|
Career
Highlights |
9/50: Claims Representative--New
Rochelle, New York
1953-1958: Claims Supervisor/Field Rep.--Yonkers, New York
1955-1958: Senior Claims Supervisor--New York Downtown Office
1958- 1960: Staff Assistant Management, New York Regional Office
1960-1961: Assistant District Manager, Midtown New York Office
1961-1962: Assistant Regional Rep. Intern Program
1962-1965: Assistant Regional Rep., Cleveland Regional Office
1965-1968: Regional Rep., Cleveland
1968-1970: Assistant Director for Administration, Bureau of Retirement
& Survivors Insurance
1970-1972: Program Advisor, Assistant Commissioner, Field
1973-1976: Assistant Director for Operations, Bureau of Supplemental
Security Income
1976-1979: Assistant Director for Operations, Bureau of Disability
Insurance
1979-1980: Director, Office of Disability Operations
1980-1986: Associate Commissioner for Central Operations
11/84-10/86: Acting Deputy Commissioner for Systems
10/86-12/88: Senior Advisor to the Deputy Commissioner for Operations |
Some Reflections
on Art Simermeyer
Art Simermeyer had a long and distinguished career of more than
38 years with SSA. Starting as a Claims Representative in New
Rochelle, New York in 1950, Art came to Baltimore in 1968 where
he rose steadily in the organization due to his management skills
and his reputation for prodigious hard work. He was a demanding
boss whose external demeanor could appear gruff, but whose real
nature was as gentle and sweet as anyone I ever met.
Those who worked for Mr. Simermeyer, as I was fortunate enough
to do, never minded how hard he expected us to work, because
we knew he worked himself even harder. He was notorious for
taking home stacks of paperwork every night, which would then
appear on the desks of his subordinates early the next morning,
with terse, imperative notations outlining exactly what he expected
of them in regard to the paperwork he had reviewed the night
before.
During the early 1970s Art had a key role in running the SSI
program. By the late-1970s he was running SSA's disability operations,
and eventually, all of SSA's Central Operations. In 1984, despite
the fact that he had no technical background in computer systems,
Art Simermeyer was put in charge of all systems operations at
SSA. He was Acting Deputy Commissioner for Systems during the
most critical period of SSA's Systems Modernization Plan, which
Art helped manage to a successful conclusion. Art was called
to take on this challenging role because the Acting Commissioner,
Martha McSteen, felt that the Office of Systems needed strong
and stable management--from someone with an unquestioned reputation
for probity. She knew of no one who better fit that bill than
Art Simermeyer.
During the last phase of his career, Art was put in charge of
the launch of SSA's new 800# telephone service. This was a service
innovation introduced in SSA in October 1988. When Commissioner
Dorcas Hardy tasked SSA with creating a nationwide 800-number
telephone network, there was widespread skepticism within the
organization that such a network could be put in place as quickly
as the Commissioner demanded. Hardy announced her intention
to create the system in January, 1988 and set its launch date
as October 1988. Art Simermeyer was put in charge, and put on
the spot to deliver on the Commissioner's promise. At SSA's
Operations Conference in Baltimore in April 1988, Commissioner
Hardy gave a determined speech in which she restated her insistence
that the system would go live in October 1988. To emphasize
her point, she said she had been making Art Simermeyer practice
saying "OC-TO-BER, OC-TO-BER." Art got up to speak
following the Commissioner, and with his best dead-pan humor,
he opened his speech with, "The Commissioner said to practice
saying OC-TO-BER. OC-TO-BER. OC-TO-BER. I think I've got it.
Now if she will just tell me which year." It brought the
house down, because hardly anyone in SSA believed it would be
that October. But Art Simermeyer was responsible, and so the
national 800-number went live nationwide on Monday, 10/3/88.
On October 31, 1999 Art Simermeyer and his wife Marie boarded
EgyptAir Flight 990 at Kennedy Airport in New York City for
a flight to Egypt, where there were planning a vacation. When
Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Nantucket, Art
and Marie, and 215 others, lost their lives. Art and Marie had
been scheduled to travel a week earlier, but rescheduled their
flight so they could stay in Baltimore to attend the wedding
of a daughter of long-time friends. Art was 72 years old, and
Marie was 61.
This interview, conducted in 1996, is being published here on
the Internet for the first time now so that those who did not
know Art personally may be able to gain a more vivid sense of
his career and the many contributions he made to the operation
of the Social Security program.
Larry DeWitt
SSA Historian
November 1, 1999 |
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Audio
Clip From the Interview--Simermeyer's Closing Comments |
Note: This 8 minute and
18 second audio clip is available in two formats, RealAudio and Windows
Media Player. |
RealAudio Format |
Sound
Clip |
(1.0 mb file) |
Windows Media Player Format |
Sound
Clip |
(1.9 mb file) |
Art
Simermeyer Oral History Interview |
|
This is an interview in the
SSA Oral History series. This interview took place in four sessions
on 10/22/96; 10/30/96; 11/14/96; and 11/27/96. All interviews took
place in Mr. Simermeyer's home in Randallstown, Maryland. The interviewer
is Larry DeWitt, SSA Historian.
The tapes of these sessions were transcribed by Robert Adams, Barbara
McIntyre, Gail Hooley and Mary Haskins of SSA's Braille Services Unit.
The transcripts were edited by Bob Krebs and Gloria Tong of the Historian's
Office. |
(Note:
Approximately 100 printed pages.) |
|
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Q: Okay, Art, I would like
to start at start of your career. And the question that always interests
me is the first question: how in the heck did you come to SSA? What
were the circumstances? Were you planning to come here? Did it happen
by accident? Tell me where you started, and what job and what the
circumstances were; how you started at SSA. Simermeyer:
Okay, I started in September of 1950. I had been in the service
and then in the first real college class following the service, that
is, I went in 1946 and I got out in 1950. And the job market was flooded
with applicants--people who had gotten a degree under the GI bill
and who needed a job, wanted a job.
So it came up to about June of 1950, when I graduated, and I had become
engaged and needed a job, looked around, things were tight, as I said.
I had an opportunity with the A&P, which was the forerunner of
what's now Super Fresh. And my uncle was a supervisor in that business
in New York. And he said that he thought he could find something for
me down the road, but first thought I first ought to get some experience
working in supermarkets to get a feel for the whole operation. Which
I did.
I was working there, and, actually, my mother found out about this
Federal Service Entrance Examination, I think, and encouraged me to
apply for it. So I did, with no real expectation of anything happening.
It wasn't called that. At that time, it was called the Junior Professional
Assistant Exam (JPA, I think). Anyway, I took the exam, and did pretty
well, and got nothing out of it--I mean no contacts. I had a few leads
that didn't materialize.
And then suddenly, I got a contact asking if I was interested in a
job in Social Security. Because by coincidence, the 1950 Amendments
were being passed. And that was really a tremendous expansion for
Social Security. I mean at that time, my recollection is that there
were 12,000 employees in Social Security throughout the entire organization,
as compared to, I believe 65,000 today.
So it was really a very small organization relatively speaking. But
it was going through tremendous growth, because of what they call
"New Start." The insurance requirements for people to collect
benefits had been reduced from whatever it was going up towards 40
quarters. It was reduced to 6 quarters to collect benefits. (Prior
to 1950 a quarter of coverage was credited according to the amount
of wages earned in a calendar quarter. The 1950 amendments credited
quarters of coverage based on the amount of income reported annually.)
And millions of people were being included for the first time under
Social Security: self-employed people, totally, and other groups of
workers who had been excluded in the original program. And the liberalized
retirement test did a whole lot of things to create a tremendous workload
suddenly.
So there was a tremendous expansion suddenly. So I was called down
to New York for an interview, to New York City, and passed the interview.
And within a matter of weeks, I was told that I could have a position
as a claims representative trainee. And at that point, I was living
in Mamaronack, New York, which is in Westchester County. And there
was an opening in an office in New Rochelle, New York, which was 5
miles down the road. So that was a tremendous advantage for me to
be that close--to have a job to be able to commute 5 miles to work.
In any event, I started in 1950. And after a week or two of orientation
in the office, they sent me to Baltimore for 3 weeks of training,
which was the basic claims rep training activity at that time. The
manual--the claims manual--was 1 volume. As I recall, we had 8 applications.
I mean, they were relatively simple in compared to today's world.
And the 3-week training program was to teach you how to take an application,
how to get an earnings record, how to adjudicate the claim, to handle
the public, and to answer questions afterwards in terms of the subsequent
activity, when they worked and so forth. So it was a good program.
It was downtown in Baltimore, because we didn't have any headquarters
building out in Woodlawn. And we met all the top people. The trainees
in that class were basically from the New York area. And it sort of
fits the stereotype of the New Yorker, I think.
I think that at least one thing I remember when we were coming to
the end of the 3-week training program, Francis McDonald, who was
the pioneer in training in Social Security back then, had a habit
of coming to the classes to give a little pep talk and do his thing.
So he came one day, and we were all sitting there. And suddenly, he
started asking questions. He said, "Well, what do you want to
be in Social Security?"--"What's your goal in Social Security?"
And I sat there and listened to these other guys. And I was amazed.
I mean, they wanted to be Commissioner or in charge of the region.
Or they had all these lofty goals, and they were holding forth. And
I thought to myself, "Here we are; we haven't gotten our feet
wet yet and these guys are ready to take over the reins."
My answer was, "You know, I'd like to learn my job and get my
feet on the ground and move ahead," and something a lot more
down to earth in my view in terms of what to expect. But I thought,
you know, I'm probably going to get marked at the bottom of the list
because I have no high ambitions. But I thought that was a lot of
baloney anyway.
And I look back 10 and 15 years later, and all of those people that
I can recall had all disappeared. I mean, they were not in the organization,
there were none of them in high positions, there were none of them
that had really achieved their goals as they stated them in September
1950.
So I came back from Baltimore. Q: Can I ask you a couple
of things about the training? One of the things I think we used to
do in that training class is sort of program philosophy and principles,
that we used to sort of give our employees a grounding in the philosophy
of social insurance. Did that happen in your training class? Did they
do that? Was that significant for you, was it important? Was it not?
Simermeyer: Yes. They did it. I don't know how
much time we spent on it, or how much it meant to me at that time.
It did give me a foundation. In those days, my recollection is the
conversation went (or the presentation) went along the lines that
the country was moving from an economy where people had been agricultural
and living on farms or in the same city in the same place. And the
parents, as they aged, tended to stay in the home. And the young people
and they grew up together, either farming the farm or they went out
to work, and the grandparents watched the children. And there was
always an accommodation--the young people took care of the older people.
And that was the mores or whatever at the time.
But since the war, and since the development of industry, and women
going into the labor market and farms in decline and a whole lot of
things changing, the old people did not have that kind of role to
play. And the young people, conversely, didn't have the homes to accommodate
them or a lifestyle they could be compatible with. And so the old
people tended to become more on their own, had to look out for themselves.
And Social Security really was coming on as a way to provide them
with the income and resources so they could maintain some decent standard
of living. And that kind of thing was the one foundation for what
was taking place now with the expansion. Q: What about
the experience of coming to Baltimore and seeing the organization?
This is an interesting topic to me because we don't do this anymore.
Simermeyer: It's regrettable. Q: We don't
send trainees to Baltimore, either to see Baltimore and the operations
and see the leaders of the organization or to get this background
and the philosophy of social insurance. And I'm wondering--it looks
to me like that's a loss. And I'm wondering what you think about that?
Simermeyer: I thought it was a loss. I thought
it was a loss for years later, when we did it for years and years.
And then they stopped it because there were too many trainees coming
in and budgetary reasons and other things curtailed it. But I agree
with you. I always thought there was a tremendous loss in terms of
getting to see and hear the leaders of the organization and people
like Francis McDonald and getting a perspective of the whole organization
from the central office point of view. And then the environment of
coming to Baltimore was interesting.
When we came down here, the first day, they gave us a list of names
and addresses. And we went around the area on our own. The addresses
were gathered from previous trainees and from people in training who
had made some contacts and whatever. (I don't know exactly where it
came from.) But it was a list of places where you could go and rent
a room. And we teamed up - I forget why I teamed up with this particular
fellow, he was very nice.
We went out. And they gave us directions. You had to take streetcars
and buses and go out to the community, find our way, knock on the
door, talk to the lady in charge who lived there. And in our case
anyway, we got a very nice double room with a private bath adjoining.
And I think it cost something like $10.00 a week, which is phenomenal
in terms of cost. And it was very comfortable. And I think for $3.00
or $4.00 a week more, she did our laundry. So it was really a good
setup.
And they kind of took care of us that way. And the people in central
office made us feel a part of the organization. And that was a loss
when that stopped. Later, I think it became much more sophisticated.
They stopped the rooming houses and those kinds of facilities for
others who came along. And also because it was downtown, it was very
convenient. I don't know if they had training classes out in Woodlawn
after they built the headquarters, because it wouldn't be very difficult
to get back and forth, the way we did. Q: Okay. So you
finished training and went back to New Rochelle to start, to be a
Claims Rep? Simermeyer: To New Rochelle. I turned
out to be the first claims representative in that office. The office
was that new. They had a person who was a field representative who
had been handling the claims part of it until I arrived. And then
he was able to go out and do contact stations and field visits and
so forth, and I stayed in the office and handled the claims, plus
doing the other work on the account number desk and other things that
had to be done in the office.
In those days, it was all really paperbound. I mean we had file cabinets,
and everything was on paper. And each paper was in a folder, and every
folder was in a file cabinet. And we had piles on our desks. The pending
was kept on a tally sheet, and every week, when you cleared a claim,
you put a red line through it, and so forth. And you did your end
of the week report for the old. Q: We were still doing
that in 1983 and 1984, when I left the field, Art. In 1985, we were
still doing that. Exactly the same way. Simermeyer:
That's right. It was very easy to keep up with things in those days,
too. because things were much simpler. You know, the 6-quarter rule
and other things made life relatively easy in terms of technical complexity.
The other side of it was the volume. I mean, there were a lot of people
who were coming in and starting new, getting Social Security cards,
and having their accounts established and claiming benefits. And then
all the growth problems that Social Security had, trying to handle
that workload.
Not everything worked perfectly either. Because it was paperbound,
it was very difficult if there was a problem, you know, to have it
corrected. You did not have the kind of access to information that
you have today. But in any event, I worked in New Rochelle for 4 years;
a little less than 4 years, seemed to be getting no place--I mean,
in terms of progress or promotions. So my ARR (Assistant Regional
Representative) Dave Culperman--I got him one day when he came around
and said to him, "You know, I don't see any progress. And if
I don't see how I can make progress, I don't think I can continue
with the organization," or words to that effect. It wasn't a
threat. It was just to let him know that I was getting a little frustrated,
and he didn't make any commitment or anything at that point. But it
was a relatively short time later that he let me know that I could
be a--they were establishing a-- claims supervisor job in Yonkers,
New York. (Yonkers was about 15 miles from new Rochelle.) I don't
think I had to go before a panel to do that; they just promoted me
to supervisor in Yonkers. So I went over there.
It was a larger office, had a bigger territory, a larger territory.
There was a technicality there, because I had not been a field representative,
which is the normal line of progression. They kind of labeled me a
field representative and put me out in the field. They let me continue
as supervisor; I had that job, but, in addition, they gave me field
things that sort of met the qualifications of I guess of field experience,
which was on my record. So I went through that as well. And that was
all kind of informal and ad hoc. But, I did work in contact stations
and made all the contacts and do what good field reps are supposed
to do.
It was while I guess I was in Yonkers that I had my most memorable
interview, when the manager had a call from Henry Wallace, who had
been the Vice President under Franklin Roosevelt. And after he finished
as Vice President, he retired to Salem in Westchester County, to his
estate. But he started to raise or develop hybrid corn and either
strawberries or chickens, or maybe both--I forget which.
But anyway, he had heard that farmers were covered by Social Security,
and he wondered if he was covered. And so the manager felt that I
should go out there and visit him and discuss it with him, and let
him know what the situation was. Which I did; I went up to his estate,
met him, and we talked. And I had gotten some advice from the Regional
office beforehand because of the sensitivity of it. Anyway, sensitivity
in not wanting to make a mistake.
He was very nice and very personable. And we talked. And as it turned
out he was not covered, because it was not actually a business and
it was not producing any income. It was just strictly research. Although
later, it did develop that his hybrid corn, as I understand it, it
did develop into some very productive strains. I don't know what finally
happened to them,whether they became patented or how they got into
the marketplace. But at that point, he had no income, and really wasn't
concerned; he just wanted to do what was right. Anyway, it was a memorable
event for me. Q: Did you tell him no? Simermeyer:
Yes. Q: Did he take that with good grace?
Simermeyer: Yes. He said he really wasn't concerned whether
he could get coverage like he wanted to be insured so he'd get benefits.
I mean, he didn't need it. He just wanted to do the right thing, and
he was satisfied with that. And I often wondered later if you know
if and when anything changed. I met him again, and so that was the
end of that.
At any rate, in 1954, it's also when the disability freeze started,
and that created a lot of work in the Yonkers office in terms of people
coming into file. It was a whole new world for us in terms of getting
into medical evidence and the questions that we had to develop--very
laborious and detailed. And it was only to establish a freeze. People
didn't understand that. I mean, all it did was to protect their earnings
records so that they would not suffer a loss of benefits later on.
And they were totally dissatisfied, because they came in expecting
to get something, and all they got was a lot of questions. And if
we made a determination of "Okay, you're allowed a freeze,"
I mean so what? They were disabled. They were out of work. They needed
help. It wasn't any answer for them at all. But that was a problem
we dealt with.
Plus I think what--farm coverage started after 1950, right? And we
were detailing people out to (not from my office--I didn't go) but
to the Midwest to handle the farm claims that were coming in. And
they got into all people, particularly from the New York Region--if
you can imagine going to Kansas and Missouri and all those places
and having to deal with questions like grout sows and all the things
that they get into out there. These people--it was a totally different
world for them.
We used to hear about those stories in amazement, you know, and all
of the things that went on at that time. But it didn't affect me directly;
it was sort of a tone of the times. Q: Now these two
offices that you worked in--in New Rochelle and Yonkers, how big were
they? How many staff? They don't sound very large from what you've
told me so far. Simermeyer: Well, the first one,
as I said New Rochelle, I was the first claims representative they
had. And then they got another one--Jack Scarengella who, ironically
and interestingly, is still the manager of New Rochelle, New York.
He went on from that job down to the city, worked in the Regional
Office, and came back to New Rochelle as a manager some years later.
And he remained there from 1958 up till the present. If he's retired,
it's not more than a year or so. And he loves that. So he was there.
And Jack Wallman, who later migrated to Baltimore, to a job--some
staff job. But at any rate, I think the most we ever had were 3 claims
representatives, 1 manager, we each had 1 clerical assistant, I think;
an account number clerk--an office of about 10 people in New Rochelle,
after it got fully staffed, in 1952 and 1953, after the first impact.
And then when I went to Yonkers, that was considerably larger. It
had field representatives and a manager, an assistant manager. I was
a supervisor. You had to have I think 6 claims representatives to
have a supervisor, in those days, plus clericals. So there was a staff
of maybe 20 or 25 people; probably 20; not large by any standards
today.
But I got into large later. I mean, from Yonkers, after about 2 years,
I was invited downtown to meet Harold Schaefer, who was in that picture
you saw before who was the manager of the Downtown district office
which was located at 42 Broadway. And I went down to visit him, ostensibly
to be interviewed for a job as a claims supervisor in Downtown which,
I think, was a higher grade, because it was a larger office.
At any rate, I arrived with pad and pencil and sat down for the interview
prepared to take notes and so forth. Things like that impressed him;
I mean, that was one of the big things, you know, that I was that
much into it. Instead of walking in, cocky and just telling him how
I was going to run the world or something, I was there to take notes
and get direction and on and on. He liked that. So I ended up being
promoted to Downtown, which was in the same building as the Regional
Office. Which is kind of another amusing anecdote.
At any rate, when I got in there, it was a big office. We had a couple
of supervisors, a couple of training classes. We were spread out in
a U-shape. The building was built in a U-shape. But we had so many
people, we occupied the whole floor. And there were claims representatives
in each arm of the U, and across the front was a reception area, and
in the back, were the manager, assistant manager, and so forth.
And they decided to establish a job ,which they never had a formal
title for. They called it "the third man." And we used to
say, it came with a zither--the third-man theme. But what it was a
supervisor who was above all of the people in the office: the other
claims supervisors, the claims representatives, and also the field
representatives. It was an experimental thing. And there was one in
downtown New York; that was me. And there was one in midtown New York,
that was Des Burns. I don't know if you know the name Des Burns, but
he was a brilliant guy. And he eventually migrated to Baltimore too.
He died some 20 years ago, I guess. But he and I were both in this
experiment to see if this would be a new way to operate,a new advantage
to trying to keep all of the activity coordinated, and so forth.
So that put me basically under the Manager and Assistant Manager:
Harold Schaefer, Sid Wexler, and then there was me. And they liked
that arrangement. Because I was running and jumping. I mean, I had
a lot, I had my hands full, I had all I could handle. Q:
So you were like the operations manager in the office, in effect?
Simermeyer: Right. And Sid Wexler was the public-relations
guy. I mean, Sid sat in that office at his desk on the telephone all
day long, talking to people. It wasn't social business. He was calling
the welfare people, he was calling people at different places in the
city and State level. It was a relatively key office in New York,
in downtown Broadway. And he was maintaining all these contacts, getting
all this information, which tied into things that the field reps needed
help on, or they wanted assistance with, or he would kind of grease
the wheels for them by his contacts.
So he was really filling a vital role. But he did not like walking
the floor. He did not like worrying about technical things and claims,
and so forth. He also reminds me of Bob Dole; he had polio, and he
had one arm withered. His body was very much like Bob Dole--he could
only use one arm. And he used to have a telephone in that hand. But
he was a great guy. I had great respect for him. He had over 50 years
of service when I think he died in the Fordham District Office or
else the one out in Westchester Square, or something.
At any rate, we went through that. And one anecdote there was well,
our office faced on Broadway and upstairs was the regional office.
Joe Tie was the regional representative. And he and his ARRs, who
were in town, loved to go to lunch across the street; Child's Restaurant,
in those days, was very popular. Had a light lunch, and it was on
the second floor, and it overlooked Broadway. And they'd go up and
sit there and have lunch, usually overlooking Broadway at a table
right by the window. They were there every day so they probably had
a standing situation, you know.
But one day, these guys played a prank on me. There was something--I
don't think anything really happened in the reception area. But there
were windows in the reception area that you could see out onto Broadway
and, conversely, they could see in. So they came back, and there was
some kind of a little rumble or rumpus--I forget what it was. Nothing
to speak of, sometimes a claimant gets unruly or something. But anyway,
they came back from lunch. And the next thing I heard, they were calling
Harold Schaefer to ask what had been happening in the reception area
at 12:30 when this claimant had been, you know, waving his hands and
so forth. So Harold Schaefer got me and wanted to know because he
was all upset because the regional representatives saw this, you know?
So I explained to him that really nothing of any significance. It
wasn't even worth reporting it to him, you know?
Anyway, I couldn't figure out how they what was happening in my office.
You know, none of them were there. Then it dawned on me that they
were peering over across the street and somehow caught enough of it
and decided to make a joke out of it and pull my chain, you know?
Q: So you were already a manager, an operational manager
at a pretty early point in your career that this point? I mean you
were-- Simermeyer: That was after what--6 years.
You call that an operational manager? A claims supervisor is not really;
he was down here in the status ladder, and the manager was up here.
Q: Right. But this job that you had--this experimental
job--is a lot like being the office manager; a lot like being the
operations manager of an office.
So you've gone from being a claims rep to being a supervisor to being,
what I would call generically, an operational manager. And did you
like it, I mean already at this early stage in your career? Because
a lot of your jobs that you've had you were operational manager, in
many ways, and in many places in your career. And I sort of see you
that way, as an operational manager. And I was wondering if the seed
had already been sown here or did you realize that this was your area,
that you liked it? Simermeyer: I never planned from
one job to another to another. As I said, I didn't sit with those
guys and say, "I want to be in Baltimore in charge of the operation,
or whatever in 1970." I just said, "I want to do the next
job as good as I can and think about the job after that baby, and
point towards it." But I didn't have any lofty goals. I just
was busy doing what I was doing. In a way, I was a product of my environment,
okay?
The organization was dynamic. It was growing, it was expanding, there
was opportunity. There was a lot of flexibility in that respect. I
mean, we still had to live up to the personnel rules and regulations
and fill out all the forms and all of that. But there was opportunity.
I mean there were promotion lists all the time because of all this
expansion and more people coming in underneath and trainees, and so
forth. Which I got into more later on too, when I got into my--two
stages down the road, I landed up in a district office in midtown
New York, which was tremendous.
I had no pre-direction that I was going to be operations per se; I
liked it. And I consider myself a pragmatist, okay? And I consider
myself hardworking and driving, but respecting those that perform
and not respecting those that don't. And so I got along pretty well
with the people. I was never the most popular person in the office,
maybe one of the most respected, you know? So I enjoyed that. And
I worked hard. I mean I tried to set a standard.
From the days that I became supervisor on, I always brought work home--to
the detriment, maybe, of my family and my wife and my own well-being
in some respects. But on the other hand, I felt like I wanted to be
on top of it, I wanted to be ahead of it, I wanted to be comfortable,
not feeling like I wasn't sure what was happening or what I was doing.
And I'd rather spend the time and make the effort and be ahead of
it.
And I think that's really why you know Harold Schaefer and I got along
so well. He was a good little Dutchman. I mean, he had his own lifestyle;
he worked hard, came up at the beginning of the organization. And
he was fatherly, very nice, very pleasant. But he had a very keen
sense, I think, of evaluating people, very quiet, laid back, smoked
his pipe. He liked what I was doing because it gave him what he wanted,
you know, without having to worry about it, that kind of thing. So
anyway, all of that was bubbling along.
And I was anxious to get ahead to something and also to get away from
the commute. I was commuting from Mamaronack, New York; taking the
New York-New Haven Railroad to Grand Central in New York, and then
I had to get off and get on a subway and take the subway down to Wall
Street, get off, and then walk 3 or 4 blocks to the office. And that
was to me, in those days, a long commute. And I had to do it the same
way going back. I lived about a mile and a half from the office; that's
why those pictures you see show me fairly thin, you know? I had to
keep my legs moving.
But anyway, after a couple of years, I was on vacation in Fairfield,
Connecticut. And a call came through--we didn't even have a telephone
in this little cottage we went to--the neighbor got the call. I don't
know how they found me, but they did, and they wanted to tell me that
there was an opening in new Rochelle, New York, the office where I
had started as a manager. It was only a small office; it was only
1 grade higher than the job I had. But it was great, you know? Because
as I said, on the status ladder, a manager was somebody. He was in
charge, even though it was only 1 grade up. I said, "Great, I'll
take it." And I was in heaven for about 2 days, and I got another
call.
In the meantime, this Jack Scarengella who was the other claims rep
in New Rochelle with me, had gone on into New York to the Regional
office as a Staff Assistant, a junior Staff Assistant. But he got
a promotion or two down there. I found out later that first, they
had offered him the job and he turned it down, and then they offered
it to me, and I took it. And then he decided he'd like to have it.
So then they decided, well, they'd give it to him, and I wouldn't
have it, you know? So they called me up and said, "Well, sorry,
but it was a good idea at the time." So I was very disappointed.
But that was it. So Jack became the manager. And as I said, he's been
there ever since. And I often think, "What if I had taken that
job instead of him? Would I have been there ever since, you know?"
I'll never know the answer.
I came out of that and went back to the office downtown. And Harold
Schaefer was very sympathetic, but said, "Don't worry, something
will happen; something good will happen. I'm sure it will come."
He didn't have anything specific in mind. But he just was trying to
build me up. And I was happy enough to be there, but after you've
been offered something, and it's taken away, then it's different involvement.
So within a matter of a month or so, I get called to the Regional
Office which is upstairs then about 6 flights up. So I went up, not
knowing at all what was happening, and I got in to a meeting with
Joe Tie, who was the Regional Representative. And he probed around
with some general questions. And he said, "Fine, how would you
like doing staff work here?" Well, I had never really thought
about it. I didn't know if I'd like it.
Joe Tie had a reputation. They used to call him Tiger Joe. And he
was a rough customer in his day. He was toning down even at that point.
He was becoming more gentle and easy to get along with. He was an
interesting guy. He commuted from Philadelphia every week, came up
on Monday morning and stayed in a hotel room in New York until Friday
night. Then he went home to Philadelphia, which was where his family
home was and that's where his sister lived. And he just maintained
that arrangement, except when he was traveling out some place in the
Region. But he was there in New York sort of on a commute basis.
Anyway, we got into conversation. And he said, he'd like to have me
come to work for him in the management area which was what they called
them SAM and SAP. SAM was Staff Assistant Management; SAP was Staff
Assistant Program. And there was big SAM and little SAM and big SAP
and little SAP. Now I don't think the managers called us that; we
called each other that, you know? But it got to be a permanent moniker.
Anyway, I agreed to do it. And I came to work. And I don't think I
was little SAM very long. For whatever reason, I can't recall whether
it was an expansion or what, but I got to be big SAM. And that became
a very interesting part of my career, because I was big SAM to the
Regional Representative, but also had to provide to all those ARRs.
They didn't have any staff of their own. Each had a secretary. But
if they wanted something, they came to me.
Then the different personalities of ARR's started to emerge. Like
Vic Broom--I showed you the picture before)--he was a graduate of
West Point, retired from the military, very meticulous, very neat,
very perfunctory, you know, still thought he was a general when he
walked around the office.
His desk was clean. He arrived at quarter to 8 in the morning. He
wanted his mail by 8 o'clock in the morning. His desk was clean by
8:30. Because what he couldn't or wouldn't handle, he delegated to
everybody else, through me. He would give me all this stuff, and I
would get the responsibility for assigning it out and reporting back
and all this. And he was free and clear to do what he wanted to do,
you know? He was more that way than the other ARR's. If I had four
of them, I would have gone crazy, you know? Because he was...that's
the way he operated.
Each one of the others had a totally different personality. Some didn't
care about the paperwork, others did their own paperwork--not just
signing forms, but going through memoranda, and identifying things
that had to be done, action items and things like that. So anyway,
it was interesting.
But as I built up a relationship with Joe Tie, placing more and more
confidence or faith in me, it became more comfortable in terms of
dealing with people like Vic Broom, you know. Because in the beginning,
if I didn't have things back when Vic wanted them like tomorrow afternoon,
you know, he'd begin talking to Joe Tie. Well, after Joe Tie could
see that Vic Broom was not being totally reasonable and so forth,
it got a little more balance into it. I could then negotiate a little
more with Vic Broom, you know. Because I was not just a staff flunky
running around but, you know, Joe Tie was backing me up.
It was a whole different kind of experience for me, working in this
environment. Because where I had been an operations manager with claims
reps and field reps and supervisors to deal with and delegate to,
now I was ,you know, on the other side of it. And I had a few staff
people but nothing like I had had before, you know. But again, we
got along, and it worked out fairly well.
So we worked in that environment. And that was interesting because
we were Region 2A--which was New York, the eastern half of New York
and New Jersey. And Region 2B was the western half of New York State
and Pennsylvania. And Joe Fraker was the Regional representative of
2B. But we were co-located on the same floor; we had regional reps
and staff on one side, regional reps and staff on the other side.
And those two guys didn't like each other: Joe Tie and Joe Fraker.
And they're both deceased now, so it doesn't matter, right? And Joe
O'Connor, who was the Regional Director, sat a couple of floors above
and wanted to see peace and harmony and everybody getting along. But
he didn't do anything to make it happen. He was just a nice guy. And
he was too nice, probably. But that was not his forte either. It was
political.
And that all went back to earlier days with Anna Rosenberg--do you
know that name? Q: Yes. Simermeyer:
She was a famous person in her day. Q: Hugh McKenna told
me about her. Simermeyer: Yes. Well, he would
know more about that cycle. Anyway, Joe O'Connor, I think, was sort
of the tail end of that group. And he came in as Regional Director.
But anyway those two regional reps, they had a whole staff, just as
we did. They had a big SAM, who was Ed Sabatini. Ed Sabatini, who
later became the PSC Director in Philadelphia. So we got to know each
other. We went to conferences together when they had big SAM come
down to Baltimore, you know, and things like that.
But back there in New York, when we'd write regional letters all the
time to get the message out. Every week, you had a regional letter--all
the things that were happening and things that had to happen, and
so forth. And Joe O'Connor's great dream was to have us write a joint
regional letter, you know? But we never did, never would. Because
whenever we tried to do it, Sabatini and I tried to do it. Those two
guys--Fraker and/or Tie--would get a hold of it and object to something,
you know, making it impossible for us to do it. And I don't know if
they had any real political motive like they figured if we started
to do things like that, somebody would decide they could put the region
together?
So we went through life like that. It was not a major obstacle. I
mean, we basically got the same information out to our managers. And
we basically got along. But we didn't get into things like joint conferences
or joint anything. It was always we had ours and they had theirs.
It was almost a rivalry, except that there was no prize for the winner.
It wasn't like the World Series. It was just a matter of running the
best region, I guess, or running a good region. And our region was
a good region.
So we did several things there that were very enjoyable. Some of these
conferences--like Ed Sabatini coming to Baltimore--I mean that was
where we got more of the feeling for headquarters and the people in
headquarters. And that was really something that I got more out of
than I guess than I did as a claims rep. Because now you were dealing
with the people who were not the policymakers, but they were implementing
the policy. And they were making decisions, and you could have more
of an impact on them and they on you. And you just had a better working
thing. They did have a lot of conferences and meetings.
I think back now to that and think of today, when we talk about doing
things by conference calls and other types of devices which are effective.
But you don't have the rapport, you don't have the relationships,
and you don't have the follow through that you had then.
Q: Now let me just make sure I've got the years right that this
is happening. What years are we talking about here that you are doing
this job? Simermeyer: In New York, in the Regional
office? I went in there in 1958, and I got out in 1960.
Q: Okay. Simermeyer: So in the meantime, I
had been married before. And my wife developed leukemia, and died
in 1960. No career decisions resulted from that, except that after
her death in August of 1960, I went back, for a short time, to the
Regional Office.
It was very shortly after that Joe Tie said, "You've got to go
out and get more experience in the field." Because I'd not been
a manager; never been a manager. So he said, "You need that to
get ahead." And I really wasn't--at that point in my life--wasn't
that interested in starting on something new, but he prevailed.
Anyway, I went up to midtown New York as the Assistant Manager, to
another pioneer, Charlie Ferber, who is now dead. But he was one of
the great old guys in that region. Charlie Ferber was a wiry little
guy, read the-- what were the original Social Security laws? What
did they call them? Regulations, Social Security regulations or whatever?
Q: Yes, there was Regulation No. 1. Simermeyer:
It was something else though. There was some kind of a book of fundamental
Social Security rules, maybe rules and regulations. Anyway, that was
his manual. He had them in the office. And when he had a problem,
he'd go to them instead of going to the claims manual. I had to go
to the claims manual and tell him what they were telling us to do,
and it didn't agree with what he thought from the original regs. And
I had a hard time getting him to come on with it.
Anyway, it was an interesting office. It went from 51st Street to
52nd Street on Broadway. It was a city block long. And we had two
training centers; I mean, like 18 trainees in each one, running almost
continuously. We had 10 field representatives. And we had well, 30
claims representatives and a tremendous workload. And the Third Man
theme had disappeared somewhere along the way. I don't know whatever
happened, but there was no more, you know?
So I was Assistant Manager there. And a really interesting kind of
job because of all the variety, you know? And trying to keep track
of these field representatives who were--some of them had been there
10 and 15 years. And they knew their way around the city. And they
knew their way around everything, you know, including me. I had to
try to keep up with them and make sure they're out working. These
guys could find their way across Manhattan without ever surfacing,
you know? They knew where all the tunnels were. They could literally
get any place around that whole area. On a rainy day, they didn't
need a raincoat, you know; they'd never get wet if they were out there
working; at least, they seemed to be working.
Anyway, it was a great experience for me. And then, at some conference--I
forget where--maybe that picture you saw there, we started talking
about this ARR Intern Program. And I'd heard about it before that.
But at this conference, I was in and around after hours and we hung
out in the local pub, and whatever, having a beer. And Hugh McKenna
was there. And Hugh McKenna warmed up after a couple.
So he got into a conversation with me about the ARR Intern Program.
And he said, "Because of your home situation, meaning that I
was a widower, I'm not going to consider you for that program, because
I don't think you have the mobility that I need." And he said,
"You would have been a candidate." And I said, "Well,
I really thought that point could be a turning point," because
I did, after working in the Regional Office, wanted to be an ARR.
That was one goal.
And I said, "Well, ARRs, as I'd seen them before, were always
class I District Managers who had had 30 years of service. And they
kind of went into this job in their dotage, you know?" And I
figured, "That's the only other way you're going to get in, unless
you get in through the Intern Program." And so I said, "Well,
let me think about it, and I'll get back to you; maybe I can work
something out."
Some of the conditions of the ARR Intern Program were that you had
to be mobile to go to wherever they sent you,and, I mean, out of the
region. That's one thing he was trying to do, these Class I managers,
they were so long in the area that they didn't want to go any place.
And they were so entrenched and had so many relationships that you
know, they really were not able to be impartial and objective and
effective and bring in new ideas.
So he wanted to start this kind of new breed. And that's the way he
was going to do it: by having you go to a region where he assigned
you. And also, if you hadn't been to Central Office, you had to come
into Central office for an assignment, so you could get that exposure,
experience. Those were the things he said I wasn't going to be able
to handle in my situation, you know?
So I came home and I said, "Well, I've got my mother and father,
who are in their 60's, at that point." And said, "this would
be a great opportunity for me." I had 3 children at that time.
But I said, "I can't do it, under those conditions, unless you
could help me with the children, while I'm in this program."
And they agreed. They said, "Okay, if it means that much to you,
it's an opportunity, we'll do it." So they did. They took the
children and they put them to school every day and all the things
that go with that--feeding and caring and loving and all that.
So I then told Hugh McKenna I was available for this. So then, I had
to come to Baltimore. And there were interviews and discussions. And
that led to that other picture you saw with Jack Malane, and there
was George Demott, Jim Hoss. Jean Reagler didn't get into it; (he
got into it later), Tom Hart, me. There were five of us anyway. We
were the ARR interns to start the program.
Then we got assignments to different regions. And I was assigned from
New York to go to Boston; the Boston Region. Which was good, it was
adjacent. I think McKenna was trying to be a little understanding,
instead of sending me to San Francisco, you know, or Atlanta. I went
up there anyway.
And I got into a relationship with--I don't know if you've ever heard
the name--John Campbell. He was another one of those pioneers, like
Joe Tie, a real pioneer. He was in the program from the beginning--a
real crusty old guy. I went to the Regional office there and worked
for him for a period of about 4 months, which was again an interesting
experience because he was kind of-- took it upon himself to show me
that any smart, uppity new Yorker coming up here doesn't just walk
in and take over, you know?
He gave me an assignment to write a regional letter explaining thus
and such. And I'd write it in my New York style, laying it all out.
And I'd take it in, and he'd take it like some of these things you
see where you shred it down to where the only thing left is the word
"the?" Well, he would do that to me. "Why do we need
to say this? Don't you think they know that?" And you know, on
and on. And he was giving me a lesson in you know, how other people
live. So anyway, I had to absorb it, but I did. And I got along with
the staff there pretty well.
So I stayed in the Regional Office, doing that kind of thing for about
oh, a month or 6 weeks. His staff meetings every morning were like
nothing I'd ever seen. We had an office on the Boston Common. You
know the Boston Common? Q: Sure. Simermeyer:
And Welson Street, I think it was. And the third floor, I think was
the Regional Office. The second floor was a coffee shop. And every
morning, we'd go in the coffee shop, sit down, have a cup of coffee,
sit around a table--his staff was that small. And John would hold
forth on the activities of the day. And the other guys would chime
in because they had been in the Regional office. They didn't have
any turnover at all. They were there for years and years, most of
them. And if the ARR were in town, they would join in.
We'd sit there and talk. And out of it would come the plan for the
day, you know? That was it. There were no staff meetings as such.
We didn't sit around the table and have an agenda or anything like
that. We had to learn to live in that style, you know? And of course,
I had no voice, no vote. I was just there as a learner. So I finally
learned enough, and after about 6 weeks, he decided I could go out
with other ARRs and visit other offices.
So they each--most of them--took me out--about 3 of them--on trips,
you know? And they would orient me as to what they were doing in the
office. And I would sit and listen and you know, chime in. That was
great. I mean, I really enjoyed that. Because these guys were really
nice and had their own personalities. But it was a learning and seeing
a different modus operandi, a different style of management. Most
of them were laid back, very casual.
And after several of these kinds of things, he then decided I could
go out on my own. That's really a big step forward. I mean, I'm going
out in his region to visit his offices without anybody looking over
my shoulder? So I got a string of offices to go out and visit.
I remember one where I went. And sure enough, in the afternoon, who
comes walking in but John Campbell, you know? I mean, this wasn't
like I just happened to be in the neighborhood thing? It was like
you know, a fair distance from the Regional Office. But he still wasn't
totally sure of me, I guess. But anyway, I got along pretty well.
Q: Now during those visits, what kind of stuff were you
doing, you and the ARRs? What was this like? Simermeyer:
We had staff meetings, and talked to the staff about what was
happening and what was going on. I'd get my 5 minutes at the end,
to explain why I was there and what I was doing, you know. And they'd
talk about current developments and what ARRs were supposed to do
in those days. Our modus operandi, all the time I was an ARR, was
to always be there when the office opened.
I'd always open with a staff meeting. I'd always give them an update
on anything that was happening in the region or centrally, or whatever,
then turn it around and ask them how things were going and what the
feedback or recommendations or what complaints, whatever, you know?
It was an interactive kind of thing. And when I went out of my own,
I pretty much did the same thing. I had an agenda. We all did. When
I went out on my own too--to cover these items, look at these things,
they were told.
John Campbell was the pioneer of what they called, in those days "self-help"
and that became "claimant participation." And when I was
in the Boston Region, he let me go to Hyannisport,which was the birthplace
of not only John F. Kennedy, but self-help, as they called it then.
The field rep, who had been out there regularly--I guess 20 years--had
gotten an increase in workload,and had finally worked out this technique.
They met in the basement of the City Hall which was this big, open
room; that was his contact station. But the conditions were good for
that kind of situation, okay? So he'd sit up there in the front where
they had the town meeting, and the people sat where the taxpayers
usually sit, you know. And they could see but they couldn't hear.
But he, as he saw the size of the crowd, started saying, "Well,
how many of you want a Social Security number," you know. And
they raised their hands. And he said, "Well, take this application
form and fill it out while I'm doing this interview," you know.
And they would. So he was kind of running a dialogue with the people
waiting for the contact station.
I don't know if you've ever worked in a contact station.
Q: Briefly. Simermeyer: But for most of them,
and I did, it's like being in a post office where you sit in a room
and they sit outside on a bench. And you call, "Next," and
they come in. And there's no interaction, no dialogue, until you see
your next customer.
But here he had this environment where he could do this kind of thing,
you know? And it became, all of a sudden, a big thing, that this was
a new technique--this self-help--where people can help themselves,
and it's going to save manpower, and it speeds up the process, and
everybody participating and they're feeling better, you know? And
all this psychology started coming out, what was basically, for him,
a pretty simple thing, you know, when he started.
So I went to Hyannisport and looked at it, talked about it. And I
heard John Campbell later coming to Baltimore, bragging about this
self-help, you know, which later became out of vogue. I mean, self-help
was not a good term. So they coined "claimant participation."
I think if you walked up to somebody and said, "What's claimant
participation?" they wouldn't begin to know what you're talking
about. But self-help you could understand. But anyway, this was one
of the things that John liked. He didn't like bureaucracy. He didn't
like a lot of writing, he just liked to have it that kind of easygoing
way, you know? And his managers knew that. And the ones that went
along with it were his favorites.
But I remember one: we went to Portland, Maine, for example, to visit
the District Office. I was sitting there in the managers office, and
all of a sudden, he gets up and takes this school bell and rings the
school bell. You know, big bell. "What's happening?"
Work sampling. It was work sampling. Do you remember work sampling?
Q: Sure, sure, of course. Simermeyer:
When they heard the bell ring, they all wrote down what activity they
were doing, you know. I never heard of such a thing, you know. But
that's the way the Region ran.
And then, there was another one when, there was a guy who worked at
the account number desk, and I was watching him work. He was walking
up to the desk saying, "Now, what do you want, you know? And
I went back and I talked to the manager. And I said, "You know,
look at the way he's talking to these people, �you know'? Couldn't
he address them, �May I help you', could he use �may' or anything?"
I said, "You know, if he used those kinds of words here, they'd
be totally turned off." He said, "That's what they expect.
What do you want? That's the way they talk in Maine or New Hampshire
or whatever, you know?" And I was out of step because I was the
guy who didn't understand. Q: Didn't understand the locals.
Simermeyer: Forcing this stuff in on him. "You
read this in a book someplace? That is the way we're going to go?"
And he even let me go out on a comprehensive review. You know what
a comprehensive review is? Q: Yes. That's why I asked
the earlier question. Because I was wondering if you were doing comprehensive
reviews. Simermeyer: That was the cap of my career,
to be able to do a comprehensive review in that region. Philip Bryan
was the guy who let me do it. He was one of the ARRs who later became
Regional Commissioner. He was a great guy, intellectual.
When I used to go on a trip with him, we'd drive through the countryside,
and he'd say, "Take a look" at a scene, you know, a barnyard
scene alongside the country. And we'd pass on, And then he'd say,
"Tell me what you saw." You know, these mental exercises
as you're driving along. "Did you see the tree? Did you see the
side of the barn? What did it say on the side of the barn?" And
he was doing these mental gymnastics with me all the time. Which was
good. He was sharp.
But at any rate, he sent me on a comprehensive review to an office
in Maine, I forget which one-- Bangor Maine, there was an Air Force
base up there. So I went in. And the manager was Snowshoe McManus.
Snowshoe McManus was a good old guy. And he got his reputation from
way back when. I mean, he was just a little old guy. He was no big
husky guy. But he had been a pioneer up there and grew up at the office
and went through his whole life there.
I remember we used to go to lunch. And we ate I think it was like
at a luncheonette at a supermarket, and that was it, when I was on
the comprehensive. We were coming out of there one day and a little
child --a little girl--is crying outside the store so we come out
and Snow Shoe takes her by the hand. He says, "I'll go this way
around the block and you go that way, and if you see a mother that
looks distraught tell her that I've got her child." And he took
the child went the one way and I went the other way. Sure enough we
found the mother and got the child back to her. But I thought later
we could have been picked up for kidnaping. That was the kind of guy
he was. He couldn't let something like that go by or, just take her
into the store and get the manager and say here this child's lost
you know. He'd take it upon himself. He was wonderful. |
However I went through at that
point, N.Y. style, on a comprehensive review. I had done many of them
in New York, and I was a pretty rough rider. If I didn't see something
I like, came 5 action items. So anyway I did a report on this office,
and I took it in to or I sent it in to Phil O'Brien, my report.
Well, he called me in. He looked at me he says "You wrote this
report on this office and Snow Shoe McManus."
I said "Yes." "You don't realize, he said,
"that man stood out there on the highway in 1937 and thumbed
his way up and down the highway to get Social Security applications
into the hands of people so that they would get numbers and they would
start working this program. He started from nothing, zero, and built
himself up, and the organization up, and you have the nerve to come
along and give me all these action items that need to be done in order
to put this operation on an even basis. I don't understand it. I'm
not going to do turn this report in." That was the end of it,
the comprehensive review.
His whole philosophy was a shock for me and a lesson. Snow Shoe McManus
had earned his stripes. He wasn't going to see him be subjected to
any kind of, anything. He earned his place. And, respect him, and
the operation--it would survive. It was not what it could be, but
it wasn't like it was a derelict office. O'Brian had enough eyes on
it and kept touch with it that it was not the best performing office,
but it wasn't the worst.
What he was saying is that the values of these thing are not just
aiming for the best, just appreciate what has been done--which was
a lesson. That's what the old organization was: there was a lot of
feelings for the old timers, the pioneers. They really had done a
tremendous amount of work and under adverse conditions compared to
what happened later on, starting from nothing and building up an organization
like that.
Well anyway that was probably pretty much the most interesting part
of that to report to you. A short time later Pinkie Lupton, who was
Hugh McKenna's Deputy, arrived in Boston on a visit and said to me
"well you'd been here now 5 months and it's time, we think, for
you to come into Baltimore to get that kind of experience. So report
in like in two weeks or what ever." From there, from Boston,
I moved on down to Baltimore. Q: Should we stop there?
Simermeyer: Yes. Q: O.K. I think where we
left off is you were telling me the story of you comprehensive review,
and then we just left your assignment in Boston and Pinkie Lupton
came to get you to come into Central Office. And that's where we left
off. Simermeyer: Pinkie didn't come to just see
me he was there on a visit and during the occasion of the visit he
told me that it was time for me to move on. So I went to Baltimore.
There I teamed up with Tom Hart. Tom Hart had come from the field,
he was in policy in Baltimore but that didn't qualify for central
office experience in Hugh McKenna's mind. So he had to come over and
work in Operations.
So he and I were there together and they put us together in a room
down adjoining the Post Office in the Operations Building, which is
very barren. He received a project which was sort of a base for us
to work on something. Mine was to restructure the Regional Office.
I don't think they had any idea of restructuring the Regional Office.
It was just kind of a exercise. I had to call for materials from Bob
Minick there, who was in charge of employee development and training,
as I recall.
I don't know what Tom Hart's project was. We were each on a separate
project. We worked a regular day, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Bob
Minick's section or branch--what ever they called it in those days--kind
of adopted us for meetings and things so we didn't feel isolated totally.
We went to their staff meetings, and we kind of engineered a few things.
Like the regional reps used to come in for meetings every quarter,
and we persuaded Mr. McKenna and the powers in the front office to
let us sit in on those meetings.
So we'd sit in, for example, three or four days while they met which
was a very interesting experience to see these, what were then the
most outstanding, (I mean outstanding like great, but like notable),
people in the whole field organization to watch them interact and
perform, because they were all old timers. They each had a role to
play. In fact they all sat in that ninth floor conference room. Each
had their own seat. If someone sat in the wrong seat that was a major
event. Then they would dialogue with Hugh McKenna and Pinkie Lupton
and those people on what was happening, what was going to happen.
So it was very interesting. It was a very good experience. Couldn't
duplicate it in any other kind of a situation. Well, anyway there...
Q: Tell me before you go on, do you remember anything about
those meetings? Can you give me a little bit of a sense of McKenna's
management style, or how those meetings went, or anything that stands
out any anecdotes, or any impressions that stand out besides what
you just said. Simermeyer: Not specifically about.
First of all I didn't attend that many of them, because I went in
around October and I was moved out in January. So I only had a chance
to go to one of them. Q: Okay. Simermeyer:
So I was there about 4 months. Hugh McKenna is a very authoritative
person. He had an agenda, he had everything lined up the way he wanted
to present it. He did get feedback, he did let them talk, but he wasn't
about to have some kind of a democratic process where he took a vote
to decide to do this or that. It was pretty much getting clarification
on what his goals and objectives were. I think I could give more on
Hugh McKenna later since I interacted with him in a closer relationship
over the years.
We went through that and other kinds of activities that we could generate
for ourselves. If there was a meeting of some public affairs officers
or something we managed to finagle our way in so we could sit in the
back and listen and learn, ostensibly learn and get a feel for Baltimore
which is probably more meaningful than the projects we were working
on.
We had meetings then, regular meetings, my meeting was with Al Wells.
I don't know if you remember him. He was a old pioneer he was the
Assistant Director for Management I think, in the old DFO structure,(Note:
Bureau of District Office Operations, Division of Field Operations
and Management Assistant Bureau Director). He would ask me what I
was doing, and he would pontificate. He had a tremendous library of
old documents to date, he never saved them I don't think. You, as
historian, would have a field day. So he pulled some things out and
showed me what was happening. He gave me ideas and things.
While I was there,that's when I met Marie who was a secretary to Bob
Hughes who was the Executive Officer to Hugh McKenna. We just kind
of accidentally met each other when I was up in the suite up there.
And Rosina Cascio comically called it "Our Lady of Room 200."
Later "Our Lady of Room 500." Kind of presided over the
girls up there you know. Any way she was very cordial and friendly.
Incidentally I had met her when I was in New York on 51st Street,
in a job as Assistant Manager. Hugh McKenna sent her to the Region
to get some first hand look at the field offices and so forth. Charlie
Ferber and I--I remember--took her to lunch at this famous place,
Lindy's. The specialty was cheese cake. So we had a little rapport,
not a lot. She knew me, and she knew about me and so forth.
Anyway, when I came into the front office I saw Marie and you could
say our eyes met or something like that. But it wasn't that way exactly.
But we did strike up a conversation and than one or the other of us
suggested going out to dinner. So we did. From there the whole thing
kind of grew. I remember our first date was in this steak house, around
Mount Vernon. I don't know if it's still there or not. But afterwards
for want of something better to do we went to see the deceased Archbishop
who had died and was being laid out in the Cathedral. Q:
Exciting date? Simermeyer: It was unusual. It's
not something you would say you wanted to do to impress somebody.
But, we had nothing better to do. I lived in a boarding house, and
she lived with her mother and father. Later I switched off from the
boarding house and roomed with a guy called Harry Stoddard, who since
passed away but he was a very nice guy. Q: When exactly
was this that you were there? What year was this. It was October to
February of ...? Simermeyer: Well, my wife died
in 1960. I went into the intern program in 1961 and moved to Baltimore
in October 1961 and left Baltimore in January 1962. So we got along,
Marie and I got along very well--had to in fact because we became
engaged in a matter of two and one half months so that was amusing
to me.
I almost felt compelled to go and ask Hugh McKenna for permission
to get married. That's the kind of guy he was. I'm coming into his
office, here I am a intern and so forth. So I did. I didn't really
ask him permission. I just told him I thought we were getting along
very well and we would probably want to get married and so forth,
and he hurumphed a little bit, and said well ok. He didn't ask any
questions really. But it was only a matter of a week or two after
that I found out he was transferred to Cleveland, Ohio. That was my
next assignment. I don't know if there was any connection between
cause and effect. But, I didn't stay there long after that. So any
way those were the highlights of my Baltimore career.
I moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in January, totally naive. I went into
Cleveland and it was cold, but not too bad. I went into the Regional
Office; Byron Goetz was the Regional Representative. As soon as I
walked in he said to me, "Do you know how to conduct an FSEE
interview, Clams Rep interview? (A panel, chair a panel.) I said,
"Yes, I did that in New York when I was SAM in New York."
He said, "Okay, we need someone in Detroit right away."
Don Messmer who was the ARR for that area had taken ill, got the flu
or something, couldn't make it. They wanted an ARR up there to get
together with the managers and do the panel. So I just turned around
and got a travel order, turned around, went back to the airport, and
got a flight to Detroit where it was really bitter cold. I had a light
black rain coat, no boots or any thing like that. I didn't expect
snow. But it was snow and ice everything. They didn't do this out
of malice. They just wanted somebody there and they thought I was
smart enough to take of myself, I mean in terms of clothing myself.
But I got there and it was cold. I remember that so well.
I went downtown and met with Ben Wachter, who was the manager of Detroit
downtown. I walked in and explained who I was and why I was there
and so forth which was kind of a shock to these guys that here comes
this smart aleck from New York. You never get rid of that tattoo where
ever you go. So I walked in and I was about 35 years old, and he was
about 60 something. I told him I was going to chair the panel instead
of Don Messmer.
Don was a lovable old guy, but they used to buffalo him. In fact there
was a story that Chicago was region 5A in those days, Cleveland was
region 5B, and these guys from Detroit had set themselves up as region
5C. They thought of Messmer as their leader. So this kind of upset
their apple cart to have me walk in. They had no reason to other than
I wasn't the standard person. So any way we went through the panels.
They worked out alright. I didn't have any great problem and came
back to Cleveland and told Byron that I was going to get married in
April, and I would need some time off for that.
We decided before I left that we would do it in April because of Lent.
We had to wait until after Lent. So that meant 3 months of a commute.
He said okay. He set me up with what he called the bride's groom network.
He had had an ARR, Ray Jordan, who had passed away. He had another
intern there--George Dermott, and then he sent me out. Why they sent
two I don't know but they did. I came in after George.
So, Byron decided to divide up his territory. His territory was pretty
Northern and Eastern Ohio. They gave me a couple Cleveland offices
which were great, and Akron which was close by, and then I went East
to Youngstown and Ashtabulla and South to what later turned out to
be a new office, New Philadelphia, which they opened up while I was
there and Stubenville and Zanesville, and heading south came to Marretta,
Chilacopy, and Portsmith. So there was like a arc around eastern side
of Ohio.
The big offices that got most of the attention were in Cleveland.
The smaller ones I had to visit regularly but I knew Philadelphia
too. That's where I met I met Harry Overs. Smaller ones didn't take
as much time or attention. So it was a mix, and it was good. And I
remember the one office we were at, West 25th Street. The District
Office was upstairs in the Regional Office, and the manager was Maggie
Bolton, which means nothing to you. But Maggie was an old female dowager
manager, very set in her ways who again didn't see me coming in as
a smart New Yorker, you know, telling her what to do or how to do
it. And loved to pull my chain.
For example at that time Tony Celebrezze was the Secretary. He came
from Cleveland. Of course she knew Tony Celebrezze. So at Christmas
time I'd go up to see her and she'd pull out Christmas card greetings
from Tony and Ann celebrating whatever. She'd say "Did you get
your Christmas card yet?" Well she knew that no way I was going
to get a Christmas card. Little wrinkles like that made my life interesting.
So I had to deal with her but everybody in the Region knew her, and
what to expect and so forth. So I went through that routine working
up. We had to go visit every quarter, and so many comprehensive reports
you had to do and so forth. We had to have an agenda, have visit reports--a
whole lot of routine. Probably a lot of it's still in existence today.
But anyway to take care of my engagement I worked out a deal where
I would fly out from Cleveland to Baltimore on Friday evening and
meet Marie at the airport, and we'd drive to New York, where my children
were. My mother and father were looking after them. We'd spend the
weekend with the children and then Sunday night we'd drive back to
Baltimore. I'd stay overnight with my buddy and then the next morning
I'd fly from Baltimore to Cleveland and get there in time for the
staff meeting. And the next week instead of coming to Baltimore I
just went from Cleveland to New York and back.
It got a little bit harried as it went on from one week to another
to another, particularly with bad weather and other kinds of things.
But we got through that anyway to April and got married. Took Marie
out there and we got a little apartment in Palma, Ohio and we planned
to stay there through the summertime. And get a place and bring the
kids out and reestablish the family. Q: Now was this a
permanent assignment in Cleveland or was it part of your interning?
Simermeyer: No not a permanent assignment. Yes, it was
a intern experience. It had no permanence to it. Q: But
you were planning to stay there permanently at that time?
Simermeyer: No. I was just planning to stay there as long
as, I figured it was going to be a longer term than the ones I'd had
before in Boston or Baltimore. But I mean they didn't give me any
indication that I was going to stay a year or what. I got this place
in Parma and then in the summertime Byron gets that transfer to Chicago
and Paul Webb took his place.
When Byron moved out, he had a house in Bay Village that he vacated
on rather short notice. We had been there because he was very socialable
and friendly. We liked the house and it suited our needs so we made
a deal with the landlord to take over the house on a rent basis and
with no renovations. I repainted some of the rooms and things but
again no lease, no permanence, no nothing. So, in the fall the kids
came out, they got established in the school out there and so forth.
In the mean time, of course, Marie had gotten pregnant. She was due
to have a baby in January and she did, who was Maureen. She was born
January 26th or 27th. I get confused with the dates because it was
28 below zero, and snow and ice on the ground, and my car was frozen.
I had two cars one in the garage and one behind outside, and the gas
line froze, it was so cold. Couldn't get the car started.
She got a ride to the hospital from a nurse who lives down the street
who had seen her that day in the doctor's office. So, she went off
to have her baby. I came home and stayed with the family. Found out
about the new arrival by telephone call from the nurse who then came
out and got me and took me out to the hospital to see Marie and the
baby and so forth. Of course, I've heard about that ever since about
how I couldn't even be there when the baby was born. The fact that
was one of the coldest days I've ever seen. Q: Well now
your on record with your version of the story. Simermeyer:
She knows my version of the story. Doesn't matter. Anyway, it's all
in fun. So, we went on like that. She had the baby now we had three
other children so that was 4. She was doing well. Adjusting to life
in Cleveland because when she was home she was a only child and her
mother doted on her. I thought maybe that was the best thing that
could happen was to get her out of town so she would be on her own.
It was a little hard in terms of being thrown into the water and having
to learn how to swim. But she did very well.
So, we went on like that through 1961. I was working my network--1962,
I'm talking about. So we got on up through 1962. They made a cut around
the middle of 1962 on the ARR intern bit. They decided that they didn't
want to keep two there, and so they were going to transfer one. It
turned out to be George Demott who got transferred so he was gone
and then I took over his network. In fact George had part of that
network I described before; what I told you about was a full fledged
network after I had taken George's part over.
My part had been more, what I said was the bridegroom network. It
was more confined to the northern part of Ohio. They added the southern
part on after I got married and I was no longer a bridegroom. But
George wasn't too happy about that. There was no pass or fail, it
was just a matter of making a cut. So I stayed and he left. He went
down to Charlottesville. He transferred to Charlottesville with Maury
Duberry at that time.
So continued on in Cleveland on a permanent basis now into 1963 doing
what an ARR was supposed to do. Simermeyer: There
are no particular highlights but in early 1963 Hugh McKenna asked
me if I wanted to participate in this NIPA (National Institute of
Public Affairs) program which was a year of graduate study. The Ford
Foundation was funding this program to give a year of graduate work
to people who had gotten into government but hadn't had a college
background, a training for government. Mine had been economics and
statistics and so forth it was not really government per se. So I
said yes, I'd be interested.
It was kind of a long drawn out process. You had to submit papers
and get recommendations and go through interviews by somebody who
happened to be in Cleveland who was on a board and got through that.
And then they decided that I would be eligible or selected, however
you want to say it. It was supposed to be quite an honor to participate.
There were 5 schools: Princeton, University of Virginia, and one or
two out West, I...USC. I remembered Princeton and University of Virginia
because I put my bid in for one of those two schools because I felt
they were more in the neighborhood, on the East coast anyway. I'd
never get back to see the family or anything else if we all transferred
out, moved out. So as it turned out it was not a great reason for
making a selection. But I had no other criteria to go on anyway. They're
all good schools. So they selected me for University of Virginia.
So I went down there in June and sent the kids back to my mother and
father for the summer. And they took them to Fairfield to a place
where they had a little beach place on the water. Marie and I packed
our belongings and went down to Virginia to find a place to live.
And it was very hard with the baby and three children in a college
town and only on a one year basis. We knew we were only going to stay
there one year. We could have left everything in Cleveland but we
had no real permanence in coming back to Cleveland.
I thought maybe this program would generate another new one some place
else. So we went down and found a place by luck and happenstance.
A nice rancher, close to the University. We joined up, I mean we took
a lease of 1 year. Put our things down there. I guess it was later
than June but it was more like early, late August. So in the meantime
the kids had to come back and get set up and go to school. And they
started school earlier down there then they did in Cleveland.
So I got a detail which was very thoughtful of them. They detailed
me to the Charlottesville Regional Office for about 4 or 5 weeks while
the kids were in school and before the program started. So, I got
to know Maury Duberry and the ARRs down there and staff people, and
I went out on some visits and did a comprehensive I remember in Richmond,
Virginia, having learned my lessons from Boston about how to handle
those things when you have a strange territory.
But I enjoyed the regional office there although Maury Duberry was
something else again. Maury wanted his ARRs to be traveling all time.
So he had his staff meetings on Saturday. He started 8:00 a.m. in
the morning and it was still going on at 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
These guys were, they didn't appreciate that at all. That didn't seem
right but he didn't want them to interrupt their office schedules
and business and things. He was a stickler for all that. A very nice
guy really, a little stodgy. But his ARRs were something else again.
I don't think some of them are alive today.
But, Jessie Lynn was from Beltbuckle, Tennessee. He used to put on
a accent about being a country boy. Irv Allen, I remember particularly.
He was a nice guy. He later retired or got out rather than move when
they later moved the Regional office to Philadelphia. But anyway,
I did my time there and then I went into the program in September.
There were 4 other interns or NIPA fellows; they were from Bureau
of Mines, Defense, Bureau of Prisons, some Defense outfit in Hawaii,
and one other--6 of us all together. And we got into this program
at the University of Virginia, and he gave us some flexibility.
This fellow named Herb Emerich was the facilitator. He was very well
known. I didn't appreciate him at that time, I mean his tremendous
background. But he was one of the principal staff people of Franklin
Roosevelt and had a history going way back to that time. And he was
doing this as sort of a semi-retirement thing. So he helped us along,
guided us, and counseled us, suggested programs for us. We had some
flexibility in some of the courses we took.
One was pretty much mandatory. It was called "The Processes of
Change." The professor was Paul David, who had an excellent reputation
in terms of elections--that is studying elections, nominations, all
the way through the election. He had written books and delivered lectures
and was an authority on the subject. But that's not what his program
was about. It was kind of a dynamic thing. We had about 6 of us and
then we had about 5 or 6 graduate students who were going through,
taking that course. And we had Professor David, and he had another
professor who was there on some kind of a not full time basis but
he was attending classes giving counsel and so forth. And anyway we
went through a whole tremendous range of subjects from Twinbe's books
to everything from the beginning of time all the way up to the present
and then try to predict the future.
Tremendous amount of reading, and tests weren't tests, they were essays
or how do you relate this, or how do you relate that? What do you
think of this and that? But we did very well. The other guys and we
all did very well. Maybe because we were all more mature then the
graduate students or maybe we were not as enmeshed in a lot of other
background and information and history. We just hit it cold. But of
course everybody came up to a tremendous problem after they tried
to predict the future. Everything is fine when you talking history
until you get up to the current and then you realize all the factors
that play into what makes the world go around in terms of everything--politics
and environment, etc.
Anyway that was a wonderful year because I was home everyday. We had
a corral at the University, where we had books where we would go,
and we would try to work an eight hour day, 8 a.m. to 4 or 8 a.m.
4:30 p.m. with time out for lunch. And we'd do research in the library
work in the corral, and try to not fudge it. We figured we were being
tested as a forerunner of a continuing program. So we did work along
and we would talk to each other and share things with each other.
But, that was the year too, that John Kennedy got shot. Everyone remembers
where and when. I was at the University; in fact got a call from Marie,
that she had heard it on television. We went out, of course now everybody
was tuning in on it, everything ground to a halt. But that was a traumatic
time. School shut down of course. We went through the whole experience.
We came up to New York for Thanksgiving, a week or two later, and
we drove through Washington. So we stopped at Arlington, went up to
the grave. There was snow on the ground at that point, really an early
snow fall. And at that point they had the servicemen's hats on the
grave. They had each had--Navy, Marine Corps, Army--each put their,
the guys in the honor guard put their, hats on the grave. I don't
think they had the eternal flame developed at that point. Anyway,
that was another moving experience.
We came back, finished the year at Charlottsville, really enjoyable
for a whole lot of reasons. And then in June came the "What's
next?" routine. They said "we don't have any plans for you,
other than go back to Cleveland and continue doing what you were doing".
So we packed up all the furniture again and sent the kids up to New
York for the summer, and then went out and bought a house in Bay Village,
a bigger house, 4 bedroom. We moved in and got established, and this
time they switched my network to Michigan from Ohio.
I got downtown Michigan: that was Detroit, Highland Park, Dearborne,
and going west to Kalamazoo and some other town out there. North to
Muskegon, Travis City, Grand Rapids, Lansing, on up to the Upper Peninsula
which was Eskanolva, and Markette, those were the district offices,
which was a good network but it wasn't a bridegroom's network anymore.
I had to travel from Cleveland to, if I wanted to take my car I'd
visit Detroit office in the southern tier of Michigan using my car.
But then after that came really elongated to get up to the other parts
so I'd usually fly up there which meant flying from Cleveland to Detroit,
and then maybe Detroit to Grand Rapids, and then Grand Rapids to Eskanolva,
and what they called at that time the Blue Goose, which was a Northwestern
Airline, or something. That was not like the Northwestern we have
now. It was Northern Michigan Airline--little twin engine planes,
you know bumpy rides. So I took that on and we went up through that
area. I had a lot good times there. I mean friendly people, and we
did our job and I don't remember any outstanding events there either.
Paul Webb in the meantime was the regional rep.
I was pretty well getting along and came up--that would have been
1964. Let's see. John Kennedy died in 1963 and I was in that job through
early 1965. Medicare was about to, I'll say, erupt. Bob Ball had decided
that he wanted to restructure the whole field. And he set up Regional
Commissioners for the first time in 1965. But he didn't set it up
in Cleveland, he set it up in Chicago because that was the home region
really. And we had 11 Regions and 10 Regional Commissioners. Cleveland
had no Regional Commissioner.
Paul Webb was really unhappy about that because he thought everybody
else got it, and he didn't. Got it meant the grade, prestige, and
the whole thing, and now he was subservient to the guy in Chicago
that he had been a peer with. Anyway, Paul negotiated with Baltimore.
He came in and made some visits and did some negotiating. He got himself
a job within BDI in charge of the Field Liaison Staff, I think they
called it, with a promise of a super grade. He said it was a promise
of a super grade. We never knew whether that really was, you know,
when or how that would happen.
The bottom line is that Paul left Cleveland. And now there was no
regional rep there. The turned around and offered it to me, in early
1965. First they had offered me a job in Kansas City about 6 months
before. I had gotten a phone call, I was out in the field. Hugh McKenna
doesn't call and say I would like you to do this. He says somebody
call and say Hugh McKenna would like you to do this you know. And,
so I said let me think about it, and I thought about it.
Meantime Marie was pregnant again. Now we had a baby, three children,
one on the way, and move to Kansas City which is another 500 miles
west of Cleveland. This was really tough. At that point, I would have
really liked to have the job, but I realized it was going to be a
family stress thing. So I called back and said "I'm sorry my
wife is pregnant and going to have a baby, and I can't see moving
her in the middle of all that going through a whole relocation project
because I had been relocating every year for the last couple years--to
Charlottesville and back to Cleveland. So he
said okay. But I figured in those days if you didn't go when they
said go, you didn't go period, and that was it. So I figured well
that's the way it is. But then sure enough three or four months later
this other thing opened up and they offered it. I took it. And then,
Medicare was about to explode. It was. It started in 1965 and I forget
when the legistration went through but... Q: July 1965.
Simermeyer: Okay. So we started with a tremendous campaign
to enroll everybody in Medicare. I mean all senior citizens who were
eligible. That was a major effort, public relations wise, and workload
wise, and getting our staff up to handle it, and the consequent problems
of having enough space for the offices, and having enough offices,
anticipating the workload coming in. When did it? You said the legistration
started. Q: Yes and implementation was a year later.
Simermeyer: 1966? Q: We had a one year period
for it to take effect. Simermeyer: So we had
one year to kind of tool up. But also to enroll people and that got
to be a real challenge. You know having meetings with managers and
meetings with groups in areas. The managers basically did most of
it but I was involved in some of that. Then... Q: Did
we open a lot of new offices? Or some new offices? Simermeyer:
Not a lot of new offices, but we had some expansion. It really
didn't come until some time later. And it came more as an evolution
from large district offices to branch offices. That's when they really
proliferated. This is kind of before that. But we had negotiations
with Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Michigan who appeared to be the
primary carriers and then Nationwide Insurance got Ohio. So we had
to meet with them and tried to have joint meetings and talk about
how we were going to handle things and so forth.
In the meantime we were facing a lot of opposition from the AMA and
other organizations. So we were trying to put that down. And trying
to persuade people to sign up for Medicare because there was a deadline,
I think it was the implication date to do it without a penalty. Also
to get enough people in to make it viable. If people hung back and
didn't sign up then you have all other kinds of consequences. So that
was probably the major challenge for us to do that.
I remember one time I wrote this letter, regional letter, to all the
managers and I titled it "Selling Medicare". I went through
a whole discussion of why we should get people signed up for Medicare--what
it meant, what the consequences would mean be if we didn't, etc.,
etc. And I sent it, of course a copy went to Central Office and they
thought it was great. They sent it over to Wilbur Cohen who was then
the honcho of Medicare as an example of what the field was trying
to do to put this program across. Back it came with a stinging rebuke
about "We are not selling Medicare. Medicare is not a program
that we sell like Sears and Roebuck sells bicycles or what ever."
He was totally throwing it back in our face. Q: From Wilbur
Cohen? Simermeyer: Yes. Wilbur or somebody on
Wilbur's staff, had Wilbur's name. Q: Probably him.
Simermeyer: Probably. I'd say you know you can't win.
Some people think it's great, and some people don't. Q:
He wanted you to just...? He wanted you to have to not sell it because
it's already the law? or what? What was his attitude?
Simermeyer: It was along that line, and you don't sell the
law. It's a matter of law. I don't know why he did it, maybe a bad
day the day before or something. Anyway it kind of deflated me. But
the message was out and it did, along with other things, take its
effect.
We came up to 1966 with this crash program. We were doing all kinds
of things like staying open the last week or two till midnight so
people could come in if they were working and sign up for Medicare,
and open on weekends and Sunday--things we had never done before.
We had been open on weekends but never on Sundays.
And so anyway we pulled it off, and Medicare got off the ground in
1966. Of course it was a very rocky ground. I mean, the carriers were
not up to taking on that workload. We had then tremendous problems--people
complaining we sent their bills in and they weren't paid, what happened?
Then communication with the carriers was not the best because they
had their own problems. They didn't want to spend all their time explaining
these things because that diverted resources from what they were trying
to do--set up a system.
Well it was just a typical hairy start-up problem that I think you
had to expect but we didn't. And we certainly didn't advertise it
that way. You know tell people that it was going to take 180 days
to pay a claim and so forth. We got a lot of flack for it because
all the adversaries, the AMA, and everybody else was saying see we
told you, it wasn't going to fly. Anyway we got that program up and
it was the major singular thing.
Another problem happened in SSA which was what was then called the
area offices got into a lot of trouble. They were, they didn't get
into it; it finally exploded on them. I forget exactly how the Medicare
impact hit them ,but I do remember one thing. For example, during
that time when Medicare was going in, they decided in Baltimore to
transfer the workload--the Ohio claims workload from Philadelphia
to Chicago, from Philadelphia area office to the Chicago area office.
You wouldn't relate to those days, but it was hard to get responses
from the area office. When you sent them a form you had to do it by
mail. You had no telephone lines, and sometimes it was weeks before
you heard from them. In the meantime the claimant is hung up--can't
get his check, doesn't know why, can't get this, can't get that.
Q: You mean you couldn't call them? I understand you didn't
have a phone line computer system but? Simermeyer:
They had a phone. You could call but unless it was a Congressional
or something they were just overwhelmed. So they were backed up and
the same thing as the carriers they were saying we have to work on
getting these cases out. They were so paper oriented and so buried
in paper that that was a problem. Folders all over the place and all
kinds of antiquated management practices which is sort of a prelude
to what happened next.
But in the meantime they tell me I'm the regional rep. They're going
to transfer my cases from Philadelphia to Chicago. I said, "Oh,
no!" I mean the physical task of pulling all our folders, loading
them in trucks, transporting across the Ohio turnpike to Chicago,
unloading them in Chicago, setting them up in file cabinets. In the
meantime I'm out of business. That's the only record, the only power
we have. I protested. They told me to basically to shut up. This had
to be done because Philadelphia was in such bad shape that they had
to get the workload out of there. That's's the way it was going to
be. So they did which compounded my Medicare woes too, only to the
point of extreme aggravation. It was not total chaos, but it was another
problem.
So in the meantime other problems were showing up in the area offices.
It was quite apparent that they were not able to function properly.
They were outdated antiquated, and Dick Bradden had been in charge
of that operation. Dick Bradden was a bright guy and he was a guy
who kind of outlived his time. He was very good in his day but his
day passed by. He was a Director, and he wasn't addressing these problems
at all. So Bob Ball decided that he need to change that and he decided
he wanted to put Hugh McKenna in that job. Well, Hugh McKenna...
Q: Didn't want to do it. He told me he didn't want to do it.
Simermeyer: Didn't want to do it. Did he tell you about
his visit to Cleveland? Q: He did tell me that Ball came
to the airport when he was on his way to fly to Cleveland and offered
him the job. He had to fly to Cleveland and think it over while he
was there. Simermeyer: Well, it has so harried
what he told me, when Bob Ball came to the airport to see Hugh because
he found out Hugh was leaving town. He came without his wallet. He
didn't even have enough money to get out of the parking lot. He had
to borrow five dollars from Hugh McKenna to get himself out of the
parking lot to get home.
So Hugh's flight came and Hugh left, and he came to Cleveland. So
here he lands at the airport and he's totally engrossed in this problem.
I had Dan Rucamp who was my staff assistant and his wife, Marie and
me had a nice diner for him--a couple drinks, and stuff.
First we came out to my house, and he said "I have to talk to
Bob Ball." We no sooner get to the house than he's on the phone
with Bob Ball. They're going on and on and on. So we knew that this
was not your normal every day social event. So I had company there,
and I had Maria cook the dinner and everything.
So we went through it anyway, kind of in a perfunctorily form. Dan
and his wife left, and Hugh was there now. So he told me what the
situation was and what should he do and why should he do it, and on
and on. Well I was kind of idealistic and dedicated and I said this
really has got to be done. You've got the background, the experience,
the ability--this is something only you could do and if you don't
do it who will do it? And on and on.
We went on with this conversation until about 3 o'clock in the morning.
Marie went to bed in the meantime. At 3:00 a.m. we decided to back
it in and went upstairs and went to bed. He was in one bedroom, and
Marie and I were in the other. I woke up and I looked at my watch,
it was about 9:30. The sun was out. We were supposed to be downtown
at a staff meeting at 8:30. I completely overslept and so did he.
So I went and knocked on his door and he was very grumpy. He said,
"You--we'd better get going. We have a staff meeting." We
were a little late. Well, anyway we did. I called down there and had
them reschedule the staff meeting for 1 o'clock in the afternoon which
we made.
So we went to the staff meeting. None of this came up, but we took
off and he was on a "visit the region" kind of thing-- get
the feel of the region to see how well I was doing. So we were going
out to west to, I forget the name of the office but it doesn't really
matter, and eventually down to Lima, Ohio, where the manager was retiring
and they were having a party. At the festivities, Hugh was going to
make a little speech and so forth, and that was one focal point. Then
we were going to go on down into Columbus, and fly him out of Columbus
at the end of the week.
So I had him the whole week. This was Sunday--we were off to a great
start. We started out going on our visit from one place to another.
Every evening it was the same thing, not until 3:00 in the morning,
but you know? Q: Sit up agonizing over this decision?
Simermeyer: Yes. What should I do? And, why should I do
it? What am I giving up and how can I make this thing work? He didn't
want to do it for sure. I kept leaning on him and leaning on him as
best I could. The good of the organization and dedication and all
that--all the good words. But, we finally got to Columbus and I got
him on a plane back to Baltimore. I was never so happy to see him
go. Q: He was still undecided when you put him on the
plane? Or had he reconciliated by the end of the .. Simermeyer:
He hadn't made a decision. He hadn't said "I'm going to go back
and do it". He was still in his mode. And that's the way, you
talk about how Hugh McKenna--he mulls over something until he's worn
it out, until he's satisfied with it. This was really a traumatic
thing for him. So he went back to Baltimore. I went back to Cleveland
and we're chugging along and the next thing I heard he agreed. So
he went over that new organization.
Jim Murray came in as his successor as the head of the field organization.
So now I worked for Jim Murray. He was a nice guy but completely different
from Hugh McKenna. Laid back, low key, smooth, polished but not--he
wasn't a driver like Hugh McKenna.
One other thing that had happened before that too, it's another digression,
but Hugh McKenna had introduced this MUM plan--that was another big
effort we had back in about 1964 I guess it was-- Maximum Utilization
of Manpower. This was the first introduction of the service representatives.
As compared to what had always been before, every claims rep had a
clerk; and they handled everything, claims and post-adjudication and
so forth. Now came this division of work with claims going to claims
reps and the other service workload going to service reps.
But it became our challenge to go out and sell this to the whole field
organization--us, the ARR's, regional reps. We had meetings, and Hugh
McKenna got on us to do that and we did it. It wasn't easy because
it created a lot insecurity in the field. Claims reps saying "if
you bring service reps in what happens to my job. You won't need as
many clams reps," and on and on.
Well we worked out something. I think it was in the advent of Medicare
so that there was some growth potential so the growth would be focused
towards that. So there was some hope that it wouldn't just be wouldn't
have to have some RIF in the process. Q: Who were these
service reps? Did we promote the clericals or did we bring new people
in? Simermeyer: Both. We promoted some clericals.
We recognized that a lot of clericals couldn't handle that. They had
not had that kind of background or training, so we recruited service
reps. My recollection is that we recruited them off registers, but
we also went out to places like business colleges and things and held
that out as a job with a future. You could move from service rep to
claims rep and so forth, and that was all part of it too.
So we're back to Hugh McKenna going to that other organization. I
keep calling it that because it was then called Division of Claims
Control. Maybe it was before that it had changed its title. When Bob
Bynum and Bob Ball realigned the Regional Commissioners and so forth,
changed the field organization from DFO to something--to a bureau
of district office operations and the DCC got changed to BRSI, Bureau
of Retirement and Survivors Insurance. Hugh McKenna was now the director.
So Hugh McKenna is down in Baltimore, and I'm in Cleveland and I'm
tooling along my merry way, and now I start getting calls from Rosina
to Marie. Remember our Lady of Room 200. And Marie was not too happy
in Cleveland because it wasn't Baltimore, and she wished she was back
here and so forth. She wasn't rebellious about or anything, just was
not happy with the idea of having Cleveland as a home for an indefinite
period of time.
In the meantime I got calls, of course, directly from McKenna about
coming in because he was now restructuring the organization. He was
going to set up these changes from area offices to program centers.
He was going to have a Regional Representative for BRSI in the Program
Center, under that he was going to have a new Director of Management
which they had never had before, a Director of Operations which they
had never had before, and some other peripherals. Quality assurance,
I think, was one of them.
Hugh wanted someone to head up the management area. I said I don't
want to work in Central Office. Thanks a lot, but no thanks. And then
we'd go by for a week or so and I'd get another call. It was going
on like that, and I kept thinking in a way you're kind of a turncoat.
You talk to McKenna for a whole week, tell him go and do your duty.
But when it comes to you, you don't want to do it. But I was happy
in the field, and I thought I was a field man and that was where I
wanted to be.
Central office was loaded with all kinds of personality conflicts
and bureaucratic stuff and things I had seen enough of when I was
in there for my short tour. I really didn't see myself as having a
great future there. But anyway I finally succumbed to the request
to come in. So, in October of 1967 I came into Baltimore on a kind
of a detail. It was more than a detail. It was just that I was not
permanently assigned because I had to then go to a housing relocation
kind of thing. So I came in and I started with Hugh as a Director
of Management and in the meantime started trying to kind a place to
live.
Marie stayed in Cleveland with the 5 children then. We had to sell
our house out there. So it all worked out finally; that's how you
got to this house. It was a model. It was just being built, and when
we came across it, I liked it. I liked the area and the size and so
forth. When Marie came down during a holiday, she looked at it, and
she liked it. So we decided to take this house. Of course, they had
to finish it.
In the meantime, good old Hugh is pressing me about getting past this
point of being on a detail because when I was on a detail, all I was
getting was per diem. But, I'm maintaining a home in Cleveland. I
fortunately was able to live with my mother-in-law and father-in-law
in Baltimore. But I had travel expenses traveling getting back and
forth and on and on. And I was aggravating him cause I wasn't getting
it done quickly enough. That's the kind of guy he is. Even though
it was a rather major undertaking familywise.
Anyway it all came about in January of �68, the house was ready and
we moved here. Then I was telling you the other day about they had
plywood walks up to the house because it was all mud in here. The
streets were all mud. They cut all the trees down, everything. But
we got through that.
Of course, one of the first assignments after Marie and the kids came
here, his assignment to me was to go out in the field with Gene Brees
who was then the Deputy Director to Hugh McKenna. And Gene was a great
guy. He had been a great deputy to Dick Brennan. He was from the old
school. He knew the people, the places, he knew the history but he
was not dynamic and forward thinking the way Hugh wanted to go.
So, he said he decided to set up a team of Gene and me because Gene
is the senior man right. I am the new ABD for management, still wet
behind the ears. And we were going out, we were going out. We went
from one city to another on a continuous circuit, interviewing people.
And the BRSI Regional rep at that point was the third member of the
team. So we had Ed Sabatini in Philadelphia. We had Al Wisterman in
Birmingham. We'd arrive in the city. In the meantime, we had solicited
these jobs for director of management and assistant director of management,
director of operations and assistant director of operations.
Q: Did the management staff, were they payment centers at
this time? Simermeyer: No. By that time they
were called PCS. Q: So the management staff reported to
you, and the operational staff reported to someone else?
Simermeyer: Charlie Delle Bovi. Q: O.K.
Simermeyer: But Charlie was another one of the died in
the wool area office DCC type guys. He knew that operation cold but
he was not what Hugh McKenna was looking for in terms of the future.
So Charlie was not even included in these panels because the panels
were not that detailed in terms of operations.
Hugh McKenna recognized he needed some continuity, stability. Couldn't
have, if he brought in new faces for the management side, you don't
want to bring in all new faces. Bring new faces on the operations
side and toss out some new guys who had done nothing wrong. They did
what they were supposed to do, and they carried the organization under
tremendous workloads and things. They were struggling to get along.
So, it was really kind of, I won't say pro forma; but, it was part
of this over all restructuring that he wanted the interviewed.
But we went as I said from place to place and had these people report
into these places for interviews. We interviewed them in each of these
cities--whoever had expressed an interest in that location, in that
job. So they came in and anyway we spent about 3 weeks on that, full
time going hither and yon all the time. I'm away from home here and
she's just moving in. So we came back anyway and reported to Hugh.
We had a whole new cast of characters for directors of management
who were identified in one of those pictures there. And mostly the
same people for Directors of Operations and the Regional Reps had
had a hand in it, which was his wish so that they would be involved.
Gene Brees had a hand in it so he would be committed to carrying it
out. And I had a hand in it because I was going to get all these new
types, and we were going to engage in this whole new activity.
Meantime when Hugh McKenna took the job from Bob Ball, he said he
had three requests. I think he said they were requests but they were
basically like demands, I don't know if he told you about that. But,
he wanted three studies one in Operations, which was headed up by
Byron Goetze who was the Regional Commissioner from Chicago. One in
Policy which was headed up by Roy Wynkoop who was had been in the
Department and who had retired but had a lot of savvy in Labor relations,
which was headed up by Willoughby Abner who was in the Federal Mediation
Service. So they each conducted their own studies.
They got their own teams together and did a whole lot of stuff, and
came up with a whole raft of recommendations. Of course the Operations
recommendations were focused towards that side of the house. They
didn't involve me too directly except for management support, like
budget and resources and other kinds of things to make things happen.
But the management side of it--well it wasn't management per se. It
was sort of a new frontier. He wanted that created.
The labor relations side fell into my lap. The whole labor relations
exercise. And he wanted to have a whole new frontier because the unions
had been a good part of the problem before, in his view and in mine,
too. When the payment centers were in such deep trouble, he had gone
out and I had gone out and heard stories, too, about how Claims Authorizers
would spend a part of the day making up bundles of cases. They had
to do a certain quota of cases like 15 cases a day. Now you can get
15 tough cases, you can get 15 easy cases. How do you make that equitable?
Well they had people who are screening files to make up "bundles"
they called them. Q: For other people to work?
Simermeyer: Yes. Of hard cases and easy cases to get the
right mix. Totally unproductive. Q: Instead of just working
them. Simermeyer: Yes. And that's judgmental
anyway. How do you know the tough case is a tough case until you get
into it enough? How do you know an easy case is a easy case because
something can come up at the last minute? Anyway, all that kind of
stuff, and the files were driving him crazy because they were stacked
in file cabinets all over the buildings. They were moving from one
division to another in gurneys. Do you know what gurneys are--like
in the post office--these big tubs. So you had gurneys of files moving
from one location to another. While they're in transit, people couldn't
get to them. So they got to a point where they had to have the freeze.
Have you ever heard about the freeze?
If you had a problem in the Region about a case and you couldn't find,
you couldn't get an answer from anyone, you'd call some telephone
number--I think that's the way it worked--and you put the name on
a freeze list. Somebody in our Regional office--the BDOO regional
office--would make up the list and get it over to them. And on Friday
morning everything would stop, and people would go looking for these
cases in the gurneys, in the file cabinets, on the desks. In order
to find them to find them to find out... Q: So everything
had to stop moving so people could try to find it? Simermeyer:
Yes. That's why they called it a freeze. Everything froze. Totally
unproductive. So he recognized these problems, and the problems were
magnifying. Workloads were increasing, the backlogs were increasing,
and it was out of hand. So anyway that's what he was complaining about
when he said why should I take this job. I didn't realize all of that
then, but I thought later how big a piece I had bitten off.
Anyway, we got the directors of management and it was my job to bring
them in and get them oriented and set up a program that would give
them training--experience in budget, in management--in all the things
they needed because a lot of them were people from the field organization
quite obviously. That's were we were looking to for the new blood
for the new look: people to understand the problems of the field and
bring it in. We recruited some outstanding people. We recruited some
that weren't that outstanding. We did our best. We had people like
Lou DeLucas who later became the Director in South Eastern. Pat Kalagearie
who later became Associate Commissioner.
So, they all saw this as a opportunity because they all got a grade
out of it. They all had to go through somewhat the same transition
too, moving from where they were in the field organization. They were
fairly successful with their work, but there was not any great hope
of a grade 15. They were all grade 14s. It was a career opportunity
and so forth.
They came in and we had been a whole program of training and management
and organization. Labor relations and Willoughby Abner's recommendations
came in. They called for a whole new focus on labor relations to try
to bring it into a cooperative mode. Hugh McKenna was really dedicated
to that. We put so much time in.
We did set up a labor relations staff and, on that staff, one of the
people who passed through was Herb Doggette who came in. We recruited
him as assistant director of management in Chicago, out of Watts.
He had been in Watts, and he may have been an ARR at that time. He
came in, but was on his way to a Congressional fellowship. So we got
him basically to get him into the organization for the future. Then
he was in Chicago and then I don't know who suggested it, probably
Hugh, that he come to Baltimore and take a crack at the labor relations
job for a while before he went off in his fellowship which he did
do. He wasn't there that long to make a substantive input just because
of lack of time.
Anyway the whole scenario was very demanding in the labor relations
area, because it called for meetings with the Payment Center people,
management people, the directors in principal, and with the presidents
of the locals, and Art Johnson who was the head of the OPEC or whatever--he
was the national head in Kansas City. They met locally and negotiated
locally and they sent a lot of stuff into Baltimore. It had to be
reviewed and we had to go back and forth a lot of staff work.
Then Hugh wanted to have meetings, dialogue. So we had meetings in
Hartford, Connecticut. I remember one in Houston, Texas; one in Indianapolis,
Indiana. They were in neutral locations offsite--not PSCs, not program
center sites, not Baltimore. We'd travel out there, and we'd have
an agenda, and they'd have an agenda, and we'd go through this. It
was such an extensive effort to try to bring them into a cooperative
mode.
In truth, I feel like they acted like spoiled brats. I mean they thought
this was something that they were entitled to and something that they
were going to have a hand in and they wanted it. They didn't want
to be just partners. They wanted to be at least spokesmen for the
employees and they were doing to tell management how to do it. Got
into all kinds of questions about standards and quality and union
time, grievances, the appraisal system--it just went on and on.
That was sort of a major part of the effort with the Directors of
Management in the PCS, too, because they were the principal point
talking to the directors. Of course the union didn't like that because
before they had been dealing with the Director of the PC, now they
have to deal with this new guy who just had come from the field. He
doesn't understand their problems. Well we went on through that whole
thing, and it was there when I left.
But in the meantime, two other major efforts that started to come
into play. One was to break away from the concepts that had these
gurneys moving around and these paper bound organizations. Hugh decided,
or somebody Jim Matarazzo--you didn't know that name. He was a specialist,
staff person for Hugh McKenna. Very gentle, as a lamb, great mind,
not a good presenter, but he did research and some others on a payment
center within a payment center which is the beginning of the module.
Instead of have work moving from division to division, to floor to
floor to floor--in some cases building to building, you had these
modules set up.
And you know what a module is? Everything was integrated. It was under
much tighter control, and the paper didn't move as far as it used
to. You could develop a sense of teamwork and so forth, responsibility
with the work in your module, which was related to Social Security
numbers so it was not strictly on a geographic assignment. Like module
one didn't have Maine. But there was some tendency towards that because
how the numbers had been distributed initially, and it still had a
heavy impact on the workload--the origin of the workload.
So that started up. Then he had Jim Matarazzo and others who were
the principals develop this and present it. We went to meetings there
with all the PC directors. I remember so well Julius Berman who was
then the director of Great Lakes. He had been a manager in Chicago
and really wasn't cut out of the old school, the way the other guys
had been.
When they presented this story, this picture of the module to Hugh,
he rose up in great protest. "Hugh that is a blueprint for disaster!"
McKenna was completely taken back. Julius wanted no part of this.
He didn't want to go through the transition, the reformation if you
want to call it that, of getting into this mode. He tore it up and
down. Well Hugh got a hold of Julius later and tore him up and down,
I'm told; I wasn't there to see it happen. But Julius learned to keep
his mouth quiet in those kinds of meetings, but he had never kept
it quiet completely. He was a another great character. They used to
write highlight reports--the PC Directors--to Hugh every week about
what they thought was happening and what wasn't happening and why
it should happen.
Julius had been a journalism major. He was the greatest writer. He
had a great sense of humor, sarcastic, but he also used it almost
like a machete. If he had a requisition into us for another 500 gurneys,
and we had called out and told the Director of Management GSA had
to get a new contract or something like that, and we had to wait for
it, it didn't suit at all. It came in in the form of a highlight about
how could he be expected to run a program center when he couldn't
get something like a gurney to move the folders, and they would have
to sit on the floor someplace. So McKenna would get a hold of that,
and he would write a note on it and send it down the line to me, to
the Director of Management. What are you doing about this? We explained
to the guy what we were doing but he didn't like that answer. So we
liked to get Julius's reports because they were so humorous but we
dreaded getting them because he was zinging us all the time. He knew
that when he'd do that Hugh would get on our tail. Q:
Now I imagine that he was not only one who was apposed to the ideal
of going to this modular stuff. Was there a lot resistance to this?
Simermeyer: They were all opposed. This was radical.
And these directors of the payment centers--we now had John McConnie
in New York, who was an old timer there. He had been there before
under Dick Brannan. Ed Sabatini in Philadelphia who replaced Joe Tie,
who had retired. And Al Listermen in Birmingham who was an old timer
but gentle. He was probably the most willing. Joe White in Kansas
City, who was an old timer; he was a country boy. You never got an
argument from him. You just got a lot of country philosophy to let
you know he didn't think much of the idea. Walter Bond in San Francisco
who was very intelligent. He really didn't buy into this thing, but
he wasn't openly defiant. He was willing to give it a try. Julius
Berman of course in Chicago. So those guys would get together and
go through this presentation.
We were kind of on the sidelines except that we weren't. The management
aspects of this modularization were tremendous. Q: This
should be an operational issue. Simermeyer: It
was--but the budget, the equipment, the logistics, the moves?
Q: Labor management relations. Simermeyer:
Keep the operation going while you do this and the whole thing. Directors
and management were very heavily involved to support it, not as the
principals but as the main support.
We had the modularization coming along and it looked, it was a monumental
thing. So we tried, as I recall in mid-America which was Kansas City,
which was Joe White, which was probably as good an audience as we're
going to get. They set it up on a mini basis. They didn't do the whole
Program Center, but they configured some modules, and they watched
and evaluated them.
We got through that. We were there then, I'm talking 1969, I guess,
and of course what we focused on, too, was the need for new space,
new buildings because the old buildings were so antiquated and outdated
and not even in--the operation wasn't necessarily in one building.
They had gone into multiple buildings like New York had the Lepbrack
Center, where they were first downtown, they moved up to the Lepbrack
center. They had a spin off at Hunt's Point, and Chicago they had
a building across town which made life even more difficult when those
guys used to drop folders off the back of trucks as they were delivering
from one building to another. Then we get feedback from people in
the Region. Hugh was a very unhappy guy.
It turned out that we needed--we had to go for--new space: a new building
that would suit this modular operation and be up to date. They were
letting in worn out warehouses and everything else. So that became
a Director of Management focus. We circled around that one and decided
that the best place, because I think our lease was running out or
something, and it was not good space anyway, was Birmingham, Alabama.
Lou DeLucas was the Director of Management. Lou became a disciple
of getting a new building, a Taj Mahal. We went through all this work
to structure what it would look like, and expansion possibilities,
and where the different components would be. We took field trips.
I remember going to Hartford, Connecticut with Jim Matarazzo, who
was the guy I told you about, working on the modular structure and
Lou DeLucas and me. We met with Al Ragazino who was the manager of
Hartford. He took us around to visit all these insurance companies.
Hartford and all others up there. I can't recall the names. But they
were very cooperative in giving us information as to how they thought
they should be done and what they had done, and all the other amenities,
too--the cafeteria, the nurses' facilities, and EAA, and the whole
9 yards.
And so Lou came out of that thoroughly enmeshed in this operation.
We had some, or he had some, expert advice--architects and others
who were in the Birmingham area who fit it in with him. He had the
basic idea from what he'd learned from Al Listermen and being in Birmingham
plus what he saw in Connecticut. Developed what turned out to be Prototype
for the new program service center. Q: On that terminology
question, did you change the name then to Program Service Center as
a result of this change to modularization or, tell me about why we
made that change. Simermeyer: I don't know.
Q: And when we made it. Simermeyer: I
don't know. Except that it had been called the Payment Center, and
Hugh put a great deal of stock in words and the meaning and message
of words. To him Payment Center was a misnomer because they were not
making payments, they were handling the paper. Payments were made
by the Treasury Department, they were made by tapes at that point.
So it really wasn't a Payment Center, from my recollection, just like
he conjured up the words Service Representative, he conjured up the
term Program Service Center to illustrate that it was not just an
initial payment, it was the servicing of the beneficiary all the way
through the AERO; with the falloff from AERO, the manual workload,
the annual earnings test that they had to do, with all the things
that had to be involved with when somebody died--they had to adjust
all the benefits, they had collect overpayments. It was a whole range
of activities that really did not suit the word Payment Center. I
don't know if anything more dramatic came with that, I can't recall.
I don't think anybody got a grade out of it, or anybody got anything
out of it other than it was a more descriptive term. Q:
Now just to jump ahead on this same subject for a second. Then later
on, we named them Processing Centers and I think you had something
to do with that. Tell me about that while were on that subject of
terminology. You renamed them again, later on. You changed them to
Processing Centers, right? Simermeyer: Well,
yes, partly because my recollection is that I wanted to get a universal
title. That was down in the office of Central Operations, OCO--I had
6 PSCs, 1 DIO, 1 ODO, 1 OCRO. Each one was doing a different kind
of work. But I wanted to get a common terminology so that when I wrote
to anybody I didn't have to explain why I have 6 of these, and one
of these and one of these and one of these. I just created a universal
term "Processing Center" because they're all processing
workloads. Maybe not the best word, but it was a universal word that
suited all of them, and nobody could argue with it. I think that's
why I did it.
That had not been the structure before OCO came along. You had just
the PCS.
Space became paramount. We were working on this building and this
maturing. We got contracts and we started building. Then Hugh decided
he wanted to go on and do other things too. In the meantime Jack Futterman
had engineered this activity at the Dickinson Building because of
expanding workloads. In the Dickinson Building he created that thing
or had Dickinson build a structure that went from the original 2 story
low rise to that central tower to handle all their workloads. Then
they pulled some other disability units from other places and put
them in there.
He, Futterman, thought he had an inside track with Dickinson because
they did this so fast and with the minimum of red tape, and it was
all going to be a model for the future for any kind of large building
we wanted to do. So Hugh became entranced with this and decided he
wanted to but up a new one in San Francisco because again we had poor
space and I forget what the lease terms were.
He decided that it would be a good place to start and kind of a new
twist. Bob Ball had moved Social Security headquarters from downtown
Baltimore to Woodlawn, into farmland and then over the years you've
seen what's happened to that plant. Well that's not what he was looking
at directly but indirectly that by moving into an area outside the
downtown area, you'd get a much better environment--work environment
that is--and labor supply that would also enhance equal opportunity,
because he was interested and active in that area too.
So his decision then was to try to go to Walnut Creek outside San
Francisco. Because at that point the BART was expanding out to Walnut
Creek and he thought that would be a great opportunity. They'd run
that line out to Walnut Creek from the downtown area. You could have
your minorities coming out on the subway to work or whatever, for
work in that area. You'd have new space, new area--everything brand
new. Unfortunately when he and Jack went out to survey and discuss,
negotiate, whatever they did, I wasn't party to that, I just heard
about it.
It went down the tubes because the Congressmen at that point were
making decisions that were, what they wanted were, Federal Buildings
in downtown ghetto areas to revitalize the downtown area. They didn't
see moving to Walnut Creek as serving their problems. And these would
be the Congressmen whose district were not in Walnut Creek. They wanted
Federal money to be poured into downtown areas and thus enhance that
vesco, which wasn't totally without merit but it put the kibosh on
all the dreams that Hugh had had for these kinds of expansions.
If you look today, you will find that with the exception with South
Eastern which is where Lou DeLucas is, I think he got into a fairly
good area. By good, I mean the economy and the environment in the
surrounding area was good. But you look at Chicago, New York, Philadelphia,
San Francisco. Kansas City didn't get into that because Kansas City
was in a Federal Building, so they moved out in the Federal Building.
In fact that's the one place where we never did get new space and
had to make space modifications. That was the newest of all the buildings.
As I think back maybe that's one reason why we went for the modularization
there because the space there was more acceptable.
While all this is going on, we're dynamically trying to relocate,
dynamically trying to build up mods, dynamically trying to improve
labor relations, dynamically trying to get our directors and managers
up to speed. They're really getting a full test after coming from
an ARR job in the field. This was a whole new adventure. We got to
the end of that period.
By 1970 I had been in there for 1968, �69, �70--all this time, I was
getting a lot of flack from Hugh McKenna about why this wasn't getting
done on time and that wasn't getting done on time. You asked me what
kind of a man he was. He was dynamic and forceful, but he was non-forgiving.
He was just a driver. I'm saying to myself he gave me no real promise
of any opportunity after 3 years of this, I'm saying to myself this
could be a long siege. Gene Brees was still the Deputy Director, and
I'm chugging along, beating on all these things he wanted done right
away.
So I said to myself, it's time to look for something else and see
if I can take another turn on my career. I never had a job that lasted
more than 2 years except for the claims rep job; it was four years
there. So, this is after my time anyway. I saw this posting on the
board for this program evaluation job, under the Assistant Commissioner
for Field, Tom Parrott. I read it. It was a brand new job. It had
pretty broad job description: to set up an organization, under the
Assistant Commissioner Field, tied into the Regional Commissioner's,
to have a field staff at each Region to conduct....to carry out what
sort of turned up later to me, I can't recall who told me, or why,
or how, but it seemed like the Department was anxious to have a program
evaluation capability at their level, which would be under the Regional
Directors. |
Now if there was anything that
SSA never wanted to do was to become folded under the Regional Directors,
anyway they could avoid. When this came to light that the Regional
Director would have this staff and this capability, Bob Ball kind
of seized the opportunity and suggested setting it up in SSA. If we
had our own, then we don't need their's, right? It sounded so simple
and so that really was the basis for it.
There wasn't just suddenly a need for this program evaluation function
that arose out of amendments or legislation or anything. I didn't
know that at the time, but it didn't matter. It was a job where I
would have a whole different frontier so to speak.
I had a small staff of my own of about 6 people, augmented by people
coming in on staff development programs and things like that. Then
each Region had a Program Evaluation Officer with some support staff--senior
and junior members and a couple of clericals. So it was not large.
It was like the whole organization was maybe not more than 40 or 50
in number you know. Q: And what kind of work was this?
I am not sure what you mean by Program Evaluation? What do you mean
by that? Simermeyer: Well it was a little nebulous
because there really wasn't a, just like the distinction between Payment
Center and Program Service Center and Processing Center. Words had
a life of their own. So Program Evaluation could almost be anything
you wanted it to be, and it landed up being that. I decided in order
to make this thing function we'd have Central Office for directed
projects, augmented by regional projects, which the Regional Commissioner
would dream up that he wanted, because of some local condition in
the Region that he thought needed some evaluation by his staff. At
this point the Regional Commissioner had housed an umbrella organization,
right, with the BDOO and the BRSI and BDI and BHI, and I don't think,
I don't know if BHI was in there or not; maybe they had already broken
away. So he needed capability to be able to look over the whole organization,
not just focus in on one component or another, although he wasn't
precluded from that.
So that was sort of the concepts that were being developed and some
of them like Murray DuBarry, and my recollection is, took very strong
interest in equal opportunity across the component lines, you know,
were they all carrying it out the way that they should? The one project
that I decided on, which turned out to be a monster, was evaluating
the appraisal system across organizational lines. Where BDOO's appraisals
inflated verus BRSI's, and was one region's verus another region's?
That turned out to be like I said a big kettle of fish. Q:
Now the field organization that reported to Tom Parrott, did it have
BDOO and BRSI and all of that, or did you go across?
Simermeyer: Yes, Tom Parrott was sort of a figurehead, I mean
he sat up on the 9th floor; and he reported directly to Bob Ball,
and under him he directed the Regional Commissioners. They in turn
directed their regional components.
Tom Parrot, that's another part of the story, Tom Parrott was not
Hugh McKenna. He was not aggressive. He was not forceful. He was brilliant.
He was a good friend, but if I went in there and talked to Tom and
said, "Well listen," you really had to get his attention
first. He really wasn't that eager to have me to come in and say give
me a plan of action for the next six months or so.
He would say "What would you like to talk about?"
And so I would say," It looks to me like we're having a real
problem in this area and we really ought to set up a program of evaluation
study to take a look at it and see what we might do about it."
"Well have you talked to the Regional Commissioner?"
"Yes." "Has he talked to the Regional
Representative?" "Well, yes." "Did
they agree with it?" "Some do, and some don't."
"Well maybe you ought to go talk to Hugh McKenna whoever
and get their reading on it."
He was not saying it's good, let's do it; or it's no good, let's not
do it. It was sort of like, if you want to do it, go sell it. So I
did. I remember in one case of going down to Hugh McKenna to explain
why I wanted to do this thing which impacted on his Program Service
Centers. First I went to Gene Brees who saw no problems with this
at all.
I'm really on the status ladder. I'm below all of these guys. They're
Directors and Deputy Bureau Directors, and I'm a Staff Director.
Q: Except organizationally you're a higher level.
Simermeyer: But they knew that Tom Parrott wasn't going
to raise a sword and say... Q: Okay. Simermeyer:
But Gene Brees was very cooperative and he'd agree, but then would
come another stonewall, and I couldn't get through. I'd go and talk
to Tom Parrott, and he'd say go talk to Hugh McKenna about it.
Well, I went down to talk to Hugh McKenna, and he read me the riot
act. He said, "You know the problems I have. You know the problems
I had. You worked on the problems," and he said, "you left."
That was it. I got my Auschwitz number tattooed on my arm. So that
was another thing I wasn't going to make any great progress working
through that kind of a structure. So we worked around it.
By that time Jim Murray by that time had gone back to be Regional
Commissioner in Atlanta, and Lou Gossett was one of our best people
down in Atlanta, Program Evaluation Officer. So I get Lou and talk
to him and say, "What do you think about this?" He would
say, "Well let me take a look at it." He would get on the
horn to the people in Birmingham and people in the field organization
and whatever, and he'd say, "Well we'll set up a study and do
this and this and this." He would go over and interview people
and do whatever he had to do. I don't even know if Hugh McKenna even
knew what was happening or if it mattered, because now it was being
handled at this level. So we were getting feedback on the problem,
but only from one place, not the whole country.
So it was like that. It was not a clear cut mandate. It was not a
clear cut program and like I said it covered everything--program evaluation,
appraisal systems, equal opportunity, some substantive issues, difficulties
between BDI and BDOO in terms of communications, because BDI at this
point was now the stepchild.
The PSC's were now being modularized and coming into a closer alliance
with the field. Where before they had been pretty antagonistic to
each other, they started to come closer together. So the bottom line
is that I was working that job and had again a kind of a new experience
bringing these guys together for the first time, having meetings.
We met in various places. Boston was one location to talk about that
Region. We met in Atlanta I think. We met in different regional cities
where we would see how that Region operated and tried to transmit
some of the dynamism, like from Lou Gossett to some of the other people
who were less energetic.
Because these Regional Commissioners had a heavy hand in selecting
the Program Evaluation Officers. And some of them had picked live
wires, like Lou Gossett and others had picked unlive wires, you know,
who were a little hard to motivate, particularly since they were sitting
in a Region reporting to the Regional Commissioner. He started giving
them other kinds of diverse assignments because they had staff and
capability. I really couldn't fight that because I wasn't getting
a lot of support from the top.
Karl Bredenberg was a Deputy at the time to Tom Parrott, but he really
wasn't that interested in this whole function and then I think he
went off to Florida as a District Manager and Sarah Juni took his
place. Sarah had been a policy person. Sarah had no real interest
in this area either so that was probably the least satisfying of all
the experiences I had. I got myself into it and then after I figure
how do we get out of it.
So I was sitting here and along comes the SSI Program which was now
1972, which was not SSI at that point it was ABDA--Aged Blind Disabled
Assistance. I got signals you know that they were looking for people
and this was a Super Grade, I think. I was not yet a Super Grade.
I was a Grade 15 all of those years. That was another thing that bugged
me about Hugh McKenna. He could have made some effort to try to reward
because I took a financial beating to come here. There were no state
taxes in Ohio. I came in here in at 5 percent off the top, plus all
of the closing costs to move in, and they didn't reimburse you for
that stuff.
I'd taken a financial beating and Hugh McKenna's just saying, "Why
don't you just get the job done." "Yes, well why
don't you sweeten it up a little?"
Well anyway to get on past that point to the Super Grade, that looked
attractive to me. The place where I was wasn't that great so I went
down to an interview with Sumner Whittier, you know that name?
Q: I know him very well. He comes to see me occasionally.
Simermeyer: That's right you told me.
Sumner Whittier, I want to describe his personality. You know him
better than I know him. But he had a dream, and it didn't seem to
be going any place. Nixon was pushing, I guess it was then Welfare
Reform, but he wasn't pushing it like he wanted. He was pushing it
like it was a thing to do, almost like Clinton pushing Welfare Reform
now. You know--with regrets. Q: I think that there is
a lot of similarity there. Simermeyer: So any
way Sumner says that he had a job opening in Administration and Systems
and with my background in SSA I would be qualified etc., etc. I said
okay, and it was a Super Grade.
I would be reporting to Paul Cotton. I met with Paul. He was very
charming, persuasive, dynamic. I thought that he was great after coming
from the organization I had just been in. We were going to conquer
the world in a peaceful way. So I got down there on that job. It went
on for 3 or 4 or 5 months and Martha McSteen was there then, she was
the Assistant Director for the Field.
She had the field organization. Martha was looking at all of the pros
and cons of what was happening, where she was, and what was the best
thing for her. After about 5 months, she decided that the best thing
for her was to be back in Dallas where I think she had been pushed
back because the Regional Commissioner was waiting to register or
something. She didn't get that job. But she went back there. She was
the Director of Health Insurance in Dallas when she went back there.
She had been in Denver too. She vacated the job.
In the meantime the organization was moving forward with possibility
of legislation and so forth. Sumner decided that I would be better
off in the field organization, with my background, in setting up a
field organization, because I had done things like that before.
Q: All right explain to me a little bit about what the structure
was there. Sumner was the Director. Was Paul Cotton his Deputy? And
then there were sort of Assistant, I don't know what you would call
them, Assistant Directors? Simermeyer: Yes, we
were Assistant Directors, because we didn't have a Bureau.
Q: So you were Assistant Directors? You had one for?
Simermeyer: Well I was Administration Assistant. This was kind
of the early days okay, not the full fledged organizational structure.
Q: You had Administration Assistant and then Martha had
the Field, and was there another one, or was that it?
Simermeyer: I think that there was Quality Appraisal and then
there was maybe State Relations. There were components that didn't
relate to other components in SSA because we were now in an environment
where we were interfacing with all of the States. Q:
Now I want to sort of plant the question here and you can talk about
it now or talk about it later as it evolves. One of the things that
happens with the SSI Program as we begin to implement it is that we
have lots of problems. You talked earlier about problems in committing
Medicare, but we have even worse problems implementing SSI. A lot
of folks depict that period in that whole transition as one in which
SSA stumbled to some degree. So my question is at
this early point in 1972, were there already having signs of that?
Were we already having problems? Did that happen later in 1974? Just
be aware of that question and tell me how you saw all of that happening
as it unfolded? Simermeyer: It happened more
in 1973. 1972 was still early. There was no legislation, a lot of
conversation in Congress. The organizational structure that Paul Cotton
had set up, incidentally we go back one other step too, Sumner Whittier
came into the organization, he told me later, fully expecting to be
named Commissioner when Bob Ball left.
Bob Ball, he had been tied into Elliott Richardson. You know that
name? Elliott Richardson was his campaign manager. And he thought,
and I guess Elliott thought, he owed him something. So when this thing
came along, this a possibility of legislation, it was a home. Sumner
Whittier had been involved in some dynamic things. He had been the
head of the VA. He was the head of Easter Seals. Q: He
was Lieutenanat Governor in Massachusetts.
Simermeyer: Yes. He was Lieutenant Governor, ran for Governor and
lost. Built up a big campaign debt which he worked to pay off as I
understand it. But anyway he was slated to become the Commissioner
he thought and Paul Cotton, who had been recruited as a Deputy to
Sumner, fully expected to take Sumner's job.
When that didn't happen, they brought in Bruce Cardwell whose background
was budget and finance to extensively--from what I can see--Nixon
wanted somebody to put reigns on Weinberger and put the reigns on
SSA, try to cut back. This was the beginning of cutting entitlement,
not with legislation, but with other things.
So Cap the Knife got his title there as I recall. Sumner didn't get
the job. Bruce Cardwell did. Sumner started showing some frustration,
and Paul Cotton started showing some frustration. But that sort of
came along as time went by. It wasn't apparent right in the beginning.
But because we had no real staff or organization or whatever...
Q: No program. I wonder what you were doing in that area?
Simermeyer: No program? Well we had a cadre of people
who were people from throughout SSA who saw an opportunity maybe to
get in on the ground floor, maybe a grade down the road, or maybe
for good reasons and bad reasons and other reasons, they all came
in.
So Paul Cotton sets up this arrangement of Functional Staff Officers
and Activity Task Officers. Functional Task Officers (FTOs) and ATOs
(Activity Task Officers).
Functional Task Officers were people--sort of disregarded grades and
former jobs and so forth. They were set up in different areas, like
one was enumeration. You had to enumerate all these people under this
program if you are going to pay them under Social Security. A lot
of them had been enumerated and a lot of them hadn't been enumerated.
Then you had to convert the State rolls over to a uniform Federal
payment file so you could start paying benefits and that was the conversion
FTO and ATO.
The FTO, I think, was the top and the ATO was the support. There were
different groups. I landed up with this hodge podge of people and
these functions and trying to put together a strategy. Like you said
we had no program, we had no law. We were totally ignored by the field
organization. Like, "What are you getting in our hair for? We've
got real work to do, and you guys come along, and you guys want to
talk about these possibilities..." and so forth.
So it was not a pleasant time even though one of these guys in the
Field Organization was Harry Overs, who was in charge of Operations.
We had worked together in Cleveland. We worked together in other places
and he later became a great friend. But, in those days he was so dedicated
to that Field Organization. I am trying to get along and be able to
function the way we were supposed to do it, the way Paul Cotton wanted
it.
Sumner of course had the big overview picture. He didn't get into
all of this detail all day, he is worried about Congress and the States.
Q: He is a politician after all. Simermeyer:
Yes! If it smelled of politics that was his baby. But the rest of
it, he just wanted somebody he could rely on. He was relying on Paul
Cotton until they started to have their split. But any way, we went
along like that and that was when I was an Administration Assistant.
When I got into the Field Organization, things had jelled a little
bit.
My memory is a little fuzzy now, I'm going back to 1974, that's over
20 years, right? I can't remember what I had for breakfast. But they
had started to get a feel, to recognize the need for a Field Organization.
They didn't want to give them a title like Regional Rep, which I wanted,
of course, was stature, grade, get good people, had to call them RPO's
Regional Planning Officers. What does that mean?
To begin with, in the semantics of the government, you couldn't call
them Regional Reps because there was no program, no bureau and so
you had RPO's. I had go out then and recruit the RPO's which I did.
I mean I didn't recruit them unilaterally, but I had to work with
the Regional Commissioners to identify these people, get them processed
through, get them set up, and then set up a small staff with each
one of them. They were starting to work out into their areas in their
States and make contact like Pete DiSturco with Albany and Trenton
and the people in Albany and Trenton talking about what if and how
do we do it and so forth.
So it was all kind of formative but not really going any place because
the law was hanging there. It looked like it might not pass and then
all of a sudden one day Sumner had gone over to a hearing or something
and came back and had a bottle of champagne. Did he ever tell you
that? Q: No. Simermeyer: Got us together
in the office, and he breaks open champagne which is strictly against
Government regulations. But he had gotten the word that the House
or whatever had passed the bill. Q: H.R.1.
Simermeyer: Yes. Now we have a life. So we all had a little
paper cup of champagne and celebrated the occasion. Now we got some
resources which mainly went to the field. Of course, they were claiming
that they didn't nearly have enough to do and it had to be done on
a short time frame because the law was passed in what, late 1972?
Q: That is correct late 1972. Simermeyer:
It was to be implemented January 1, 1974. Q: Earlier
than that I think? Before 1974 and then it got pushed back. I think
the law was that you were going to do it in 1973 and then you guys
pushed it back a few months, not many. Simermeyer:
Okay. Pushing it back, they also added on some more complications
so it was not just like giving us just 3 months of grace or whatever.
So now we are in a sudden deal where we had to go through this transformation,
get all of these people enumerated, which was the workload for the
district offices, go through the conversion which was a tremendous
workload for the regional people because they weren't going to do
it. But they had to go out and negotiate it. They started negotiating,
well had been negotiating, but now it got serious and States were--some
were in favor and some were not. Some were really negative and some
of them were devilish.
I mean like New York City went through a conversion where I believe
and we believe that they deliberately goofed up the records of a lot
of drug addicts. They also had poor information in their files anyway
so maybe they didn't really deliberately goof them up. They just got
goofed up. So it really hit the fan in January 1974.
But other States were cooperative, but in many cases it was counter
productive. What we are doing is hiring state workers who see their
jobs going down the tubes right because they are going to convert
all of these records, and then that's their workload--kiss it goodbye.
So what motivation did they have? They're spread all around the country
in all of these different jurisdictions, and some of them had state
wide systems, and some of them had county wide systems. and some had--like
New York City had--it's own jurisdiction.
You are trying to deal with all of them, and you are bringing all
of that data into Baltimore through--I think it was large tapes they
were sending in--and they were getting goofed up. They didn't get
delivered, or they weren't done right, or they were not done in the
right format. They had to be sent back and done over. Meantime the
clock is running, and we are paying for all of this. It was really
getting scary in terms converting this workload over so we could make
a payment in January of 1974. Then all of the nay sayers are saying,
you know, "We never thought that it was a good idea for the Federal
Government to take it over and now they are going to make a mess of
it."
By then the State Supplementation come along. It threw in all of these
other clinkers about modifications and how do you determine the housing,
the size of the family, or whether they had a working relative, or
what the level was going to be--whatever. It was just a monumental
problem that the regional people and the people I had known in Central
Office who were in the structure were really grappling with to try
to bring some order out of chaos. There was no place that you could
go to get prior experience to see how it was done before.
You have questions? Am I getting too fast for you? Q:
No. No, you do, and let me put them to you. One thing
that happened that just occurred to me, when we implemented SSI we
didn't follow the familiar pattern that we had with RSI, which was
with the Program Service Centers--with the field offices taking claims
and adjudicating them in the PSCs. Instead we made a decision somewhere
along this way that the Field Office would adjudicate these cases
and that there wouldn't be PSC involvement. How did that come about?
Simermeyer: We had an earlier decision too that I forgot.
When I was back in maybe Administration Assistance that, like you
said, instead of using the PC's which were by now starting to come
out of their own trauma and you know, starting to stabilize but not
to add on to this workload and put them down again.
They decided to have Assistant Payment Centers. There were going to
be 50 of them, one in each State. They were going to handle the variations
within the State, I mean State Supplementation and/or whatever else.
Then, they would be the hub and the District Offices would feed into
them for information. Q: Okay. Simermeyer:
Well that was sort of before the legislation. And when the legislation
broke I didn't go to those meetings either, but I remember hearing
that Art Hess and the other guys that run the table at that point,
Hess was sort of driving SSI or the forerunner, decided that it was
not economically feasible to setup 50 of these locations and staff
them, put in the system, and equip it to go in the timeframe that
they had so they abandoned the whole thing. Then they decided to go
with the District Offices as the focal point and to have the data
fed from the DOs into the Central Office and to bypass the Program
Service Centers. Q: But that created other problems, because
you had to also implement new systems capabilities to do that? You
put in place your process that was in one sense was more streamlined
than anything that you had had before, but it meant that you had to
have a new system, a new telecommunications system which drove the
creation of SSADARS right? Simermeyer: Right.
Q: Tell me about that. Simermeyer:
I can't. You get fuzzy because it was so long ago. But SSADARS was
supposed to be the forerunner. Everybody was heralding it as the great
answer. Then when they put in SSADARS and it didn't deliver, then
that was compounding the problems. That happened because of all the
other problems. The poor data that was transmitted, and the fact that
the payment tapes weren't processed properly whenever they didn't
use the right tape and on and on. SSADARS was kind of one more problem
that had started out as being the magic answer and turned out not
to be the magic answer. I can't really give you a lot of depth in
that area because it was not my forte. Q: Two other things
happened organizationally. One of them was at some point you became
a Bureau. You became BSSI at one point. Simermeyer:
BSSI. Yes. Q: Did that happen before the legislation
or after the legislation? Simermeyer: After the
legislation to my recollection. Q: And what did that do
to your operations, anything particular? Simermeyer:
No. We still had, I don't know if we ever got to calling the Regional
Planning Officers Regional Reps in BSSI--I'm vague on that. But I
know that as far as our organization centrally we now had an ABD for
Management with Don Helms, his picture is in there some place. One
for Systems who started out with a couple of old DAO types. They didn't
work out so they eventually wounded up being Renny DiPentima and Quality
Appraisal and that ended up with Earl Young who then transformed into
Pete Wheeler and me in Operations and Lou somebody in State Relations
or I forget if that was her direct title and this other guy, I can't
think of his name, Williamson, I think? But anyway he was one of these
guys that Sumner had brought in out of the blue, and he was supposed
to have all of the answers, but he was more showcase than anything
else. So that became our organization centrally. Q: You
also alluded earlier to the idea that Paul Cotton and Sumner at some
point had a sort of falling out. Could you tell me what that was about
or what you alluded to there. What was going on in terms of the internal
management of this organization? Simermeyer: Well
Sumner, as you know, was focused on the Congressional relations, the
State relations and his ability to make presentations which led to
his creation of the Chart Room which led to all of these charts that
went on almost to infinity. We had a whole staff that did nothing
but develop and work and maintain these charts.
Then we had briefings in the Chart Room, and we were expected to know
everything about every chart that was in our area of responsibility.
He would put us through this interminably, and then he would have
staff meetings. As we got down to the deadline, it got to be daily
staff meetings. They would start at 9 o'clock and they would go until
maybe until 10:30. In addition to that he had briefings by ABD on
a one on one basis in which you would explain your situation and he
would throw questions at you. That was like once a week.
So we were landing out spending half of our time in meetings, staff
meetings, other meetings, conversation which seemed to be totally
fruitless. Meantime, all of these problems are compounding and Paul
Cotton, who is trying to drive the organization, is totally frustrated
by Sumner's approach, what he thought his priorities were. They didn't
have any open arguments or whatever.
In the meetings they were very civil to each other, but it was not
the kind of relationship that I have found with other Bureau Directors
and Deputies, where one would trust the other. In private conversations,
Paul would get very sarcastic about Sumner. Sumner would not treat
Paul the same way, but he would kind of indicate that he couldn't
count on Paul to do what he wanted in these areas. So it was sort
of like an open division, but not an open conflict. Q:
To go back to the point about the idea that SSA stumbled in implementing
SSI, to some degree, it sounds like this was an insoluble problem,
that some of these problems with the conversion and the data that
we got from the States, that there was simply no way to avoid that
and nobody could have fixed that? Simermeyer:
I believe that. Q: Okay. Some of other things that you
described could be called management issues, and there might have
been a better way to manage them. Some of the others might be Systems
issues, might have been out of our control again. Give me your assessment
of why we stumbled, and whether it was inevitable given the task that
they gave us and the time we had to do it, or whether we could have
avoided it, or give me your overall assessment of how that all happened?
Simermeyer: Well I think that it was almost inevitable
maybe that given more time and more support from the whole SSA structure
and more access to resources early on and if SSADARS had delivered
more according to what it should have done, we might have come out
of that with much fewer scars, but not clean. To me that's an inevitable
problem of trying to make such a massive conversion for the reasons
that I mentioned before. You're dealing with States that are antagonistic,
and people in the States who were antagonistic, and in quite a few
cases even our own local District Office people were antagonistic.
They didn't want any part of this.
California managers were almost in revolt about taking on SSI, down
to the point where down to almost the last minute there was an attempt
to try to put in legislation to exempt California from the SSI Program,
not submitted by our managers, but fostered by our managers. I can
get to that later on too.
In January 1974 when this whole thing erupted, we went live with the
payments system and problems started to occur. They occurred in two
major places, one was in New York City. I shouldn't say in two, in
at least two. New York City was one where these drug addicts, who
were not getting their checks, arrived in the District Offices with
knifes. The people who were unable to get their checks, other people--the
poor citizens arrived in the District Office, couldn't get any assistance
because the system was down, and records were incomplete or incorrect,
and they had no way to take care of their problems.
People were backed up in the District Offices in New York. They were
out to the streets. I don't know if Sumner told you that but to the
point that he hired buses to put on the street where they could sit
in a heated bus anyway and wait until they could take them into the
reception area. When they took them into that reception area they
couldn't do anything for them anyway. Sumner went up and climbed on
those buses to try to reassure those people. He felt so strongly about
it, but there was nothing that he could do about it either.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Ray Lynan was a Deputy to Bob Bynum,
and problems were happening in California all over the west coast.
Ray Lynan decided that he wanted to go out there and Bruce Cardwell
kind of pushed him out I think for the political background I just
mentioned. He called me and asked me if I wanted to go as the SSI
person in Operations to see what was happening.
I talked to Sumner and he said sure, go. I was glad that I was going
to California and not to New York in January. But we went out and
we toured. We went from offices all the way from San Francisco, all
the way down to Los Angeles and visited. Early in the morning saw
the lines outside and talked to the people and Lynan was talking to
the Managers. He was on the telephone back to Baltimore talking to
Bob Bynum. He was trying to wrestle down what was happening and why.
At the end of our tour, Bruce Cardwell came out and had a meeting
with all of the managers in California and Bruce Cardwell and Ray
Lynan. I was excluded because I was a part of that organization.
Bruce Cardwell told them in no uncertain terms that the program was
here to stay, we are going to live with it, you are going work it,
and you are going to do what you have to do, etc. But I mean it was
that kind of a negative attitude, and I don't think that it was restricted
to California. It was just more of apparent in California, which was
another negative. If you got people on this side of the fence who
don't want the thing to work, and people on the other side that don't
want it to work, how is it going to work?
I don't really know why the managers were so ticked off. I think,
you know, the truth going back to my good old friend Tom Hart, that
he was not really driving them to acceptance. He was, I won't say
that he was encouraging them, but he was not doing what he should
do, and the Regional Commissioner I don't think, did what he should
do.
So it's a many sided coin. I don't know of any comparable programs
really, even Medicare you see was not that bad, because we enrolled
people in, they came in, and they filled out the applications and
we entered the data. We didn't take a State file that may not have
been updated in 6 months or updated incorrectly, and try to work up
data elements on a sheet, put it on a tape, send the tape to Baltimore.
So there was no comparison.
Time when I was working for Tom Parrott in this Program Evaluation
area, and after we talked I started thinking about how much did I
accomplish in that job, what did I do, and I wasn't there that long.
But I thought back then, I don't think that I mentioned this before,
but one of the things that came up when I was in the job, and I recognized
that it was partly political in being set up in order to have to give
SSA a facility to head off the Department coming in with its own program
evaluation staff capability and the unknown.
After we got it up and rolling and operating, and the Regions were
functioning with their Regional Projects and so forth, two opportunities
came along that I seized. One was they had an 8-week program at the
Federal Executive Institute for Senior Executives, and I put in for
it. I heard about it and, I put in for it, and Tom Parrott readily
agreed for me that I could go to that. I could not have done that
working for Hugh McKenna or anybody else--to walk out for 8 weeks
would be too much.
That really turned out to be a great opportunity for me, and I appreciated
it. It was a wonderful program. I don't think that they do them any
more, but they did then. It brought together a group of, I guess we
were Grade 15, people then from all over the country at the Federal
Executive Institute in Charlottesville for an 8-week program on lots
of things that were interesting to government employees. A lot of
people--executives, they brought them down from Washington, speakers,
and then we had individual programs.
One of them was at that time--I guess we were really just getting
into becoming aware of the hippies and the new breed that was coming
in--and it was interesting because they took us in that program into
some places downtown where the hippies were living--communal type
things. We had rap sessions with them and it was pretty interesting.
Another one was where we had projects to go out really studying black
culture was the theme. As one of the offshoots, we went to a day care
center down in Petersburg, Virginia, on a trip just to see how things
were. It was so shocking to go down there and see these little black
children in the day care center, and they were so deprived. The day
care center was teaching them how to use the bathroom, how to use
the toilet. They had never even seen a toilet you know.
We got a lot of information and experience out of that. In fact when
we came back the class usually presented a gift at the end to the
Institute in the form of money. One class built a volleyball court
and so forth, but I used whatever powers of persuasion I had to donate
our class gift to this day care center in Petersburg to buy some more
equipment. The head of the facility came up and talked to us, and
we had a banquet at the end and talked about how much he appreciated
that. But as I said that was a wonderful experience I wouldn't have
been able to have if I hadn't taken a Program Evaluation job and out
of that sort of spun off another one.
There was a Regional Director there from Denver whose name I think
was Bob Van Ormam. Maybe it wasn't Bob or Dick, but Dick maybe. As
I mentioned before Regional Directors are political animals. He found
himself out of a job when he came into the Institute. Things sort
of closed in behind him and filled his position. There had been some
other political wrestling going on, and he might have come into the
FEI partly to get off the scene himself. In the meantime they made
this move, and I didn't know all of the ins and outs. But anyway he
landed up being assigned to a Task Force to study Welfare Reform under
Dick Nathan, who was the Under Secretary at that time.
So we had become acquainted in Charlottesville and he propositioned
me to go with him on this Task Force to develop this Welfare Reform
proposal. So I went back and talked to Tom Parrott and again he agreed,
that it was, I guess, that SSA was happy to have some. I was not the
only representative that was there too. Jerry Boyd was there heading
up another group that was kind of competitive. And Renny DiPentima
had come over from SSA, and he and I were mainly the Team Leaders
under Van Orman to develop this strategy for this Welfare Reform.
So we were at Fort McNair, I think, in Virginia during that time we
spent several weeks there. We went over a day, we drove over, we commuted
over and back in the evening. Anyway we finished that project and
got merit certificates of appreciation or whatever for our efforts.
It never went any place. It's kind of one of those efforts maybe like
your folder process. It was political, I think, in terms of the activity
to demonstrate to Congress that we were, that Nixon was actively interested
in this area. Q: This was early in the 1970's? We are
talking about before SSI? Simermeyer: Prelude
to SSI, because it... Q: And before the Family Assistance
Plan? Was it? Simermeyer: In around maybe, I can't
place it chronologically that well. Q: Okay.
Simermeyer: But anyway again it was an interesting exercise
and I got some good out of it, and I think we made some contributions.
But it was another interesting aside in that I never could have done
that if I had stayed with BRSI. I would have been chained to the desk
and told that these are my goals and objectives and told to get them
done. So that accounted for part of the time when I couldn't think
of how that time went by, and I didn't just sit on the 9th floor and
go to Tom Parrott's deputies and so forth. So anyway we jumped from
there through, you said that we went through SSI right? Q:
I think that we finished unless there was more to say there. We talked
about all the implementation problems and conversion.
Simermeyer: Sounded religious you know. And then I talked about
the visit to California and Sumner went up to New York and we got
through the early stages there with tremendous trauma and bad publicity
and systems problems, and it was just terrible.
But we did survive. After the clean up, it started to function better.
The Regional staffs were more established and in place but I don't
recall if they ever got the title of Regional Representative or whatever
for SSI in my time you know. They just went on and on.
So we came up to a period where after the initial shock and after
we got moving--1974--I guess was the first payment was around 1975.
I guess it was that some decisions were made, and I think it was because
there was some residual from all of this activity in 1974--I mean
in terms of bad feelings and Bob Bynum.
I can't recall why, became maybe the Deputy Commissioner over some
kind of reorganization or something, but he decided to, I don't want
to say break up SSI, but reconfigure it and move the people around.
Sumner Whittier was being moved out, I think Pat Libers took his place.
Paul Cotton went back to NASA where he came from. The other Assistant
Directors were sort of shuffled and in that arrangement I was shuffled.
Bob approached me about going to BDI to do an operational job. I had
never had an operational job in headquarters before, and it is more
management and administration and so forth. So this was a new experience.
But I mean he put it in a positive light and also didn't give me any
other choices. He said this is what I wanted you to do.
I guess we weren't SES at that point I don't think, but anyway I went
over to the Dickinson Building. Bill Rivers was the Bureau Director
and the, what happened to the guy before me? Oh somebody I guess left,
and Bill went from his position in charge of Operations, the ABD for
Operations, up to become the Bureau Director, and I backed filled
behind Bill Rivers in Operations.
And so I went in there, spent a little time getting acquainted and
oriented and so forth, because that was a whole new world to me. You
are talking about the disability folders, I mean they were that thick,
and they were going through the mail room and it was a whole different
world. I mean not just the mailroom but then from the mailroom on
through the whole process. There were tubs and gurneys and like they
had in the Program Service Centers. It was stacked all over the place.
It was horrible.
Backlogs and problems in terms of staffing, but not utter despair,
but it needed a lot of support. With no reflection on Bill, I mean
Bill Rivers was doing his job with just an overwhelmed and overwhelming
work load at that point, I think, because of a combination of SSI,
disability, plus the regular disability workload and the nature of
the disability workload. I remember Bruce Cardwell one time said,
"If I had a choice of to which program [this was when SSI was
first starting] I'd rather remove or eliminate in order to help SSA
get balanced, it would not be SSI. It would be Disability." Just
the nature of it created all of the difficulties we were having.
So we set about doing a number of different things. One was to modularize
disability which was a major task because we had to keep it operating
while we did it. The Payment Centers had all ready gone through modularization
so it was not like we discovered it. But it was major effort. First
we had to set up a pilot and maybe the pilot had already been set
up, I think that it had been. They were operating with a couple of
modules--functioning--and then we cut some experience from the pilot
and then had to set up a plan to reconfigure. This was complicated
by the fact that it all had to be done in the existing space. We didn't
have an overload of space.
In addition we didn't have, that building was never built for the
kind of workforce that was in there. When I talked later to other
people about it, it was described as motel type construction. It was
meant to be on a concrete floor, supporting no heavy loads like file
cabinets and other kinds of things. So in that building in fact the
whole files area was all down on the ground floor, so it wouldn't
sink through the floor.
Then as we modularized, of course, we had to move the file cabinets
up into the building and into the modules. It became a matter of physical
stress. We were putting file cabinets in. We could see the file cabinets
tilting as the floor bent, because it was too much overload. So after
some engineers looked at it and decided that we really couldn't do
that, we had to mask the folders along the girders running North,
South, East, and West and then kind of construct the modules around
that.
Little problems like that kept surfacing to make life interesting.
So I remember Dick Robinson, I got him as my Deputy. Harold Waumsa
had been my Deputy. He retired, he was a good guy, but he was kind
of from the old school. Dick Robinson was too, but he had a very good
reputation with the people there and he was a good, hard worker. He
had a lot of credibility with the troops. I kind of put him in charge
of modularization totally. I mean he didn't have anything to do as
my Deputy per se but to go out and see that modularization got done.
And, he did. We pulled that off after extended amount of time and
wrinkles like the one that I described.
We also had to recruit a massive number of Benefit Authorizers because
of the workloads. The question came up about where and how we could
train them. There weren't enough training facilities in the Dickinson
Building, and the people in SSA were not going out of their way to
make training space available to us. It was sort of like you had to
do everything by your own boot straps--pull your own boot straps up.
Lou Enoff was there. He was the ABD for Administration. He was helpful.
But, anyway the bottom line is we had to go out and look for space
to train all these several hundred Benefit Authorizers and that was
an extensive training program. I think it went 26 weeks as I recall.
Q: Do you recall? Simermeyer: No I never
did that.
It was one of the hardest jobs that I think in the organization. But,
whatever it was lengthy. So we went out and looked for space. We went
out and looked at that place on Route 40 which is now the Health Center
for University of Maryland extended health care thing. The Hoschild
Kohn Building in that Mall out there where we didn't take that space
for several reasons. But we did finally land up at St. Charles Seminary
down off Maiden Choice Lane, which is now Charlestown. At that point
the Seminary had closed, but the space was there.
So we went in and got a contract to set up training classes in that
area. And we had as I said, several hundred of these Benefit Authorizers
trainees going there. So we shuttled down back and forth to visit
them, talk to them, and see how they were getting on. It turned out
to be really a great opportunity for them. They liked being together
in an off site location, and they had a good facility there. It was
comfortable.
The Colts were in town then, and they were practicing there. So during
their break or after class, they would go out and they could see the
Colts playing. They had their own intramural space where they could
have games, and they had food brought in. I don't mean we sent a caterer
or anything, but they would send out. They had a standing arrangement
to send out for food, or bring it in, or they brown bagged it so they
got along very well. They really had a wonderful rapport, and it was
a good class. They stuck together I know long after they graduated.
They had reunions and activities and kept track of each because I
think of that environment.
I thought later that it was totally accidental that we set it up that
way, but how good it would have been if we could have done that for
other people like Benefit Authorizers or whoever in Baltimore instead
of what usually happens. You get absorbed into a training room here
or there or whatever and they are not given that kind of opportunity.
We would meet with them, have sessions with them, wrap sessions and
talk with them in general in a group session and then it was a very
interesting time as far as I was concerned. So those two, I guess,
were the major activities in Disability during the time I was there.
During that time they had a reorganization. We went from BDI to ODO.
It's when they set up the Office of Central Operations with Pat Caligiuri
as the Associate Commissioner and Bill Rivers retired. I don't know
whether he had been striking for that job and didn't get it or what,
but anyway he left and other parts of Disability were realigned with
other organizations. The Office of Disability Operations arose out
of the ashes and so I was then, the whatever position? Q:
The Director. Simermeyer: Director as you say.
Director of the Office of ODO and remained in my office on the second
floor, if you know the Dickinson Building, overlooking that fountain
which I was always kind of happy to have except that it spouted water
for about three months in the summertime. Then they turned it off
and somebody came by and looked out the window and described it as
a sewage refining plant. That is what it looked like with all of these
pipes. It was more accurate than I had ever thought about, but anyway
that was my world there.
Other parts of the organization remained in the building because even
though they were realigned I don't think that they were relocated
for a while. Well time went by and Pat (Pasquale) Caligiuri decided
to leave as Associate Commissioner and when he did I guess this was?
Q: It was 1980. Simermeyer: Yes. Let me
see January 1979; that's the Dickinson Building. Q: I
think you were the Director of ODO of 1979 and 1980 and in sometime
in 1980 you went to OCO. Simermeyer: March 6th.
Q: But before we go to OCO, let me ask you a couple of things
about the ODO period. You talked about modularization and you talked
about training. Was there anything during that time that you were
there from well, I guess, from 1976 to 1980? Was there anything going
on with systems changes? Were you doing any systems modernization?
Was there anything about folder lists or was this long before folder
lists? Any of that sort of stuff going on? Case controls, systems,
anything that was important doing that period? Simermeyer:
Case Control System--that was a big item, yes, because we had all
of this problem with the folders and trying to control the folders
on individual disks. Even with the modules, there were still thousands
of folders out and in the process. So somebody had started the Case
Control System to use bar code scanners to read the folders in and
out of each location using the bar codes so we had a constant inventory
telling us where each folder was so that we didn't have this constant
searching. I think we had the freeze in Disability as we had it in
the Payment Centers as I had mentioned earlier. So we went through
a lot of trauma there because the case control state of the art was
not that good. We couldn't get good equipment to make the bar codes,
to read the bar codes with accuracy and quickly, and so forth.
Renny at that point had moved into another systems area, I think,
because he was the principal person I was dealing with, that we were
dealing with, in terms of the Case Control System. He was putting
a lot of time and effort into it. That was one big area that we were
working on. You get confused because some of these activities that
involve Disability I picked up on later when I was in OCO. But as
far as systems changes, I can't recall. Q: Okay.
So then you became the Associate Commissioner for Central
Operations? So what was that at that time? That was ODO and...?
Simermeyer: OPSC. They called it Office Of Program Service
Centers which was Harry Overs with 6 Programs Service Centers and
DIO and then OCRO, Office Of Central Office Operations, which was
the Metro West Building downtown plus the 3 Data Operating Centers,
plus Boyers Pennsylvania, which is where they had the so called Cave,
where they stored a lot of SS-5s, material, and other archivical stuff.
And that pretty much was the world of, what they called Central Operations.
So when Pat, left I was put into that position under Herb Doggette,
I think, who was the Deputy Commissioner for all of Operations, which
included the field and Central Operations. So then I operated on the
2nd floor in the Altmeyer Building which had been where Hugh McKenna
had been when I first came into Baltimore. In fact that is where I
met my wife when I told you about way back when about first running
into her. So in a way it was kind of nostalgic to come back to that
location. Q: But a big step up in responsibility. I mean
that was a major move it seems to me in your career?
Simermeyer: Right. So I will go back one more minute to Disability.
As we were going through modularization, one of the big problems we
had, the biggest problem, was the field constantly complaining about
us (that is Disability) not being responsive, not giving them service.
When they called in about a critical case or they had a problem they
called, or I guess they mostly wrote and/or called the Regional Office,
or they called in sometimes to somebody in Baltimore, but it never
really was very effective. They said they couldn't get answers. It
took too long, we weren't responsive.
As the modules were set up they were aligned by Social Security number
and they were not strictly in geographic order. But the ways the numbers
had been given out,there was some relationship between the numbers
and the location like zero, zero, one to zero one hundred or something
would be located in the New England States. Like my Social Security
number is 120, it came out of New York. It went down the East coast
and across to mid-America and up the West coast. Anyway there was
a pattern between the modules and the Regions.
So I started trying to figure out way to improve the communications
back and forth between ODO and the field. The PSC's, Program Service
Centers, had a step up on us because they were co-located in many
regions. Like Chicago, the Great Lakes Service Program, related to
Cleveland and also to Chicago and then they merged the Regions into
one which was Chicago. But in other cases it was Kansas City was aligned.
Dallas was not aligned. Boston was not aligned. But they related to
there, like Boston related to New York and Dallas related to Kansas
City.
When they had meetings of their managers (the module managers and
others), they would bring District Managers in and they would talk
to each other and talk about problems each one had and/or solutions
and communications and everything was getting better in the PFC's,
but it wasn't in ODO. Partly because there was no facility for that
kind of exchange. So I said to start a program having the Module Managers
call District Offices periodically and ask them if there anything
that they could do to help them establish some, to take care of their
problem cases. Establish some have a telephone number that they can
call.
The managers could call in and in order to revolve in to this and
in order to make it work we let the District Managers know that we
were going to be contacting them so that they could look for their
problem cases or difficult cases and be prepared to have a discussion.
Not just to have somebody call out of the blue and say, "Hey
you know, I'm from Baltimore Disability are you having any problems?"
The managers in many cases would not have had any kind of direct exchange
recently so they wouldn't be able to talk about them.
So anyway it took some doing, because that was a sensitive area you
know. Some District Managers were just waiting to get a shot at the
people from Baltimore, and some people from Baltimore were just leery
about calling the District managers and so forth. So anyway with some
careful tuning, I mean, picking the right module managers to call
and trying to work through Pat Kelajuri then as Associate Commissioner,
talking to, having meeting with the Regional Commissioners and others
and I would describe what we were doing and why we were doing it and
how we were doing it.
Over a period of time it started to catch on so that then as it did
they found that problems that they had been so concerned about and
carried on about really weren't that severe, there weren't that many
there were some attention being given. The modules were starting to
have an effect, because it was an improved process and the whole thing
started to homogenize you know in terms of the field feeling better
about ODO, and ODO feeling better about the field, that they weren't
out to zap them all of the time. They got into some real situations
were they helped out in some real troublesome cases. It wasn't like
it was all sweetness and light, but it did go a long way towards improving
the relationship between the two components which had always been
very bad.
So in Disability also started the idea of having of having a conference
of managers. They had never been brought together as managers before.
And I think it started probably more as modularization started to
take effect. We did put together like a 3-day conference. We didn't
have enough space in the Dickinson Building so we would come across
to the Altmeyer Building and have it in the Multi-Purpose room. In
a sense was getting them off site and I forget whether we involved
a cocktail party. I don't think that we did. I mean at some neutral
location to try to get them into some kind of social setting, but
I don't recall if we were able to pull that off.
Anyway in doing that too we bring the Commissioner and others to talk
to them and that kind of helped morale and to make them feel people
were looking out for them and caring about them, and I think that
helped to improve morale.
Then we had meetings on site with the managers with me, I mean, periodic,
that was in the cafeteria. The only way we could do it was to divide
off half of the cafeteria right after lunch, get them together and
have the dialogue and try to build up some communication that way.
So we were doing things like that to try to foster this idea of management
being a team and management having a real role to play. And I guess
that pretty well summarizes my Disability initiatives. I think I started
the WEP Program there.
There were 2 other things there. One was the Work Exchange Program
because all of these people had been sort of locked in the same jobs.
There were not that many career opportunities in Disability at that
point--I mean to work up the ladder to other kinds of positions or
to get out of BDI into other places. So I decided to have this program
for people I think were basically Benefit Authorizers and below to
voluntarily make themselves available for assignment in other organizations.
I made the proposition to other components, I mean outside of Disability.
Some of them got assignments within Disability and other parts that
they hadn't been in before and others got assignments in other components
outside in Central Office complex to get some exposure and some experience
and you know, break out of the mold and on the premise that it would
be like career development with no specific reward at the end, just
to have that kind of satisfaction.
But it did turn out to be beneficial to many of them because they
did get exposure to other people and they exposed in terms of their
own abilities they were, they surfaced. Where people used to think
that, you know, beady eyed people were kind of drones or something
they saw them, dealt with them and worked with them. They came to
appreciate them more.
A number of them did get promoted. I think that the program is still
in existence, but I think, I heard over the years, after that, you
know, people would come up to me and say, I was a WEP. I often thought
that I should have tried to create a better name because I never thought
of them calling themselves WEP's you know, but we weren't that smart
in terms of that particular feature. So that was one of the career
development things that I was boosting, and I don't know if there
was another one or not that I wanted to mention, but maybe it will
come back to me.
In any event I went over to OCO and then Jack Svahn was the Commissioner,
and I was elevated to the staff meetings. I went to them as part of
the, I can't recall if I went in place of Herb Doggette, maybe I did,
but I think I did sometime. I was there with Herb and sometimes not,
but Herb had a pretty rough time with Jack Svahn and his people.
I mean Jack was more of a political animal and Herb was a traditional
bureaucrat. Like you said before the CEO type who should be left to
manage and somebody else could do the politicking. But it was always
a lot of, I don't want to use the word friction, but a lot of dialogue
back and forth about you know the way things were going in SSA, because
Herb had the bulk of the responsibility for all the Operations and
if anything went wrong it was, why did you let it happen kind of thing.
And if I can recall those times, they were hectic times; and we had
a lot of problems.
The Systems problems were starting to magnify and Jack Svahn, being
the politician, was going around the country talking about how bad
things were in SSA. I mean how we might not be able to get the checks
out next month and other kinds of statements that were truly alarming
and so that was part of the problems we were having in the staff meetings
and these conversations and discussions.
If I can put it in perspective, Jack Svahn's point was that he was
trying to get the attention of Congress to focus on Systems, to focus
on a solution to Systems problems. He needed money. He needed support.
He was trying to do it by running around the country saying the house
is burning get me a fire engine or whatever. But the managers around
the country were horrified, because they were reading about all of
this bad press and he got on some talk shows, The Today Show and other
things. Wherever he went he had these drastic tales to tell and it
was a very stressful time.
He explained his logic, you know, to us saying that was what he was
trying to do, and we should understand that and try to keep the troops
quiet. But he would go out to the field and have these Regional meetings,
and I went to some of them too, and he would deliver that message
to those managers, but then you know, next week he would be out with
another kind of a horror story. So that was kind of a back drop that
made things a little uneasy.
But in the meantime, I think, that was while I was in OCO, the Systems
problems had grown so bad that like the Program Service Centers had
these 360-365 computers that were totally obsolete and had no capacity,
no capability and other problems were compounding and Jan? Jan who?
Q: Prokop? Simermeyer: Prokop was
brought into Systems to solve all of these problems. Jan Prokop had
no background in SSA and I don't think intended to stay long in SSA,
but was one of these brilliant scholarly types that professed to have
all of the answers to the problems. Anyway I went to meetings that
were representing OCO as I recall and we sat around the table while
Jan Prokop developed his partitioning strategy I think he called it,
which was to, Systems problems were so monumental he broke them up
into groupings and he was going to focus on one after another after
another. It turned out the last on his list were the Program Service
Centers, and he was going to take care of all of these other problems
first.
Well I was horrified because that seemed to me like that was the gut
of the operation and if Operations failed in hearing about these problems
from PSC's and also from Harry Overs, who was a very strong advocate,
I tried to make a strong pitch to him that, you know, that couldn't
be and we needed a lot more systems a lot sooner than that. Well I
came back from the meeting and I wrote a memo to Jan Prokop and expressed
my unhappiness in the way he was dividing up these partisans and that
we should be moving in a different direction. I sent it off to Jan
Prokop, I think I sent a copy to Herb Doggette, but anyway, it hit
the fan after that.
Prokop had the mistaken impression that I had sent this memo out to
all the Regional Commissioners as well as Herb Doggette and that I
had deliberately sandbagged Phil Croppin tried to make him look bad
and in front of all of the whole SSA world, so he erupted, and he
sent me a stinging rebuke. I got it, and I was aghast you know so
I went to Herb Doggette and showed him what Jan had said. I can't
recall details only that Herb went to see Prokop and had it out with
him. Then he came down to see me, and he had it out with me like don't
you ever send a memo like that again and you know whatever, whatever,
whatever. I think in my own mind I thought that he was doing it partly
to demonstrate that he wasn't just my advocate, that he was trying
to take the broader look at this thing you know.
Well I think that it did do some good in terms of getting more recognition
of our problems in Systems, but that is the kind of environment that
I faced in OCO. It was a very difficult one because of all the dispersed
authority and priorities and trying to take care of your own needs
seeing that you own needs, of course, are the most important you know.
So we went through that kind of an exercise and in the meantime we
were having to do other things.
We had a regular series of Program Service Centers meetings, which
I would have started to bring Disability people into those meetings
and we had field representation as I said, we tried to you know, open
up communications that way and we did a number of things along that
line.
ODO? I don't know if ODO had started before while I was there or if
it started after I got into OCO. But they couldn't handle the workload
that they had, I think while I was still in ODO. We worked on a project
to peel off all of the age 62 to age 65 disability beneficiaries and
move that workload out to the PFC's to relieve the pressure on ODO
and because at 62 do they convert to...? Q: I think that
it is 65 that they convert? Simermeyer: To get
the full benefit yes, but there was some kind of a thing at 62?
Q: I'm not sure what happened? Simermeyer:
Anyway that was one phase and then the second phase was it still wasn't
doing enough so we moved it down to age 55, I think. We had another
survey and study and work group which at that point was under Ruth
Pierce as my Deputy to engineer that, to work out the transfer of
those folders to the PSC's to further reduce the workload on ODO.
At that point it was very saturated in terms of a lot of overtime
and a lot of backlogs and so forth. |
When I went to OCO, my Deputy
was Walt Statham. He was a black fellow, very highly regarded, had
been in the old DAO-type operation in OCO when it was reconstructed
as OCRO. So he came along as Pat Caligiuri's Deputy. Then when I took
over that position, he was there as my Deputy. He had been just assigned
down to Metro West full time, because they were just moving the people
from Woodlawn down to Metro West to fill up the hodgepodge of space
down there with OCRO components.
So he was down there for several months as a gadfly--I mean that in
a positive sense. He was looking in on where problems were occurring
and people problems and working with the Union and trying to make
it a peaceful transition. Not everybody going down there was happy
relocating and other things were being shuffled about to accommodate
that. Q: Where was the OCRO staff physically before that
move? Simermeyer: They were in the Operations
Building. That's what it was. The Operations Building was built for
them. Walt Statham was down there anyway. He came back out to Woodlawn
and continued to kind of be the ombudsman of that operation. Did you
get enough answered to your question about where DAO was before?
Q: Yes. Just while I'm thinking about it, who took your job
in ODO before you moved up to the OCO job? Who took over as director
of ODO? Simermeyer: Ed Arthur. I'll come back
to that too, I guess.
But Walt Statham came back out to Woodlawn. We worked together. We
made some trips to Wilkes-Barre, and other places, where he really
needed to get some exposure, to understand their operation. But Walt
started to develop problems and pain in the stomach. It turned out
he had cancer of the pancreas. That's a painful way to go, and he
did. So he went through that trauma. And after he was gone, I tried
to get some recognition for him in terms of, well, I wanted to name
the Metro West Building in his honor. But that was not feasible in
those days.
So we did get to name the multipurpose room for him in his honor.
We called it the Walt Statham Room, and had a ceremony where we had
a picture--a painting made up actually from a photograph. The guy
did a wonderful job and mounted it. There was a ceremony with his
wife down there to honor him.
So I had no Deputy then for a while. Then one day, I got a call from
Ruth Pierce, who, at that point, was on some kind of a fellowship
program or something studying at Harvard. She called out of the blue.
I knew her, but not that well. We talked a few minutes. "So what
brings you to call?" She said, "I understand you have a
Deputy job open, and I'd like to fill it."
So I was kind of taken aback at first. Q: That's Ruth.
Simermeyer: I was impressed with that. No difficulty
in figuring out where she was coming from. So I said, "Okay."
She went through the machinations, whatever they were. Anyway, she
came in and became my Deputy from then until I left OCO.
But I used her, again, for these projects, like moving the disability
folders out to the PSC's. I mean, you could give her a job. It was
difficult in terms of a whole lot of the ramifications, as you can
imagine. She just took it and did it and no bones about it. I think
she got the Secretary's Citation for that. So anyway, she carried
that off very well.
Then Tina Sung had come out from someplace--she was in HEW I guess,
at that point, and in some kind of a fellowship program or something.
She came over. I forget how I got to know her. But anyway, I was impressed
with her--maybe through Ruth because she was in that group. They had
meetings and so forth.
Anyway, she came over. She expressed an interest in the job. I don't
think it was permanent at that point, one of those career-opportunity
things. She became the Executive Officer. So I had Ruth and Tina as
the top team there, which was very good. Then, as I said, I backfilled
behind me with Ed Arthur, who had been--I think he had been my Deputy
before. Dick Robinson, after we modularized disability; he retired.
Then Ed Arthur came in. He had my position after I left. I think it
was on a permanent basis.
Within about a year, Herb Doggette had--I think it was Herb--had recruited
Huldah Lieberman to come into Baltimore from Chicago, where she was
a Regional Representative for Disability to head up some kind of a
disability task force to do something because the whole disability
process was still getting a lot of bad press and had a lot of problems.
But she came in, and she wasn't there too long in that job. My recollection
is that she was making as many enemies as friends with her attitude
and strategy and approach. But after some months in that position,
I got the message from Herb Doggette that I should place her in disability
operations. She said, "I'm happy with what I've got." Well,
that wasn't the point. So the point was that she would take over disability
operations.
Then, I looked around and worked around. I forget what had happened
in OCRO; who was occupying OCRO. I don't know if it was somebody there
who retired or not. But anyway, they offered OCRO to Ed Arthur. He
took it. So he went down there as the director of OCRO. There's a
gap there; isn't that strange? Q: What was happening
with the PSCs during all this stuff? You haven't mentioned any change
or anything with the PSCs. Was it still Harry Overs at the PSCs?
Simermeyer: Harry Overs remained at the PSCs until he
retired. I think that was before I left OCO. Well, they got better.
My recollection is their performance improved. We started to get some
replacements for the 360-365. It wasn't fast enough, and it wasn't
good enough, but it was better. We got the case control system developed,
and that was installed. That helped a lot to eliminate the folder
backlogs. Of course, the modularization in the PSCs had started to
take effect.
They had mostly been moving, or moved into new buildings. They got
a new building in--maybe before that--in San Francisco. The first
one was Southeastern, as I told you, and then Philadelphia and San
Francisco. Kansas City was in the Federal Building and remained in
the Federal Building-- the best place up to that point of any of them.
They never did move out of there. Then finally, New York came along.
That was the last and the slowest. For a lot of political and other
reasons, they finally built space in--what was it, Queens, or something?
Jamaica and that was being occupied at about the time I was leaving
OCRO, I guess. They'd had a lot of other things going in management--training
kinds of things, upgrading their managers' skills through broader
selection processes. It wasn't just seniority.
Harry had a lot of things going. He'd come in early in the morning,
like 6:30 in the morning, and start talking to his directors, particularly
starting with the East Coast, Marty Tapitt, who was always in early.
He'd pick up information. By the time I got in (I'd get in about quarter
after 8), he usually had been in touch with about two or three of
the PSC's.
I'd go in and there'd be notes on my chair from him--little stick-on
notes--so I couldn't miss them, before I saw anything on my desk,
telling me what was happening and I needed to know or whatever. So
he was just Johnny on the spot, out visiting all the time, and bringing
them in. So they were pretty dynamic in terms of that stage of the
operation for what they had come through. They would absorb these
disability workloads, I mentioned, and everything was sort of working
for them. I can't recall much more than that about it.
Any other questions about that? Q: How about the DOCs?
You haven't talked about the DOCs at all during this time. Later on,
the DOCs had a lot of changes in recent years. But during this period?
Simermeyer: DOCs. When we first went out to Wilkes-Barre,
that was the big one, the old one. That came up out of the Dan Flood
era. He used politics to engineer that. I guess it was following the
flood up in Wilkes-Barre. The flood, not Dan Flood. Q:
Dan Flood, who was a Congressman from Pennsylvania.
Simermeyer: Dan Flood engineered this activity so there would
be a workload up there. It was always held out as the ultimate in
terms of workforce: dedicated people, very loyal, and no turnover.
Because of the environment, it was a better-paying job up there, and
it was looked upon as a real good work factor for SSA.
Well, that DOC got expanded out before I got there under the then
Director--what was his name? He was later chased out of SSA. It was
later than DAO. I'll think of it some time, I guess. But he construed
a DOC in Albuquerque, and a DOC in Salinas, California. By saying
"construed," I mean that he, from what I could gather (and
I don't have any firsthand knowledge) he went out and kind of structured
them for several reasons, one being equal opportunity because there
was a high Hispanic population in Albuquerque, and also in Salinas.
But the rationale, it probably tied into politics. Probably Domenici
had something to do with Albuquerque, and I don't know if anybody
in California--any Congressman had anything to do with Salinas. But
they did open up. Q: Leon Panetta later on; it was Leon
Panetta's district, at some point. Simermeyer:
Well, he could have been in there. But if those things were happening,
they were beyond my circle of knowledge. They weren't highly publicized.
But they did open those facilities. They were comparable, in terms
of workforce stability--low turnover, hard working people. A good
workforce. Wilkes-Barre was handling SS-5's primarily, as I recall,
right? And then also wage reporting. That was a big item for the DOCs,
handling the high volume of 941's that were coming in--the employer's
report of earnings that they had to post and get into the central
records--the wage records.
But as the systems transformations took place, and the employers moved
more and more to magnetic tape and to more sophisticated systems,
these workloads started to drop substantially. The big item had been
these data-entry operators in these facilities and their equipment.
The drop in workloads started to have some adverse impact on them.
Well, one thing that had emerged too over time was the paperbound
SSI folders had become a problem. In order to house them and manage
them, they moved that workload to the Great Lakes Program Service
Center back in the 1970's. Over time, it grew and grew and grew.
Great Lakes didn't have the space for them; it housed them in a separate
building. They had a separate workforce over there. It was not being
handled that efficiently. It seemed to me in the balance of things,
to have that work in Chicago, where you didn't have these factors
of good work force, low turnover, high productivity, etc. Having it
at an offsite location, there were a lot of complaints about it, that
it was not really the best place to have that.
So I had a group look into that. We came up with an alternative to
move that workforce, that workload to Wilkes-Barre partly to offset
the reduction in annual paper wage reporting. So we did engineer that.
We had a transition to move all that work into Wilkes-Barre. That's
where it is today, I think, and that's the way they operated.
Q: So you had to take millions of folders, that were in Chicago,
and physically move them to Wilkes-Barre? Was that a problem?
Simermeyer: Well, like the other problems, I'm moving
the disability folders from the Dickinson Building out to the PSCs,
that was a problem. But this was a problem in terms of getting adequate
space and getting the space adapted to accommodate this operation.
Again, time wipes out a lot of the details. But it was difficult to
bring the workload into the whole, different environment like that.
I guess the things I remember about it was that I went up to Wilkes-Barre
one time, thinking I had done something good to help retain the workforce
and keep them occupied. The first thing I got hit with was somebody
from the Union, telling me "What right did I have to bring in
a basic grade 4 workload into a situation where there were a lot of
grade 5 data-entry operators or something, who are going to suffer
as a result?" Rather than see it as a benefit, in terms of retaining
jobs, it was a negative in terms of they were losing something. That
was the price you paid for doing things like that.
I don't recall what we did with Albuquerque and Salinas. At one point,
I thought we were going to eliminate them. As the workload shrank,
we would either find other workloads for them, or move out. One of
the things we did do, I think, was to set up some telephone lines
into Salinas anyway to handle some kind of information about earnings
records or something. I forget what it was. I remember going out to
talk about it and look at it. I don't know whether those things materialized
into a permanent workload or not. So I don't have much more on DOCs.
Q: Now did each of the DOCs have a Director?
Simermeyer: Yes. Q: You didn't have a person
who was like the head of all 3 DOCs? Simermeyer:
Well, the person in charge of OCRO was in charge of all 3 DOCs.
So Ed Arthur was in charge of the 3 DOCs. Q: Okay, that's
right. Simermeyer: So Ed Arthur was in charge
of the 3 DOCs. He would bring them in for meetings periodically. They'd
come in with the Director and the Deputy Director and 1 or 2 other
top people. There would be maybe 5 from each DOC, and we'd have an
agenda. They would communicate with the people in OCRO. I would go
down and talk to them down in Metro West. They usually met down in
Metro West.
In OCRO meantime, after Ed Arthur got down there after we'd gone through
the modularization in ODO, we thought about doing the same thing in
OCRO. Again, the concept of setting up teams in a smaller environment
and having an interaction with the field because they related more
by area, like the mods in ODO, all started to come about. So that
was put into effect while I was in OCO. Again, you had the transitional
cost of doing that, but it paid off in terms of better communication,
rapport. They were dealing with the--I guess the earnings records
primarily--that was the main thing they were looking for from OCRO
downtown.
We set up some other units down there. I'm trying to recall what they
did. But I remember putting in these telephone units. I think that
was part of the attempt to provide faster information on earnings
records where they didn't come in in rapid order. So, again, I lose
track of that too. Q: So your office, OCO--your executives
were Ed Arthur in OCRO, Huldah Lieberman in ODO, Harry Overs in the
PSCs, yourself, Ruth Pierce, and Tina Sung--that was essentially your
front office? Simermeyer: Yes. Q:
Did you have any kind of other staff components? Simermeyer:
There was one other staff. That was Jerry Boyd who was the Director
of the OOAS, Office of Organizational and Administrative Support,
which was a kind of a staff component that supported all of the OCO-wide
activity. But each of the directors had his own staff who did their
own internal. ODO had its own staff, and OPSC had a small staff because
each director of the PSCs had his own staff, and the Director of Management
in Operations. They were all working on their local projects and on
some of the offload that we gave them from the OCO. But, then the
OOAS was the coordinator among the OCO components, and then also,
I think, the primary interface with the other components in SSA headquarters.
The OCO budget, for example, was a big deal. They managed that, and
then it filtered down into all the other units. I set up a system
of briefings for all of them. I met with Harry and his staff on one
occasion. Like I did maybe one a week. The next week would be ODO,
Huldah and her staff. The next week would be OCRO, Ed Arthur and his
staff, and then Jerry Boyd and his staff. They'd have an agenda. We'd
meet and we discussed workloads and so forth. They had graphs. We'd
have to struggle hard to get some uniformity in graphs and presenting
data so that it was meaningful and trying to track whatever the local
focus was: earnings records for OCRO; disability folders or whatever;
complaints, whatever from ODO; and on and on and on.
So I rotated around like that, and brought usually Ruth and some others
with me to these briefings to kind of quiz these people and keep them
on their toes, and then gather enough information to provide me so
I could feed it back to other people and try to keep that going. So,
I don't recall we ever had a managers' meeting in OCRO. If we did
or not, I don't think so. I don't know if I ever got to that point.
But we had them in ODO, and in the PSCs. We had a variety of communication
kinds of things going to try to manage that way. Q: When
you took over the OCO job, was it Herb Doggette who basically selected
you for that job? Simermeyer: I think so. I was
acting for quite a while. And then we went through some kind of a
process, and it became permanent. Q: When you took over
OCO, did Herb communicate to you what his expectations were, what
your goals were, what he wanted you to accomplish or anything like
that? Did he say to you, "You know, you've got to fix what's
going on in ODO or whatever?"
My general question is going to be, did you achieve the goals he set
out to achieve at the start of your tenure in OCO? Did you have a
clear set of objectives? Or did you just make up as you go along,
discover your goals as you worked it out? Simermeyer:
Probably more the latter than the former. I didn't walk in there with
a set of objectives to accomplish. I carried with me the ODO background,
and I had had the exposure from meetings with these other people.
Pat Caligiuri used to have them. It's not like created all these things.
Caligiuri had meetings where we went offsite, all of us: Harry Overs
and whoever was the predecessor for OCRO, and me, and our deputies,
and so forth. He'd have an agenda, and we'd go through it and talk
about workloads and things.
So I was walking into something I was fairly comfortable with, not
all new territory. I knew the problems too. I knew what difficulties
we had with the staffing, for example. At that point, my recollection
is it was after Jack Svahn left and Martha came in, that Nelson Sabatini
came in with the big pronouncement that we were going to have a 20
percent cut in staff, and so forth. Things like that kind of determined
your priorities.
You know, "how are you going to live with that, you are you going
to do that," and on and on. So between the systems problems and
the workload backlogs and modularization activities and other things
going on, I didn't really have a clearcut set of objectives to take
me down the road. It was sort of going through a minefield and trying
to get to the end of the minefield, but, in the process, trying to
bring in certain kinds of principles like I've been talking about
like communicating and organizing and having an agenda, and having
briefings--a lot of activity, oversight activity, to try to bring
it along.
If things were not going well, then there were remedies. You had overtime,
you had sometimes moving people around, or moving workloads around.
All these things that we did were consequences of seeing what the
problems were and what to do. But it wasn't a foregone set of conclusions.
My feeling is that Herb's strategy was that he and I had a long relationship,
all the way back to the time when I recruited him into a job. I didn't
recruit him. I was one of the people who was recruited into the job
in Great Lakes and then into Baltimore. He had confidence in me. We
didn't have a lot of need for direction. If he gave me an order, that
was pretty much it. Something like placing Huldah, or something. We
talked about it and then I placed her.
But he wanted results. If the results were there, in terms of workload--pending
or whatever--he looked at the broad numbers. But he didn't look at
them in the detail I looked at them. Because he was focused more up
and out than I was; I was focused more down to my people. Also, my
relationships with the field. That was his other big activity, was
the Regional Commissioners and the Regions and Larry Hendricks and
all that good stuff. Q: You talked a little bit about
your working relationship with Herb. Tell me a little bit about your
working relationship with your three top executives: Huldah, Ed, and
Harry. You talked about Harry a little bit but you haven't said much
about Huldah, after she took over, and Ed as he ran OCRO. Anything
particular that stands out-- how the four of you functioned as an
office? Simermeyer: Well, there really were five;
if you count Jerry Boyd as one of the principals. I don't know how
to deal with that. I guess I had a closer relationship with Harry,
again, because we went all the way back to Cleveland back to the early
1960's we had first met. We had been back and forth over the years
in different jobs and relationships and so forth. Harry was more aggressive
in terms of--he was also right down the hall--he was about 4 doors
from me. The other people were sometimes relatively remote: the Dickinson
Building, Metro West Building, or way down the hall was where Jerry
Boyd was quartered.
Jerry Boyd was a very low key kind of guy. You could go by his office
for a week, and you'd see him in there on the phone or talking or
something, but you had no communication. Whereas you rarely got by
Harry's office or like even as I said into my office without having
a message on the chair.
So it was partly that.
But also, the Program Service Centers were really the major part of
OCO, both in terms of size. I think there were 13,000 of them in 6
different locations, plus DAO. ODO was second in size and importance.
OCRO was third in size and importance and didn't go by size equating
to importance. But it was the focus of the world on those workloads.
The main RSI workload was the PSCs and that was the bulk of our activity,
and the secondary thing was the disability.
But I had known disability operations, again because I had been there.
I knew it, I thought, as well as Huldah or better because Huldah came
from a position of being in the Region, in the field into ODO. She
walked into an operation that had already been modularized and knew
all the managers who had been in Operations. Ed Arthur had been my
Deputy in disability, and he moved down to OCRO so I had a fairly
close relationship with him.
But I tried to let them operate with some sense of independence, although,
as I said, I was on them all the time with briefings and things and
feedback. I had staff meetings of my own where they came to my staff
meetings. We kicked around a lot of things, issues and so forth--staffing,
overtime--all the things that managers talk about. I'd say it was
a pretty good relationship.
The relationship with Jerry was okay. Jerry, as I said, was laid back.
He more or less was reactive, I guess I'll say. But maybe that was
my doing as much as anything else, because I gave him a lot of stuff
to react to. Jerry had come off a long career in SSA, coming from
the field in Kansas or Iowa into central office. He had been a major
player in systems under Jack Futterman. He was one of the guys that
really put in the early systems before SSADARS, and had a good systems
background and knowledge.
He was working his way up to, at one point, to be the head of welfare--whatever
they wanted to call it in those days--FAP, or something. At a time
when Jack Futterman was endorsing Jerry Boyd for that job, Tom Bell
came along. Is it Tom Bell, who was his competitor? I forget. But
somebody else came along and kind of squeezed out Jerry. There was
some kind of like--Jerry kind of went on a shelf at that point. His
star stopped rising. He still had a little background information
and knowledge. But again, he was not actively, aggressively, trying
to enhance his career. He was satisfied to do the job he was doing.
It was a team. I don't know if it was the best team we could have
had, but it was a working team. In looking at their backgrounds and
so forth, you know, it was pretty functional. Our performance was
pretty good, again recognizing the handicaps of systems drags and
things like that. Q: You mentioned DIO a couple of times.
Was there anything of particular interest happening in DIO during
this period? Simermeyer: Well, DIO was operating
okay in Central Office. They had these foreign service posts. We had
a major problem with one in Italy, where one of the field representatives
in Rome was taking fraudulent claims and taking the initial benefit
payment as pay back for that activity. That was creating a problem
when I got into the OCO job and had been surfaced. I forget how and
why. But it was known.
GAO, I think, had done a study or got into it, and made some criticisms
that nobody had ever gone from headquarters out to look at these foreign-service
posts or exercise any kind of direction or showed any concern, and
this came back as criticism. Well, that wasn't strictly true because
Pat Caligiuri had gone out a couple of years before to visit the post
in Italy, and maybe one other. But that was not really focused on
anything, I don't think, other than Pat's desire to see his homeland
or something. It was work-related and oriented but I don't know the
details of how he went, why he went, and what he did when he went.
But then Harry Overs had gone out too. In his job as OPSC, he had
gone to a couple of posts: one in Mexico, and one in Rome.
So it was not totally correct that we had never shown any interest.
But after that happened, I decided that I ought to go for whatever
good I could do.
So I went with Jack McHale. Jack McHale was in charge of DIO. We had
a program of visits where teams from DIO would go to these foreign-service
posts and evaluate the whole operation, and see if they could offer
them any kind of assistance. These foreign-service posts were run
by basically foreign nationals under the control of one guy who was
the representative--really working for the State Department--but had
been named the Social Security whatever, and brought into Social Security
for some training and for meetings and discussions and so forth. But,
basically, he reported to the State Department, as you probably know
from talking to Lou D'Angelo.
So there was a team set up. I went out with Jack and the team. We
actually visited Frankfurt, Germany and then Stuttgart, which was
a post working out of Frankfurt. That team was staying in Germany,
looking at that operation. Jack and I went on down to (left them in
Stuttgart), flew down to Rome, and visited with Lou and his staff
and the people in the embassy, and met with the ambassador and others
to kind of show the flag and talk about the problems and show an interest.
So that was one activity that I remembered in DIO that took place
while I was there. It never got much attention. The fraud situation
was corrected. It was corrected before we got there. There were no
more instances of it during the time I was in OCO, that I know of.
In fact we went over to Rome and talked to Lou and talked to the staff
and looked around.
We really were not in a position to evaluate or catch that kind of
a problem, or do anything about it anyway. That's true even today,
like Frederico Pena giving an evaluation of Value Jet. I mean, what
did he really know? Like you have some authority, and you get some
information the best you can get. But you're not in a position to
ferret those things out. It has to be done onsite. Or with this team
that DIO sent out: those guys were more attuned to you know, finding
things like that.
But it's a very hairy proposition in terms of the foreign-service
activity. Even today, in my book, if it's operated today the way it
was then. These people and everyone I met seemed to be honest, loyal,
sincere, dedicated and so forth. But if you got one of them in there,
and they're dealing with these people out in the boondocks, and they're
clever enough, I don't see any good way you could have a good enforcement
program, a good integrity program to back that up in all these foreign
countries.
I remember going to Hong Kong. I went on behalf of Martha McSteen
because the State Department invited her to go, and she turned it
down at the last minute. So I went. It turned out to be a meeting
of all the Southeastern Asia State Department people. As part of that,
the guy from the Philippines was invited to go. So I went to the Philippines,
met with him, talked to his staff and looked around and talked to
people in the embassy, and so forth. We flew over to Hong Kong, and
went to that meeting and talked it out, fraud and things of that type,
but again in generalities. Those people at the meeting really weren't
that interested in what we had to say. They had their own problems.
In the course of that, though, we did go up to the facility we had
in Hong Kong to look at it and talk to the people. There they had
file cabinets, full of folders of all the beneficiaries. But in each
folder was a photograph of the beneficiary. My recollection is, those
people had to come in to collect their checks, and in doing that,
they compared them with the folder--the picture in the folder. They
got down to that level of trying to have integrity. In an operation
like that, in a place like Hong Kong, you can see, it's fraught with
possibilities for abuse. Q: When I look at the foreign
operation, I would say that in some sense, it's kind of an orphan
operation, in my limited perspective of it. In that many aspects of
it, even today, are very primitive. For example, the systems that
we use, if I'm correct, we use this very convoluted way of moving
data back and forth by borrowing the State Department's and the VA's
electronic network to send messages. Like even getting a query, it
would take weeks to get a reply to a query. Simermeyer:
That's right. Q: That in a local office, in a local DO,
would be online--you could get instantly. Simermeyer:
That's right. Q: If you needed a query from a database,
and you were in a foreign-service post, you could wait several weeks
to get it in the mail. So in some ways, that operation is still very
primitive and very paperbound and sort of hasn't benefited, even today,
from some of the modernization that we've done in the last couple
of decades. Is that a fair assessment of the operation? And was it
any kind of a management issue for you during that time? Or did you
pretty much see it that it was going to run itself in the traditional
way that it had always run? Simermeyer: Well,
no means nothing. It's a multisided question. I don't know what the
operation looks like today. What you described is the way the operation
looked like when I was there. We were concerned about it, and we did
talk to State Department people about getting a better kind of information-transmission
facility. My recollection was that there was some optimism, and some
people talking about some breakthroughs, and so forth, that I guess
never materialized. Because what you're saying now strikes memory
chords that did happen; that's the way it was.
I think it was. Your house is burning, you're not really worried about
taking care of the barn 40 acres over. We had our own focus. We had
people in systems both then and later I don't think really concentrated
much on it, understood much about it, or felt that was a problem they
really had to give a lot of attention to. That is true.
I think it's also because it was so diverse. I mean, you're talking
about so many foreign-service posts. But beyond that, so many countries
where there are such a strung-out network with all the different complexities.
I don't know how you could really provide a very effective system
that wasn't paperbound or, you know, tied down with all of that handicap.
It's not viable unless the State Department decided it was a top priority
and gave it a lot more attention. But I think they would probably
argue that they had their own priorities and backlogs with illegals
coming in and people trying to get visas and so on.
Even there, the foreign-service officers, to my recollection, were
hard pressed to concentrate on their jobs, depending on where they
were because they were compelled to take their turn as desk officers
then--which was worrying about getting American deceased bodies back
home, visiting prisoners, and doing other things that take up the
life of one of those guys. Trying to get some focus on the job that
they had was difficult. Plus the fact that the State Department had
its rules for rotating these guys (I guess the basis that they would
remain more honest if they were not localized to the degree) so that
they knew all the ins and outs of all the different operations.
The converse was that when they got to a point where they could do
it relatively effectively, they were moved to another place. But they
weren't allowed to come back. I think Lou D'Angelo was probably one
of the exceptions in terms of staying in. He went from Rome to England
and then back to Rome again. Q: And stayed there for
a long time. Simermeyer: Right. So there were
a whole lot of factors. Plus the individuals themselves. They were
out of sight. We saw them once a year when they came in for home leave
or something. We'd have a meeting. Their concerns were so different
in terms of what they had to live without in the State Department
compared to what we had back home was a concern. It was just a strange
world. Q: Okay. What else about OCO? I have one more
question about the OCO period. You mentioned that at some point, Jack
Svahn left and Martha McSteen came in as Acting Commissioner, and
you also mentioned the downsizing. Can you talk a little bit about
how those two things impacted on OCO? And that's about the end for
today. Or do you want to take that up next time? Simermeyer:
Probably, because I can't. Q: We can start with that
at the next session, especially the downsizing. I wonder if that's
an issue for you or had you already gone on to systems by the time
the downsizing hit? Simermeyer: Well, I was in
OCO I think, when it hit. But I only know there was Nelson and Herb
and Lou Enoff and me and Martha et al. in this setting where Nelson
was running back and forth to Washington and coming back with this
news. I'm fuzzy. I think I was in OCO at the time when he was talking
about these cuts. Q: Well, that's a major topic. Maybe
we should hold off and start with next time so we can talk about that
a little more. That's a major topic. Simermeyer:
Yes. I can't just get my bearings in terms of where I was and what
we did in OCO. Q: All right. Simermeyer:
Let's do it that way. . .
I thought a lot about it since then and tried to figure out why it
isn't more of a standout in my mind. It must have been a relatively
short time from the time we started it, or I got the message until
I went into Systems. There was a different focus. When I was in OCO,
Martha approached me about going to Systems. Systems had quite a few
problems at that time, generated in good part I think by Marshall
Mandell and the crew that he had assembled, plus some leftovers from
Jack Svahn's era.
Jack, as I said before, had made a big thing politically out of it
about talking about the tragedy in Systems and the whole program;
how the checks might not get out on time, and so forth, and used that
as a driving force to get political support for the Systems Modernization
Plan, which was then developed basically by Carl Couchoud. It had
a price tag on it, as I recall, of $479 million dollars for the whole
thing. I think it was a 5-year plan. So Marshall Mandell was the first
Deputy on board when the plan was to put into effect. He started it.
But it was rife with problems. Some of them I can't recall too well
either.
One fellow had been involved in some kind of a swindle. He took off,
at one time from his home. Do you recall that? Q: Yes.
Simermeyer: He disappeared. Q: Right.
Later, he later was arrested by the FBI and went to prison for some
shady business on one of the contracts that he was the manager for.
Simermeyer: Yes. That was one element. I don't
know if that tied in directly to Paradyne or not, because the Paradyne
thing erupted. It turned out that they had built a phony model to
show to the people who were looking at the contract. They didn't have
a product that they really could put up. So I think he was tied in
to that, but I'm not sure. But anyway, that was another problem.
Then there were problems within the front office where Marshall was
involving contractors. There were some people there from the Department
who were on assignment to that office, which was in the West High
Rise. In the meantime too, GAO had suddenly become very interested
in all of these activities and whether the plan was a good plan, money
was being spent properly, and so forth. GSA, which is the usual monitoring
authority, or was over in systems at that time, started to show anxiety.
In the midst of all of that, Marshall Mandell decided to leave.
So that's when Martha asked me to take over Systems which I really
didn't want to do. I remember the meeting with Herb and Martha and
me because Herb was my supervisor then and talking about it. I tried
to say, "Well, Herb would have been better in Systems than I
would," trying to do what he was doing on an acting basis. But
that wouldn't fly. Herb didn't want any part of that.
The bottom line is, I did agree to take it. I did go in there, but
it was in the midst of all of this controversy. The fellow, who had
been from the Department, returned to the Department. I never saw
him again. He sort of like disappeared which suited me fine because
all I had heard were bad things about him. The other people that had
been involved in these contracting things were no longer around. It
was a cluster of them. EDS was there to assist, sort of bring in the
private industry element, and keep the whole thing on track. Well,
they remained on.
Delloite, Haskins, and Sells was one of the outfits too; maybe they
preceeded EDS, I forget. Q: Yes, they did. Before we
go into all of that, I want to go back to that first meeting with
Martha McSteen, where she offered you the job. Tell me about that
in a little more detail. Describe to me what she said to you and how
she made the offer to you and what her argument was to you. Why did
she want you for the job? What did she say to you? Simermeyer:
I don't know if I have that much memory. We were at some kind of an
affair in Martin's West. I got a notice that she wanted to see me
right away. So we broke away and went back over there. I think Herb
had been over there with her anyway before that. So I entered the
room, and we sat down. She said that she had all these problems with
Systems, and needed somebody who had a good knowledge about Social
Security and some management experience to take over Systems.
Q: Did she outline the problems that you just described to
me? Was she concerned about this lack of integrity and sort of whiff
of scandals that was there? Is that what motivated her?
Simermeyer: She didn't express that. She just had a--I don't
know if you would use the word desperate, but it was sort of like
she was desperate to find somebody who could step in quickly. So that
she couldn't really go and recruit on the outside. She wanted somebody,
as I said, with some management background and experience.
We'd had a long history of working together from the time, way back,
when she was an SSA Fellow in 1969 or 1970. She came into the front
office and worked for Hugh Mckenna. That's when I was the Assistant
Bureau Director for Management, and I remembered her spending about
4 months, I think, in that office. Her activity was more or less to
generate some thoughts, suggestions, whatever, for improving Hugh's
world of operation, which she did, which sort of gave me gas pains
because they all ended up as action items falling in my area when
she left.
I thought that was really a neat trick in some ways. She didn't do
it just to give me a fit, but that was the beginning of it anyway.
But she was very charming and gracious and so forth. Our next encounter
exchange was in SSI, when she came in to head up the field organization,
as I told you. I was brought in to head up a whole cluster of activity,
including in Systems, in what was going to be the Assistant Program
Centers, and other things we talked about.
Then Martha decided to leave that environment. Then I stepped in behind
and did what she had been brought in for. From then on, it was just
sort of like a friendly exchange. When she in different positions,
we'd meet in different affairs. She was always very friendly. Anyhow,
my feeling is that was part of the strategy: that she knew me, she
trusted me, she had some--I don't know whether to use the word "respect"
for my ability, or thought I had some ability. She needed somebody
in a hurry. Q: So basically, it seems to me like her
concern was managing the Systems Modernization Plan and all the activities
that were going with it. She was looking for a strong manager. That's
why she picked you? Simermeyer: I'd say so.
Q: Okay. So you said no? You demurred at least?
Simermeyer: I demurred as much as I could. It was not like
"thanks, but no thanks" was the deal. There was nothing
in it for me. I liked what I was doing. I liked where I was. I knew
that if I left there that I wasn't going to go back. You couldn't
turn around and go back. It wasn't like 6 months or whatever, it's
just "go and do this." Again, for the sake of the organization
however you want to describe it.
I knew that as soon as I left, that Ruth Pierce would--and could--take
over in my place, acting. She did and quickly established herself
as somebody who could operate and run that thing. So that sort of
closed the door behind me. So anyway, I went on to Systems.
Q: Now, was there any discussion either at that time or was there
any thought on your part about whether or not you had the appropriate
background for this job? Usually, we put someone with some technical
systems background in this job. That was the history of it, in recent
times anyway.
She didn't do that. She didn't look for someone with a systems background.
She looked for someone with a management background. It sounds like
her attitude was, "what I need is a manager; I don't need a technical
expert." Simermeyer: Right. Q:
Did you discuss that issue at all? Was that a concern to you when
you went into that job? Were you concerned about not having that technical
background? Was that an issue for you at the start?
Simermeyer: Yes, I think it was an issue. But it was not controlling.
If it had been, she wouldn't have made the offer, and I wouldn't have
accepted. I felt that it would be a handicap. But given all the problems
she had and the experience she had with someone like Marshall Mandell
who was also preceeded by that other guy we talked about before, Jan
Prokop. Q: Who were technical people. Simermeyer:
We had a short history of these techies coming in, who had good technical
background, but didn't know anything about Social Security in terms
of its overall operation, its tradition, or its modus operandi and
really felt that they didn't need to know that. So it's sort of like
counterforce there. They had the technical and didn't think they needed
anything else, nor did they have, in my mind, a good management background.
They were more teacher types. They could expound on these things,
but they didn't have--I don't think--the ability to put them into
effect and pick people to lead them and monitor those people, and
so forth and so forth.
So anyway, now we come up to the situation where it's sort of going
the other way. We're in deep trouble. The oversight agencies are pushing
in on us. Martha is temporary. Martha's looking to get some permanent
status, and this isn't helping her cause. She needs to do something.
So I was the plug she decided to use to plug into the dike, and hope
that it would work. Not like it was the end of a 6-month search or
something like that.
So I really didn't look forward to it. But when I did agree to take
it, I went down there. When I say down there, it was on the West High
Rise on the ground floor--Sumner Whittier's old office-- which was
kind of ironic, me landing up there again. Well, the front office
staff to me was critical because it was kind of related to Marshall
Mandell. I wanted to remove that whole group. So I did.
Tina Sung had been my executive officer up in OCO, so I brought her
down as my deputy. Q: So Tina was your deputy?
Simermeyer: Yes. Tina was my deputy. She had no great
systems expertise either. But she had a lot of smarts. She was very
intelligent and had a lot of people skills. I had a lot of regard
for her. I knew she was very loyal, and we could work together as
a team.
So I got Roger McDonald, who had been one of my staff in OCO. I forget
his exact position. I think he was the Executive Officer. But anyway,
he came down to work with me. He had not great outside technical expertise;
but he had an excellent knowledge of what was happening in SSA systems,
in the Program Service Centers, and in other ways. He really was the
guy that I wanted to use as the gadfly. He could look at things, evaluate
things, report back, and give me information as to whether things
were working or not working. I mean aboveboard. He didn't go around
as the spy in the dark.
Like they had daily briefings in the NCC at that time--they'd talk
about the status of the activity in the NCC, whether they'd been successful
in their overnight runs, whether there were delays or problems or
backlogs, or what the consequences would be. So it came out in very
hieroglyphic fashion to me. I couldn't relate to that or understand
it. What they were reporting to each other would be summarized. By
the time it got to me, I would only know basically if a disaster was
about to occur with no lead time.
So I started to send Roger to those meetings. He went every day, sat
in, asked questions, picked up information, came back, gave me an
intelligent report on how things were going--whether we had problems,
whether there was a solution in sight, what the consequences would
be, and so forth. So we set up a good team there.
I did keep one guy, Fred Wirth, who had been in that office. I think
he was outside that office. He was sort of a contracting officer,
in terms of evaluating contracts and procurements and working with
contractors or vendors or others who approached that office, either
looking for business or reporting on contracts, or whatever. So I
kept him. He had an SSA background, and he related to the people in
procurement very well. I had a lot of faith in him. I thought he was
totally honest and dependable.
I set up a system whereby any contractors, vendors, or anybody else
approaching that office had to go through Fred. It was sort of a way
of trying to keep some purity in the operation for one thing. The
other was that I couldn't technically relate to them that well anyway.
So it was not a matter of me being able to deal that effectively with
them. Q: But it gave you sort of an arm's length distance
from the vendors. You weren't the one evaluating the contract proposals
and so on? Simermeyer: Right. I never talked
to a vendor directly after that--I shouldn't say after that, I never
did, period. I think Marshall had a couple of situations, as well
as some of the others in there, for having gotten involved with the
vendors in terms of some perks. My recollection is Nelson Sabatini
got nailed on some of that too; taking meals, entertaining. Not major
financial things, but just enough to throw a cloud over whether they
were really using integrity in their process. So I didn't want any
part of that and never got into that. And that was good.
Q: Can I ask you one thing about your selection of front office
staff? Because again, it's this theme that I asked you about before,
and I'll probably ask you about at least a couple more times.
It's conspicuous again that you didn't pick anyone on your
front office staff who was a technical systems expert. Was that deliberate?
Was it there just wasn't a slot there because you had filled it with
these two other people who you had other reasons you wanted on your
staff? Was it an issue for you at all at that point? You didn't see
a need to do that? Simermeyer: No. I thought
my priorities were to have people whom I could depend on to follow
through that you have, some kind of management perspective, as I did,
that didn't have any shadows on them from prior experiences. I thought
that the technical systems in itself was not the major factor. I didn't
think that was that essential at that point. Q: So the
issues from your perspective were not technical. They were managerial.
Is that a summation? Simermeyer: Managerial,
ethical, what do I want to say? The image. The relationship to the
rest of the organization. Systems was regarded as a great problem,
because the rest of the organization felt that they were being pulled
down by it. It could destroy them.
These contracting things were erupting, questions about whether systems
was really moving ahead, all that kind of stuff was really kind of
something that I felt were the major problems that I faced.
Q: All right. So you started to say, you arrived on the scene in
systems. Simermeyer: In the first week, about
I think it was, we ended up going to a briefing on this thing. I think
it's now called the Systems Modernization Center (the SMC) up on the
second floor in the West High Rise. I was told that there was a meeting
of these people, what do you call it? These HMA's (Hiring Monitoring
Authorities). That's what I learned after I got used to it. But anyway,
they were having a briefing.
We walked in on the meeting unannounced. It was to me a scene of chaos.
There were people there from Systems who had been making some presentations.
These guys from GSA and GAO were literally tearing them up and wanting
to know when they could have some specific information about this
contract, or that project, or a whole lot of things that to me looked
like they were really giving Systems a very bad time. My recollection
too is that there were some representatives from Congress there. But
I can't recall names, and I can't recall how many--not many.
Q: Was this your Associate Commissionersgiving this presentation
or do you know who it was? Simermeyer: No, below
that. I don't know what they called them anymore. It used to be like
project officers or something. Q: Well, when I came into
systems, you had 6 program managers. Simermeyer:
Yes. Q: Now I don't know if that was something you introduced
or if it was in place when you got there. There were 6 parts of the
SMP, 6 major areas. Each one of those had a program manager, they
were called. Are those the guys you're talking about?
Simermeyer: Well, my recollection now is that was the idea.
But, they may not have been the same people, and there may not have
been 6. It might have evolved into something from that beginning.
But it was like that. There were these people who were the focal points,
and they were giving this briefing. But it was totally, to me disjointed,
both in terms of what I could see happening with these other people.
So I took that upon myself as a major project to try to form that
into an overall part of the Systems Modernization Plan, to have these
things arranged so that they would be reported regularly. There was
also I think a report that was due every 6 months or something on
the SMP. It was supposed to go to all these people. It hadn't been
put out for either 6 months or a year. So it was that kind of slippage
that was ringing the alarm bells as well.
So I figured you know, my focus is on getting the SMP report out on
time. I think I went in there in November, and the report would have
been due like in December. It wasn't being done, and these other guys
were not really that organized or coordinated. I attributed that to
a lack of direction, leadership, whatever from the top, including
the Associate Commissioners, who were in some disarray. They were
feuding amongst themselves as well. So that was not helping either,
particularly Elliott Kirschbaum and Carl Couchoud. One was Systems
Requirements and Validation. Q: Elliott.
Simermeyer: And the other one was what? Office of what?
Q: Whatever we called that. It was Systems Development. But
I can't remember, was it OSD? What did we call that?
Simermeyer: It could have been. But anyway, those two should
have been in harmony; they should have been working together in sync,
and they were not. They were accusing each other: "Well,
you didn't do this, or I can't do this." "Well,
you didn't give me that information, so I can't follow through."
It was going on like that. So that was a major impediment to these
other things happening, too.
So we started having a lot of briefings in the SMC, interminable briefings.
I spent hours there. I wondered many times whether that was the best
approach. But it was the only approach that I knew was to have these
guys come and put up on those charts their milestones, and explain
delays and what they did to catch up, and whether these milestones
were realistic, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.
So we went through that time after time after time after time. I made
the top staff come and sit in with me--the Carl Couchoud's and the
Elliott Kirschbaum's and others--to see what was happening and to
relate to that. If they couldn't relate, they were supposed to do
something about it. That information then was used as a base for the
Systems Modernization Plan Report, I guess I'd call it.
Well not simultaneously but almost simultaneously, Martha was giving
me a lot of support for things that I don't think Marshall even tried
to get. For example, outside recruiting of top staff. Tina Sung, who
came in (not with systems expertise but had personnel expertise) was
really great at that, in terms of advertising in publications throughout
the country and other places--not other places but to other devices--soliciting
applications for these topflight jobs.
So that became part of it, bringing these people in for interviews
and then working them through the process in what I think was a fairly
streamlined process in relation to the way the Government works normally.
But it was as a result of people like Dean Mesterharm came in and
Cary Green and there were some others who are still there. I could
dig up their names if I thought hard enough.
Some turned out to be not high fliers. There was one guy we got from
Hughes Aircraft on the West Coast who came in, ended up in the NCC,
and turned out to be--I won't say a loser. But he didn't turn out
to have all the credentials and ability and so forth that he was touted
to have and that he touted that he had. But others did, and they were
very good.
So they came in. Of course, they were new. They had to fit into the
organization. I set up a process (again, because I didn't have that
kind of background where I interviewed them). The others interviewed
them as well--Carl, Elliott, Renny, and other people--and gave me
feedback on what they thought about their abilities.
So we kind of picked good, solid performers. But breaking through
all the history of SSA, which is always coming up the line, through
the line, and working your way up the grades. That was a little bit
rough as I recall now in terms of the impact probably on the people
in Systems to see these outsiders coming in, taking some of the top
slots.
But Martha was game for it. I also got her approval to go out and
recruit programmers--a large number of programmers--which, I think,
totally irritated Nelson Sabatini who was trying to mastermind this
downsizing, and Herb Doggette who, while he could see the merit of
this, was hurting because they were putting the freeze on his field
organization. Here I am advertising for programmers--I can think both
externally and internally--and probably raising all kinds of questions
throughout the organization.
But to me, that was a desperate situation: they didn't have enough
trained programmers. Again, we had to bring them in and set up training
classes over on Security Boulevard in that building across next to
Meadows East I guess it was. It was along that strip there. So we
put them through training there.
I'd go over and talk to them regularly to try to get a feel for how
they were moving, going, and what they were doing. So we had a multifaceted
approach. We're trying to deal with the monitoring authorities, trying
to bring the SMP up to the speed it should be in terms of the reports
that were due, getting the program managers in sync--doing what they
were supposed to be doing. All of this basically was kind of a management
focus.
I didn't profess to be the systems guru, and I relied on them for
support from people like Roger to keep it on track. So we went, and
I think we started to make some progress in terms of pulling it all
together. Well, we did other things, like I did get the top staff
of systems, many of whom had never been in a district office and didn't
know anything about the district operations, out in the field. I got
approval from--I guess it was Tom Shortley--to take them down to Glen
Burnie. They visited Glen Burnie, groups at a time. My recollection
is that they spent a week there--not to overload the office and not
to have a picnic--but to go down and to observe claims being taken,
talk to people in the office, and get a feel for what their problems
were, what their frustrations were.
So that was one element: to try to open up that communication. Then
generally just going to all the meetings where the Regional Commissioners
would come in and we'd talk and try to give them meaningful status
reports and other kinds of things. I'm trying to recall whether we
put out any kind of informational sheet to the field. I don't recall.
Q: Well, yes. Simermeyer: Yes?
Q: I helped you with it. But we'll come to that in a second.
I wanted to ask you about one of those meetings. I actually came to
headquarters to work for you in July of 1985, when Tom Margenau and
I came in as field reps. I'm going to ask you what you had in mind
when you brought us in. But first I want to ask you
about those meetings. Because one of the things that struck me when
I came were those program manager meetings. By the time I got there
in July, the way you had it arranged is each of those 6 program managers
would come in and give you a briefing. You'd have one of those meetings
every week in the SMC, as you said, and that program manager would
come in and brief you on all the projects in their program area. The
next week, the next one would come in, and the next week, the next
one. So over 6 weeks, you had all of them in. And so each one came
in every 6 weeks and briefed you; and you had a meeting every week.
You had one of these briefings every week.
You used to let Tom and I sit in to sort of educate us about Systems
in the beginning. It used to boggle my mind about how many projects
you had there that you were trying to manage and trying to keep track
of and trying to manage this process. At the time, I know there were
over 200 projects in the SMP that you were trying to manage.
How did all that work? Did that whole system of having all those briefings
and trying to manage all those 200 projects, how successful were you
at doing that? Simermeyer: I don't know. It's
tough dealing with you. Because you were there. You have a better
memory than I of some of these things. As you say them, you refresh
my mind. And you're right. I don't really, honestly think that I was
managing 200 projects. I was sort of sitting on the top of the wagon,
cracking the whip, and making those horses pull that wagon up that
hill, even though I thought it was a pretty steep hill, and it was
a hard load to pull.
But, I, on the other hand, was driven by the HMA's, and the forces
that be behind me. I felt if I had a clean start from day one, didn't
have any of this baggage, I would not have operated the way I did.
But when I walked in there, because of all these things, the controversy
and so forth that was swirling around, I didn't think it made any
sense to try to change course. Because even if I wanted to, I wouldn't
know how to. To disrupt the operation at that point would be to admit
it was going down the tubes and would be to invite these people to
just tear us apart. They were not there to help us. Well, they said
they were.
Unless you put up a front and made it push forward, to me a plan is
a plan is a plan. It doesn't have to be the perfect plan. You can
make a lot of plans work just by force of support and direction and
whatever without saying that this was the best way to go. But I never
thought that the 200 projects were all what I should be so engrossed
in. I didn't know anybody--either before and after--who went through
that kind of torture. But again, it was because of these outside factors
and the history. Q: You guys did try to at least track
those projects. Because it used to boggle my mind about how I would
see a briefing, and they would put up a project and show a time line;
and either you or Tina or Roger would invariably say, "Now wait
a minute. Six weeks ago, wasn't that milestone March instead of April?"
You guys would get down to that level of watching all these projects.
Simermeyer: Which is not really the best way
to manage. There should have been more done at the level of the Associate
Commissioners or others to do that. But I was kind of bringing them
in, as I said, to make them participate by asking questions, hoping
that they would say, "Well, the next time, that would be taken
care of. I'm not going to have him sitting there saying, Why didn't
this happen or whatever?"
The program managers, I think, were pretty frustrated, because this
was so out of keeping with the way SSA operated before. Nobody had
ever run SSA that way before, with functional managers and program
managers, except that guy, Paul Cotton, back in the SSI days, who
had set up the ATO's and the FTOs--Activity Task Officers and Functional
Task Officers. That was an attempt at this kind of organization.
That management style was not unique to SSA. SSA was not a pioneer,
but it was atypical. It was something that I found difficult to deal
with because I never had to deal that way before in operational areas.
There was somebody in charge, somebody accountable, somebody you could
deal with. You didn't have this crossover where things were being
integrated if you want to call it that.
I also tried to strengthen (speaking of integrated) the Office of
Systems Integration. Q: That's what it was, OSI.
Simermeyer: That was Cary Green, right? Q:
No. OSI was Carl, and OSPI was Cary Green. Simermeyer:
Oh. I put my eggs in OSPI's basket. That was another guy. There was
another fellow who had been there before Cary. Q: Dick
Shepherd? Simermeyer: No, before Dick Shepherd.
This guy was--I'm going to use the word even though it's going on
the tape--a raving maniac. We had gone over when I was in Central
Operations for a briefing in the NCC, I think it was. He put on this
display. It was very persuasive, very effective. It looked like he
was some kind of a borderline genius. What do they call it? Something
folly, or something like that--not Haley's folly or--maybe his name
will come back to me.
But anyway, this guy was very impressive at first glance and first
flush. But then as time went by, and it turned out that he and his
operating in this area was not getting the job done. He was coming
up with this radical approach, and the other people weren't buying
it. He was kind of blocking me because he was in this strategic spot.
I wanted to use that job in addition to Roger being on my own staff
and monitoring and giving me feedback. This OSPI was going to be the
one to monitor the overall plan and the program managers and write
the Systems Modernization Report and do all of that staff work. That
was a staff of considerably more than I had in my immediate office.
I needed somebody I had a lot of confidence in, and that was Cary
Green, another guy we recruited from the outside.
Although Cary came in without having the SSA tradition and all that
good stuff, he had to me a very good level of understanding. He was
very cooperative. He was a very low-key guy, but he generated a lot
of respect. I had to maneuver a little to get this other guy out of
the position he was in. I forget exactly how I did it. But I got him
to take early-out or something and get out of the job, and then moved
Cary into it, and then restructured it. It started to function. The
people in the SMC, I think, were on his staff. The girls that worked
there--Sandy Failla and the others. Q: Right.
Simermeyer: You know, he had that function.
Q: That's right. Simermeyer: So we were trying
to pull that in through OSPI as well. |
Q: I wanted to ask you. I
mentioned this before. This may not be as significant in your memory
as it is to me, but I actually came to headquarters in 1985 to work
for you. Simermeyer: Yes. Q: You
recruited--you and Tina--actually Tina is the one who approached me
and asked me to do this. Two field reps to come in from the field.
Simermeyer: Right. Q: To work on
public information material to go back out to the field about Systems
Modernization. Simermeyer: Right. Q:
Do you remember that? Simermeyer: Yes.
Q: Can you tell me what your thinking was and why you did that
and what you were trying to accomplish? Simermeyer:
Well, it was that same thing that I talked about before--trying
to get a message to the field that they would relate to and understand.
In the face of all of the earlier downplay by Svahn and all of the
bad press that was being generated by these in-house scandals or whatever
you want to call them, try to put out a positive image to the field
in language they could understand.
Tom Morganeau, as I recall, had written an article that was in OASIS
when he was a field rep in Boise, Idaho, and that impressed me very
much, that he had that kind of writing ability and skill. I forget
how it became known that he wanted to come to Baltimore, but it did.
We talked--Tina and I--about the idea of bringing in people with a
field base who could come in and get enough of a grasp of what the
Systems environment was and what the Systems activities were, and
put out a report that would go back out, could be understood by somebody
below the level of a Systems technician in the regional office--the
field reps, the claims reps, the service reps and others.
And, you came in as a second one of them, and my recollection is that
Tom was there first and had started. Then the Commissioner or somebody
up there decided that they could use somebody like that so he went
upstairs either on detail or whatever, but it ended up as a permanent
assignment up there. You were the other one of the two remaining behind
to do this kind of a job. In my recollection, it gets a little stronger
than that, and we did put out some kind of message to the field.
Q: Right. I'll tell you, we actually did two main things.
We did a monthly Systems newsletter that went to everybody in the
field, and we did at least once what we called the field version of
the SMP which was like an Executive Summary version. Those were the
two big products that we produced for you on a regular basis so that
we could sort of translate the SMP into common language.
Simermeyer: That's right. Your memory is better than mine
in that area, and I do now remember the field version of the SMP because
it was so focused towards the higher monitoring authorities. I had
gotten a lot of feedback from the field when I myself had tried to
read it. I could not understand it when I was in OCO. I figured we
needed to bridge that gap so that's what that was; so we went into
that kind of a mode. Q: All right, let me ask you about
a couple of other things, too. you talked before about tensions between
OSR and OSI, between Carl and Elliott. It also seemed to me that there
was another problem like that between the people in OSO in the NCC
and people in OSI, between the software developers and the people
running the system. For example, it would manifest
in complaints that someone had thrown their software over the wall
to the people in the NCC without any regard to whether or not they
could put it up without bringing down the system and so on. I would
describe it as bickering between those components about finger pointing
whenever problems arose. I perceived when I got there that that was
going on as well. Was that accurate? Did you also have that problem
in the beginning at least? Simermeyer: Yes. Jack
Wicklein had been the Deputy to Jan Prokop. When Prokop left (I don't
know if that is when Mandell came in and Jack stayed in Prokop's place
or what) but as Svahn came in and took over, then the NCC was opened
up. I guess Jack was the first one to go over there.
Jack was another kind of individual as well. He had a good Systems
background and training and expertise I think, but he was not a techie
type. He was more of (as he is today) a salesman and not a manager
either in terms of managing a whole big operation like that. He did
it more by a slap on the back, and let's go to Hertsch's and have
lunch kind of thing, and didn't really bite the bullet in terms of
some of the hard things to do.
So I kind of think that that was part of it--that he tended to blame
somebody else for problems in his operation. That was the way it was
done. Those people had no loyalty to the Systems organization--no
esprit de corps the way SSA had had it--working way up from the ground
up and developing over the years.
These people came in from diverse places. Carl had come in with Jack
Svahn as an outsider, and Jack Wicklein had come in from some place
else as an outsider. Elliott was there for a long, long time. I guess
he had been working with Art Hess way back when, but he had maybe
more of an SSA perspective; he was not a manager per SE. Elliott,
in my view, had never really managed anything. He was a very bright
guy, very precise and I suppose articulate. These guys all were individuals.
They were not managers, they were not team players, so that was part
of the problem of Systems and its lack of progress and all of that.
Q: There was also another component if I remember. I may be
getting confused on the timeline here, but you also had, I think,
Pete Herrera at some point who was the Associate Commissioner for
the part of the operation that was Office Automation. I don't remember
what we used to call it. Was that during this time, or was that later?
Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was later. Maybe it was before. Well, I
don't know. Simermeyer: Pete was there when I
was there. Pete was a protege of Martha McSteen. Pete came in, not
as my selection. He was... Q: from the Regional Office
in Dallas, I think. Simermeyer: Yes, you're right,
probably on a detail or something to start out. Then it gradually
emerged into this kind of a situation where office automation became
recognized as a big area and he was brought in to kind of pull it
together. That was another diverse element in the amalgamation of
Systems people because he had some Systems background, but again,
not a techie type, and he didn't relate to the others. You're right,
he was there. Q: Okay. At some point I want to talk about
some of the successes because I think you had some, but I want to
ask you about one more problem. This is terribly unfair because I
happened to have been part of seeing this one unfold. I'm going to
ask you and see what you say about it. It seemed to me that one of
the problems you faced in trying to manage that organization was the
very traditional problem of information coming up the line--whether
it would get filtered out before it ever made it to you.
I'm going to remind you of an incident that you and I participated
in and have you comment on it. When we did that field edition of the
SMP, the way Tom and I prepared it is that we went around and talked
to all of the six program managers and we said: "What are your
important projects? Describe them to me and when are they going to
be operational? Give us the dates."
Tom and I prepared the first draft of that SMP, and we sent it up
to your front office for review. I was sitting at my desk two days
later, the phone rings, I pick it up and it is Art Simermeyer on the
phone. He says to me: "You've got an error here in this project
where you're discussing the National Debt Management Project. You
show it going up six months later than it's going up."
I said to you: "Well, I don't think so, Art. That's the date
they gave me when I talked to them about it last week."
You said: "What!" You hit the ceiling. Then you hung up
the phone and presumably went and had a conversation with your managers.
It wasn't the only problem that we had trouble with, but I particularly
remember the Debt Management Project was late. It was six or nine
months late beyond its due date. Apparently your managers had not
told you about that. You found out about it from me with the draft
of this field edition of the Systems Modernization Plan.
That little incident stuck in my mind. It made me wonder whether
that was a problem that you faced during your tenure as the head of
Systems--people filtering out information and not bringing it up to
your office. Was that true, or was that an isolated incident? Do you
remember that at all? Simermeyer: No, I don't
remember that particular incident. I think that there was some of
that in there. There were commitments made in the reports that we
were supposed to update the next time around. If they didn't show
progress, then it brought down the heavens from GAO wanting to know
why we were slipping and then also from others in the organization.
National Debt Management was a biggie and had been a biggie when I
was in OCO. We were trying to get on top of that and it was a major
priority for the organization by its very nature. You know, we were
going to save all this money by this magnificent new system.
Q: It was a troubled project. Simermeyer:
Yes. Q: It had been delayed many times before you ever
got here. Simermeyer: Yes, right. It was probably
totally unrealistic to put it up the way we did with the dates that
were there, although again, the dates that were there were the ones
that were there when I went into it. I did not choose to (right or
wrong) go in and say: "Look, all this information has got to
be reevaluated and the dates have to be changed. We may have to drop
back a year or two or three." To me that was just unacceptable.
That was not what Martha wanted in her position again as temporary
Commissioner with all of the other pressures on her and on the organization
and the funding for this SMP. If we showed that we had spent part
of that $479,000,000 (this was in the second or third year of the
plan that I moved into it) that would have been just anathema you
know, not acceptable.
How could I say that it could not be done in the time frame that they
said it could be done? There was no base of experience. We were not
copying somebody else's ideas. We were in this thing, and so I decided
that the best thing to do was to try to make it happen. I didn't like
slippage because I knew that it was going to just turn out to be more
of this criticism and questions, so that was probably why I reacted
the way I did. I probably reacted, you're right, because somehow I
had gotten some misinformation. The misinformation was what I wanted.
I did not want misinformation, but I wanted... Q: to
know there was a problem. Simermeyer: No, to
know the dates, and I wanted to know that it was moving. This thing
comes along and says: "No it's not." They were very stressful
times. That's about all I can say about all that activity.
I remember when Martha McSteen as Commissioner was invited to speak
in Switzerland at a conference called ECOMA (it's a European Community
of Management Analysis which was basically a code name for a computer
organization of European companies), and Jack Wicklein had managed
a membership of SSA in this organization overseas. How he did and
why he did, I'll never know. There was really no rationale for SSA
to be a member of this organization. Be that as it may, the organization
invited Martha to be a keynote speaker in Zurich, Switzerland in 1980...when
did I go in? In 1985? Q: You went in November 1984.
Simermeyer: All right. In 1985 or 1986, Martha was invited
while she was still there before Dorcas came, and she decided not
to go. My feeling was that she didn't want to be out of the country
at the time. Like I told you about this guy who was the Regional Director
in Denver, went to the FBI and found out his job was filled after
he left. For whatever reason, she did not want to go. She asked me
to go to this conference. Well, you know, here's me going to Zurich
to talk to this group of Systems people from all over Europe about
what?
So I got somebody to drum up the speech. It was this guy Jerry Kiefer,
no Jerry Rieger. He was good at that. I got him in there as a staff
person. I forget where he came from, but he turned out to be excellent
in terms of giving me good information, support and feedback and so
forth. He developed a speech for me to present. What I talked about
was the progress of Systems Modernization in SSA and so forth, and
it was good enough to carry the day.
Anyway, I went to Zurich. Jack Wicklein was there. Jack went along.
I don't know what his rationale was for going, but he was there as
a representative. Jimmy Dean was there. Do you know Jimmy Dean?
Q: Yes, he's from Systems. Simermeyer:
He was there on his own. He went as a private citizen, as far as I
know, and a friend of his-- Ricky somebody who was from BHI or HCFA--they
just happened to be there, and they were there for the whole conference.
I went from here to Madrid to a meeting of ISSA (International Social
Security Administration). I went in to sit in on that meeting. I was
not on the agenda, but I was invited to go, so I chose to go. I went
to that meeting and then I went from there to Zurich.
After the meeting and after the speech, I got my platinum plate, you
know. That's when I showed you the picture when Jack was there. Well,
we took off some time and drove up around through Lichtenstein, Switzerland
and had a great old time. Jack was a great guy to be with. He was
a great companion. The other two guys were nice, too.
Then on the way back, this guy in charge of ECOMA had these gifts
for Martha which we brought back. There was a Waterford Crystal owl
and other things. We went up to see Martha when we got back, and Jack
made a presentation. Jack brought them back. Jack presented them.
I was there, but it was pretty clear that Jack was the engineer of
this whole thing. We subsequently dropped out of ECOMA.
After that, I couldn't see any rationale for us to belong to this
organization and paying the fees that they wanted, but it was Jack
who engineered it. Jack was that kind of a guy. I forget how I got
into that, but anyway that was part of the history at that point.
Well, one other interesting thing when I was in Madrid, this guy who
was in ISSA (I think they worked out of Brussels) said he was interested
in having a project to evaluate all of the social insurance program
systems activities throughout the world in terms of their Systems
modernization. Wouldn't it be a good idea if SSA would head it up,
do a survey, gather this information, then assemble it and present
it in a paper, and then he gave some location--I think it was Rome--in
2 years? I said: "Yes, it sounded okay." Politically, SSA
was always favorable to ISSA initiatives. It was like the United Nations.
It was something good to belong to and it did some good, but it was
rather nebulous in terms of that.
I came back anyway and I described it to Martha and told her what
I planned to do. She said: "Okay," and I set it up anyway.
Basically, Jerry Rieger? Keifer? Q: Rieger.
Simermeyer: I keep mixing him up with Jerry Keifer. He was
a Deputy Commissioner. Q: Yes, he was head of policy
at one time. Simermeyer: Jerry Keifer?
Q: Yes. Simermeyer: There was a Jerry Kiefer
who was a Deputy Commissioner... Q: Yes, he was a Deputy
Commissioner. Simermeyer: Back when I was in
BDI. Q: He was the Deputy. Simermeyer:
He spent weeks in my mailroom just going from one place to another.
He drove me crazy. But, Jerry Rieger got the project of designing
this survey and then sending it out to all these countries and trying
to get them to respond. Of course, about half of them responded and
half of them didn't. He had to gather the information into some intelligent
form and then putting it together to draw some conclusions--the basis
for putting together a paper. Well, in the meantime, the evolution
of my career and everything else went along, and I never did deliver
the paper. The paper was developed and presented by Herb Doggette.
That's how it started. Q: I actually worked on it with
Herb. Simermeyer: Did you? Okay. Well then, you
know more about these things. Q: No, just a couple of
little things I had. It's the point of your career that I brushed
up against. Alright. At some point I want to talk
about Martha leaving and Dorcas coming in and what change that produced.
During that period when you were the head of Systems and Martha was
still there, we've discussed some of the frustrations and the problems
that you faced and the challenges, but we did some things, too. We
made some accomplishments during this period. Systems began to be
successful, I would say, during the early part of your tenure.
Simermeyer: Well, the NCC started to perform at a much
better level than it had earlier. There were fewer delays, breakdowns,
and I'll call them traumas. I remember when we would have these things
and something would break, and then we would have to have a conference
call with all of the Regions. I guess Hal Fine was one of the people
in Systems who was in SSA long enough and knew enough people in the
field and so forth that he could communicate.
So we would get him, and he was also able to relate to the Systems
side of it. We used him a great deal to have these meetings or conference
calls. He would come and talk about what had happened and what we
were doing to fix it and when we would be back on track or whatever.
So those kinds of things were happening. But they started to drop
off.
I don't know if I created that kind of communication, but I know I
encouraged it as a way again to keep the field posted because I felt
the worst thing they could have would be these things happening and
information coming in and no feedback. What other things?
Q: In 1985 did we put up the TAP terminals? We must have. Did we
put up the dumb terminals? Did we really expand? I should have looked
at my own notes here. Simermeyer: Yes we did.
Q: The Modernized Claims System began to really go into
place around then in a serious way. Simermeyer:
Well, yes. Renny DiPentima, who was Carl's Deputy, had really taken
the lead in that Claims Modernization activity. He had the model DO
(they called it) down in the Operations Building, and he brought in
all these detailees to work on the terminals and develop these programs.
He really was able to put a lot of focus in it and that was very popular
with the field because he had all of these promised improvements coming
along.
When he started to generate some, he had a lot of credibility and
gave people a lot of hope because really at that point I think was
when the impact of the downsizing was being felt. The rationale is
supposed to be that Systems Modernization would compensate for that,
and it hadn't been in the beginning, and it started to show some effect.
That was a much more positive image for the field. The TAP terminals
were, in my recollection, really outmoded before we even installed
them. Well, I think we kind of suspected it. We didn't say it, but
we just looked foolish. We were really looking for the TAP terminals.
They were the dumb ones, weren't they? The Paradyne ones.
Q: That's right. They were after Paradyne, but they were dumb terminals.
Simermeyer: Well, the Paradynes were out there,
I guess. Then what, the IBM got the contract? Q: Right,
IBM 3270's, they were called--dumb terminals. We put 50,000 or whatever
out there. Simermeyer: That's right.
Q: Let me say a good word for you on behalf of the field. Even
though they were dumb terminals, they were a big improvement over
what we had before which was two terminals in the office, one in the
back. If you wanted a query, you had to go get in line to get that
query. When we put all those dumb terminals out there and you had
one on your desk, that made a world of difference to the folks out
there. It was a big breakthrough, I would say. Simermeyer:
I think you're right and I recall some of that now, but the great
hurrah was for the fact it was IBM, too, instead of Paradyne because
they had not been able to get IBM into that environment. To my recollection,
they would not be competitive. They were too high priced. For whatever
reason, they changed their strategy and they became competitive.
This became the magic answer to the Paradynes which had been discredited
for all the reasons we talked about before plus the limited number
of them. Even then there was a lot of talk by the HMA's: "Why
are you putting in dumb terminals? The way that procurement process
went, there was just no way to try to derail that. Again, you would
have been behind the eight ball. If you had derailed it, you would
have nothing, and it would be a long time before you would get something,
plus all the questions about: "Why did you do that in the first
place?" Q: So you had to live with that decision
to buy dumb terminals? Simermeyer: Yes. It was
made. Q: It was made before and you decided you had to
carry that out. You couldn't restart that. Simermeyer:
Right. It was either made before or we were so far into it that there
was really no other strategy that I could have seen coming into play.
You're right, the problems in the field of queuing to get queries
and so forth was ridiculous. Q: The other thing that
happened was that you got a bunch of new mainframes put in the NCC
which made a big difference on the systems performance and how often
the system was up. We got a lot of capacity during that period. We
bought a lot of capacity and that helped a lot. Simermeyer:
Yes. Q: We shouldn't diminish that achievement, I don't
think. Simermeyer: No. But again, I think those
were things that were in the flow. I didn't say this is what we need
and do it, and that was the answer. They took a long time to accomplish,
to justify, to get on board and when they did, there was some payoff.
I can't talk too much more about that. Q: Okay. I don't
remember the dates here exactly, but at some point Martha had to leave,
and Dorcas came in as Commissioner. Martha didn't get the job permanently.
Simermeyer: Right. Q: That ended
up producing a change for you, too. Tell me about that transition,
how that happened, and your first encounters with Dorcas and anything
else about that. Simermeyer: Martha left, and
I guess Dorcas was the anointed and decided to have a series of briefings
in Washington. Briefings and meetings. It was a two-way flow. It was
not just one way. We all had to troop over there (all the deputies,
that is) to these meetings. She and Jim Kissko and this other guy
who was on loan from another organization, a Philippine...
Q: Chick Manzano. Simermeyer: Chick Manzano
was there and maybe one or two others. They had been associated with
her in her job in the Department. Well, they were sort of like "gad
flies, too" (I'll call them). She had this group come and sit,
and she would talk about what was happening in SSA and what she wanted
to happen and so forth. I don't recall any specifics, and they would
chime in--to me not offering anything of substance. They played a
role as her staff advisors, and I suppose what they were doing was
evaluating us.
Then later they probably had a session to go over who they thought
was doing well and who was not doing well or doing right or doing
wrong or whatever. It was not a happy time. She was not rude or anything
like that. It was just a little stressful to go through that kind
of a process.
Also, rather than her come to Baltimore where everybody was, five
of us had to run over to see her every time she wanted to have one
of these sessions. We started out that way, and then she started coming
over to SSA. My recollection there is that she was absent a lot there,
too. She spent a lot of time in Washington, certainly more than Martha
had.
Jim Kissko came over with her and became more of the focal point in
the Commissioner's office. She would come over for Commissioner staff
meetings and things. But on a day-to-day basis we dealt with Kissko
more than with Dorcas and this little, almost like a girl with long
hair, very eccentric). What was her name? Q: Enid Borden.
Simermeyer: She brought into the Commissioner's
staff meeting a radio so she could listen to the World Series while
the staff meeting was going on. If I hadn't seen or heard of anything
like that in my life, I wouldn't have believed it. It was true.
Q: She was an eccentric character, wasn't she?
Simermeyer: One of a kind. She was just eccentric. She didn't
bother anybody or anything. She and Dorcas had their own little agenda,
whatever it was. Dorcas was interested in establishing that she was
working with the people in the Department, GSA, and GAO; and things
were going to be better. She knew enough about the earlier controversies
and criticisms and so forth.
My calculation is her strategy was to show that she was going down
her own track and that she was going to get the job done, and she
was relying on these people for advice and counsel as to how to get
it done. By these people, I mean in GAO and GSA. The guy in GSA, Frank
McDonogh, was another one of those individuals that I came in contact
with, a politician from the word go in my book. Is he still in the
job? Do you know? Q: I don't think so. Simermeyer:
He was a survivor, and he was putting up with all of these Federal
agencies and their activities at a time when this guy from Texas,
Congressman... Q: Jack Brooks. Simermeyer:
Jack Brooks was really running around with a sword trying to cut
off the head of every Systems person you could see as I recall and
ruthless and driving GAO to investigate. There were problems, and
he just continued to repeat them, confound them, and mount them. Anyway,
McDonogh I thought could have been a buffer zone in there, but either
he didn't have any rapport with Jack, or Jack Brooks didn't want to
have anything to do with him.
Nevertheless, he played a role. He was there and he put all kinds
of constraints on us in terms of procurement, made life more difficult
on the basis that he was monitoring more carefully. We had to go over
and meet with him and play the game--have his people come over and
meet with us and play the game.
To me, it was not really substantive monitoring. It was more of this
political kind of thing and I didn't like it at all, but I had no
choice in the matter. Frank being Frank, we'd go over and have sessions
and meetings and so forth. He finally decided that I ought to be on
this interagency committee to evaluate this Navy procurement which
was also underway at the time.
Consequently, I had to go to these briefings which were given over
in Washington or in Crystal City or wherever to participate in this
activity as sort of a price of buying Frank's support in my own job.
Like you said, he knew I had no real systems background and he really
didn't care. He just wanted a representative from SSA.
Well, I went, I sat, I listened, and I did not get much out of those
briefings. They were done by EDS, I think, or Delloitte Hoskins himself,
one or the other. They were very sophisticated, and they looked impressive.
They were no better than ours and no more impressive. In fact, they
were less detailed than ours.
They would sit around and the Admiral, (I forget his name now) who
was a very nice guy, would give Frank all kinds of words of reassurance
and comfort, and they would serve coffee. The Assistant Secretary
for the Navy sat in on those briefings, too, on occasion. They were
not trivial. Eddie Heronimous from IRS was there. He was my counterpart
in IRS. Some others were there. I can't recall.
We finally got to a point where I persuaded Frank to let me bring
Cary Green to the briefings mainly so that he could interpret what
was being presented and give me feedback in language that I could
understand--whether things were going or not going and in order to
foster some relationship. I thought that some of the things they did
looked good.
I even arranged for a trip to Camp Phil in Pennsylvania which is a
Navy base where they were doing a lot of this systems development.
I got all the top staff at SSA, packed them on a bus, and took them
up there. We went through briefings and had a lot of exchange about
how we were going to work together and there were plenty of things
we could cooperate on and all that good stuff.
We came back from there and I think we had a counterpart briefing
at SSA. We invited their top staff over and we took them through the
NCC, built up our role, and tried to show them that we were making
progress and all that good stuff. I think the whole thing kind of
dried up after that. I recollect after that also that the Navy procurement
kind of fell into disfavor. It did not deliver what it was budgeted
and supposed to do. The contractor did not perform the way he should
have. But anyway, that was another kind of sidelight that was going
on.
So here I am maintaining a relationship with McDonogh under these
kinds of conditions which is a further distraction. If you figure
I've got to get up at 5:00 o'clock in the morning to go to SSA, get
a car to drive to Crystal City to be at a briefing at 8:00 o'clock,
(we usually had them at 8:00 o'clock in the morning) sit through a
briefing for 4 hours, and then get the driver to bring me all the
way back to SSA. In the meantime, I had both hands pretty full with
stuff to do, but they didn't care. That's the way it had to be.
Q: What about your relationship with some of the other HMA's,
like the Department and GAO? Did that improve at all? That was one
of your objectives--was to improve those relationships.
Simermeyer: Well, did it improve? I don't think so. One of
the other peripherals, too, incidentally that came up was the Office
of Technology Assessment which was not managed by, but who was the
guy who had been the former Deputy Commissioner for Management in
SSA who was kind of chased out before or at the time of Cardwell?
I'll think of his name sometime, too, but he went over to Washington.
He landed up with a job with the Inspector General. He was bidding
for the Systems job because all this time I was Acting, and he was
making it known that he was interested in that Systems job. Somehow
he was also connected to the Office of Technology Assessment. OTA
was an outfit, to my recollection, that was supposedly set up to evaluate
and assess technology in a broad sense.
One of its first assignments was to look at SSA's Systems Modernization
with a critical eye. They had a team that came over and interviewed
our people, and did evaluations and so forth, and then proceeded to
start to write a report. They would show us the drafts of the report
as they were writing it and invite comment.
We went over to Washington to briefings. I took Renny DiPentima with
me for that because Renny had good credentials from his academic background.
He had the ability to talk their language. He was very expressive
in so many ways that I felt he was the best person to dialog with
them. They brought these people in who, in my view, were really technocrats.
They were inexperienced and they were sharp shooting, and I don't
really know what their purpose was. They were an arm of Congress to
report to the Congress, but they were not related to GAO per se. Anyway,
that was another element.
I remember people like Jack Futterman going along on that briefing.
I forget whether he was invited to comment from his perspective about
SSA's history and what its focus was. And this other guy who was the
former Deputy Commissioner, he was there as well. He did not have
much to say. I felt he was there more as sort of a spy than anything
else to see if he could find anything that he could use to enhance
his idea of taking over the Deputy job. Well, he didn't come forth
with anything, but this was another element of these monitoring authorities
that I was putting up with that were bugging me.
GAO had a guy who used to work for Social Security back when the DAO
organization existed as I recall. (DAO was the Division of Accounting
Operations which is a forerunner of Systems.) He was not a resounding
success in SSA. He went to Washington, and he landed up at GSA and
he landed up heading up this team ostensively because he had some
SSA background.
The people in Systems thought that he was coming back with a vendetta.
I forget his name, too, but he did act like that. We had meetings
and briefings and sessions with him, and he would present his findings.
We would rebut them, and it was not a healthy environment. It was
not a constructive environment. That led into the feedback to the
GAO Report which came out sometime after that.
In the meantime, another element had come along which was the SMP.
It was a 5-year plan for $479,000,000. I got it in the second year,
and along about the fourth year the question came up: "What happens
after 5 years? Is it over and done?" No, it's not over and done.
It's a living plan that is going to go on. We change the goals. You
add new elements. Now you bring in new enhancements. You need more
money to maintain those enhancements, right? If you add all those
TAP terminals, they don't run on ozone. You need power, you need programming,
and you need a whole lot of other things to make this thing work.
So you have additional costs on top of the SMP costs to keep the system
functioning. That got to be a hard sell even with Nelson Sabatini
who was focusing totally on downsizing and on budget cutbacks and
everything else.
Here comes me wanting additional billions now. I forget what we projected,
but it was billions more to do the SMP and run it out another 5 years.
From whatever year we wrote the report, we were looking out 5 years
as our span, but it got to be misinterpretation in terms of "What
is this? They can't get it done in 5 years? Now it's a 7-year plan?
It's going to be an 8-year plan?" There was no real recognition
of that kind of a strategy.
It was driving me crazy because of all of the monitoring people, and
that includes the Department as well. What's under the Deputy Secretary
to the little Irish lady? Q: Heckler? Simermeyer:
Heckler. She had this guy who was a nice guy--an older man. I can't
recall his name. He had some political base, but that was not overpowering.
He decided to take on the role of monitoring the SMP and me. He had
me running over to Washington all the time to brief him on what was
happening in SMP. He had a gad fly on his staff--Wally somebody who
spent all his time (as far as I could see) monitoring the SMP and
me and giving this guy ammunition to ask questions.
So I had to get on my horse and go over there once a month to meet
with him and go through an agenda. He would be asking all these questions
about: "Is this on target? Why isn't it on target? Why did it
slip, and when are you going to make it up?" That went on and
on and on. It was like an attack from every side, and there wasn't
one ally--GSA, GAO, the Department, OTA, you name it--all coming in.
And in SSA questions about: "Why aren't we achieving the savings
that we projected?" because that was one of the budget things.
The downsizing would be accomplished by Systems doing thus and such
and by the year 1987 or whatever, we will have done thus and such.
By 1987 we didn't do thus and such. We weren't making that kind of
progress that they had predicted initially, and that became another
negative. So here we got to be even our own for the new SMP, and I
was getting no real staff support from those people.
I had my own budget staff, and they were pulling this information
together which we printed in our SMP Update without permitter of Nelson
Sabatini and others. So later when that got around the circle of all
these HMA's and questions were raised, they didn't always come and
ask me. They'd ask him. Well, he either didn't know or didn't agree
or for whatever reason. I felt I didn't have a good base of support
there.
The whole thing was kind of on quicksand. Dorcas, sitting where she
is sitting and listening to people like Nelson who's giving her the
gospel according to whoever he's talking to over in the Department
and OMB or whatever, is coming up with a story that SMP isn't delivering
and it's costing more money, and so forth and so forth. The bottom
line there is all of those factors played into the idea that she thought
she had to demonstrate some changes in order to either establish or
maintain some credibility on her part.
The GAO Report came out in the meantime, and it was very critical.
I remember the guy in charge of GAO calling me up one day and telling
me the report was coming. I think I had seen a draft or something.
He said: "I just wanted to give you a heads up." I had never
heard the term "heads up" before. He said: "What do
you think?"
I said: "I think you sandbagged me." "What
do you mean?"
I said: "You've sent people over here on a vendetta. They dug
in. We had meetings. We gave them information that doesn't show up
in that report. You got it slanted to show that we didn't do it right,
and that you could have done it right. It's just downhill."
"Well, I'm sorry you feel that way," he said. But that's
the way I felt, and I think that's what came out of it.
So Dorcas had her rendezvous and decided that she was going to have
to shuffle some people, including me. I guess the major one was me.
Others weren't included at the same time; I forget who. I think maybe
that's the time when Rose Lepore got shuffled to Seattle, or a few
other things she wanted to take care of. She did offer me the job
as Regional Commissioner in Philadelphia. Did I want to go to be Regional
Commissioner in Philadelphia?
We had SES interviews. In the SES scheme of things, there is a time
to rearrange and you move at their discretion. It's not a matter of
you picking out a place you'd like to be, it's a matter of their discretion,
so I was called up as part of this routine. There were others who
had been called up as well.
I had no real suspicion or conviction that anything radical was going
to happen. She said in our conversation: "What did you want to
do?
I said: "Well, I'd like to stay and finish the SMP. I'd like
to continue working on the SMP and bring it to some kind of a conclusion."
She said: "Well, what else would you like to do?"
I said: "Really nothing. I don't think that I want to go back
to Central Operations. Ruth is doing well there, and there's nothing
else that I want. I've done most of the things that I want to do in
my career. I'd just like to finish up with this." "Well,
how would you like to be Regional Commissioner in Philadelphia?"
(These are not the exact words, but anyway that's the gist of it.)
I said: "No, I don't really think so. At one time it would have
been very attractive, but after 37 years in Social Security and a
move for my family, that's not the way I see it."
She said: "Well, I'm sorry about that because we're going to
have to make some changes and some of them will be in Systems."
I said: "Okay, well, what do I do now?"
She said: "Well, why don't you go talk to Herb Doggette?"
I left there, I went out, and I tried to get Herb Doggette who I think
had already been forewarned. He was not party to this, but he had
been forewarned I think that it might come that I would be contacting
him.
So after a while I did make contact with him by phone, and he said:
"Well, what would you like to do?
He said, "You can come and work with me. What would you like
to be called? Would you like to be a Deputy to the Deputy Commissioner?"
I said: "That doesn't sound very meaningful to me."
"Well, would you like to be a Senior Advisor to the Deputy
Commissioner?"
I said: "Well, that sounds a little better than the Deputy to
the Deputy Commissioner."
Well, why don't you do that?"
It was that simple. In the meantime, she had also made arrangements
to replace Tina, Roger, and Liz McCardle who had been my mainstay
all the way back from BDI as my secretary way back in 1976. She stayed
with me all that time. She would go with me. That's about the way
it came about.
About a week later I was upstairs on the ninth floor again working
for Herb Doggette in an office where I had been way back when working
with Tom Parrott because he was at that end of the hall at that point--Herb
Doggette and Tom's suite. That's when I went in as Senior Advisor
to Herb Doggette.
Q: All right. Then how did you end up honchoing the 800 number project?
Tell me what you did. Did you do something before that? Did you work
on something before that for Herb before you took over what you were
doing with the 800 number?
Simermeyer: Yes, but nothing major. I participated in Herb's management
meetings--staff meetings, if you want to call them that, but very
informal. He had a small staff, and we got along very well. I knew
the people on the staff from earlier experiences. There was Ann Hart
and Marilyn...Johnson? Q: Holland. Simermeyer:
Holland. It used to be Johnson before she got married, and the tall
guy. Q: Alan Lane. Simermeyer: Alan
Lane. He was a nice guy. And, Liz came up with me and we sat there,
and they kind of didn't know what to do about it either. We started
figuring out what kind of activity could I do. I think one of the
rules that had come down was that I was to be totally removed from
the Systems environment because I never sat in on any Systems meetings
or conferences or whatever even after that.
First, Chick Manzano became the Acting. That was as big a blow to
me as anything because it would prove that Dorcas had no concept of
what to do about the job. She put him in there and he was totally
miscast. As soon as she found that out, then she put it under Herb
so he could try to bring some sense to it.
Anyway, we got in to working with Herb and things came up, like I
did a lot of review of material and whatever--to highlight items for
him. That was not of great consequence, but we got into an area of
handling special projects and Congressionals. Herb was getting a lot
of heat from Congressmen about problems in downsizing and consolidating
offices and so forth. They had a field component. It was Larry Hendricks,
Art Solomon, and I guess Janice Warden was Larry's Deputy. They were
the primary focal point of things like that, but it usually evolved
up to Herb Doggette.
I would work with the people in what they called it then, OFO (Office
of Field Operations) to develop these replies to these Congressionals
in terms of trying to satisfy the Congressional interest and try to
bring about a peaceful settlement, if you want to call it that. They
would work out with the Regional Commissioners, and I would work with
them. Together we would kind of handle these things.
Then there were special projects like Tins for Tots. Do you remember
that? Q: Oh, sure. Of course. How can I forget, Tins for
Tots. Simermeyer: Tins for Tots got elevated
to the Deputy Commissioner's level, and I would be his honcho for
Tins for Tots. There were all kinds of reports that had to go to Washington,
I think, and other places, and feedback on numbers each week to show
the progress. I would be honchoing for Herb, getting information from
OFO, kind of pushing them to make their commitments things, and then
providing feedback in memorandum form to the Commissioner's office--things
like briefings and things like that. Tins for Tots was one. There
was one project that involved Phil Graham from Texas who had a project
to look at alien immigration relating to Social Security numbers.
Q: Verification, yes. Simermeyer: Yes,
and I got involved in that. That was near and dear to the heart of
Dorcas for whatever reason, although it made no sense to any of us
because the sample was invalid and it was structured so that the results
were meaningless. Graham wanted something to have a report on and
this is the way it went. We worked through the Dallas Regional Office
on that pretty directly under the lady in charge of Operations. I
forget her name, but I worked with her on that particular one.
And then the Commissioner's priorities. What did they call them at
that point--the objectives she had that we had? Tins for Tots was
one of them. She had some kind of name for it--CAROTS. Q:
CAROTS, yes, that's right. Simermeyer: Commissioner's
something . . . Q: Activity... Simermeyer:
It doesn't matter, but the concept was there, so I was the head honcho
on CAROTS for Herb. Herb didn't do CAROTS. Somebody else did them
down the line, but I had to help develop them, monitor the progress,
get the feedback, put together reports, brief the Commissioner, things
like that.
Those kinds of things became, I guess, my major focus until the Commissioner
decided she wanted the 800 telephone number project. Ann Jacobowski
came from New York to head up that workgroup to determine how to go.
After she gave her briefing and Dorcas decided she wanted to do it,
Ann wanted to go back to New York to do her own thing. I had volunteered
for that. I felt like these things I was doing were really not that
meaningful to me, and I did not feel like I was doing the kind of
work I could do. Herb approached Dorcas, Dorcas was agreeable, and
so that's how I headed into that project which was basically to set
up a workgroup made up of the different components, and then develop
a plan, have meetings, briefings, strategies, and so forth.
They were never as complicated, complex or difficult as the Systems
kind of activity. The briefings were once a week on a Friday morning
for an hour, with all of the components reporting so others could
hear each other's reports. Then from there, monitoring--principally
the guys from Telephone Technology and the field and working with
them, and then from there out to the vendor, MCI.
We had a very close relationship with them after they got the contract
and with the procurement up to the time that MCI got the contract,
and then working with the field in terms of trying to set up a field
organization that included the existing teleservice centers plus some
new ones to try to minimize the adverse affect on the field organization.
We did not want to consolidate and pull all the service reps out and
put them into one big mess. We tried to have an amalgamation of what
was already there which wasn't adequate, but then supplement it with
some additional new teleservice centers and expanded teleservice centers
to make the thing start effectively. So we got that off the ground.
We went out and visited Delta Airlines, Davis, American Express--a
number of companies and organizations--to study their teleservice
operations and get feedback and ideas about the backup for teleservice
centers, when their peak loads were so as to have other workers adjacent
who would be doing other work, who would be pulled in on a temporary
basis--the whole range of activity. That was interesting and that
was challenging, and that was very good.
In the course of that, then we developed this briefing with these
slides to show how the teleservice center areas, zones or whatever
would overlap so in the morning the East Coast would open up. As the
day went on, the West Coast would come on line. Gradually there would
be a shutdown in the East Coast, but there would still be some ability
to transmit traffic back and forth across these zones depending on
weather and time of day and so forth (all that good stuff) to try
to demonstrate to the field that what was happening was good for them
and wasn't going to hurt service to the public. Those sacred words,
you know.
Then we went around the country, or I did, usually to the Regional
Commissioners' meetings which they had periodically to present this
and have conversations, discussions, workgroups and so forth. Basically,
that came up pretty well as planned. Although as it went on, I saw
this really as phase 1 and what we needed was phase 2 which would
be to expand out to build more service centers, bring on more teleservice
reps because we were not handling 100 percent of the traffic to my
recollection.
We handled 60 percent and the other 40 percent was still going local.
They wanted to expand that out to make it 100 percent, but that would
take additional resources and that would have to be new people. I
didn't see pulling people out of district offices to make that 40
percent because I found that a lot of the telephone service to the
public before the teleservice centers had deteriorated very badly.
For example, we went to visit one place (Tulsa, Oklahoma, in fact)
where Avis had a teleservice center. We went down to see the district
office in the morning to pay a courtesy call on the way up. We walked
in the office and in the whole office there were people sitting there
interviewing, and telephones are sitting all over on the desks off
the hook. The receivers are sitting on the desks. I asked: "So
what's happening?" "Well, it's very simple: either
we answer the telephones and the people don't get served in the reception
area, or we take care of the people in the reception area and we don't
answer the telephones." They were just sitting there.
Q: They were off the hook. Simermeyer: Yes,
they took them off the hook and turned off the telephone service which
is self-destructive, right, because people who can't get through then
have to come into the office and take a number and wait. It was just
terrible. That was the accepted practice because they said they did
not have the staff to handle both. That's the kind of environment
we were trying to overcome with this 800 number. I tried to explain
that days later.
Hugh McKenna never did accept the idea that the 800 number was anything
like an enhancement to service to the public. It was contrary to his
philosophy, and we would talk about it and I would give him the Tulsa
example. "This is not the district office environment that you
knew, Hugh. This is what it was when we put that thing in. It was
never intended to be done at that point, stopped and then just to
keep pouring more traffic. It should have been expanded out as we
were able to grow." Q: When this was being discussed
and planned and when Dorcas committed the Agency to do this, I think
it's fair to say there was a lot of skepticism in the Agency about
whether we could do this or whether we could do this as fast as she
wanted or whether it was a good idea. Is that true? Did you encounter
some of that? Simermeyer: Yes, in the field. Well,
they didn't like it. They thought they were giving up something, particularly
when we started the appointment system--the idea that these teleservice
centers were going to be given a block of time when people called
in wanting to file a claim in X office, and the teleservice center
would say: "Well, you can go in next Tuesday at 10:30 and have
an appointment and somebody will take care of you." That was
totally incomprehensible to the field because their total direction
had been taking care of people as they came in, no priority. I don't
think they had appointments in the field before that.
Then we had to try to engineer it to say well, the manager will have
to determine what blocks of time in a week are normally not heavy,
what days of the week, what times of the day, and carve out a number
of hours. We did not give them targets. Let's say, you had to make
25 hours available or anything like that. It depended upon a whole
lot of factors, so some offices came up with a fair amount of time
and some came up with very little time.
We were talking the other day about some people (in fact yesterday)
who go into a district office because they have an appointment for
10:30 on a Tuesday morning and they are there at 10 o'clock.
They say: "We can't take care of you."
There's nobody in the reception area. "We can't take
care of you because you have an appointment at 10:30. You have to
wait a half an hour." Those kinds of incongruities were never
meant to be, but they have crept into the system.
To get back to your point, yes, there was some apprehension,there
was some skepticism, there was some doubt because they felt like:
"Even though you say you're not going to take our people to do
this, how do we know it's going to happen after the thing is up and
running. Also, we won't have that workload, so our workload drops
5 percent. You take away 5 percent of our people; they're gone regardless
of what you say."
There were all kinds of feelings about it. There really was nothing
in it for the district office per SE except for the sense (that I
said before) that they couldn't handle the traffic anyway, but they
didn't see that as a solution to that problem. We put it up, and,
as I said, that was fairly successful (I think) with some initial
impacts, of course, in terms of the breakdown in the system. It didn't
mesh the way it was supposed to with the traffic being exchanged,
the interchange of traffic, and there had to be a shakedown period.
But again, with adverse criticism from the press and the media and
the district offices. Q: But you did put it up, and you
put it up on time according to Dorcas's schedule. Simermeyer:
Right. Q: In fact, I'm going to remind you of another
incident which is one of my favorite Art Simermeyer anecdotes. I think
it was 1988. We put this up in October 1988? Is that when we put phase
one up? Did you retire shortly after it went up? Simermeyer:
I retired at the end of 1988. Q: I think we put it up
in...Well, I don't remember. Anyway, we had a Systems conference which
I think you started. Did you start the Systems conference?
Simermeyer: That's right. Q: We forgot to
talk about that. Simermeyer: Yes, we did.
Q: Let's talk about that now. Well, I'll tell you the story
first, and then we'll come back and do Systems conferences. After
Herb Doggette took over as Deputy for Systems, he continued the tradition
that you had started of annual Systems conferences.
I remember one Systems conference where Dorcas Hardy got up and
made a speech about how the 800 number was going to go up and how
it was going to go up on time, and how she was telling you that you
should practice saying: "October, October, October" because
it was going to go up in October and she was making you practice.
Then she sat down and you got up and in your dry wit you said: "Well,
I've been practicing October, October, October, and now she'll just
tell me which year." It brought the house down, but it was an
expression of one of the issues that was there behind the scene which
was this skepticism that we could never make this happen on time.
It was never going to go up in October like she said it was, and she
insisted that it was. You did it, and she was right. Part of that,
I think, we have to give some credit to Dorcas for her determination
to make this happen. Simermeyer: Yes. Well, I
give more credit even for the longer term picture because Dorcas as
I said, I put up this paper that said that in order to go to phase
two which was to expand out the service, we need to add umpteen teleservice
reps and so forth. I could never get the paper past Jim Kissko. He
never gave it to Dorcas, and I felt that she really never understood
that she had to make this extra commitment.
I may be wrong in this, but that's the way I sized it up, and I never
did talk to Dorcas. We had some meetings where we talked about it
in vague terms. She would say: "Well, now this is going to be
fully operational."
I'd say something about: "Well, that's for phase one," and
Kissko would butt in and say something to kind of derail it like not
talk about phase two--we're just in phase one. I felt that she really
never had the full information that we weren't going to just somehow
magically make this thing more and more productive. I don't put that
on her.
I'd frankly put it on Jim Kissko, and he, I think, was reacting to
the idea that the downsizing was a major goal and we weren't going
to try to upset that apple cart and worry about trying to get additional
staff when we made a commitment to meet our downsizing. That part
of this organizational difficulty is that you're competing with other
objectives for other reasons.
To get back, you're right, for the Systems conference thing, I thought
as I started the conferences in ODO, OCRO and in other places, that
these people (after I got into the organization) these people had
never had anybody come and give them anything positive. They were
never brought together. They were never given an opportunity to act
like a team or talk like a team and relate to each other at the managerial
level.
The top level was talking, but to do that, we would have to set up
a conference and hopefully offsite. I maneuvered, and again with Tina's
help, we managed to get the Convention Center with great difficulty
because even there our good friends in the administration and management
were saying: "Well, you can use the Multipurpose Room."
I didn't want the Multipurpose Room. I wanted an offsite location
where we'd have a different kind of environment and we'd have an opportunity
to have a social hour afterwards and stand around and have a drink
and talk. These people would feel in a different mode being brought
into that environment. We did it with difficulty. By that I mean we
couldn't provide reimbursements for travel. We provided some buses
for those people who were not willing to drive.
But others who drove, they drove and paid their own way, and we did
not provide any kind of per diem or anything like that. They had to
buy their own lunch. They had to pay for their own cocktail party.
They had to do things that if they had gone out of town on a true-blown
conference, they would have gotten the per diem rate and the whole
thing would have been a little bit more palatable, maybe to some of
them. They were very willing, and they turned out for that.
We set up this program of outside speakers, especially Martha McSteen,
to come and talk to them, and then the outside speakers to come and
give them some good words on technology. We had these workshops where
different components would talk about something in their particular
area. It was pretty technical stuff, but we would give the managers
a choice of workshops to go to so they could pick and choose because
they could not go to all of them.
We set up a little system where they had exhibits, and each component
was encouraged to develop an exhibit to kind of highlight its accomplishments
or what it was headed towards. They did that and to try to highlight
that, we set up a system in which I created a little award which Roger
McDonald eventually named "The Arthur" in lieu of "The
Oscar". It was a little computer clock sitting on a marble base
with a little thing on the bottom. We got it down here at Larry Kay's,
and I bought it myself because I did not see anyway to get management
to buy it. It was not that expensive.
Anyway, we gave them out with a little hoopla and tried to fill up
a little feeling of identity, rapport, respect, and make Systems people
feel like they were as good as everybody else and they were getting
done what they had to get done and they should be proud of it. Anyway,
I took a lot of satisfaction from that. In fact, I was delighted when
Herb took it over, I think he continued "The Arthur".
Q: He did. Simermeyer: Later that dropped
out, which was appropriate, but Renny continued to invite me to those
conferences, not to participate but just to sit in. I enjoyed that
because I got to meet a lot of the people there who had been there
when I was there and who were friendly and responsive. I thought:
"Dare I go back there after all I've put some of them through?"
Many of them were very friendly and I think had acquired a lot of
esprit de corps and basically had done what I hoped would come out
of the conference. Q: I think it was a great idea. In
fact, that it endures to the present day indicates that it was a good
idea. Simermeyer: Did it endure this year?
Q: I don't know. Simermeyer: I know,
it did endure. What happened was, I came back from a trip to someplace.
When I got here on a Friday, I got a call from Meg O'Hare that the
conference was on for the next Monday and Tuesday or Tuesday and Wednesday.
I forget which. I just couldn't make it. Then I thought later, "Well,
maybe it's time to say good-bye anyway because years have gone by
now. It's not like it was yesterday.
So it did go by. They did have one this year, yes? Q:
Yes. Simermeyer: Renny was gone, right? So I
guess Dean did it. Q: Yes, Dean. One
other odds and ends I forgot that I was going to ask you at the beginning,
and I forgot to ask you, and I'm sorry to have to change the subject
on you here. This is about the downsizing and about that meeting you
were in with Martha McSteen and I don't know who else when Nelson
Sabatini was in Washington getting worried about the downsizing. It
sounded to me like you were sort of an eyewitness to that drama as
it unfolded. I wondered if you could describe that meeting a little
bit and what happened. I wanted to ask you that before.
Simermeyer: In vague terms, the Deputy Commissioners and Martha
were together, and Nelson came back from Washington. He called on
the car phone and said he was coming back. He had the information
and he wanted to discuss it, and we all got together. He arrived and
he came in and he said something like: "Well, you are going to
have to cut 20,000 positions in the next 2 years," or something
like that.
We were aghast. We said: "No way! We were just coming out of
the SSI workload backlog, and with those Systems problems, you don't
want to do that to the organization." He said: "You don't
understand. I negotiated 20,000. They wanted 28,000." Those aren't
quite the right numbers. But, what he was saying is: "That as
bad as it is, it was worse until I got in there and negotiated."
Then everybody said: "Well, 20,000 is better than 28,000,"
or words to that effect. We started thinking about how could we do
this and what would we have to do to do it. I personally speculated
later whether that really was the way the negotiation went.
Q: So Martha wasn't then involved in the negotiation. That was
Nelson? Simermeyer: Not directly. She was aghast,
too. She had relied on Nelson to negotiate, and Nelson came back with
this message. Nelson had some contacts in the Department. I don't
recall the names now, but they were there. He had dealt with them
for quite a while and a couple of people on the Congressional Committee,
too. I can't recall those names. Again, I believe that Martha, being
in a temporary position, was cowed, if you want to use that word.
It's probably not the best word. She was being submissive and they
were laying it on her.
If she had been a full-fledged Commissioner with the President's support,
she could have held her ground better, and she felt insecure because
of that. Therefore, she did not choose to fight on these issues, but
either tried to accommodate or figured if she was going to start,
she might or might not be there when it ended. If she was there, she
might do something if they had turned around. At that point she had
followed Jack Svahn, right? Q: Yes. Simermeyer:
She was under the Republican Administration? Q: Yes.
Simermeyer: My feeling, with no verification, is that
one of her strong supporters was Senator Tower, and he demised. It
could have been the Speaker down there, too--Jim Wright. I may be
off in terms of my timing whether he went down the tubes before or
after that. Q: It was after that. Simermeyer:
Okay, but I think Tower was an ally and had been before. Historically,
I can't put it in the right perspective. But those factors might have
played into it. She just lost her political support and that's the
way it ended. Q: In terms of your own career then, we
put up the 800 number, phase one. Then what did you do?
Simermeyer: Retired. Q: You retired right after
that, right? Simermeyer: Yes, I announced when
that was going up--not at that meeting when they said "October,"
but I said to Herb, "When this is done, I'm leaving. I don't
see a senior advisor role on any long-term basis." The position
was not there before I got there, and I don't know if it was filled
after that, although I understand that senior advisors pop up around
now like mushrooms here and there. I felt that it was not the way
I wanted to end my career in a long-term basis.
Herb just said: "Okay fine, you're welcome to stay. If you want
to go, okay."
The Commissioner, in deference to her, said: "This was a great
job." She gave me a Commissioner's Citation for it. We had the
awards ceremony. She got up and made a little speech about how she
respected that accomplishment and so forth, and the good things I
had done. I got a standing ovation from everybody, and it made me
feel good. It made me feel like this is a good time to walk out--when
you can walk out and not be carried out or just fade away to nothing.
Q: That's all I've got. Is there anything else that you
wanted to talk about that I haven't asked you? Simermeyer:
No. The 800 telephone number is my bottom line here. I don't know.
There are little vignettes and things that I think have slipped by,
but you've got enough vignettes there to make a pot of stew.
Q: All right, let me just give you sort of a chance to sum
up now. I usually ask people to sort of tell me their overall view
of their career with SSA. Are you glad you did it? Simermeyer:
Yes, sure. Q: Was it a good career?
Simermeyer: Yes. Q: Was it fulfilling for you?
Simermeyer: Yes, all of the above. Q: All
of the above? Okay. Simermeyer: I felt like I
had a whole range of jobs. I don't think I ever occupied one job more
than 2 years except maybe a claims rep job. Not because I couldn't,
but because new opportunities came along. There really were opportunities,
and I was given opportunities.
I was one of the first ARR interns when they set that program up and
I had a year as a Fellow at the NIPA in Charlottesville at the University
of Virginia. I got to go to the Federal Executive Institute for the
8-week program and other programs and other training experiences that
were of great value and satisfaction to me to have that. I think it
enhanced my career in terms of getting more of a management background,
and I really enjoyed the program. I had a great deal of respect for
it because of what it meant to the American public, and I thought
it was a good, sound, social program that did a lot of good. It was
fair and equitable in the way it was administered.
The organization (as I told you) from the beginning--it had a tremendous
esprit de corps. We compared then with the Marine Corps. It was relatively
small, compact; and we knew each other. I knew a lot of people and
held them in high regard. We stood together. We had a great reputation
with the public for a long, long time. We were not politically poisoned
or politically singed. The people that I knew and grew up with and
got promoted with were career people. They were not politicians. They
earned their promotions, and they put in a lot of extra time and effort
to make the programs work. It just goes on and on and on in terms
of my satisfactions.
As time went by, a lot of those things kind of got worn out. The organization
grew beyond the size when it could have that kind of esprit de corps.
They had to discontinue the 3 weeks of Central Office training for
claims reps the way they did in the beginning. Growth and the program
exploding changed a whole lot of that. Medicare was an explosive growth,
but it was still under control. Then when we got into SSI, those things
started to tarnish some of the images. Then the disability workloads
started to get out of control. By out of control, I mean they were
just becoming more and more cantankerous I guess (is the word I'll
use), and nobody could control them.
Then political impacts and influences started to come into play, and
other factors started to take away those early years of pride and
satisfaction. The growth slowed in terms of the population. The workforce
as well as the program growth sort of reached a plateau, so a lot
of those things started to lose some of their meaning and value to
me.
On balance, I think that could probably be true of a lot of organizations.
It wasn't unique to Social Security. People say that the whole American
ethic is changing and other things are happening that you'd find a
similar situation in a lot of other places. I think I was fortunate
in terms of being in a good place at a good time in 1950 when all
of this was occurring; and all of these good things were coming into
play and getting a very fair break in terms of my personal treatment
in all of that. I don't think that could be duplicated today because
of all these other changes that have happened.
There is no longer that kind of an environment where people could
come in and do what I did, follow the path that I followed, and I
didn't chart it. I didn't plan it, and I couldn't have. I was just
glad that it came about, you know. It involved some effort. It involved
some movement of my family, some disruption of my family and other
minor sacrifices. But on balance, it was a good career and I'm satisfied
that it turned out the way it did. Enough said? Q: Okay. |
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