Wednesday, April 23, 1997
Secretaries often outlast bosses
By JERRY DANIEL REED
Senior Staff Writer
She must be friendly and flexible, yet firm.
And above all, she must be organized and efficient. Else the
rest of the organization's productivity can take a dive-bomb.
She is the secretary, of whom 3.5 million were counted in a
1995 census. More than 98 percent are women, thus the pronoun
"she."
Though many secretaries work only a few years before marrying
or moving on to another job, many stay in it for the long haul,
serving the same boss, or a string of bosses, over a career.
Abilene secretaries Betsy Pierce, Brenda Casselberry and Colleen
Worley have put in an average of 20 years, among the three of
them. Pierce has been secretary to five superintendents, Worley
to three Abilene city managers (and five mayors). Casselberry,
though, has stuck it out with one boss, oilman John Thompson,
for all her working life.
"I did not go with the job," explains Pierce, who's
put in 21 years in the outer office of the superintendent's suite
at the Administration Building. "Each new superintendent
had the prerogative of selecting his own secretary."
Her initial job with the arrival of a new superintendent was
that of salesmanship, to persuade the new No. 1 administrator
she could be a real asset. So far it's worked; she's held the
post through the tenures of Harold Brinson, Allison Koonce (twice),
Gordon Harmon, Wayne Blevins and Charles Hundley.
At the polar opposite, Casselberry had to convince but one
new boss of her abilities, John Thompson. The turnover at the
top in a private, family-owned business tends to be less than
in a school superintendent's or a city manager's post.
She started work for Thompson, president of Lytle Creek Operating,
as a part-timer who was also attending Hardin-Simmons University.
He persuaded her to take a year off from school to get the firm's
new computer up and humming.
"If I liked it, I had a job. And if I didn't like it,
I could go back to college. And the rest is history; I've been
here ever since," she said with a smile.
Colleen Worley went to work at the center of City Hall power
in 1979, when Oliver Howard was mayor and Ed Seegmiller was city
manager. First out of the box, the mayor matter-of-factly asked
her to get the governor on the line.
"That just shocked me, to have to call the governor,"
she said. But she got used to it.
Some of the other calls she's handled might strike most people
as odder than casually ringing up the governor. For instance,
a Lubbock woman called to see if the mayor could buy her son a
bus ticket east, and another called to see if the mayor could
help obtain a prescription.
Though the scope of local government isn't quite that wide,
even these callers got help through referral to agencies dealing
with their kinds of problem.
Pierce recalls the time she was instructed to receive an irate
parent in her office outside the superintendent's, while in the
inner office a policeman waited, just in case that parent was
packing heat. He wasn't.
Taking some of the heat off the superintendent, who must routinely
make tough, sometimes unpopular calls, comes with the territory,
Pierce says.
"It's good when the boss is not immediately available
to speak to an angry telephone caller," she said. "Very
often, the caller has had time to cool off by the time the call
is returned."
"It's not a mundane job," says Worley. Each day brings
different situations, different needs, different requests, she
said.
Casselberry said she has the best job in the town, and her
friends agree after she's laid out the facts.
"If you ever leave," they'll ask her, "could
I have your job?"
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Copyright ©1997,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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