Wednesday, July 31, 2002
by Jeff Gillenkirk

People judging our country today by the likes of Enron’s Ken Lay, Adelphia’s Rigas family, Global Crossing’s Gary Winnick or Halliburton’s Dick Cheney might cast their gaze further down the corporate food chain — to Marvin Gillenkirk, my father.

This American never cashed in millions of dollars in stock options just days before the collapse of his enterprise.  He never built a $7 million seaside mansion with severance pay from a corporation that couldn’t honor its workers’ pensions.  While America’s Crookedest CEOs were stuffing their lifeboats, my father was quietly going through the last of his savings at a nursing home in Rochester, N.Y.

On the morning of July 10, 2002, he died in a state of advanced Alzheimer’s with $1,500 left in his bank account.  And therein lies the key to one of the most spectacular economic success stories in world history.

Marvin Gillenkirk graduated from high school in 1933, at the onset of the Great Depression.  With his father demoted to part-time status at Rochester’s Hudson Dairy, my father went to work rather than pursue his dream of a college education.  He walked through the iron gates of Gleason Corporation in 1935, and walked out for the last time in 1978 — after 43 years of service.

Gleason specializes in making machine tools and gears — an apt metaphor.  My father helped provide the gears that turned America’s wartime and post-war economies, one of the largest and most sustained economic booms in the history of the world.  Business schools and publications glorify the genius of CEOs whose shrewdness and vision helped create jobs, but it was millions of people like my father working those jobs, day in and day out, who created the vast wealth that so many CEOs have either stolen or frittered away.

My father was very much a man of his generation and class: stoic, humble, hard-working. His mantra was “work hard, play by the rules, keep your nose clean” — and he lived by it.  Insider trading to him meant swapping one of his bologna sandwiches for a roast beef or ham, or giving a lift home to a co-worker whose wife had to take the kids to the doctor. He was almost never sick, and he took sick days only when he actually was.  He paid his taxes on time, gave the traditional tithe — one-tenth of his income — to the Roman Catholic Church, and provided steadily and adequately for his wife and four children.

That’s not to say he was a flawless man.  He was intolerant of others’ failures, and too spare with praise.  Like most men of his time he was more wallet than heart, with the emotional range of a boulder.  He occasionally drank too much, and smoked Chesterfields well into his 40s — but then, he lived till 85, so what?  He played golf more often than my mother wanted, and forced his children to sit in straight-backed chairs for an hour on Sunday if we talked at Mass.  But his integrity was unassailable.

My father died just days before intensive nursing home care consumed his savings and Medicaid was scheduled to kick in.  I don’t suggest that he timed his death because he knew that his own money was nearly gone; but that it worked out that way seems another fitting metaphor.  Other than Medicare and Social Security benefits he received after paying into the system since its inception in 1935, my father never depended on anything except his own labor for his livelihood.  He paid his own way until the end, and left behind many admiring family members and friends, a personal legacy built on hard work and honesty, and a nation wealthy from the fruits of his labors.

I grieve for the hundreds of thousands of workers and investors who have lost their savings through the collapse of Enron, World-Com and other plundered corporations.  But I grieve more that the ethic of this country has evolved so far from what my father taught me.  From Enron’s spectacular looting to President Bush’s failure to recall the details of a questionable $848,560 stock sale, the prevailing ethic of America is about getting rich at all costs — rhetoric to the contrary nothwithstanding.

The dividends that allowed men like Ken Lay to look like geniuses and live like kings were created by workers like my father.  While many in this country up to now have conceded corporate larceny and fraud to “the way business is done,” that’s not the way my father worked, nor the way he expected me or anyone else to.

My father’s America was a hard-working America, a modest America, an honest America.  I pray that his version of this country didn’t die with him.

Jeff Gillenkirk is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.