Chapter 08: Working on Dr. LeMaistre’s Book and Thoughts about Hierarchies and Retirement
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Description
Ms. Hale begins this chapter talking about what motivated her to retire in 2005. She then sketches her work with Dr. LeMaistre (2006 – 2008) on his book about the first surgeon general’s report on cancer and smoking.
Next she talks about returning to the institution in 2010 at first in a volunteer capacity, filing for Clinical Cancer Prevention. She talks about sifting to a part time position and reflects on the value of having past employees come back to work for the institution. Next she reflects on the position of women at MD Anderson and gives examples of how education was the biggest factor in determining the hierarchy among the administrative staff.
Finally, Ms. Hale talks about her involvement in the MD Anderson Retirees organization.
Identifier
HaleJ_02_20180531_C08
Publication Date
5-31-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Career and Accomplishments; Post Retirement Activities; Portraits; Working Environment; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, I wanted to ask you about transitioning to retirement. Why did you decide to retire, and that was in 2005.
JoAnne Hale:
Two thousand five. I had gone on a trip to Africa, on a mission trip with a group, and everybody on that group was retired. They were talking about what they did, their coffee and reading the paper. That kind of got me thinking about it, and then over the course—I would schedule, particularly for Mendelsohn, some of it was through Dr. LeMaistre but not as extensive as Mendelsohn’s. I would work all week and schedule all these appointments for the following week and I’d come in on Monday and have to rearrange all of them, and that kind of got stressful because this person is more important than that one, so rearrange all of this. So between the two, I think I just thought you know, and so that was [when I began] thinking of retiring. I had asked them, you know because I could either retire in August or in January, and they would prefer that I do it in August, so that they can do their budget for the next year, so that’s when I chose to do it then.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
But you ended up working with Dr. LeMaistre. So tell me about that.
JoAnne Hale:
I retired in [August 2005] [redacted] and Dr. LeMaistre really needed to come back to work for a little bit, and so Dr. Mendelsohn said well why don’t you write a book on this, the first Surgeon General [report], because being connected with us would give him a little more power to work with that. And they agreed to his salary and my salary, or someone’s salary. So he had called me in January and said, “Have you had enough fun yet?” I actually was a little surprised that he called me, because there was another lady in our office who had retired before me, she handled his mail and stuff like that and I thought that he might have had a better rapport with her. But I guess, with handling his schedule and stuff like that, you know? His first wife was a little difficult to work with and I stood up for myself, and I think that he thought that maybe I could have a little bit more pressure with the people outside. So I worked for him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What year did you start working for him?
JoAnne Hale:
I started back with him in [January] 2006, and then we [completed it in August 2008.] [ ] He did more after he retired again. It was 2008, August of 2008, we both left again.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was your role, what did you do for him?
JoAnne Hale:
My biggest role was to type the book, but I researched things and I researched people. I was on the Internet an awfully lot and it would have been—I think about it today, I think oh my gosh, it would have been awful if I’d have had to work with it today, because you get on the Internet and it will say… I haven’t noticed that recently but it will say warning, you know, and things like that. I was researching different institutions and all that kind of material, and then worked with NCI. His wife helped a lot too, Andi [Andrea LeMaistre]. She coordinated them going up to the NCI and getting copies of certain papers that were in the archives, they had to go and get the archives, and connected him with some of the people that were involved in that. He must have been the youngest on that team because most of them other than a staffer, and we worked with a staffer a lot when we were doing his book. Relatives, wives, or relatives of the original people that were on the committee provided a lot of information for us, and then I typed it. And even after I left in 2008, that winter, he sent me things at home and I typed on it from home, and made his corrections and sent it back to him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. Now, you retired in 2008 but end up back again. So tell me about that.
JoAnne Hale:
In 2010, I did a lot of volunteering different places. I volunteered at a local school. Not a local, but it was a teacher in my church, she was a first-grade teacher, and I volunteered once a week for them and prepared teaching materials for the teachers, that they wouldn’t have been able to use. Then, I was still friends with the people there in the Clinical Cancer Prevention, and they had that realignment. I don’t know what they called it at the time, but they had a big layoff, and so I said well I can volunteer, I can file. So I would come in once a week and file, and I got their filing caught up, and then I started helping the lady that did the reconciliations, and I started helping her do that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, when you say reconciliation, just so I know what that means.
JoAnne Hale:
What they would do is once a month you got a report from the general ledger, and what you had to do was you had to verify that the expense that was on there was correct and had all the approvals and invoices, and receiving tickets, all that had to be there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So it was part of the budget, the ledgering process.
JoAnne Hale:
It was budget. It was a monitoring of those accounts, which is what I basically do now. It was difficult for me to do it because I didn’t have access. So she would have to come over and log in, and I would do it, and then if I happened to go away and it went back, she’d have to come back [and log in again]. And at the time, I think it’s when the market went way, way down, and I’m not on teacher retirement, I’m on ORP, so I thought you know, I may go try to find me something in case this keeps going down. And so when I was just sharing that with them, then they asked if I would be willing to come back part-time, and I said yeah, I can do that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What’s the advantage of having someone who has worked with the institution come back in a role like that?
JoAnne Hale:
They know the people, they know the policies. I think MD Anderson would do great if they not necessarily put them in the same role. Now if I would have gone back, I would never have gone back to volunteer or to work part-time in the same role, because you got out of it for the stress or whatever, and so you don’t want to, you know. But if people have expertise, there are several that have come back, and what one of the ladies in our department really thought she would do when she retired, was talk to them about getting the—because they would hire people from employment services, is having our own, staffed with people that had worked at Anderson, but that never did materialize.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting idea though.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah. Well, I had an idea early, when I worked for Dr. Clark, is having our own travel agency. I had it all worked out, how we would do it, but I figured they’d turn it over to some man, so I said no thank you. And then it wasn’t long after that, that I guess they started where they had approved agencies that you could work with, travel agencies.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Did you notice that a lot? I mean you mentioned they’d turn it over to a man. I mean is that something that…?
JoAnne Hale:
Oh yeah, it was very much, very much so.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Can you tell me, kind of what you observed?
JoAnne Hale:
Well, not so much that. It’s just that—and I knew my limitations. I didn’t have a degree, you know, and everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned on the job. One of the things that, when doctor… I guess it was when Marion retired, or Beth was going to retire. They wanted to bring over a lady, and I don’t remember her name, from Mr. Boyd’s office, and have her be over the whole office. It would be a promotion for her, but I would [have had to train] her, because in the interim, I was doing everything. So I told him, I said well, she’ll learn on her own, because you know, I’m doing a job. And so that’s when they promoted me to a staff position, you know, because I was approving vice president’s leave requests and stuff like that, so. That was where I thought, you saw it with—I don’t know whether it had to do with education, but I think it was just more personal, you know, they had their favorites type things. It was basically in those years, that I felt like that they had that type of you know, we’ll give it to a man, because women just didn’t have the positions, unless it was in the clinical area. They just didn’t have—in administrative, everything was… And I didn’t have any problem with that. I remember one time, I think I mentioned that I put together that major, major document, from when we received the 51,000 acres in Florida, and we sold it and that’s what we built the Lutheran Hospital with. I pulled together all the documents from the very beginning and System wanted it. Dr. Clark told me I didn’t have to give it to [System], he said they’re just going to take credit for all of that. I didn’t want to make it another copy, it was a big book.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting.
JoAnne Hale:
I think at that point, education was the biggest thing, because the lady that was over the office, essentially office, I don’t know what her title was, that she was over the office girls, she was very much, you had to have a degree. And then we got a person, a lady in HR, that recognized experience and so she kind of pushed that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How did they document experience, how did they do that?
JoAnne Hale:
I don’t know how she did it, but I just know that she said that a certain number of years of experience equaled what a person would be going through college. I think even to this day, I think a college degree pretty much to me, states that you stuck to it. Because now, I’m in a process that we’re interviewing candidates at my church for youth pastor, and I notice one of them saying, he’s gone to college, he’s done this, this and this, but he’s never gotten a degree. And so their thought was will he commit to a program and stick with it. That’s always been my thinking, one of the main reasons that people like to have a college degree, because they know that they’ve put forth the effort, you know?
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And they finished something they set out to do.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah, and they finished. I just never had the self-confidence I guess, to do it. Now I did, you now I got my certified professional secretary [CPS], which the test was almost equivalent to the CPA, it was very difficult. They gave you six years to go through it, to be able to get it. But anyway, I guess that was particularly the era where I feel like they had the most, men knew what to do and women were emotional.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Do you happen to remember the name of the woman in HR who put forth this idea that experience could…? I mean it’s fine if you don’t.
JoAnne Hale:
No. It was when we were in the HMB [Houston Main Building]. I sure cannot remember her name.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s okay. I mean you might think of it later and you can add it into the transcript. Well, are there any kind of final stories you wanted to share, or thoughts about your time at MD Anderson?
JoAnne Hale:
I just think that really, people that are retiring, and [say] I’m never going to go back, I’m not going to go back into that to visit even, and I just never felt that way. I never felt that I was just so glad to get out, that I didn’t ever want to go back. I don’t know what their circumstances are, but I’m involved in the retirees, well I go to the retirees… We have a nice MD Anderson retirees group and we go on field trips, outings, and some of those they state, you know, well I’d just never go back, I don’t want to go back.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
About how big is the retirees group?
JoAnne Hale:
I think we may have membership, we have I think between 250 and 300. We’ll have as many as—it depends on your program, but we have as many as 70 that will come, and at Christmastime, there are about a hundred that come to the luncheons. We have luncheons four times a year. But they have outings where they all go, and those outings, well the last one, I didn’t make the cut, I didn’t get my check in, in time. I think 35 is all the bus will allow. They have the precinct gives us a bus and they provide a guide to whatever we’re going to. That particular one, the popularity was that we were going to Transtar, but they went to shift channel and then to Transtar. In April, or March, the latter part of March, the first of April, we went to the painted churches. At Christmastime last year, we went to Galveston and had dinner. Usually it’s a dinner, but they’ve done all kinds of interesting things. Some of them I didn’t go to when I first started working back here but now, I can rearrange my schedule and work a different day if I want to go, or they’re having more of them on Mondays so that I can go. But the retirees, they do some—HR really supports us very well. They used to support more financially than they do. And I think we’ve done a lot recently. Linda Korb, who is with the Development Office, when she was our president, she got us into working more with helping the volunteers and things. She’s a volunteer at Anderson, and so she’s kind of stayed connected. Some of them have stayed connected volunteering, especially if they were ones that have had cancer. But you know just, I enjoy the people. Right now, it helps me a lot with not just being by myself all the time, and I see some of the people that have difficulty filling their day. It’s interesting though, to hear some people, not necessarily retirees, but just my older friends or friends my age at church and different places, they wish they had something that they could do a couple of days a week.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Retirement is tough, I think for some people.
JoAnne Hale:
Well, and some of it’s financial. My sister in-law is a retired teacher and she doesn’t want to go back teaching, but she tried to go back to work at a health food store and she just couldn’t cut it. Of course she’d been retired for 15, 20 years, and so that was kind of difficult, to get back into it, but she did it, she wanted to do it for financial reasons.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
How long do you anticipate staying in the job in Cancer Prevention?
JoAnne Hale:
I don’t have any idea. I had thought that I would retire. I’ll turn 80 this year and I thought that I would retire then, but you know, when I start finding myself making a lot of mistakes is when I [will retire as I will no longer be an asset to the office]. Or [if] it’s just more difficult to get here or whatever, I will do that, but [now] I feel that I’m a benefit. The biggest challenge I have with this one is that I’m so out of touch with everything. You know they’re all young and when we go into meetings, our staff meetings, we have what they call a team building thing, so that people get to know each other, and some of them are just trivial things, and I realize I’m not up-to-date on everything that’s going on in [music, movies, and social media]. But they are really good, to make me feel a part, but I can tell there’s a big difference there.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, is there anything else you’d like to add at this point?
JoAnne Hale:
I can’t think of anything. Of course, I’ve had a lot that’s gone on my—and that’s the reason I wrote these, because a lot has gone on in my life in the last month and a half. My best friend for 20 years passed away.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, I’m sorry.
JoAnne Hale:
And then my son’s mother in-law took her life, and that’s been really…
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh my goodness.
JoAnne Hale:
She was only 62.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh my gosh.
JoAnne Hale:
And my daughter in-law is having a real rough time with it. So you know, when I thought about it this week, I thought oh gosh, I don’t think I can do it and get my mind thinking about that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, you’ve shared a lot, so I thank you.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah. Well, I don’t know whether it’s interesting to anybody or not, but I liked my time here.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
It’s valuable. Well, I thank you very much for coming back in.
JoAnne Hale:
Thank you.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I just wanted to say for the record, that I’m turning off the recorder at eleven minutes after 11:00. So thank you very much.
JoAnne Hale:
Great. All right, thank you.
Recommended Citation
Hale, JoAnne H. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 08: Working on Dr. LeMaistre’s Book and Thoughts about Hierarchies and Retirement" (2018). Interview Chapters. 975.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/975
Conditions Governing Access
Redacted
