tumbled to the fact that it was only two blocks from union headquarters. Company negotiators were a two-stop subway ride and a walk of two long blocks away. So the union people were pleased to conduct negotiations at “Number One.”
Marsh did not find going home as an attractive thought. In normal times, he liked his staff to hang around the office until 7PM whether they had something to do or not. Now, with negotiations going on, Marsh had a hotel room and pretty much insisted that all of us should stay overnight in our rooms. With bargaining occurring on many weekends, it meant that I did not see much of my family or the house in New Jersey.
Finally, Marsh was a big man weighting pretty close to 300 pounds. When it came time to eat, more often than not, Marsh would suggest Luchows. That place served heavy German food. Marsh often called for Baked Alaska for dessert. Bob Creasey had his steaks. Marsh had his German food.
I told you in Part 1 of this series about New York that, “Once in a while someone who earned my disrespect and dislike would come along.” Jack Marsh is the man I had in mind. In 1960, Bell System officials at the worldwide headquarters finally decided to move Killingsworth to a job where he could do no more harm. When Killingsworth was removed, Marsh lost his only support and he too was moved to a job having to do with General Service and a little real estate management thrown in. It was a nothing job. For all intents and purposes, I lost five years when those sorry reprobates ran the Long Lines Department of AT&T.
So now that you have read a little about Jack Marsh, it is time to see whether Doc Groenwald’s description of a spherical S. O. B. or Jack Botcowsky’s term of a miserable S. O. B. should fit Mr. Marsh. I’ve given this a lot of thought over the past 42 years and I think a wedding of the two descriptions ought to do the job. And so I say that a miserable and spherical son of a bitch fits Jack Marsh to a tee. Or as my father would say, “He was a sorry S. O. B.” I am sure that Doc Groenwald and Jack Botcowsky would be glad to know that after all these years, their vivid descriptions live on.
E. E. CARR
June 10, 2002
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More bad SEO for bad people, which is kinda fun.
It was also interesting to learn that he was one of the first to make the union -> corporate switch, which I’m sure would be incredibly difficult to pull off without offending the unions and souring future negotiations. The more corporate parts about shooting the messenger, or allowing clueless executives to think that they’ve “won” when the reality is more complicated, both still ring pretty true in today’s working world as far as I can tell.