Free Grace and Grit by Lilly Ledbetter Page B

greater than his he finally accepted the fact that I had a knack for what I did. Eventually, he found a good job he liked as the housing administrator at Fort McClellan and stayed there until he retired, working his way up to the rank of command sergeant major and finishing his college degree.
    C ONTENT AT H&R Block, I thought once I started there, I’d stay and manage the office, prepare returns during tax season, and teach the fall tax-preparation class at night for the rest of my career. Working the line at GE, I might as well have been one anonymous figure in a string of cutout paper dolls. Now I had a chance to define myself through hard work. The seventies were a rocky time as far as the economy was concerned, beginning with the oil embargo in 1973, a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Exorbitant oil prices were soon followed by debilitating inflation, widespread layoffs, and the energy crisis defining the decade. What this meant for me was a layoff from H&R Block four years after I started working full-time.
    When the state auditor who visited our office regularly recommended me for a position at an accounting firm in Gadsden, I took it. After a short stint there—I got tired of my paycheck bouncing—I became the officer manager at a small gynecologists’ office. My most challenging task, besides typing on a broken typewriter, was stocking up on boxes of Zest crackers and gigantic jars of pickles each month.
    Hoping to go back full-time when the economy picked up, I also moonlighted at H&R Block. The doctors’ office just wasn’t for me, in more ways than one: I knew I was in the wrong place when they offered to perform a hysterectomy on me. Like the otherwomen in the office, the doctors told me, I could keep the insurance check when it arrived, pocketing the much-needed few hundred dollars, in exchange for letting them sharpen their surgery skills. I was hard up for cash but not desperate enough to give away a perfectly good uterus.
    Before long, I was talking to a friend at church and found out about an opening at Jacksonville State University in the financial aid office. I wasted no time pursuing the job. At the end of the interview, the financial aid director, Larry, a lanky guy with a mustache, told me, “You’ve got my vote. Now my wife and secretary just have to approve.” An easygoing, kind woman, his wife warned me that working with Larry would be like walking on eggshells, since he had low blood sugar. As his assistant, I got along with him just fine. Whenever he’d get really cranky, he’d pull a boiled egg from his coat pocket, or as if he were a magician, a sausage biscuit would appear out of nowhere. Most of the time he just paced the office eating spoonfuls of peanut butter from the largest jar I’d ever seen.
    The day I started work, I walked onto campus thinking about what my life would have been like had I gone there, if only my mother had let me earn college credit my senior year. I didn’t dwell on it too much. In my own way, I’d gotten to college after all. Working on campus and helping eager, grateful students in need go to college was something I looked forward to daily.
    Unfortunately, without my own college degree, I could only achieve so much financial success at the university. After I’d been working with Larry for three years, H&R Block contacted me, as I’d hoped, to become the district manager for the Anniston office when my old manager left. By then H&R Block had around seven thousand offices and opened a new office seemingly every minute. The pay was double my university salary, and as much as I enjoyed helping students and appreciated the academic setting, I had to move on.
    I returned to H&R Block in 1976 and stayed there until 1979,in the end managing fourteen offices. One busy morning as I was reading
Business Week
, I was struck by an article about Goodyear. Just as the technology behind making tires was changing with the newly constructed radial-tire plant built