HISTORICAL INTERVIEW WITH JACK S. FUTTERMAN

January 23, 1974

Interviewed by O.R. Garcia

Q.: Mr. Futterman, when did you begin your career with Social Security?

Mr. Futterman: In November of 1936. Do you want to ask me questions or do you want me just to reminisce?

Q.: Well this is really conversation, I suppose, rather than an interview. You began in November of '36. Is that at the very beginning of this program?

Mr. Futterman: Well the law was actually signed, or course, in 1935. There was no appropriation for an organization, and actually there were few people that were loaned from the Department of Labor to form a nucleus in which to do the planning. And I think that they used money that was available to the Department of Labor to finance that small group.

The person that really had major responsibility in those very early days in 1935 was Arthur J. Altmeyer. He was, I think, at that time, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and he was assigned to build up this Social Security organization. But there were no funds available for Social Security as such. It was operating on handouts and there were some small number of people that were hired during the year after the law was signed in August 1935. Offhand, Esther Sholl was one such person; Jim O'Beirne; and I think Jim Murray, the present Regional Commissioner, was hired. But then around the fall of 1936 they had money and they began to hire people. And my recollections, of course, go to the installation in Baltimore which is now known as the Bureau of Data Processing.

Q.: What was then known as DAO.

Mr. Futterman: What was then known as DAO.

Q.: You didn't work at that time in Washington? You worked in Baltimore?

Mr. Futterman: I never have worked in Washington. My entire career with Social Security has been in Baltimore. By the time I moved from the Division of Accounting Operations, which was in December of 1948, the headquarters of Social Security had come to Baltimore. It had come to Baltimore in 1942, or approximately during the war. But I was in service from early 1942 through, I believe, November of 1945, when I returned from service. The early days of Social Security in Baltimore--and I stress that because there are other parts of Social Security with which I was not familiar at the time; but I'm talking about the record keeping organization which is now known as BDP--were illustrative, I think, of much of the environment and the circumstances under which Social Security Administration was born. If you'll stop to think about it, in November of 1936 when I first started to work with Social Security, the country was in the deepest depression it had ever known. It was a worldwide depression. I don't know how many millions of Americans were out of work at that time, but my recollection is that there were numbers like 13 million, and keep in mind that this was a much smaller total population and at a time when a smaller part of the population was part of the working force, so that percentage-wise unemployment was tremendous.

I mention this as being pertinent because while most of the hiring, almost all of the hiring for the Record Center in Baltimore, was at the then grades 1 and 2, with some very rare exceptions at grade 3, the number of people that we had to draw from, and these were people large numbers of whom were Ph.D.'s of all kinds from music to physics or they had graduate degrees, master's degree. I had a master's degree in Education. Bachelor degrees were a dime a dozen. And the poor applicant who had no college background at that time was really facing very tough competition for the most menial clerical position that existed.

Q.: Of course some of these people who started about a grade 3 [inaudible].

Mr. Futterman: Well that was much much later.

Q.: Oh. Not in '36.

Mr. Futterman: Well there are not too many people today in the organization that go back that far in the Candler Building. Some of the people who at about that time that I can quickly recollect, many of them today are in the field or retired from positions in the field in recent years. But people like Lou Zawatzky, although he was not a part of the Records Center, he had an assignment which brought him to work shortly thereafter.

Q.: He started out with the Division of Claims, didn't he?

Mr. Futterman: Yes, but he had some assignment in Baltimore that made him work there. Herb Borgen was one. Henry Schumer used to be my Deputy until a few years ago. There was another. Well literally for many years--and if I had known that this question would come up I could make up a list of 200-300 people who occupied very prominent positions in the Social Security Administration that came in those early days in the Candler Building and worked their way up to top positions in Social Security. Of course, Jim Murray started, and my recollection is as either a messenger or a grade CAF-1. Today he is a Regional Commissioner; Dick Branham also started in Government just shortly before he came to Social Security. He started as a grade 1 and I think he also started as a messenger and he ended up as Bureau Director in Social Security. Not too long after those years, people like Bernie Popick, Art Hess, and Bob Ball came into the organization in the late thirties, like '39 and '40, so that they can also be included in the group that while they were not there at the earliest days, they still were part of that depression reservoir of people that we had to draw on with tremendous confidence.

One thing I think you should be clear on are the salaries, the magnificent salaries that were paid in those days. Grade 1, which was then known as CAF-1, was $1,260 a year; grade 2, CAF-2, was $1,440 a year; and the lucky one who was able to get grade 3, was paid $1,620. There were some not in the record keeping center but in other elements of the Social Security organization at the time, they were, of course, professionals, and the beginning salary for a professional which was known as P-1, was $2,000, and that was the equivalent of a CAF-5, a grade 5. The P grades went by $300 jumps--P-1 was $2,000; P-2 I think was $2,300; P-3 was $2,600; P-4 was $2,900; and P-5, $3,200. And I think Mr. Fay who was the Head of the Bureau of Data Processing and Accounts, was at that time a CAF-11, possibly a 12, and that salary--a 9 was $2,700; a 10 was $3,000. I think I was about $3,00 or some such salary a year.

That's just an aside to give you some feeling of the salary scales. Of course prices were very much lower and one could get a steak dinner at what was then a pretty good eating place, the old Longfellow Hotel up on Charles Street-it was an old residential hotel with very fine quiet service, it wasn't a fancy hotel but the service was superb and the food--you could get a five-course club steak dinner, as I recall, for $1.25. And my wife and I enjoyed that on my tremendous salary quite frequently.

But the point was that there were literally thousands of people who wanted any kind of job and Social Security had the pick of tremendously qualified people. The problem was that for the work that had to be done at that time, they were overqualified and that caused problems. It was unfair, of course, for those that did not have this tremendous education to compete for jobs which they were perfectly capable of doing and lose out on the basis of what was really not relevant--education. But in another sense I have always felt that if I were to return to this life at some later date and be entrusted in an underdeveloped country or in some developing country with responsibility for setting the precise time at which to begin a social security program, I would take the depths of a depression--not that I would want to create one--but I would wait until one arose because that would be absolutely the best time to start off a social security program, to staff it, because what happened then was we drew into the Social Security ranks a tremendous reservoir of professional, intelligent, confident staff. And we drew off that reservoir of staff for many years to man the jobs that a developing program, such as social security, was setting up. In other words, we had a sort of standby army of highly-qualified people to select from when we got around to developing the full structure of technical and special jobs that were required to run a large program--a large national program--such as social security. And it wasn't until World War II that some problems developed in respect to not having all the people to fill all the kinds of jobs that were needed.

There's something, too, about the way we started that I think conditioned the style of the Social Security Administration. As I've said, it was in the deep depression and people were highly qualified, overly qualified. But fortunately, social security had overtones of sort of a semi-religious activity, one with which one could identify with a purpose because all about were evidences of economic insecurity, people who were old. And in those days, people over 40 might have been considered not in very good competition for the jobs that were then available because of the great unemployment. People in their old age were just unprotected and had no means of livelihood. And so when this social security scheme was developed, it was something that people could identify with with enthusiasm. In addition, there was absolutely no map of where we were to go or how we were to do it. The job was not defined; it had not been worked out. It reminds me of Alonzo Stagg-A Punt and a Prayer. The law was passed but the mechanics whereby people would contribute over their lifetime in relation to the work that they did and be entitled to benefits on the basis of the work that they performed, the record, that job of keeping lifetime records, there was no plan for it, there was blueprint for it.

And, as a matter of fact, there was a lot of opinion to the effect that the job was so big it would fall of its own weight and couldn't be done.

Well these highly-qualified people--and again, I'm only talking about that part of social security with which I was then familiar, the record keeping part-those people set about proving that it could be done, and they did it, as I've said, by improvising as they went along. And by application of great ingenuity, the illustrations abound, I think, that graphically indicate the kind of ingenuity with which people attacked what might be regarded as simple tasks but when multiplied by millions become very difficult tasks.

Take a simple thing like continuous forms. We used to have ledger sheets ostensibly prepared so that you could post each person's lifetime earnings record on that ledger sheet and that would be the record on which the individual's benefits would later be determined when he became 65. Well they were pin-feed forms and there would be a machine that would head them and they would still have the pin feed edges on them. And obviously before you put them in file you needed to do two things. You needed to take the edges off it, the edges with the holes, strip them as we called it, and then you had to separate one sheet from another. A relatively simple job, but when you have 30 million it becomes quite a task. And if you can visualize yourself taking one sheet at a time in your hand and then trying to pull the edge off it and pull that edge off to separate it, you can see yourself doing this into the 21^st century. And this kind of a task was reduced to a mass-production job, people were given piles of ledger sheets without any instruction as to how to do it, and it was just a delight to see how their minds began to operate to find ways in which to speed up this operation and ways to reduce the cuts that people got from the edges of paper which could cut their hands. They'd start using gloves. Some started to use pliers to pull off single sheets but get a set of pliers and clamp and tear. They used gloves to prevent cuts. They used cutting machines to slice through falling edges. All of them had problems. And eventually one of my colleagues who had a job at that time just like my own, a fellow by the name of Gus Chesler, who wasn't one of the intellectually, one of the creative people, but he was an inventive type, he developed the machine which is used today, and it was patented by the United States Government, a simple device. The ledger sheets were fed in. There were two knives that were vertical and as the ledger sheets passed the knives, the knives just cut and this ledger sheet moved forward. And in order to separate them, they were on a set of rollers that were curved so that when they passed a certain point after the sides had been stripped, the tension on sort of a semi-change in direction of the flow would tear the sheets and they'd just fall on top of another. And what had initially turned out to be a very tedious, monotonous, unpleasant manual job was turned over to a couple of machines that were the product of the people's own creativity.

We also had such simple tasks as I recall of alphabetizing some 30 million what we then called office records. We had an alphabetic file and a numeric file. The SS-5 applications we have today were filed numerically. But we needed a file from which we could search and get that same information if we searched alphabetically. When you try to alphabetize 30-some-odd million records that size, roughly 3x5 I guess, that's a lot of paper to handle and it's a massive alphabetizing job. And here again, cards were given out for people to alphabetize and they just went to work in ingenuous ways. You might start out using whatever desk space you had and separate the A's and the B's and the C's and you'd have 26 places and you'd find you'd need a lot of desk space. So what happened was people took a board and took punch cards and stapled the punch cards one on top of the other with 26 slots and labeled the first one A, B, C, C and they put the board on their stomach. They said, here, instead of going like that standing up, they would file that way, right in the slot. I just use these two very simple illustrations. They graphically demonstrate the kind of ingenuity, the kind of enthusiasm , with which people undertook tasks for which there were no plans, no procedures, and applied great ingenuity to it.

Now there were sophisticated tasks that were done in the same way. The machinery that we had to do the job in those days to keep records did not exist. I should rephrase that. There was no machinery that really could do the social security job before the Social Security organization came into existence. It was only because the Social Security organization developed the idea of a machine and the specifications of it and worked with IBM, I think, that what is now known as the collator was developed. And the collator that was then developed was a punch card handling machine which was activated by a plugboard wiring arrangement, giving the machine some flexibility. If you changed the wires in the plugboard, it would do things somewhat differently. It was a fixed wiring in the machines that Social Security got. It was known as the Social Security setup, and that collator never existed until it was built on our specifications. And once it came out, it was the basis upon which IBM's business took off. It seemed because the country then had a set of tabulating equipment that could undertake to do jobs that up to that point were really not too possible with tabulating equipment. They could do limited jobs but the collation, the ability to take two sets of records and do a matching to see whether they were appropriate or the same and related to one another and then to make, in effect, decisions as to whether to interfile one or to reject it was a facility that did not exist in the equipment up to that time. Up till that time you could take cards and you could tabulate them and you could total them and you could add them and subtract them. You had a sorting machine which could arrange them in sequence. But you just didn't have the capacity to take a set of, let's say, bills for O.R. Garcia and Irene Gold and a lot of other people and mechanically post them to the accounts by first making sure that the item did relate to your account by checking your name and account number and after affirming that, then crediting it to your account. So this machine which was created by our technical people really was at the bottom of IBM's takeoff in the business. Well we were responsible for that.

The tabulating equipment in those days was extremely simple. And they were like large typewriters. You'd put cards in and then they would print. They would list the items. They would also list amounts if you wanted. And they had the capability of producing a total, so that the tabulator was a combination of an adding machine and a typewriter. And it was very slow. But before our people got through with that simple piece of equipment, it was a highly sophisticated tabulator for one job.

Now I'll stop with these illustrations.

Q.: Well they're very useful. I did want to find out--I did want to know what an organization table of DAO in 1936 would have looked like, and to take whatever existed then in the way of organization and disclose the changes it underwent for the first few years.

Mr. Futterman: Well I'm sure Abe Bortz has it in some detail. Let me just finish this other point. The ledger sheets which I mentioned to you, after they were stripped of their pin feed attachments and separated from one another then had to be available for posting of earnings reported for those individuals. And that job was done--they had this massive tabulator in front of you and you had a file of ledger sheets unposted and you had a bunch of cards that went into the machine. You took a ledger sheet and you put it into the machine and you turned the roller to position it to the line that you wanted it to print on. And the cards, one card might be there and the machine would go "bloop" and then you had to take the ledger sheet out. Now I should have said beforehand since not every ledger sheet had a wage card there had to be a listing made of all the wage cards so that you knew which accounts were active and you had to pull them out or offset them in the ledger sheet tray and then you had to be sure you had them in exact sequence. The punch cards, you know, have holes in them and you didn't read them. They were stacked up in the machine and you had to be sure that it was printed on the right sheet. Well that's a slow tedious job. And my recollection was that a very fast man could post 1,100 ledgers in a day. Considering we had 30 million ledgers, you can see what kind of a terrific job that would have been twice a year which was the semi-annual thing you had then.

They then put the electric eye on the machine that made it unnecessary for you to position the ledger sheet by turning the roller. It would automatically go to a certain position where the electric eye would control it and stop it. But that didn't solve the problem of making sure that the ledger sheet was for the right number or for the cards that were next going to be going through the machine. So we developed a way of putting holes on the ledger sheets that represented the numbers and a reading device in the machine that read the number on the ledger sheet and the number on the punch card made sure that they related to one another and eliminated all this offsetting that you had to do in advance. Well this went on and on and on and in the relatively short period what was very very primitive type equipment for the job was highly sophisticated within the limits of the kind of equipment that it was.

Of course we then pioneered in getting a whole new technology. Ed Rossii--well, before him, a fellow by the name of Perkins in the thirties, the late thirties, developed for us a whole advanced position on micro photography. They microfilmed. We were the pioneers in photographing records because if we had not we would have been pushed out of the Candler Building many times over. We were accumulating paper at a tremendous rate. Well so much for that one particular facet. There were many other facets that would be very interesting to go into, but you did ask about the beginning organization. And all I can say is that it was very fluid.

Q.: Oh, was it?

Mr. Futterman: It was very fluid. And you have to keep in mind that the nature of the job was changing. The initial job, one could not--well, to backtrack. One could not set up a permanent organization because you had first to set up the records, and that was a massive job. Then after you set up the records, you then had to develop procedures and you had some initial problems, and then of course you had the system underway. Then you made changes and you developed systematic ways of operating the system.

The first job you had was to take these millions of sacks of mail that had accumulated in the post office and produce--well the applications were issued. On the basis of the applications, social security cards had been issued to people and two records therefore came to Baltimore. One was the application form, the SS-5; the other was the office record form, then known as 702, OA-702, which had the name information but it was to be alphabetized.

The first thing that was necessary was to set up a punch card record that carried the essential information. So there was a tremendous punching job to punch up from these 30-odd million records punch cards, one that would be the basis for the mechanical system of maintaining the accounts, and another punch card that would be used--well it was known as an actuarial card. It would be used to develop some understanding of the basic factors that went into the costing of the system, the actuarial factors. And that card, representing the people who were coming into the system, was diverted to the analytical, not the record people but the actuarial people to study the age and sex and other composition of the work force that was enrolling. So the initial job was to set up the records. Now what are the records that we needed to set up? We set up a punch card record, master card. We set up a ledger sheet that I touched on. We set up a numerical register. After you had the punch cards, you'd list a hundred of them on a page, so that for a given area, which was the first three digits of a number, and for an area and group which was the next two digits, and thousand series, you'd have, let's see. The first six numbers would be the same and you'd have a whole page. Like for 001-01-0100, you'd start 0100, the top one listed, and 0199 would be the last one listed on the page. The next page would be 0200. It would be 001-01-0200,0201, etc. Those were known as the numerical registers.

There were other records that had to do with employers. Employers also had to file applications. They were more difficult to deal with and to alphabetize, and they needed to be coded. And I'm going to mention also that in the employee records an important job was to code these records. Another record I didn't mention was what we call the flexoline files, which became the national index. So Futterman would not be filed essentially as Futterman but it would be filed--Jack Futterman would be filed under F-360 which was the phonetic code which only went to the consonants in my name after you forget the F, but the succeeding ones, the T's were 3. The R--did I say 360? The T's were 3; the R was 6; and the M was 5. So Futterman would be, I think 365, if I'm right, after almost 40 years. And then they would file Futterman 365 with all other 365's. The next break would be first name and middle name. So it would be F-365, Jack S, and then within that group if there were more Jack S's, they would be by date of birth, sequenced by date of birth. So that you would have not only Jack S. Futterman's but you'd have Jack S. Futterman's, Futterman's, with D's, because D's had the same value, all kinds of variations but names which had essentially the same configuration of consonants which was a system designed to overcome some of the problems of an alphabetic system. An alphabetic system, if you're off by one letter you may search that file forever and never find it. If you're trying to find Smithe with an E, S-M-I-T-H-E, as against a regular Smith without the E, you might be able if you do a lot of searching. Then there are all kinds of variations on that, especially people the spelling of whose names are not always stabilized, people of ethnic origins. Spanish people and people like yourself don't particularly have problems, but the Poles and people of that sort--Z's and the S's and the Ch's and all the rest are not stable. Sometimes their names get simplified retaining the essence. This eliminated that kind of a problem.

But incidentally, we had a great deal of problems with Spanish names. First it was not really understood what the Spanish and Latin customs were. We often really didn't realize what the family name was. As you, Irene, I'm sure O.R. doesn't need me to tell him, but the Spanish custom is that the mother's maiden name is appended as a part of the father's maiden name. And later in life it's usually dropped or it's abbreviated. So that I don't know what your--what is your full name with your mother's--

Mr. Garcia: Garcia Y. Hinojosa.

Mr. Futterman: Do you use the--

Mr. Garcia: No, but an uncle of mine does

Mr. Futterman: He uses the full name. But sometimes you use just the letter, right? But anyway, if you use just the letter or you drop it, no problem about Garcia. But if you use Garcia Y. Hinojosa we set it up many times as Garcia as the middle name. And we had similar problems with the Chinese. The true name, family name, of the Chinese is the first name which is the family, and we made it the first name, see. Lee Hung, or something like that, Lee would be the name; Hung is the given name. And sometimes they would have Anglicized it, you know, themselves. So there was a lot of confusion. And of course it was essential to set the records up in the right name.

You asked me about organization and I'll try in the next 5 minutes so I can go back to work.

Q.: Rather than that, as you said I can get that from Bortz or someone else who was in DAO. You said that you left DAO in '48. Did you go into management then?

Mr. Futterman: I became the Budget Officer.

Q.:And the rest of your career you were in management or administration?

Mr. Futterman: Well I was in management when I was in DAO. I started out as a grade CAF-2, but that was for about 4 days.

Q.: Was that in 1936?

Mr. Futterman: 1936. Then I was appointed a group leader in charge of 20 people at CAF-2 for several months.

Q.:You were in effect then a kind of systems analyst planner or something in DAO for most of your career then.

Mr. Futterman: No, no, no. I had lots and lots of jobs.

Q.: Well what I'm getting at is that you served as Director of OA for 5 years and before that had a great deal to do in what eventually became OA, and there's nobody around--there are a lot of people who can tell us about, you know, what it was like in DAO but there's nobody who can tell us what it's like to run OA because you're the only one who's ever done it.

Mr. Futterman: That's not really so.

Q.: Well, all right, not OA, but you certainly had a big part in running the administration of the Social Security Administration. And I was wondering, since we are running out of time--I didn't know that.

Mr. Futterman: We have run out of time.

Q.:All right, we have run out of time--if you could in your own words sort of assess what it was like running OA, what you tried to do, or what you consider your chief achievements or disappointments have been.

Mr. Futterman: I don't think I'd want to try to undertake it in the time that we have available. Maybe at some future time. But that's trying to compress not 5 years of effort, I was there actually 7 years. In May of 1965 I reported officially to the then OA which was then DM, and I left in June of 1978. My calculation is that it was 7 years and it felt like 7, not 5. But there were many things there and I just would not want to try to characterize it. I'll just give you some small indication and then just leave it at that.

Q.:Okay.

Mr. Futterman: There were, I think, many things that I did that went to establish a style of administration and was warm and sensitive, public-oriented, program-centered, an administration that was regarded as a means to a program end and not as so often is the case, an end in itself to be achieved in the cheapest way possible. But ends, program ends, always seemed to me to be the way you evaluated how good your product was, and that in administration if what we did was good, it meant something better at the end of the line for the beneficiary of the program, for the people in terms of either better service or in terms of quicker service, less errors, more dignity, more courtesy, et cetera. And this is not something that you accomplish by a single act or a single improvement. It had to pervade everything that you did.

But you can't accomplish this as an individual. This kind of thing involves a multifaceted attack. It involves the development of a philosophy to undergird the Administration. What you do ought to be consistent with some kind of a philosophical view of the proper role of Social Security. In that respect I had a happy relationship with Robert M. Ball. We shared the same kinds of thoughts and the same kinds of values as to public service, and so we sort of made music together in this respect. But as I said, it took a multifaceted effort. It meant the creation of an Administration philosophy, an administrative philosophy. It meant the creation of an Administration strategy, you know, how are you going to get to where you wanted to be? It meant the development of good people who shared the values that you had in terms of the role of administration in the whole scheme of things, you know, what were the important things? Were the important things to reduce the unit cost? And how does that relate to improving the end result of the program insofar as the individual for whom the program was designed is concerned.

I think that I did a lot of things. I'd hate to put one above another. But some of the things that make me feel very very good about are the things that I did that affected the staff, whether they knew it or not. Of course one visible product that most people identified me with and recognized my hand in was the establishment of a multifaceted employee development program which I think was outstanding for the Government as a whole. We had a program that no comparable agency even approached in terms of, I think, substance. I'm not prepared to say that some might not have been cushier or more superficially attractive, but when you look at the kinds of employee development programs combined with the idea of self-development that I had a large part in creating, if not imagining and developing--the internship program of course we've had--but to make it better we had to develop the staff associates program. We developed the fellows program. We developed and expanded the [unintelligible] program. We developed great participation in civil service programs at Berkeley, at Allenbury, and various other places. From a rather insulated outfit that rarely had our people leaving, we had scores of people in orbit being trained, separated from their duties. And this was one of the, I think, very big achievements, the ability to conceive of a way of getting the bureaus and offices to be willing to agree to let people go away and be trained. They used to be opposed to it, not because they didn't want people to be trained, but because it always presented a problem to them. They had a vacant job that they couldn't fill and the work was undone and, that was a problem. One of the real breakthroughs was the idea I developed of setting up jobs, fellows jobs, and setting up associates jobs, which in effect eliminated this problem because the jobs that these people vacated then could be backfilled. And not to be overlooked was the ripple effect of training that took place. If you had 30 fellows identified for this highly formal program which we had of 2 years and which I think is a manifestation of a willingness to invest, then there are 30 people that took their jobs on a temporary promotion and they developed skills and knowledge and experience, and the 30 jobs that they left were also filled by people. You had a ripple effect throughout the organization, so that by this device of creating a job you multiplied the development, the employee development factor by many times. The same thing applied to associates. We had something like 300-some-odd associates-two classes at a time. And those jobs were freed up. And so there were people taking their places and people taking the place of the ones that took their places.

Besides all of this activity, the whole tone of the organization, I think, improved because it opened up opportunities for people throughout the organization. It made some people visible who would never been seen. In a national organization like we have, if you're working in a place like Presque Isle, Maine the chances of anything happening to you like happened in the Horatio Alger stories is very rare. Who goes to Presque Isle, Maine? And what chance is it that the Commissioner or the Secretary is going to happen by chance to be in Presque Isle, Maine, and identify that there's a guy up there named O.R. Garcia who is a bright and able guy and we ought to bring him down? Part of the business of promotion has to rest upon people being visible. People are afraid--and legitimately so--to take a job that's important and fill it with an unknown. When you break down the barriers of--or at least if you don't break down completely, if you reduce the barriers, people are more willing to take a chance if they've had a favorable experience. Well if you came down from Presque Isle, Maine, and they got to know you, you worked there, and they liked what you did, then they'd bring you down, you know, and they'd consider you for a job. And if they had a good experience with you they'd be more inclined. They'd say, "Well now, you know, there are a lot of guys there. We just don't know them." So it breaks down a lot of the things. Well I've kind of rambled.

As I say, I can talk about maybe 50 different aspects of OA's activity systems work--planning for new legislation, upgrading the quality of the leadership of the organization, employee relations, civil rights. It's almost endless. And to say that I look on one as a more important achievement than another would be to be artificial. They are all my children and even the least of them I don't like less than I like the others. And on that note, which is a sort of poetic note, I will leave you.

Q.:Thank you very much.