What I Learned Along the Way
Frank J. Landy
SHL North AmericaLitigation Support Group
This represents the second installment of my recollections of how I got from there to here. As I indicated in the introduction to the first installment, I am confident that my experiences are not unique. Everyone reading this column has had one or more experiences that have altered the course of their personal and professional development. If these installments are to morph into a regular column, you will need to send me your recollections and experiences. I have received a few to this point, and the promise of others, but talk is cheap. If you enjoy reading the reality version of professional development, send me your experiences for future columns
(FLandy@shlgroup.com).
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It is November of 1961. I began my undergraduate career a year ago in mechanical engineering. It was a mitigated disaster. I was awarded an F in every required course. I went to summer school to take two of the courses over as a way of expunging the failing grades. I flunked the courses in summer school as well. I never could understand why someone would want to fire a bullet from the front platform of a subway train going 60 MPH, let alone catch up with that bullet. Not to mention what you might tell the judge about WHY you were firing the bullet. The mitigated part was that while I was failing every course, I successfully pledged the engineering fraternity. My parents were delighted that I had made some new friends, even if they were geeks. I spent most of the spring semester sleeping on the floor of the closet of my pledge masteras well as sleeping in my required classes. In any event, when my summer school grades were in, the dean asked if we might have a chat. He asked me if I had chosen engineering or my parents had chosen it for me. This guy was not as dumb as he looked. I conceded that my parents had always wanted to be engineers. He suggested that he call his friend the dean of Liberal Arts and get me set up in psychology. He felt this would be a good way to transition into college level courses. I accepted with enthusiasm. Psychology. That sounded good.
My first course in psychology was the mass intro course with hundreds of students. The first test was a snap, and I felt that I had found a safe haven for a while. I got the test back the following weekF!! OK. Minor adjustment in study habits, blip in the road. Next test, another F!! Whoa. Now I was scared. Third test, I actually study over a weekendhard. The instructor hands back test grades and I have received an A! Yes!!! OK!! He calls out my name and asks me to see him after class. What a guy. Notices the change in grades, here comes the atta boy that makes it all worthwhile. He takes me over to the side of the classroom and looks me deep in the eyes and says, Where did you get the copy of the test? I am in the early stages of developing what will become a signature response styleI am uncomprehending. He repeats his question and I mumble something about having studied hard. He smirks, turns on his heel, and leaves me standing alone to savor my humiliation. He really had that heel-turning thing down.
My undergraduate psychology experience is only modestly better than my engineering expedition. I am in and out of academic problems. A new dean of Liberal Arts has made it his mission to make me leave school. Every semester he calls me in to discuss my progress. I am always about .05 GPA points from an automatic expulsion so he takes the moral high road and tells me I am taking up space that a truly deserving student could use to advantage then waits for me to do the right thing and quit school. Ive seen bullies before so I just smile and ask if we are finished. He gives me the stare and says I may leave. This goes on every semester until I graduate in 1964.
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It is Christmas 1975. My wife, daughters, and I are visiting family in Philadelphia. I have been at Penn State for 6 years, have received my first promotion, and it looks like I will get tenure as well. My wife and children ask to see my undergraduate campus, Villanova University. We drive out and I give them the walking tour. As we walk through the main administration building a secretary is coming out of the presidents office. She smiles benevolently, it is obvious an ex-student is showing the family the site of his glory days. I look on the door and see that the bully-dean is now the bully-president. I smile. She notices. She asks if I know the president. I reply that he was dean of Liberal Arts when I was an undergrad. She is tickled. He so loves to see his old students. He is free for a few moments. Would you like to pop in and say Hi. There is a God. I say sure as innocently as I can. The family is tickled. The President!! They dont know our history. We walk in. He comes around the desk, hugs the kids, shakes my hand and my wifes hand and asks me to help him recall what interactions we might have had. Oh, yeah. I do. The room becomes very quiet as I help him recall. The secretary is edging out the door. My wife is trying to follow her out. But the dean/president/bully and I are on a roll. You dont get to be president by being a sissy. He says, So, at least you graduated. I guess you have me to thank for that. I say, Just what I was thinking. We look at each other for a long second, each knowing thats a load of crap. But my wife, children, and his secretary all breathe a sigh of relief thinking we have reconciled our old difficulties. We havent made up, but we do let it go. It was great to catch up.
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Its the summer of 1966. I have begun my first real consulting job. Art Elbert and I have been hired by Stouffers Frozen Foods in Cleveland to do a job evaluation and classification projectbasically redo their hourly wage scale. We live in Cleveland for that summer, in a blue-collar neighborhood just east of the Hough district, Clevelands tough neighborhood. The plant is a 24/7 operation, so we are there at all times of the day and night. The disruption of the day/night cycle makes the whole experience surreal. In addition, we are continually going back and forth from the cook floor, where the temperatures are about 140 degrees, to the blast tunnel, where it is minus 40 degrees. There are two particular supervisors who love to lure us (the college know-it-alls) into the blast tunnel for long discussions of work procedures. Of course they are wearing parkas and we are in shirt sleeves. We finally get whats going on after a few weeks when we see people giggling as the supervisors take us into the tunnel.
The cafeteria is open 24 hours a day and you can be served a free meal anytime you want, regardless of whether you are working or not. This is a real perk for most of the workers. We both gain a lot of weight. Stouffers frozen food, particularly before it is flash frozen, is good stuff. Lobster Newburg, chicken tetrazzini, welsh rarebit. Not bad after a grad students typical fare. It is a tough place with a tough workforce. In the back of the plant is a rail siding. During scheduled work breaks, a few people go out by these loading docks and buy drugs or alcohol, or spend their 15 minutes with a prostitute. If you are back there during a work break, you are there for one of those reasons. It is essentially the red light district of the plant. Although it is against company regulations to do anything like this on company property, officials have given up trying to stop it. As far as the cops are concerned, it is a victimless crime so they dont intervene. Ironically, in the front of the plant there is a wholesale counter for Stouffers products for employees. As a courtesy, cops are treated like employees and they can buy at wholesale, so it is not uncommon for cops to be buying food up front while employees are buying drugs out back. Go figure.
About 50% of the workers are Black and another 20% are immigrants from eastern Europe, mainly Romania and Poland. This is a bad summer. Many cities experience racial tension and riots. Cleveland is no exception. We go to work each morning with Army reserve units on the corners with 50- caliber machine guns mounted on jeeps and personnel carriers. There is looting and some deaths. Each night, a different area explodes. We live on the east side of the Cleveland ghetto, Hough, and the plant is just to the west of Hough. That means we need to drive right through a dangerous area twice a day. One night, when the riots are at their height, a Black supervisor who is friendly with us and knows where we live says, Go down to Route 21 and across to get home tonight. That route will take us an extra hour. We joke, Cant we just ask them to throw smooth rocks at us? He doesnt smile. If I were you, I would take the long way home. We are working the afternoon shift so we start home about 11:00 p.m. We decide to take his advice because he clearly knows something and is trying to help us. As we are headed to Rt. 21, we see a road block ahead and we turn left off the main highway. Within minutes, we are on a street clogged with people and cars. Lots of shouting, lots of running. The Army reserve owns the daysthe people own the nights. We try to snake our way through, and we hear someone shout something about, the White M.F.s in the red Chevy. Thats us, we think. At least we know we are White, and we are in red Chevy. In such circumstances, 2 out of 3 is close enough. Just then, I see a pop bottle with a wick and a flame arch over the small crowd to our left, headed toward our car. Someone has thrown a Molotov cocktail of cleaning fluid at us. This has happened frequently over the nights and is the weapon of choice. It goes over our car and hits a wire fence, falls to the ground, and explodes with a great deal less force than I had expected. Art and I are shouting, not so much at each other as just shouting. To our right, there is a relatively empty sidewalk. Art drives onto the side walk and we go the rest of the block with our horn blaring and the few people on that side of the street getting out of our way. We turn right, then right again, and within a few minutes, we are back on Rt. 21. We arrive home in an hour and sit quietly nursing a beer until we can sleep. The next day, we go back to work the same way as always and see Jim Swain, our protector. He asks if we got home OK. We say yes and thank him for his advice. We cant think of anything else to say to him. The riots diminish in 2 days and the city is back to normal within a week or so.
One day, an elderly White woman with a thick accent stops me and asks if I can do something about the cleanliness of the bathrooms. She knows I have something to do with the personnel department. I explain that I am not in the personnel department, I am just a contractor doing a job analysis. She waits patiently for me to finish then repeats her request. She is sure I can do something. Of course, I cant. I dont even know who to ask. My contact in personnel says that the washrooms are part of the maintenance departments responsibility. Over the next week, I try to find out who that would be, but with little success. I dont have a lot of time to devote to my quest. Before I am able to locate the appropriate person, the same woman approaches me again and gives my arm a little squeeze, and says, Thank you. I say, For what? She tells me the bathrooms are a lot better and she credits me with the improvement. I try to tell her that I was not even able to find out who is responsible for the bathrooms, let alone get them to pay more attention to them. She is having none of it; she sees this as false modesty. For the next several weeks, she introduces me to her friends as the nice young man who fixed the bathrooms. After a few days, I just smile and accept the praise. When I get back to Bowling Green in the fall, I read the full account of the Hawthorne Studies and understand what happened.
That fall, Art and I write up our job evaluation study and send it to JAP. About 2 months later, we hear it has been acceptedwith no revisions!! We decide this publishing stuff is not as tough as it is made out to be. This is the last article that I will submit in 37 years for which no revisions are required.
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It is the summer of 1983 and I am about to interview some NYPD cops as part of a job analysis. I am at a precinct around the garment center waiting for the shift to come on. I wait in the coffee room for my SMEs to arrive. They come in to check their mailboxes before changing into uniform. Most of them look too young to drive. They look at me out of the corner of their eyes. There he isthe guy whos going to grill us, the psychologist. They are nervous. They come back 15 minutes later in their uniforms, carrying bullet-proof vests, with all their leather on and they have their guns on their hips. Now they are supremely confident and I am scared. They look a lot older and a lot meaner than before. They are sullen and cant wait to get out of the room. How can they explain their jobs to this mopeand why do they have to?
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It is the summer of 1987. I am heading out with two cops on a ride around in Cincinnati. They tell me to go out and wait in the squad car while they pick up some warrants they will serve. They are clearly annoyed that I will be with them. I see them ask the sergeant if I can be assigned to another car. He says no. They roll their eyes, making sure I see the interchange. I go out and wait in the back seat of the squad car. They take their time. Im bored. I look down at the rubber covering on the floor of the back section and see a little sliver of metal peeking out. I reach down and extract a knife blade from a slit. The blade is about 5 inches long and serrated. Nasty. They come out and get in the car, talking about something that had happened the day before. I try to interrupt them, but they will not be interrupted. They keep up their conversation ignoring me. Finally, the passenger side guy turns with studied indifference and gives me a sliver of his attention. I simply hold up the knife blade. Holy shit. Where did that come from? I show them the slit in the floor covering. We all know right away what happened. It was stuck there sometime in the last few shifts by some perp. The cops from the last shift who were assigned this car never knew the blade was there. And they missed it when they did their end-of-shift inspection of the car. My guys were supposed to have inspected their squad car before taking it out, and they had missed the blade as well. They look at me. If I say anything to anybody, bad things will hit the fan. I wait a long second, hand them the blade, and ask them where we will be patrolling that evening. They know I wont tell. One of them goes back in to confront the officers from the earlier shift about how they could have been killed. The other cops are already gone. Theyll get them tomorrow.
We start the shift. Two young White guys and me. We cruise down a main drag of the ghetto adopting the swagger and confidence of conquerors. The driver smiles and waves to kids, tells some old Black men on a stoop to put their beer back in the paper bag, tells a prostitute to stay out of trouble on their shift. The driver sees a young Black man walking slowly down the street ahead of them. The driver says to his partner, Whadaya think? The partner says, OK. The driver says, Whats our story. His partner says, Blue coat. They stop the black guy and spend 15 minutes just hassling him. What are you doing here? I never saw you here before. I never heard of that restaurant! Why did you start to cross the street when you saw us? Blah, Blah, Blah. Twenty or thirty people watch with bored amusement. Finally, they tell the guy to take off but watch yourself. We drive on. I ask, What was that about? I am now their co-conspirator with the knife blade, and they have no hesitation about explaining what they just did. See, if you do the math, the bad guys outnumber us by more than you can count. So every day on every shift, we need to take the street, to show who is the man. We will usually find someone in the first hour of the shift, hopefully in a real public spot where everyone can see whats happening. And we bust somebodys chops. I ask, You mean you actually rough them up? They laugh. No, you dont understand. Its not about the use of force, its about the THREAT of the use of force. What, I ask, did you mean by whats our story and the blue coat. Oh. When we stop somebody, we need to have probable cause so we need to decide what that will be. Yesterday, there was a robbery by a guy in a blue coat. So, I say, this guy was actually a suspect. No, they laugh. The suspect was a foot taller than this kid and walked with a limp. No, he wasnt a suspect. But he was WAS wearing a blue coat so that was our story. For the rest of the shift, we talk like old frat brothers. They tell me stuff about what their work is really like, and I tell them stories about firefighters and cops in other cities.
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Its 1989 and Im back in New York doing more ride-arounds. I go with a patrol sergeant because he goes wherever there is action. He rides alone usually. We get a call. There is a reported bank robbery really close to us. Someone called it in. All he knows is that there is a robbery going down at a bank two blocks away. Im thinking Dog Day Afternoon as we pull up on the corner. The bank is about 5 storefronts down. He asks me if I am packing? You mean do I have a gun??? He says, Yeah, thats what I mean. No. Do you know how to use one, he asks, as he begins to unholster his weapon. It looks like he is about to hand it to me. NO! I say, I have never fired a revolver (this is before the city goes to the 9mm Glock). Shit he says as he heads toward the trunk. Sergeants carry shotguns and he is getting his out of the trunk. If there are a couple of bad guys, the shotgun will work better. He shows me how to key the radio and tells me what code to use if I hear shots. He tells me to keep people from walking down toward the bank. He has already asked for back up but he cant (or wont) wait. He walks down the street toward the bank with the shotgun laying down by his right leg. His walk is neither fast nor slow. I see absolutely no emotion on his face as he heads off. I am really worriedabout him, about me, about the people in the bank. He reaches the bank and goes in the front door. Just then a woman and a kid start walking around the squad car toward the bank. I stop them. Dont go down that street, Maam. Why not!!?? Just dont. Go around the other way. I LIVE DOWN THERE AND I WILL GO WHERE THE HELL I WANT. Maam, you dont want to be walking down there right now. Trust me. I give her the hard, thousand-yard stare I learned from the cops. Now her eyes see cop and get wide and scared. She gets it, and she picks up her kid and runs back where she came from. A minute later, the sergeant comes out with the shotgun over his shoulder and an amused look on his face. Well? I ask. False alarm. We think it was the people in the Bodega across the street. When the kids congregate, they usually try to get us to come to make them go away. Since we dont always show up so quickly if it just some kids making noise, they go down to the corner pay phone and call 911 and report a bank robbery or a cop getting beat up or something to get us here in a hurry. It takes about an hour for my heart rate to get back down to anything resembling normal. By then, the sergeant has long since forgotten the event.
The next night, I am touring with NY housing police. They get a gun run at about 1:00 a.m.a report of someone with a gun in a nasty high-rise. We pull up outside the high-rise and they ask, You comin with us or do you want to stay here and wait. You can lock the door. I ask, Which is safer? They laugh. Your life expectancy out here is about 45 seconds. With us, it might be more like 60 seconds. I go with them. We never find the guy with the gun. I dont ask anymore. My rule becomesgo with the cops unless they tell you not to. Mostly, when a job comes, they forget you are there. Thats not always good.
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