Reflecting on My Mom's 50-Year Career

I work in Talent Development at a large law firm, which means I spend about half of each year working on some aspect of associate performance reviews. One of the best compliments a partner can give to an associate is to comment that he or she shows ownership, meaning they treat the client relationship as if it were their own; they approach partners about next steps having thought independently about what they might be; and they bring a high level of commitment to the work they’ve been asked to do. When I first heard this word applied in a workplace context, I thought instantly of my mom, who embodies it completely. This year she retired from her job after 50 years.

Mom started working as a receptionist at an AM-FM radio station in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1969. She was 21 at the time, and her résumé consisted of a high school diploma and a couple of years of secretarial work in the office of a book bindery across town. Getting that job was a big deal. Jacksonville’s population hovers around 20,000 people, but Mom was from an even tinier town of 500 people a few miles away. Her dad had been a lifelong fan of the station and tuned in each day to listen to everything—news, weather, livestock reports, and St. Louis Cardinals baseball games. It made her proud that he was so proud of her for getting a job in radio.

Since I came along in the 1980’s, I’ve heard my mom tell stories about her early years at the station. (She can turn anything into a story). There was the cute college student who worked part-time on the news desk and asked her to date him. He was drafted to go to Vietnam in 1970, and she wrote him letters and sent him care packages filled with chocolate chip cookies until he returned a couple of years later. There were the casual friendships with co-workers that turned deep and sustained her, not only during a long-distance relationship but also when her dad died suddenly in 1972, as her mom got sick and died two years later.

Mom taught me that good opportunities can unexpectedly find you. When she was in her 20’s, the station’s owner asked her to take over a swap shop radio program called “Party Line” where listeners called in to buy or sell everything from puppies to bicycles to washing machines. She had no formal training in broadcast communications but learned from others around her until she had created a radio persona that was crisp and professional. For decades her voice filled the airwaves every single weekday from 1:06 to 1:20. I still remember my older sister twisting the stereo dial until her voice drifted into our family room on summer afternoons when we were home from school. The feeling of pride I felt then is the same one I feel when I hear her on the radio now. Wow—that’s my mom.

In 1990 she and an announcer pitched an idea her new owners didn’t give much thought to—a Wednesday afternoon cooking show called “Cooking with Mary.” For years Mom had taken her cookies, pies, and brownies into the office to share with co-workers. One of the afternoon announcers thought they could turn her passion for food into a regular program. Almost immediately her bosses wanted to cut the show, convinced no one was really listening to their receptionist giving recipes over the radio, but a local butcher shop stepped in to ask if they could officially sponsor it. Mom kept her namesake show, and it ran every Wednesday for 29 years.

Much is written about the new phenomenon of workers being “always on” and unable to fully unplug from work, but that was Mom long before laptops and smartphones. In our house or in the car she could monitor work by simply turning on the radio. On vacations we would drive out of range, so she would listen to other radio stations as a form of market research. “I wouldn’t think a classic rock format would do well in this area,” she’d comment to anyone who was listening. Or, “we couldn’t run a commercial like that in Jacksonville!” At rest stops or relatives’ houses she would come up with excuses to check in with the person covering the front desk back at the station: “What’s going on there? What am I missing?”

The years drifted by, with her job always being a constant in our house. The summer I turned 18 and was preoccupied with shopping lists for college, she worked up the courage to go to her boss’s office to ask if she could be promoted to a sales position. To prove she could do it she offered to work two jobs—making calls on local businesses to sell spots and write commercials in the morning and hurrying back to cover “Party Line” and to man the front desk in the afternoon. The social capital she had built over three decades as a receptionist meant she knew everybody in town. That and her natural ability to connect with people made her good at her new job, and she eventually convinced her boss she should have a full-time sales job.

Trying to excel in two jobs at once had to feel familiar to my mom. For years she had woken up at 4:30 to start her crazy routine, often throwing together a casserole, coaxing an old canister vacuum cleaner around our house, and shoving folded towels into the linen closet before getting dressed up to go to work. When my older sister was diagnosed with a developmental disability, Mom worked even harder with her to prove she could still do her best in school, but that meant late nights at our kitchen table doing homework. Her own mother had been a stay-at-home mom who did all the cooking, all the cleaning, and all the childcare, and Mom struggled with guilt that she wasn’t doing enough at home. Her mom was not a reassuring phone call away, so as she went along she was forced to decide each day what it meant for her to be a successful working mother. As I am now a working mother, I see this is what we all have to do; we just make it up as we go along.

My job requires me to think all day about employee engagement, performance management, retention, and rewarding high performers. I still can’t begin to figure out Mom’s incredible and sustained drive for her career. She found her passion, navigated an ever-changing organizational culture, dealt with givers and takers at work, and leaned in long before these topics were the subject of best-selling business books or workplace podcasts.  

I can’t recall a single time my mom ever advised me to do what I loved. She never had to explain that you can see all of an organization’s flaws but still love it, still feel deeply invested in making it better. She never sat me down to tell me that even though being a working mother is an impossible balancing act it is so worth it if you manage to find a career that energizes you and gives you purpose. She didn’t have to. She just lived it, so that when I hit my 30’s and found the career that did it for me I knew it as soon as I saw it. Like a couple of summers ago when I was traveling in Cuba with my husband and finally found a wifi hot spot in a hotel lobby. I used it to email one of the office managing partners of my firm back in Chicago.

“What’s going on there?” I typed on my smartphone, hoping my husband wouldn’t catch me working. “What am I missing?”