my office had 8 inch shelves.
    After the building layout was complete there was a staff to hire, the independent service contractors had to be notified that they would no longer be servicing JCP products and the stores famialiarized with Product Service procedures.
    Within a month I had outfitted, supplied, staffed and opened the Centerville, OH Product Service Center. Service contracts were handed over to be managed by Product Service.
    One of my early challenges was dispatching technicians. Service calls had to be scheduled so that technicians were not driving from one side of town to the other on any given day. In the Audubon, NJ Center they used a large magnetic map. Red magnets were for electronics, blue for appliances and green for gas engine products.
    I had neither the time or the budget to order such a monstrosity so I made six copies of the Area Code map from the telephone book, labeled them Monday through Saturday, attached them to a cork board and bought red, blue and green "push pins."
    When a service call was scheduled an appropriate colored "pin" was stuck in the map in that customer's Area Code. There were seven pins for every tech avaiable on any given day and the idea was to keep the pin colors grouped in a particular area for each day.
    This idea worked extremely well and the concept of areas would become invaluable when I would later be assigned to manage the first computerized service center.
    My makeshift service center was a regional award winning center rivaled only in service contract sales by the Pittsburgh service center. My boss wouldn't accept the excuse that my sales were lower because Pittsburgh had three large metroplolitan stores and I had just one large store, one oldtime "Main Street" store and one outlet store located 50 miles away.
    As for operations management, when the end of the month rolled around each center reported a "profit flash." The actual P&L generated from JCP headquarters in New York was not available for 10 days following the monthly end of business.
    I kept daily records of four important accounts in my Day-Timer pocket calendar so my "flash" was always closer than any other manager's in our region.
    I was very good at Operations so when JCP decided to put computers in Product Service I was selected to be the manager of the very first one.

I wanted more than this gypsy lifestyle for my family.
    So I was doing what I believed great fathers do, provide the best for my family. But Arlene saw things differently. According to her, and later the marriage counselers "I was trying to buy their love with material things.".
    She joined a group of wives calling themselves "management widows." Every morning they gathered for coffee, gossip and Valium!
    Apparently I was not spending enough time at home. But my job was not 9 to 5. Whenever there was a service emergency for a water heater or refrigerator and during peak seasons like air conditioning, my staff often worked overtime. And when they worked, I worked.
    During the time we lived in Centerville there were other tell-tale signs that trouble was brewing. My wife once told our sons I was late for their baseball game because I loved my job more than them.
    I routinely played tennis once a week with three guys from work. One day a female employee filled in for one of the guys who couldn't play. Arlene got so upset that a girl joined us that she called my boss to complain that I was "associating" with my female employees.
    I had 14 employees and six were women. I was the first manager in product service to hire a woman for the parts department. My boss was concerned so he flew to Dayton from Pittsburgh and met with us in our home to discuss what was going on.
    I was proud of my employees, my service center and what I had accomplished so nothing could have been more embarrassing and upsetting.
    The marriage couslers were no help. The best advice I got from them was to quit my job and find one that would allow me to spend more time at home. As far as I was concerned, this was a rediculous notion that I would not entertain.
    I had created a wonderful lifestyle for my family and could not understand why my wife objected to joining in it.
    We had lived in Centerville for about five years when JC Penney gave me the opportunity to establish and operate their first computerized Product Service Center.
    It would mean relocating to New Jersey and I thought the change might be great for the family. Arlene rarely left the house even to go to the mail box at the road. Perhaps this would be a chance to renew our life and be a new adventure for the boys.