As we march through life, there are thousands of decisions that must be made.  A high proportion of them are made by ourselves.  At the same time, outside forces make many of the decisions for us.  All things considered, I would like to have the decision-making made by myself but I know that is an impossible dream.
Now in the decision-making business, I will at this point introduce you to Alfred R. Goebel, a resident of Darien, Connecticut, who was the most pompous S.O.B. it has been my misfortune to know.  Al Goebel was a bright man but as life progressed, he became more pompous every passing week.  You may recall that some years ago I wrote an essay about Al Goebel and his pompousness.  Now I am back with a second helping of pomposity.  The dictionary definition of pomposity reads like this: “having or exhibiting self-importance, arrogant.”  Al Goebel was the epitome of self-importance in that from time to time, he was also arrogant as well.  But in spite of the fact that Goebel possessed pomposity, I enjoyed talking to him.
I first came to know Goebel somewhere in the 1950s.  Both of us were AT&T employees working in Chicago.  As time went on, Goebel found a job in the Overseas Department of AT&T, and somewhere in the 1970s I also took a position in that same department.  Our paths did not cross often because I avoided Goebel because of the pomposity strain in his nature.  From time to time, we talked.  Now remember that Al Goebel, for all his pomposity, was also an intelligent man.
During the Second World War, Al Goebel was a pilot flying B-29s.  The B-29 was the bomber that flew over Hiroshima and nearly destroyed that town.  I knew something about flying and aerial combat, so we had a starting point for our conversations.  It was Goebel who reminded me that in a bombing capacity, it was always better to turn to the left.  Turning to the right was more difficult because of having to see over the wing.  Turning to the left and dropping a wing was easily done.
Early in our discussions Al Goebel and I agreed about the two most important events or decisions in our lives, his and mine.  They were the Depression of 1929 and the war that followed the Depression called the Second World War.  Those were the most significant influences on Al’s life and mine as well.
It must be noted here that I had nothing to do with the Depression presided over by Herbert Hoover, nor did I have a voice in starting the Second World War.  Those two catastrophic decisions were made not by me but by someone else.
Here is another more or less catastrophic decision that was made by someone else.  When I entered high school in January of 1936, it was clear that I was not going to college.  This had much to do with my economic situation.  So the high school counselor put me in the non-academic category and among other things, my courses included shop and drafting.  I had no control over this decision that was made in my behalf.  As a result, my high school years were largely misspent and it suddenly dawned on me that I had to educate myself.  This is a long process and I am not done educating myself at this late date in my life.
Working for AT&T in a drafting job prior to the war, and returning to AT&T in the post war years were decisions that I made. For example, I had an AT&T job that didn’t amount to much in St. Louis.  In 1951 there was a national bargaining session that took place in New York City.  I was one of the five representatives of the union which bargained with management.  At the conclusion of the bargaining sessions, which lasted about six weeks, a prominent gentlemen on the company side told me that there would be a management job offered to me shortly.  And so it was that during one of the periodic floods of the Missouri River, I was invited to an interview with Vernon Bagnell, the Western Area General Manager in Kansas City.  Bagnell was opening a new area for AT&T and he offered me a job.
I had no strings on me except for my marriage and I immediately accepted the job.  Turning the job down would have meant the end of my career.  So now I was bound for Kansas City.
After a while, my old friend Harry Livermore asked me to work for him in Kansas City.  That was an easy decision to make.  Then Harry was transferred to Chicago to a more important job.  One Sunday morning the doorbell rang in my residence in Prairie Village, Kansas.  I opened it to find Harry on the doorstep.  He told me that he was moving to a new job in Chicago and he asked me to go with him.  So another decision point came and I accepted the job in Chicago.
After two years in Chicago, there was a dinner one night at which Dick Dugan, the company Labor Relations Manager from New York, was a guest.  He was really there to look me over.  After a time, Dick offered me the opportunity to come to work for him in New York City.  So that was another decision that had to be made, and I am glad to say that I accepted Dugan’s proposition.
You see, the way AT&T worked was to offer a job and while the decision theoretically was always up to me, the fact of the matter is that if I declined the invitation to a new job, it would be a career-ending decision.  So I pretended to go along with the charade.
Before life was done, I accepted some more decisions on the job level, including one to go to Washington, DC.  That of course was followed by a decision to return to New York at the conclusion of the tour in Washington.  So the point is that I have had a number of opportunities to make a decision about how my professional life would take place.
AT&T was a benevolent employer, according to the aura that the company extended.  But I am here to tell you that if an offer was turned down, the decision would be catastrophic in terms of any career.  So I worked for AT&T for 43 years and on the whole I enjoyed that experience, even though I did not have control over my fate or where I would work.
Now in 1953 came another decision that was life-altering.  In December of that year, the Carr family adopted a child in Chicago.  That was  doubly life-altering.  It changed our lives and it changed the life of the kid that I came to call Blondie.  When that decision was made to adopt Blondie, Harry Livermore, my long-time friend, told me that it was the best decision I ever made.  Blondie is now more than 50 years of age and I must say that Harry Livermore was right.
The decision to retire was not as monumental as one might think.  I had come to work for a boss for whom I had no respect and when my time limit was up on my age, I said, “Let’s go.”  Three or four years later, of course, was the decision to marry Miss Chicka.  That was an altering decision and it ranks right up there at the top.
So you see, there are decisions in life that we can control and a good many of them we can’t control.  I suspect that many of them were life-altering decisions, but in my case a good many of those decisions were made with the help of AT&T.
As Al Goebel and I discussed, none had the impact of the Depression of 1929 and the coming of World War II.  Those were life-altering decisions and I am still cognizant of the lessons taught me.  Sometimes the decisions we make are beneficial and sometimes the decisions that are made for us over which we have no control, are equally significant and beneficial.  Sometimes they are not.
I got into this discussion of decisions as the result of my acquaintance with Al Goebel.  As time progressed, AT&T moved its offices from New York City to Bedminister, New Jersey.  Al declined to move his residence to New Jersey and as a result, he and a companion named Fred Voege drove from Darien, Connecticut down to Bedminister, New Jersey, a distance of about 70 miles.  That is doing things the hard way.
Al had bought a Mercedes diesel engine car which he had pronounced the greatest car in the world.  It would come as a great shock to me and to everyone else to hear Al Goebel say that his car was less than the greatest.  Whatever Al had, it had to be the top of the line.
Unfortunately, not long after the Bedminister facility was opened, Al elected to retire.  Shortly after his retirement, he died.  Only one person from the colleagues he had at AT&T attended the funeral.  It would have been a shock to Goebel if he arose from the coffin and wondered where his colleagues were.  No matter how you cut it, pomposity and all, I was able to enjoy Al Goebel, even though he never offered me a ride in his Mercedes diesel-driven car.
But in the final analysis, some of the decisions in our lives are made by ourselves.  Others are made for us.  We have to live with them.  On the decision-making front I suppose it would be hard to beat the advice of my mother.  Her motto was, “We should all do the best we can.”  At this late date in my life, I cannot improve upon that maxim.
E. E. CARR
May 8, 2011
Essay 564
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Kevin’s commentary: if adopting my aunt was the best decision that Pop ever made, I suppose this means that my mother was the least-favorite Carr child. This seems reasonable.
Also I’d like to stop for a second to call attention to the line that mentions how he had no strings on him except for the marriage, which I imagine would have represented a pretty major string.  I am quite curious how Mimi felt about Kansas City. I’ve never been there myself but it seems like it would be a place with not a particularly large amount of things going on.
For my part, I’ve been making plenty of huge decisions recently in terms of where to live and work and all that. It’s been a pretty turbulent few months but I suppose that I’ve been attempting to do the best I can, so now all that’s left is to hope that these turn out well.