Two Degrees

by David D. Schwab

I have two degrees and haven’t made any money from either. My bachelor’s degree in fine art and my master’s degree in business look good on the wall in my office. I got my creative abilities from both my parents. My father was a music teacher and had his master’s degree in music education from USC. My mother only had to finish her thesis to earn her master’s degree in psychology, but she dropped out when my brother was born and never finished. Sadly, not following through is a family tradition. I realized I had artistic ability when I saw Fred Flintstone on TV and drew a picture of him. My parents praised me, and it made me feel special. I found that same drawing in my mom’s closet after she passed away.

In kindergarten, finger painting was my favorite time in school after recess. My good feelings about myself changed in the third grade because of a speech impediment. I had to walk out of the classroom, in front of everyone, to go to speech therapy. I said “thurch” instead of “church.” Making me go to therapy made me feel defective. I stopped saying “thurch” and started to stutter. I only stopped stuttering when I worked on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. I was always bigger than most of the other boys. I had to wear “Husky Boys” jeans, so my self-image growing up was a stuttering, fat kid.

I did my homework at my dad’s desk and looked up at his master’s degree on the wall and thought, “I’m going to get one of those someday.” While some of my high school friends were joining the Volunteer Army so they could go to boot camp together and then go to Vietnam, I had a high Draft Lottery number, so I registered for junior college. I did not have the grades to get into a big-time school. I only ever got good grades in art classes, and an “A” in typing class.

I transferred to Cal State Fullerton as an art major and really liked Life Drawing class, where semi-naked girls posed for everyone. They were the only semi-naked girls I was seeing then. One of my lifelong passions is motorcycles. In ceramics class, I made clay motorcycle models and fired them in the kilns. The ceramics teacher, who was only interested in the new girls every semester, didn’t like my motorcycles because I painted them instead of glazing them. Also, as an art major, my grade was based on the final showing of everything I created that semester. I was too busy working at Disneyland and taking motorcycle trips to study hard. Other than life drawing, where I had a finished piece after each class, I waited until a week before finals, locked myself in my bedroom, and created a whole semester of drawings and paintings. The girl crazy teacher told me my creations were pretty good, but they could have been better if I’d spent more time on them. He knew what I was doing.

I worked at Disneyland for nine years, met my wife, who also worked there, and finally had lost what we called “Pixie Dust.” With help from the Bell System supervisor of the AT&T exhibit in Tomorrowland, I got hired by Pacific Bell in Anaheim. On my first day, I was standing on the street between Disneyland and the Disneyland Hotel. I thought, “I can’t get away from this place.”

I loved getting into my phone truck and being on my own all day. Life was good and I had a good paying union job with good benefits and overtime, no degree needed. Then the powers that be decided a hundred-year-old company that employed thousands of people across the country had to be broken up so that a very few could gobble up the cream of the crop and then start the layoffs. It was scary times, and no one knew what the changes would be like. 

We heard that regular phone techs like me would have to perform jobs that before had been done by mostly high-seniority technicians. We, relatively low seniority guys, would be picking up big business customers. My supervisor was near retirement and knew AT&T was not the part of the business that had much of a future for technicians. He took over the residential installer crew I was on. In the last quarter of 1983, the new Pac Bell realized that big Business customers would need techs to handle the phone numbers. My supervisor looked at me and said, “You graduated from Cal State Fullerton, right?” I said, “Yes,” and he said, “Good, that’s your account.” Getting that job was the only thing my bachelor’s degree ever got me, but it was a big deal and the best thing that could have happened. I had that job for 13 years and it turned out to be the best job in our area. The inside joke was “I had it wired.” After a few years I found out about the company’s 100% educational reimbursement program and my twenty-year high school reunion was coming up and I wanted to achieve something that showed I was more than just another phone company guy. I signed up to go to National University, an adult night school. You had to pick a degree that could be used for a job in the company for them to pay for it. Two years later, I graduated with an MBA. I passed on getting a promotion into management because of all the uncertainty in the industry and I didn’t want to give up the protection of the Union. Staying in the union job worked out for the best in the log run.

Pac Bell decided, like AT&T had, that they wanted to get rid of the “dead-wood” people and opened up early retirement to anyone willing to take it. They didn’t put a cap on which departments could take it and a third of the company did. Within six months it was obvious that there were not enough people to run the company. They actually started hiring off the street and opened up transfers to wherever you wanted to go. Only union people got the offer to move anywhere they wanted. I had a transfer in for ten years to San Luis Obispo but a job never opened up until the company needed more people everywhere. Ninety days later we moved to SLO, where my wife was born, bought a house in SLO before they were out of reach. A few years later another early retirement was offered but only to non-management union members. I retired in motorcycle heaven but now my group is aging out and the rides are getting shorter, but I’m still loving the SLO Life and still looking at my dads master’s degree next to mine.