by Robert Amedee L’Ecuyer

Early Work Experiences

At age six I was hired (not technically) but a guy got me and one of my friends to sell Saturday Evening Post magazines each week door to door in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We lived there in first grade because my Dad was finishing his Masters degree in business at Harvard. He did his first year without moving the family. My sister Sally and I lived with my mom and Dandu in Concordia. The second year he moved us all to Cambridge at 57 Sacramento Street. 

That’s where this guy found us in the neighborhood and asked if we wanted to make some money. The first time I got six magazines and went around to my neighbors. At that age I was allowed to go fairly far away, but it was probably just six blocks from home. We got a nickel for every one we sold and I sold out. I made 30 cents and felt rich because I could buy anything I wanted. 

The local grocery store was two blocks aways and I was allowed to go there by myself. A candy bar was a nickel. My mother got me hooked on Hershey bars, plain and with almonds, but I liked Baby Ruth with peanuts. I could also get a comic book for ten cents. The magazine salesman, I don’t remember him really, but I remember the candy bars and comic books. 

Back in Lawrence, as a sophomore in high school, I went to work in the warehouse of JC Penny. It was one of the bigger variety stores on the main street, Massachusetts Avenue. My first real boss was the assistant manager of the store. He was probably in his late 20s, blond and tall. He was my boss and kind of ordered me around. The store manager I knew too. He was a successful guy and had a pretty good staff. 

I mostly worked in the basement warehouse. I got stuff ready to go out on the floor as merchandise. We unpacked cases of clothing and got them ready so the salesmen could come to replenish the stock. Eventually I was allowed to come out and help on the store floor but they mostly kept me in the back. I think because I looked much younger than I was. I didn’t look like a salesman, but I wanted to. 

My favorite boss story is when I dropped out of college in my second year and went to work at BF Goodrich. I worked in the warehouse mounting tires. My boss Ray Stoneback was the manager and he eventually bought the store and owned it outright. That was long after I moved on, but he was the one that taught me the tire business. 

That makes me go back one step, though, because my Aunt Louella had married Max Hupbach, who ran a filling station with a garage and auto repair on US Hwy 81 in Concordia, Kansas. Max hired me two summers as a high school student, mounting tires, pumping gas, and wiping windshields. Max was stern but he took good care of me. I got that job when he wouldn’t give jobs to my cousins. It was a special thing he did for me in part I think because I was a favorite of Aunt Louella’s. 

Aunt Louella was the oldest, she was 10 years old when my dad HK was born. She watched after HK then and took care of me, too. Before Max and Louella were married, she was a school teacher in Kansas City, Missouri. He ran a station and garage in Kansas City at that time. They were friendly, and once Max came to Concordia with Louella to visit Dandu when I was living there. 

He brought me a birthday present, a pair of pearl-handed cap pistols with holsters on each side and a belt that buckled up. It was the fanciest gun set that I had ever seen and I was a big deal wearing those around my friends. I was in first grade at the time and none of them had double holsters.  

Max and Louella didn’t get married until the beginning of WWII. He was drafted, but enlisted as a sergeant because of his experience as a mechanic on cars and trucks. They got married just before he got sent away and she quit teaching because married women didn’t work in those days. Louella went to live with Dandu while Max was in England. So I really just drifted into the BF Goodrich job because I knew how to mount tires. Then I worked my way up to be a salesman, and the assistant manager and was in charge of bookkeeping. 

That’s how Barbara and I got to Atchison where Jeanine and Larry were born. Ray was a successful guy, and that led me to think of my opportunities and my experience in the tire business. We took a trip to Arizona, and I found out they would hire me as an assistant manager in one of the largest Firestone shops in the country. 

My boss at Firestone was Chet Vasey. He was in his last years before he retired but he was the most successful manager in the US and had the largest volume store. They sold those immense tires that went on earth movers in the copper mines for $8000 or $9000 each. My first year at that job, my bonus was larger than my salary. That helped us save money for college. 

Chet was very quiet and smoked a pipe. He had 30 people working for him. He developed me and a service manager and several others who he let make decisions and do the job. He mostly sat in his office smoking the pipe and observed what was going on. He gave us advice but mostly let us do our work. He worked for Firestone since the 1920s and he knew the four Firestone brothers personally. 

Somewhere during that time, we went back to visit family in Kansas and went to a movie theater in a fancy area of Kansas City. We ran into a fraternity brother from KU. Got to talking to this guy and he said he always thought I’d be a lawyer. Barbara and I talked and talked and talked a lot about it, and that’s when I decided I was going to be a lawyer. 

We found out while in Tucson that I did not have to have a Bachelor’s degree to go to law school. But I also discovered that law school was very difficult, so instead of going straight in, I finished my Bachelors (first in my class) then got right into law school. Turned out that I had to finish more than two years, but I did it in one full year and a summer, 20 units each semester. I ended up with 181 units rather than the 128 required for the degree. 

After two years at Firestone, I told my boss I wanted to go back to school full time. By that time, three different professors also hired me as an assistant. So in my first year at law school, I was so busy working for professors I didn’t have time to be in the tire business anymore. 

Working for these two guys, Ray and Chet, they were a big part of my view of what was possible. Both Goodrich and Firestone also sold appliances and hardware too. I got experience in retail business and could see a future in that. But the tires were dirty and the business was highly competitive. There were four major tire manufacturers in the US. Goodrich and Firestone, but I was conscious of the competition from US Rubber and Goodyear. The competition was getting worse. 

I liked law because it was a higher level of problem-solving and it was a prestigious occupation. I liked doing the business cases in my business degree and I thought that case law was a good opportunity. I knew about doing cases because my dad used the case method and I had taken one of his year-long classes. Sometimes those cases had legal issues and I thought that would be more interesting. 

Another thing about law practice was the idea that I could be my own boss and didn’t have to report to anybody. As a young person I thought I would like to be an author. I did quite a bit of writing in school and was fairly good at it, and got compliments from my teachers. I was thinking about that and also about being a personnel director, like my dad had been at one time. 

I went back and forth between those two as a teenager. The first time I went to KU, I was focused on writing. I finished three semesters but dropped out and got the job working at the BF Goodrich tire store, first as salesman and then promoted to credit manager. I was 20 and had dropped out of college, but I kept getting promoted. When I went back to college again, I met your mom, and it was hard to focus on school for a different reason. 

One of the thing that attracted me to being a lawyer was being in politics. At least that’s how it is in Kansas. In Arizona, lawyers did not necessarily dominate politics at that time. Arizona is one of the few states in which the Bar Association does not encourage its members to be involved in partisan politics. The Arizona Bar said there were ethical questions about being in politics while practicing law. They believe the Bar is influential in other ways, different from having its members hold public office. I got focused on politics when I was hired to be a staff lawyer for the legislature. That led at a later time to my going to work for Sam Goddard, which led me into a combination of law and politics. 

Having a spot working in government gave me a kind of personal security that I had not had before. You were taken seriously. It also meant that I was involved with prominent people. I found out they needed help and I could get personal credibility by working for people who were elected. I also saw that the policy questions in society were decided by elected officials. By being involved I was part of the decision making of our society. That appealed to my ego. 

I may have mentioned before that people go into politics when they want to build their egos. Often they don’t have inherent self-confidence, they are performers of one kind or another. Whatever they’re doing – acting, singing, debating – they choose it because it makes them feel good. It’s the same thing in politics. It leads you down that path because it gives you a feeling. Choosing a career is pursuing that feeling that this is a way of demonstrating one’s capacity and building self-confidence. Some people have an immense amount and for some it is difficult. Either way, it is a pursuit. We all need ego boosts. 

I like people and I like to talk, particularly when I can get somebody to listen.  Claudelle and I liked to collect antiques. We were totally enthralled by what was possible to find in antiques and collectibles. We could go to the Saturday sales, and in due time we found out there are sales all week long if you knew where to look. We found we could travel and shop anywhere in the world. When we were in Cairo, or Scotland, or Spain, we were always looking. It was something to do, in addition to tourism. 

Postcards were easy to collect and carry home on an airplane. The statuary we found in Egypt, Claudelle carried on her lap coming home. It was a diversion to start with and it became more and more serious. Claudelle found out she could leave ASU, and that was something she could do. We did it first through mall shops and then later we set up our own shop and eventually had three different stores – South Mountain, Central Phoenix, and on the Eastside. More than a decade, with lawyer clients here and there.

It was fun, that was the key through my career. I was interested in what was possible, and also fun. That I had that choice is a privilege. Most people do not. They have to take what they can get to support themselves. Maybe interesting or not, could be on a factory line doing the same thing over and over. Those of us who have that choice need to understand we are favored in that way. I was the child of a university faculty member. That gave me choices to start and I could do things I like to do. That’s a luxury.