<Begin Segment 21>
SY: So your, now, you had achieved a pretty high position by this point, in aerospace.
AM: Yeah.
SY: So you were making good money, you were experienced, right, at this point? So could you have gone to, could you have gone to any other...
AM: I tried, but they told me that, "We have that position open, but when the aerospace got back on its feet you will report back, so we can't hire."
SY: I don't understand. So when, if aerospace was...
AM: Gets back on its feet, that I would leave, like --
SY: I see. They thought you would leave. That was their feeling.
AM: Like, Toyota was one of the places I went to. They had advertised for a position, and so I kept looking.
SY: So these were non-aerospace jobs that you looked, looked...
AM: No, basically I was looking at aerospace jobs.
SY: But you were at a high enough position that they didn't want to hire you? Is that kind of...
AM: Well, I figured that they could hire two or three persons in my place.
SY: For the same amount of money. That's tough. And how old were you now, when you were looking for jobs?
AM: When I, in the aerospace?
SY: Uh-huh. When you...
AM: 1970 is when I lost my job, so I was forty-four. So when I got to the, in my search... see, my neighbor across the street, I always saw him tinkering around his home, so I went to him and said, "What do you do, anyway, for a living?" And he said he was a Times delivery, home delivery supervisor, and he said I could get a job for seven, put seven thousand down and I can get the same job, kind of job he has. So he said, "I'll give you a, put a good word in for you." So I was tempted to, but I wasn't sure he was giving me the honest truth, so I wanted to check it out. And I thought my insurance agent might have a client like that, but in the back of my mind I'd say, "Oh, he might offer me a job again." 'Cause he had offered me a job when I first got married.
SY: The insurance, your insurance person.
AM: So sure enough, he did offer me a job. And...
SY: You, were you close to him? I mean, why would he offer you a job? What...
AM: Well, they are, they'll hire anybody, if you pass the so called test. But because, I find out when I became a, like an assistant, office man, the insurance agent, in the first six months they'll approach their friends, relatives, instead of learning the approach speech and all that they would say, "Hey, Sharon, I'm coming over for dinner tonight. Can I come over?" And after dinner I say, "Sharon, how about buying a ten thousand or twenty-five thousand dollar policy from me?" You can't say that to strangers. You can't do that to strangers. But I don't know, it's like my Professor McIntyre part in high school, I knew that I could learn something real quickly, the parts, my part, so I knew my insurance speech right away. And so when I went to my friends and they said, "I don't know, you're too late. I've already bought all the insurance I want," so I had to approach new people, and I managed to by saying what the manager told me to say. And anyway, I got the job.
SY: [Laughs] So because, really, you had no sales experience at all, ever, and all that you learned was from this handbook or whatever they give you when they...
AM: Yeah.
<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.