It Was a Good run

 Some things you remember, some things you don't.

That's the nature of this thing we call "aging." I can remember EXACTLY how it felt hitting a home run up in Cooperstown, NY in 1995, but damned if I can tell you what I had for dinner on Tuesday night.

I remember that my very first full-time job was in the fall of 1978 at Albert E. Price Industries in the Bellmawr Industrial Park.

It was a HORRIBLE job.

I worked an 8-hour day, somewhere from 8:30-4:30 or something like that, either unloading filthy trailers or zipping through the warehouse on a power jack picking orders. I would come home in the evening and blow my nose, and dirt would literally come out. Not fun.

Oh, and the final indignity: take-home pay was $115 per week!! But it was almost enough to support my family, with the help of food stamps.

I lasted in that job until spring of 1979, at which point the folks at Price were kind enough to lay me off. That summer, I played in Avalon, NJ while collecting unemployment (don't tell anyone!). In the Fall of that year, I continued collecting unemployment while I finished my education at Glassboro State College, getting my degree in Communications in May of 1980, along with Lou & Doretta Martelli and our good friend Michael C. Pierce.

On to a "real job!"

I got hired into the Sewell post office in late September of 1980, again taking a job to support my family.

It didn't last long.

It was another horrible experience, as they had me coming in at 4 AM, commuting from Audubon Park to (old) Sewell to make special deliveries. It was cold and dank, and in one instance, I can vaguely remember walking through the streets in a deluge delivering mail. I as desperate to find a job "in my field," and I scoured the help wanted ads in the paper (remember those??) daily.

Finally, in November, I saw an add for a typographer to run a Compugraphic 7700 typesetter. I had take two typesetting courses during my last year of college, and I liked working the machine, so I put my hat into the ring and was hired by Max Selzer Productions, located on Walnut Street between 11th & 12th streets, across from the Forrest Theatre and Moriarty's Pub (GREAT bar). 

I got thrown into the firm big-time there, as the only other typographer quit the day I was hired. I was by no means an expert at running the machine, and I worked some very long hours during the month-and-a-half left in 1980. I was working there the day John Lennon was murdered, and me and a bunch of artists hit Moriarty's at lunch and got half shit-faced in sadness.

Suffice to say that not much work got done in the afternoon.

In January of 1981, the company moved to 401 North Broad Street, across from The Inquirer building (now police headquarters, I believe). It was several blocks and a world away from the toney Walnut Street District.

Almost the day we moved, a TON of work dried up, and I was left alone with the 7700 to spend several months just perfecting my skills. In the end, I got REALLY good as a typographer, and could make the machine do things it was ever intended to do. During this period, I got the firm to hire Lou, and get him out of his dead-end, brain-cell-killing job at the Runnemede post office. 

This would be a decision that both of slightly regretted 25 years down the line when we would have already been retired with a good pension. But in all honestly, we probably both would have stabbed ourselves in the ear if we had to spend 25 years doing work a trained monkey could probably do. So no REAL regrets, I suppose.

Business eventually picked up, but it was time for me to move on. So after about 1.5 years at Max Selzer Productions, I took a job in 1982 at an advertising agency and moved to Chestnut Street between 15th & 16th, again in the heart of the city and all that hustle and bustle, which I liked much better. The job was with Orenstein Advertising, an agency that did only recruitment advertising. The help-wanted pages were about the become vital to me again, but in a completely different way.

Orenstein was a very small company (always my preference!) of about six people, including the VERY entertaining owner, Irv Orenstein, a real character if there ever was one. Thursday was Inquirer deadline day for the help-wanteds, and that was always a pressure-filled day, with the many of the ads coming in late in the day and due at the paper by 6 PM or thereabouts. This was BEFORE PCs and all that technology, so the ads were either sent to the Inquirer (and other papers nationwide at times) via fax machine, which took about four minutes per page, or couriered over to them (if they were display ads).

Yeah, that's how old I am.

I learned to work quickly under pressure, and I was working there when -- glory be -- the PREVIEW was invented in the Compugraphic 8400. This saved a LOT of time and photographic paper, and I learned some expertise on that unit. In 1987, while still working at Orenstein, I purchased a used 8400 and opened a typesetting business on the side based out of my home.

For a few years there, I managed (with the help of my ex-) to make a few extra bucks setting type. Cindy took a college class to learn typesetting, and she would work during the day in our garage. I would take over when I got home from work as needed, so I was burning the candle at both ends AND playing in bands on the weekends (that's THREE jobs, if you're counting).

By the late 80s, the world was turning to desktop publishing and the world of typesetting machines was coming to an end. I learned expertise in DTP, mastering Aldus Pagemaker and other software and just kept on trucking. The home typesetting business was really starting to dry up by the early 1990s, and eventually that $17,000 machine went to the curb as garbage, believe it or not.

During the course of my "career" at Orenstein, there came a need for another office-type person, and I was able to get Doretta in there, which was wonderful. She did all kinds of jobs at the company, and it was great to have a friend there with me, as I did before at Max Selzer. The shenanigans me and Lou into there is a story unto itself which I'll leave for another day.

One of our clients at Orenstein was a firm called Howard Lawson. They used to have me do real estate flyers. Their representative, Ruth Wait, eventually left that firm and took a job as Marketing Director at a company called RTE Asset Management in Jenkintown, PA.  Soon after, she recruited me there.

Now this was a MAJOR commute for me from Turnersville, a full hour of slogging through rush-hour traffic on a good day -- and there weren't many good days. But I decided it would be a good opportunity, so that's where I went in 1992.

RTE was a money management firm that working with financial advisors, and the entire company was based upon a computer algorithm created by the founder, David Rights, that timed market moves via a buy/sell signal. So now I was in a corporate financial environment, although again in a very small firm of under 50 people (as I recall).

I wore a bunch of different hats at this firm, working with DTP software and preparing materials for printing. It was a good place to work, and Dave was a good guy. Ruth drove me a little crazy at times, but I persevered. About a year after I started, I began hearing about this thing called "the world wide web." I could see that this was gonna be something significant, so I took it upon myself to learn HTML coding.

Ruth wanted NO parts of any of that, so I had to kinda sneak around to learn it, and eventually it became obvious that this was a "thing" and that we should join the club. So now I was a web developer in addition to a desktop publisher.

To put a ribbon the career cake, I took it upon myself to learn database programming, using a great product known as FileMaker Pro. This software became my absolute favorite, and it remains so to this very day. I LOVED it. The things I was able to do with it were amazing (and still are), and I did some really cool stuff with it.

By the late 1990s or early 2000s (there's that "forget" thing again), I had pretty much run my course with Ruth Wait. I asked to be transferred to the burgeoning IT Department so I could work exclusively on the website, programming in a language called Frontier, which I don't hear much about these days. Not sure if it even still exists.

A guy named Tom Finnegan was hired to take my job in the Marketing Department. I taught him everything I could about the job, and he was a fast learned and a good guy. He shined in the role, and I moved happily over to IT.

However, this was about to become a fateful (and fatal) move for me.

In about 2001, Dave's market signal began to fail, and fail rapidly. The signal would say "buy," we would buy, and the market would go down. The signal would say "sell," we would sell, and the market would go up. Dave (RIP, he died this year) was a brilliant and good guy, but he could find no way out of this one. Assets began flying out of the company at a stunning and staggering pace, and it became obvious that layoffs would be necessary.

And guess which department was the first to fall?

You got it: IT. In October of 2002, I fell in the first wave of layoffs.

Ouch.

My boss at RTE, Dave Scheuring gallantly hired me to work for his outside venture, HR WebXPress for a brief period of about two months, working out of his place out in Blue Bell, PA, yeah, another ridiculous commute. The software that Dave built his platform on (it was actually built by Kevin Newman, a consultant who worked at RTE for a while) was also Frontier, which I knew pretty well by this point.

But things did no go well with HR WebXPress. Dave was unable to secure a client base, I was a lousy salesperson (which was also supposed to be part of my job), and the money ran out after maybe two months. I will always be grateful to Dave Scheuring for going out on a limb for me, but there I was on unemployment for the first time in my life in 1982 at age 45.

Not good.

Getting used to the idea of being unemployed was not easy, and the job market in 1982 sucked to high heaven. We survived on unemployment for a while as I looked for work, but there was nothing appropriate to be found. Of course, we lost Nicole during this period, so the one morbid benefit of being unemployed was that I was able to be at the hospital(s) with her almost every day. This was absolutely the worst time of my life, period.

But after we went through that tragedy, from which I will never recover, I got a little lucky.

I had taken a DISC Language sales training course while working for Scheuring. In that class, I met a guy named Tom Annas, who owned a company that sold used cabover trucks out of Chester, PA. If you drive on 95 down near the Commodore Barry Bridge, you've seen it there on the right heading southbound.

Tom is a good guy, and he did me a favor by hiring me, because again, I SUCK as a salesperson. The job did not pay a ton of money, I think I was making maybe $35k per year, but it take have benefits, which was huge.

I sold a (very) few trucks during my time there. By 2005, funds were low at T&A Trucks, and Tom had to lay me off. In desperation, I took a job selling Mitsubishi vehicles at Prestige Mitsubishi in Turnersville.

There were only two good things about this job: 1) Very close to home; and 2) Benefits.

But once again, I SUCKED at sales and was making peanuts. Car sales is just an awful business filled with shysters and assholes, and I was a fish out of water in every way. The Sales Manager, Tony Bruno, was a very good guy, and that helped. But the owner was a jagoff who did not give a rat's butt about any of his employees.

Fortunately, T&A started to pick up again and they were able to hire my back for a brief period. Unfortunately, it did last long, and I was unemployed again by the end of 2006, job hunting again in another crappy job market.

I finally found a position in Marketing in either late 2006 or early 2007 with a firm called Ace Glass in Vineland, NJ, that made laboratory glassware. I was hired by the Marketing Director, Chuck Carney, a GREAT character who became a good, life-long pal. Again, the pay kinda sucked -- I might have been making $40k -- but there were health benefits and a very easy, back-roads commute.

Chuck and me had a lot of fun working in our decrepit offices on the second floor Ace Glass. I did a ton of work in InDesign and worked on their website with the use of Dreamweaver and FileMaker Pro. I wrote a sequence from FileMaker that could created 10,000 product web pages with the click of a single button, which was very cool.

But the downside of that firm is that it was owned by people who I would describe at best as "kinda miserable." I'll give you one anecdote in that regard and then move on.

When I started there, the President was a guy named Paul Kramme, who I liked very much. Big baseball fan. Paul was ill when I started, and he passed away a few years late. On the VERY DAY he died, his younger brother, Dick, who was aptly named, moved himself into Paul's office in one of the most classless things I've ever seen. They HATED each other!

But I digress.

Chuck retired a few years later, around 2011 or so, and Jim Abbott took over. Another really good guy, Jim and I got along great, but when you have ownership like those people, it was never gonna be a smooth ride. So I was always looking for options. The glass industry never appealed to me in any way, and I was looking for a future elsewhere at the advanced age of 54.

I was once again rescued by Lady Luck.

My old pal, Tom Finnegan, was now working at Clark Capital Management at One Liberty Place in Center City. Clark had purchased RTE, and about 10 people from RTE were now working there. They were starting a brand-new Marketing Department, and Finnegan wanted me on board and made it happen. I stated there on March 13, 2013.

It was a busy place, and Finnegan was a jack-of-all-trades who did everything from marketing materials to network management to PC setups to everything else you can imagine. I became his right-hand man, and we embarked on many busy days and fun project together. During our years apart, he developed a great expertise in FileMaker, and I jumped back into the program on a more extensive basis and learned a lot from the guy I had originally taught to use the program back in the 1990s. It was a full-circle moment.

Clark Capital is by far the best employment situation of my life. Harry Clark, the founder, is a great guy, and I enjoyed every minute of working for him and the firm.

In the late teens or early 20s, the firm sold its TAMP to AssetMark, and the money started to roll in. There were about 47 people employed there when I started, and we had about $4 billion in assets under management. Today? over 150 employees and up to $47 billion or so in assets.

And the firm was recently purchased by the giant financial firm Raymond James Investment.

So the "small company" days are just about over at Clark Capital, and it is quickly becoming what I would describe as "corporate," the type of company I never wanted to work for in the first place.

This is not an insult directed at Clark Capital in any way. It's still a great company run by good people. But it became clear that my time in the sun, after some 47 yeas in the workforce, was coming to an end. 

I have had enough of chasing technology, keeping up with changes, and toeing the corporate line. I am from a different generation than mostly all of my co-workers, and I feel like a dinosaur -- the oldest person in the company besides the founder.

It's time for me to close the "working" chapter of my life and move on to a more sedate, quieter time in my life, the retirement years.

My last day is Friday, March 13, 2026, 13 years to the day after I started at Clark Capital. So farewell to early rising, job pressures, useless meetings, and corporate bull.

It's time to have some rest before I move on to what's next.