Leaving a Legacy: Mary Escher retires after 52 years
Building a legacy takes time and leaving one is something to be recognized. For Mary Escher, building her legacy with Stutsman’s started in June 1970. Very few people can say their career exceeds half a century and even fewer can say they have spent their 52-year tenure at one company.
“Customers now are the grandchildren of the customers when I started,” said Mary. “But I liked the work that I did.”
In 1970, Stutsman’s looked a little different with about 25 employees and half as many divisions as today. At the time, Mary Escher had just completed business college and had heard from one of our feed customers that there was an opening at Stutsman’s.
“After high school, I went to Iowa City Commercial College, you could work at your own pace and I was done in nine months,” said Mary. “I found out that there was a job opening for office help at Stutsman’s from a man who ran a feed store in Richmond.”
Coming into a business that was predominantly male was no easy task. But in time, Mary didn’t let that bother her.
“I was here when Mary first started, and she was terribly shy back then,” said Roger Slaughter, special project lead. “Her personal growth amazes me. She’s turned into a pretty effective manager and gets her points across with some authority when she wants to.”
Having stepped into the accounts receivable role, her job over the years has been pretty consistent.
“It was basically the same through the years, I worked with accounts receivable and accounts payable too,” said Mary. “Then I went into billing after learning how to bill by checking tickets. I did the walk-in customers and then the fertilizer billing. And still did work in accounts receivable and accounts payable. ”
Today, Mary doesn’t do as much billing as she used to but in her time at Stutsman’s she has seen some major changes and played an important role in implementing some of those advancements.
“Mary was instrumental in actually getting us on a computer system,” said Roger. “When she first started, it was done by hand. We had a counting machine that you shoved a statement card into. It was a major hurdle going from that to being on a computer.”
Checks were typed on a typewriter while ledger cards and tickets required extra steps to add customer information. The change was a little bit challenging but more so just took time.
“When we switched to the computer system, I had to spend hours on the phone talking to the programmers and they had me typing in code,” said Mary. “That was before they could get onto our computer remotely; it was time-consuming.”
Albeit time consuming, the reports and queries Mary was able to set up were beneficial and laid the groundwork for reports ran today.
“She got to the point that she could run a query on the system and get information out of it which wasn’t built into the reports,” said Roger.
While Mary doesn’t do as much billing as she used to and her tasks shifted as the company has grown, she retired on July 1, leaving the company in a good place.
“Part of your legacy is leaving things in a spot that works for everybody,” said Roger. “Fortunately, she has done a good job bringing others in.”
Today Mary is enjoying the perks of retirement instead of running queries and living and breathing accounts receivables day-in and day-out.
“I’ll miss the people I work with,” said Mary. “But I’m not going to miss getting up early and coming into work.”
Mary has enjoyed the work she’s done the last 52 years that her plans for retirement are still undecided.
“Right now, I’ll be taking care of my mother,” said Mary. “I like to travel and have already gone many places in Europe and the United States, but I don’t know with how everything is, if that will happen.”
Gardening and reading are also on the list as well along with some genealogy work.
“I’ve been working on our family history and I have a lot of that done already, but I need to do a little more work on it,” said Mary. “I’ve followed up with some ancestors, and it’s pretty well complete but I just need to update it.”