Question: You had an interesting career in the service industry. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Answer: “I worked with the Statistical Tabulating Corporation, who had their home office in Chicago and had a branch here in St. Louis downtown on Locust. I lived in Overland so I remember riding the Creve Coeur street car through University City to connect with the Delmar Loop and take that downtown to Broadway to get to the office. I worked a lot with the punch card system at Stat-Tabs. You could punch a card that was about 7 inches by 3 inches. It had various columns across with various fields so for example, you could be punching a price of something and plug in different values for the subtotal, tax, and grand total. Then what you could do is take a whole stack of these cards and run it through the system to the computer and it accumulated the totals on each of those cards in a certain field. It read the cards based on how you punched it and was the first avenue that really connected to the computer business. I can’t remember how I got to be involved with the punch card system, but I started working there while I was going to school at Wash U. I just stuck on and somehow got to be involved with the punch cards. It was basically a good job to have in those days. It was new and it developed into things. Eventually there were companies here in St. Louis that then started to set up their own departments to do it themselves. They would get the equipment set up to where they could do it independently. Only the big companies could afford to do that though, so we still worked a lot later with the smaller businesses because they still wanted to track information and we were their means of getting it done.” – Bill Heaton, Friendship Village Chesterfield
#WeAreFriendshipVillage #seniorliving #retirementcommunity #FVatHome #assistedliving #MemoryCare
The above photo and text are part of a year-long project we call We Are Friendship Village. We are posting these photos and brief interviews to our website’s blog section every day as we talk with residents at Friendship Village Chesterfield and Friendship Village Sunset Hills. The idea is to give a short introduction to the residents who make up our wonderful senior living communities and give you a peek at something you might not know about them!
After a year of gathering interviews and photos, we will publish A BOOK featuring all the great residents who participated. AND PARTICIPANTS get A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK! During this year, we will also be sharing these photos and stories on Facebook and other social media such as Instagram, so look for them and please follow the hashtag #WeAreFriendshipVillage to stay current with the project!
We think it’s a great chance to share a bit about who we are! Residents’ participation takes less than ten minutes, so it won’t take much time to be a part of it and we think everyone will enjoy getting to know their neighbors and friends a little bit better!
If interested in participating (or know someone else who might be), feel free to give us a call at (314) 270-7837 or email at nagysteve@fvstl.com or drop by the marketing suites in Sunset Hills or Chesterfield. We have 365 of these to do over the course of the year, so everyone is welcome!
We look forward to seeing you as we get to share insights about the senior living residents who are making our Friendship Village retirement communities so great!
Thanks again!