Will Work for Food
Whether pumping gas, covering a murder or canvassing for a Kennedy, early jobs for Dickinsonians were memorable.
July 1, 2009
Illustration by Don VanderbeekI have Dickinson College to thank for my current career; it wasn’t a first job but an internship while at Dickinson between my sophomore and junior years, that led to my first job and current career.
Knowing that I was tired of loading and unloading railroad cars and tractor-trailers for summer employment, my beloved political-science professor Bruce Andrews told me to contact the chairman of the redevelopment authority in York, Pa., who happened to be on the college’s board of trustees. He advised me to contact the redevelopment authority’s executive director to schedule an interview for a summer internship.
When my Sigma Chi brothers heard I had an interview the next day with the redevelopment authority in York, they asked, “What’s a redevelopment authority?” I said, “I don’t know. I think they tear down old buildings.”
Sure, as a political-science major I had read Jane Jacobs’ book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, in which the term “redevelopment authority” was used. Otherwise, I hadn’t a clue, and I certainly never imagined where that internship would lead.
Due to a reference from the redevelopment authority, I landed my first job out of college as a planner with the York County Planning Commission. Shortly thereafter, I became a planner with a private planning consulting firm in Harrisburg.
I became the director of planning for the city of York, the youngest planning director in Pennsylvania. A few months later, I also became executive director of the city’s redevelopment authority, where I had been an intern several years earlier.
My experience in York led to my hiring in 1973 as the first executive director of the House Local Government and Urban Affairs committees for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. I held that position for 28 years.
What is perhaps most ironic is that a report I wrote before leaving titled “Eradicating Blight & Expediting Economic Development in the 21st Century” was used by the American Planning Association in Chicago to develop its recently adopted national redevelopment policy for underutilized property in America.
Shortly after his election, Pennsylvania’s Gov. Edward G. Rendell established the state’s first Governor’s Office of Housing and Community Revitalization. I was asked to join. I helped develop a new housing and revitalization strategy for the commonwealth and its communities.
Then, in 2006, I established my own community development and governmental affairs consulting firm, Jeri E. Stumpf & Associates Inc., based in Lancaster, Pa.
—Jeri E. Stumpf ’66
Less than a week after graduating in May 1970 (shortly after the Kent State shootings), my new wife, Elizabeth “Bif” Young ’71, and I were back on campus for her final summer-school session. She needed a few credits to finish up her degree, and I had nothing to do until law school began in September, so we rented out the housemother’s apartment in the Phi Kap house.
On Monday morning I took my bicycle to the Exxon station at the end of the street to inflate my tires and start my job search. I found a “Help Wanted” sign in the station’s window, and by 8:15 a.m., I was gainfully employed as a pump jockey.
With my double major in English and history, I was well-equipped to scrub flies and mosquitoes off the windshields of hundreds of Carlisle-area vehicles all summer. It gave me the chance to work with real people in the real world rather than keeping my head in the academic clouds of the prior four years. After 35 years of active law practice, I still use the people skills that I learned from that summer job.
—Chris Abernethy ’70
When I graduated I ran a small branch of Planned Parenthood in Carlisle and the surrounding counties. I would go door-to-door telling people about the services available. I learned a lot and found it fascinating to meet the people from all walks of life, but I was quite naive. For example, I was shocked to see a woman black and blue and unable to rise to greet me because her husband had beaten her. I would walk into the poorer sections of town in my short pink dress, armed with my ideals and my smile. Later my clients told me that they had “put out the word” to protect me because I was the “birth-control lady.” Thank heavens they did! Later in life I became a social worker, and those experiences have helped me many times to relate to people and give examples to students.
—Elizabeth Jean Kent ’70
When I graduated in 1971, the world was a very different place. The nation was exhausted from years of war, protests, assassinations and social change, and Dickinson was not immune. But my four years here had also seen an amazing flowering of the arts—The Mermaid Players, the Mime Troupe, music, dance, photography, all were flourishing. That fall, I headed up to Plainfield, Vt., where my best friend, Jim Drake ’70, was technical director in the Haybarn Theatre at Goddard College.
I spent the fall sleeping on the floor of Jim’s apartment in Montpelier, which he shared with a young English professor who also directed the plays. He was David Mamet, and he would disappear into his room for hours, tapping away on a little Olympia portable typewriter writing his first two plays, The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago. We put those plays on at the Haybarn in November, and one of the student actors was William H. Macy (see photo, Page 21).
Many an evening after rehearsal we watched State Street fill up with snow while David puffed on little crooked cigars, and we filled up with Heineken Dark. That winter, Jim offered me a job as his theatre manager. The Haybarn was in such disrepair that Jim could barely function, let alone design and build sets. So in January 1972, I began renovating the dressing rooms and lobby of the Haybarn and replacing the lighting system and helped with set construction and lighting, while David and Bill Macy did their thing on stage. My course in Stagecraft and Scene Design with David Brubaker and the hours spent with Marj Brubaker and the Mermaid Players were paying off.
There is a large P.S. to this story. Seems that Goddard always had a student fire department, complete with a 1,000-gallon-per-minute pumper and an equipment van. Jim and I, being all-American boys (and also working in a fire trap), thought it would a good idea to join the Goddard College Fire Department.
That old pumper had no power steering, no power brakes, no automatic transmission and was complicated to start. Since any member of the department might be called on to drive, a student member was sent to teach the new recruits the drill. So my heart skipped several beats when a very beautiful brunette Goddard coed showed up in the shop looking for me. Donna Williams ’74 and I have been married for 34 years now, and I’m still crazy about her after all these years. And we have always had a dalmation.
—A. Pierce Bounds ’71
My first paying job out of college was as a transmitter watch engineer for a Denver AM and FM radio station. It was thunderstorm season in the Rockies, and static electricity kept discharging up and down the “guy wires” as I ran from tower to tower taking hourly readings. At the remote site my main task was keeping the station on the air; there was a short circuit in the transmitter’s power supply that kept turning it off every hour or so. At that time, it was “sweeps” (Nielson ratings), and that could mean losing great sums of ad revenue or listeners if we were off the air for any length of time. Most of the time I sat by the “on” button, finger poised to reset it. A few months later I became an on-air personality (DJ) and station engineer at the station’s city location. That was in 1976. I retrained and gained a first-class radio/TV operator’s license from the FCC.
I had spent much of the previous three years as a full-time teacher—an unpaid, volunteer position—in an inner-city Denver elementary school. One fall, I even taught a Denver junior-high-school reading clinic in a janitor’s closet because money was tight and there was no other room at the school. My reluctant readers wrote their own books about sports—mostly football.
Between 1976 and now, I spent more than 16 years working in the media, much of that time in television as a production engineer and technical director. I was a radio news director and talk-show host in western Wyoming, and I’ve reported news and written a column for a New Mexico daily newspaper.
After taking a short hiatus last year, I returned to teaching again, this time high-school English. Now whenever the angst level rises high among my freshmen and sophomores, I truly miss those TV production days!
—Nancy Burn Thorson ’73
My first job out of college was as a cub accountant with the predecessor CPA firm to KPMG. I graduated on the steps of Old West on a Sunday afternoon and started my accounting career that Monday morning. My lifelong love of the accounting field, oft perceived as boring (think “The Joy of Tedium”) was engendered by the late Professor John King. Against all odds, he taught what amounted to an accounting minor back in the late-stage hippie era at Dickinson. Somehow a complete abstract system capable of describing a whole world fascinated me. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself called accounting the most beautiful invention of the human mind. More prosaically, I immediately started pulling accounts-payable vouchers from client files while attending night school. It was a hectic, sometimes mind-numbing, schedule, but within three years I had a CPA certificate, an MBA, three years of real business experience and an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I eventually became an itinerant CFO and helped build Tatum LLC, now home to 1,000 consulting CFOs across the land. Thank you, Dickinson, and thank you, Professor King.
—David Horn ’74
My first job was with a consulting firm called Ketron Inc. I was told after I accepted the job that out of 20 or so resumés mine was the only one selected for an interview. That was because I was a math major from Dickinson College. Another math major, Tom Gradel ’74, (whom I had never met) had worked out very well for this firm, and they figured that math majors from Dickinson made good hires. The firm did OR (a type of applied math) consulting, which got me into that field, and I eventually went on to a Ph.D. in OR and, after many years in industry, my current position on the faculty of Curry College in Milton, Mass. I have told the story of my getting that job many times to people to point out how you never know how your efforts will affect those who come after you and how your good work can have a positive influence on the careers of those you don’t even know.
—Michael Miller ’78
Following graduation, I landed a job as a stringer for the Maine Line Times, my hometown weekly newspaper. My first assignment was to make some phone calls about the mysterious murder of a local schoolteacher who had been found in the trunk of her car. Little did I know that the bizarre case of Susan Reinert and her two young children, who were never seen again, would command national headlines for years, trigger several books, and be turned into a made-for-television movie. It also led to my interest in criminal-justice journalism, a career that I have pursued with a few twists and turns ever since. And yes, I was interested in journalism while at Dickinson and even spent my junior year in Washington interning at a weekly newspaper. Today I am head of the public-affairs office for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington, D.C.
—David Sellers ’78
I was home for less than 24 hours after graduation when I received a call announcing that I had been hired as a programmer analyst for Burroughs Corp. (which eventually joined Sperry Univac to create Unisys). Our division’s building was in St. David’s (very close to Villanova University and all the nightlife of the Philadelphia Main Line) and housed HUGE computer mainframes that probably could all be replaced now with the laptop I’m using to write this.
I remember two things about my first day on the job—I was handed an accounting book and told to learn it “ASAP.” Well, I was a mathematics and computer-science major at Dickinson, had no accounting experience and had no idea what “ASAP” meant. I guess I had never done anything “ASAP” in my life and actually had to ask my boss what it meant. I learned firsthand several days later, when the company put me on a telephone hotline with about a dozen other recent college graduates. We were now the “experts” for their accounting-software packages. We sat in one very large room and answered calls from across the country. Most calls were from people who used the software and were processing accounting reports, running payroll or something equally sublime and would run into trouble with jammed paper or error messages that froze their operations. We just had to “fix” whatever mess they had gotten themselves into.
Although most of the problems were easily solved, there were times when we had to travel to teach employees on site or in a classroom. It was great fun to be 23 and spending someone else’s money in places like L.A., San Francisco and Boston. In fact, everything I did with those co-workers—outside of work—was just about the most fun a young graduate could have. Our weekends started on a Thursday night and ended on Sunday night. I guess you could call this time in my life “postgraduate” studies as we were one big fraternity of computer geek friends.
My starting salary was in the low 20Ks, and I thought that was as much money as I’d ever make in my life. Life was good, and my future was put on hold while I enjoyed the fruits of my college labor. But that job was for only two years, as I got married, grew up and moved far away (Harrisburg, to be precise), where I manage my husband’s plastic-surgery practice. I’ve used my analytical skills from mathematics, programming skills from computer science and accounting skills from that first job. In medicine, though, the greatest skills one has are social—people want to be cared for, listened to, appreciated. Dickinson helped with that, too!
—Melanie Kuhn Marchant ’83
I worked for a test-center service in
center-city Philadelphia called Assessment Systems Inc. The owner/boss was a former ETS (Educational Testing Service) employee who wrote examinations for professional licenses like real estate, physical therapy, etc., instead of SATs. I was a test-center manager, and I traveled to the states where we had contracts to oversee the on-site test-center managers and the students we tested. We had HP touch-screen computers (quite hi-tech for 1984), and I worked there for 18 months. I resigned and took another job closer to home to save money so I could go to graduate school. I am a Presbyterian minister today.
—Amy Visco Na ’84
After graduating from Dickinson, I returned to my hometown of Baltimore
hoping to work as a television producer in the 23rd-largest market out of 200 television stations in the country. It proved harder than I thought, despite my having completed several internships in Baltimore and one with the BBC my junior semester in London. There just were no entry-level openings.
I decided to volunteer for the congressional campaign of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, helping the communications director and with rallies and event coordination, canvassing of neighborhoods and phone banking.
After a few weeks, she offered me a paying job opening and running her Harford County office. I thoroughly enjoyed organizing the volunteers for phone banks and canvassing around Harford County. Kathleen had enormous energy and enthusiasm and a remarkable ability to remember names of people she’d met years ago. She would wear a business suit and tennis shoes and run from home to home when she did door-to-door canvassing, and her staff did the same. She impressed me with her intellect and, most of all, her integrity and deep faith.
I did not have any political experience except for volunteering for campaigns in high school, so it was a learning experience. I only had one political-science class at Dickinson, but my broad liberal-arts education served me well. You don’t realize how your education helps you with problem solving and managing people until you actually start to use the skills you hone at Dickinson.
After a few months, I had to leave my first job on her campaign and was offered one at Maryland Public Television, but I continued to volunteer for her gubernatorial campaign as media liaison for Baltimore County. Even though it was not what I expected my first job would be, it was a great experience. I am glad I had that opportunity.
I spent 15 years working in television and winning many awards, including two Emmys. Now I am marketing director for Mahan Rykiel Associates, a landscape architectural, urban design and planning firm in Baltimore that has projects in 25 countries.
—Cynthia Fraser ’86
When I graduated from Dickinson in 1993, I had seven awkward months to kill before leaving for Zimbabwe, where I would spend a year studying anthropology. In 1993, this country was in a recession, and jobs—especially temporary jobs—were hard to find. So when I was offered a job driving a taxi cab in my gritty hometown of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., I took it.
The first few hours on the job were uneventful. I mostly picked up people from their downtown apartment buildings and drove them to suburban grocery stores and doctors’ offices. Around 10 a.m., I had a call for a pickup at a motel 20 miles north. A blonde woman slid into the back seat, spilling her mixed drink. She reeked of vodka and cigarettes. A man trying to coax her back into the motel opened the door and grabbed her arm. “No, honey, I’m too drunk,” she said, trying to push him out of the taxi with her high heel. “Please drive,” she said to me, the man still clutching her arm.
“Do you want me to call the police?” I asked her. The man loosened his grip just enough for her to slam and lock the door. I peeled away, watching the man cursing in the rearview mirror.
“Cool, a woman cab driver!” she said, draping herself over the front seat. “Could you take me to the Newburgh bus station?”
“Are you sure?” I asked her. “It will probably cost over a hundred dollars.”
She laughed and pulled a thick pile of $20 bills from her purse. “I made a couple thousand dollars last night.” She leaned forward and asked, “So what’s it like being a female cab driver?”
We chatted and laughed, and she told me her life story from the back seat. She was an exotic dancer, a mother and had a boyfriend who had broken her heart by leaving for the Persian Gulf. I asked her how she liked being an exotic dancer. “It paid for these,” she said, pulling one of her silicone breasts out of her shirt. “Aren’t they nice?” When we reached the bus station, she tipped me $60 and gave me her phone number, just in case I ever wanted to visit her in Florida and party with Axl Rose.
At the end of the day, I had $120 in cash, an aching lower back and a few good stories. A week later, I was offered another job, and I gave up driving a taxi. Surprisingly, I missed it. Sixteen years later, as a writing instructor at a Native American arts college, I understand why. I love hearing people tell their stories. That experience also engendered a visceral compassion and camaraderie for those of us who do difficult and sometimes demeaning things to get by.
—Kirsten Mundt ’93
I joined a “class” of nine fellow 1993
college graduates from around the country working as research assistants for an anti-trust litigation consultancy, Economists Incorporated (EI), in Washington, D.C. My first day on the job, my employers asked if I had an interest in learning SAS (statistical analysis software), because their “SAS RA” had recently left. I said yes, and it set me on a distinct research career path—in all my jobs since I’ve utilized SAS, including my current job doing quantitative research at an investment-management company. It was the perfect first job, providing me technical skills, a professional work ethic (my first all-nighter was at EI, not Dickinson!), and a peer network from which I garnered lifetime friendships.
—Bram Zeigler ’93
Seven days after graduation I was thrust into a world of immense responsibility, for myself as well as those I led. I was part of a select few who chose to become U.S. Army officers straight out of college. In my first year in the Army, I found myself all over the country, from Fort Lewis, Wash., all the way to Fort Benning, Ga., for United States Army Ranger School. Finally I ended up at Fort Bragg, N.C., with the 82nd Airborne Division as a platoon leader in a reconnaissance, surveillance and target-acquisition squadron. My first job experience is different from any of my fellow 2006 grads who did not join the military. How many of them can say their job makes them responsible for 20 young soldiers, more than $10 million of equipment, has trained them to jump out of airplanes and sends them into combat?
When I first arrived at my unit, my commander asked me where I went to school. I replied, “Dickinson College.”
Surprisingly, he knew exactly where it was as well as its reputation. He asked me, “You know, if you went to such a good school, shouldn’t you be a doctor or something? Why did you join the Army?” That was almost two years ago and back then I did not know exactly why I joined the Army.
Now I find myself in Baghdad. It wasn’t until I arrived in country that I realized the answer to my commander’s question. Right after I was commissioned, my great-uncle, who was a World War II veteran, told me, “Durwin, the Army doesn’t owe you a thing. However, you owe your men everything.”
You do not join the military for yourself but rather for those around you. Dickinson introduced me to the option of joining the Army, and I took it and ran with it. My father once asked me, if I could do it all over again, would I change my mind about entering the Army. I always reach the same conclusion: No. Dickinson introduced me to so many possibilities, which led to the Army. I met some of my closest friends and have been given many great and unique experiences, not to mention many opportunities for my future, for which I am very grateful.
—1st Lt. Durwin Ellerman ’06
My first job out of college was as a health volunteer for the U.S. Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa. To say it was an experience would be an understatement. I learned a new language, Chichewa, which I spoke frequently with the Malawians. I ate new cuisine, including fresh chicken, which I was taught to slaughter, and I was given a different perspective on the problems facing the continent, especially healthwise. This opened my mind to a lifestyle opposite the one I experienced growing up. Most important, I connected one-on-one with some of the most impoverished yet grateful and happy people in the world. While I had to leave after three months due to safety concerns, I saw a baby born in the middle of a village with no doctor in sight and was taken in by a family, gaining Malawian parents, two brothers and a sister who I think of every day. I received the greatest life lesson of all—we are all the same.
Since returning to the states, I have begun a new path to fulfill my career goal of becoming a successful writer. I have been writing for the Fairfield Citizen-News in Connecticut for more than a year now as a staff reporter. In May, I started an internship at the United Nations as a correspondent with the press corps.
—Alison Walkley ’07
After graduating in May 2008 I started my life on Wall Street in investment banking. Six months into my job, my company was sold, four other big financial institutions went under, many people were laid off, and the financial capital of the world (NYC) seemed to collapse in front of my eyes.
I am still trying to understand and unwind what exactly led to this catastrophic situation on Wall Street. It has been a great experience just to be right in the middle of this turmoil and see how people react to pressure. It was different in college when we would just pick up a newspaper at the Quarry and read about a financial crisis. But when you know the story you are reading is going to affect your next paycheck directly, it’s a different situation.
It is very important to keep your cool when things are bad and think strategically about how you should stay ahead of the curve. A Dickinson education does prepare one to handle tough situations like these.
—Rohan Sen ’08
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