
Linda Nelson
THIS IS AN OPINION
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As I read Gwen Moritz’s recent column (“A Mad, Mad, Mid-Mod World,” April 20), I realized I was there. The ashtrays, the steno pool — that was what I signed up for on Jan. 2, 1967, my first day on the job with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All the men were loan officers or equal professionals, and all the women were stenographers, secretaries or administrative workers.
We were in the old post office on Capitol Avenue, which is now a part of the federal court complex in downtown Little Rock. It was old and had radiators, windows that opened and manual typewriters and calculators. I was 18, already married one year and had graduated from North Little Rock High School in May 1966. I had left a job in the accounting department at Orbit Valve that I loved, but back then you couldn’t decline a job offer with a federal agency without retaking an arduous test. I was a GS-3 (on a scale of GS-1 to GS-15) clerk-steno, meaning I actually knew shorthand and could read it back and could type with all fingers.
Most days a group of four loan officers ate lunch in one of the back rooms behind closed doors, playing cards and smoking cigars. What fun to go in there after lunch to take dictation! (That’s sarcasm. You can hold your breath only so long.)
I have to say that I learned an awful lot during that time. I typed detailed loan officer reports. Original and three carbon-paper and onion-skin copies, single-spaced and up to 10 legal pages. To correct mistakes was painful and ugly. What that taught me was to proof these before typing. Some were dictated on tapes, but quite a few were handwritten by the loan officers. Not all mastered grammar, so I made adjustments rather than retype the whole thing again and again. Surprisingly, many of my counterparts in the pool didn’t subscribe to that philosophy. “That is not my job,” they said, essentially meaning that it was above their pay grade. I just didn’t want to do the whole thing over again.
There were a lot of numbers in these reports, and I learned what they meant and how they were supposed to flow. And numbers are the hardest to type and easiest to mess up, so I learned to check the numbers before typing. We didn’t have Wite-Out back then.
There were no computers. In a later job, I posted loan payments on cards by hand. Our tickler system to send reminders was a folder with sections for each month. We did have a Xerox machine, and you had to put the document in a plastic sleeve. There was no fax machine.
Slow forward to 1970-71 and an enlightened management determined that women could indeed wear pants to work! However, they had to be part of a matching suit.
I left in 1971 after the adoption of my first child. By then I was a GS-5 liquidation control clerk. As a clerk-steno I got to see what borrowers needed to do to get approved for a loan. Now, I got to see what happened if they got the loan but didn’t succeed.
All of those experiences taught me some things I would use later in my career with SBA as a loan officer, servicing and liquidation supervisor and at one point an assistant director of the new National Guaranty Purchase & Liquidation Center in Herndon, Virginia.
I returned to SBA in 1984 as a file clerk GS-4. By then I had four children, and my goal was simply to be able to provide coats and other necessities for them. It didn’t take me long to figure out that was not enough. I got a promotion shortly after to a GS-5, but it was still a losing battle, so I decided to go to college. I had never had a desire for college before because my career was going to be wife and mother and maybe secretary if I needed to work.
I read (probably in Arkansas Business) that luck is the intersection of preparation with opportunity. I am the living proof of that as the SBA’s second female supervisor in Arkansas and the state’s first female District Director — GS-15. I’m not sure how the cigar smoke helped but I have smoked a few! I am a survivor of that Mad, Mad, Mid-Mod World.
Linda Nelson is the district director of the Arkansas District Office of the U.S. Small Business Administration, appointed in 2004. Linda has a total of 35 years of experience with the SBA. Email her at Linda.Nelson@SBA.gov.