The house was a three-year-old redwood-hued split-level with four bedrooms and a fireplace on a wooded lot on a street called Lovers Lane in a pleasant suburban setting about two miles from downtown Kalamazoo. Despite the winsome street name, it was not a happy home.
All too soon, the neighbors were talking. One reported that upon returning from a trip very late one night, she happened to glance into the brightly lit List house and see Helen was doing the vacuum cleaning, at three o’clock in the morning! No wonder she was seldom seen outside during the day, and even when she was, she wouldn’t stop to talk.
“She wasn’t very neighborly,” said Ruth Snow, who lived next door. “He was nice, but not her.”
And Helen spent money as if it grew on bushes, another said. “Those children didn’t seem to have a mother, but they had the most expensive clothes in the neighborhood. The playpen alone must have cost more than a hundred dollars.”
The playpen was something of a scandal itself. Ruth Snow was always shocked to see it out there in the driveway, with Frederick inside, unattended but apparently otherwise fine in the fresh air. “In the morning, she’d put the playpen out there in the driveway, where it goes up along the wall in front of the garage,” the neighbor recalled. “And when that little baby was just a few months old, she’d put him out there in that playpen, and she wouldn’t come near him much before noon. She didn’t pay attention to the poor little fellow. She was no mama.”
John, on the other hand, was both mother and father, she decided. He always seemed to let people know. She liked John very well, though she did think he had some odd ways.
“I’d be doing my yardwork, and we’d both be outside. We’d talk back and forth. He never talked about her to me. I never gave it a thought, that there was any problem between them,” she said.
“After they moved away, he wrote to me several times, nice letters. I thought then that not many men, after they moved, would have bothered to write to some old lady who was just a neighbor. I don’t know of anyone who would do that.”
Left up to her neck in babies and housework, a depressed Helen began directing her resentment at the most appropriate person, her husband, and in the two places, his office and his church, where it seemed to her he was spending a lot of extra time that could be better spent helping out at home.
After baby John had grown into a toddler, John would arrive at the office on some mornings and find an embarrassing message such as this sitting in the middle of his desk: “Your wife called and said your son messed in his pants. If you want them changed, come home and do it.”
On more than one occasion, coworkers noticed, John did just that.
A paternalistic company that prided itself on giving its employees free rein, Sutherland had liberal policies about doing errands during the work day, so dashing home from time to time during the day didn’t cause a serious work problem for John. It was more of a social problem. He was mortified by the fact that his coworkers were aware his wife had so little respect for him.
Erwin Slesdet, who worked beside John, said he was unaware of these diaper messages. But he did notice that Helen was on the phone a lot asking for help. “She would call about problems with the children that she couldn’t seem to handle,” he said. “On occasion, he would go home, and he would be gone for maybe an hour. At that time, the company was very generous with its employees, and if you had any kind of a situation at home and you had to leave, why no one ever said anything. Other people did the same thing from time to time, but on a more limited basis than John.”
Still, Slesdet said, John never complained. In fact, John never said much of anything about his life outside the office. Although he knew John for four years and considered himself a friend, he never met Helen.
Helen’s animosity reached a point that she even phoned the church after John had left for services one Sunday and left a similar message about changing a diaper.
“Mom was really boozing it up then,” Brenda said. “She kept saying she couldn’t forget Marvin, that John was nothing compared to him. She was on heavy doses of medication. Daddy couldn’t control her.”
When she wasn’t in bed, Helen seemed to spend most of her time cooking, the only pastime besides reading that she engaged in with enthusiasm anymore.
At church, John’s fellow parishoners sympathized with his predicament and rallied to the cause. On several occasions, women from the church made personal calls to the List house on Lovers Lane. Helen wanted nothing to do with them or their interventions.
“We tried desperately to get her into the parish life,” sighed the Reverend Louis Grother. The pastor, who had been counseling John about his marital problems, had noticed a habit that had by now become full-blown: Unable to win Helen’s respect and affection with his own personality, John lavished gifts on her, small and large. But it was Grother’s impression that Helen had simply decided that John would never measure up to her late husband Marvin, the war hero.
“So John tried to throw money at his memory,” the minister said. “And he was starting to get himself in over his head in debt.” Included in the mounting financial pressure were the bills from Helen’s psychotherapy.
Brenda, who was by now making plans to elope with a boyfriend, noticed the growing rift between her mother and her stepfather. In a 1971 interview with the New York Daily News, she recalled the only time she ever saw John lose his temper:
“One night, he was reading at the table and she kept nagging at him to get a butch haircut like the other men were wearing those days,” Brenda said, referring to the stubby crewcut hairstyle that was popular with some men in the late 1950s. John had always worn his hair with a precise part on the side and a modest pompadour in front.
“He just sat there reading, and she kept on teasing him. Finally, he just stood up, his face got all blotchy, and he threw the table and all the dishes to the floor,” said Brenda, who remembered being terrified by the incident.
It was also around this time that the few friends who had ever been to John’s house were invited to play one of his collection of military-strategy games. John could spend hour after hour matching wits with any opponent who cared to take him on in these games, which required cunning and stealth, as well as considerable attention to detail and strategical analysis. No one among the few with the ability or the patience to take him on can recall John ever losing.
“The guy was something of a military nut anyway,” one former coworker said. “You never wanted to get him talking about politics, especially in an election year. He thought Democrats were Communists. Playing one of those games, he’d sit perfectly straight in his chair and concentrate on nothing else. It was exhausting. After a while, I stopped coming over.”
Brenda decided that she wanted out sometime in the middle of 1959, when she and her boyfriend, Richard Wayne Herndon, drove across the state line to Indiana, where they tried to get married. They were rebuffed, however, because Brenda wasn’t yet eighteen. On their way from the courthouse, they were involved in a traffic accident that caused the young man to be hospitalized with minor injuries.
John and Helen were distraught when they got a call from the police asking them to come to pick up Brenda in Indiana. For a while, they forgot their problems and focused on Brenda. They had hoped she would go to college and make something of herself, and instead she had run away from home with a boy John strongly disapproved of. John had always treated Brenda as his own daughter. If nothing else, the crisis reconciled John and Helen for a while.
They lectured Brenda and brought the two teenagers back to Kalamazoo. But Brenda wasn’t happy about it. As she saw it, her mother had another family, the three children of her own with John. Brenda didn’t feel a part of it, except as a convenient babysitter. She even had to call John’s mother Mother List while the real kids got to call her Grandma.
When Brenda turned eighteen, she left home and married her boyfriend the same day they got the license.
Despite the tensions at
home, John seemed to be forging ahead at work. In January 1959, he had been promoted to supervisor of general accounting, with a raise to $9,300 a year.
The company was thriving on the fast-growing demand for disposable packaging and poised for rapid expansion into new markets across the country. However, it was still a family-run business, and the Sutherlands were members of the old-line Kalamazoo establishment that had prided itself on the town’s hard-earned reputation as the “debt-free” city. This attitude extended to business as well as municipal government: If you didn’t have, you didn’t spend it.
One of John’s first major projects at Sutherland was a long-range study done jointly with Slesdet to determine whether the company should construct a plant in Alabama to facilitate a market expansion for one of Sutherland’s top products, ice cream cartons. “We spent quite a lot of time working on the cost and the return on investment on that operation, but it never materialized,” Slesdet recalled. “We just didn’t have the money to put into it.
“In its beginnings, the company was pretty much Kalamazoo-financed. It later became national and traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but many people in Kalamazoo were the stockholders, and at this time it was a pretty conservative town. They were not really willing for us to go out on a limb and have tremendous indebtedness. They would go for the short term, but they didn’t like the twenty-year payback.
“We never had any trouble paying our bills. But when we expanded, when we built new plants, those were all paid for out of earnings. Maybe that wasn’t the smart way to go, but that was the way it was.”
Smart or not, it was certainly the old way of doing business. And as American industry entered the 1960s and began consolidating its gains from the boom decade, debt was no longer a dirty word. Growth needed to be bold, it needed to be acquisitive. There was other people’s money around, and it was cheaper in the long run to buy an industry than to create one.
Short on capital, hurting for cash flow, Sutherland found itself unexpectedly dead in the water, almost without notice, at the edge of this new era, which would totally transform the nation’s corporate structure in the next two decades.
On October 8, 1959, Sutherland was suddenly acquired by KVP Company, which merged it into a new corporation with the name KVP Sutherland Paper Company.
For many of the former employees of Sutherland, some of whom, like John List, had signed on fairly recently in the belief that they were joining a corporate family, not just a company, the merger was a stunning setback for their plans for the future. All of a sudden, all deals were off.
“After the merger, of course, we suddenly had two accounting departments, two financial people in practically all areas,” said Slesdet. The company seemed to have two of everything. The new and the old.
As it happened, Sutherland was also top-heavy with executives whose background was in accounting. The merger brought still more on board, and the new ones were now in charge of the ship. “We had a treasurer, we had an assistant treasurer, in both companies. We obviously didn’t need all of those people.” It was clear who would be tossed overboard.
John, while well-liked and admired for his industry and good nature, was nevertheless not the kind of manager that a new organization looking to trim away fat could honestly encourage. Even his old, easygoing superiors hadn’t been impressed with the management skills John had been called on to demonstrate more forcefully in the year before the merger.
So John was politely told that this would be a good time to explore his options elsewhere.
He threw himself into his job hunt with a sense of urgency and betrayal despite the new regime’s assurance that he would receive an excellent recommendation and all the time he needed, within reason, of course, to find something suitable. John bought every business classified publication he could find in Kalamazoo. Working feverishly, he sent out nearly a hundred résumés.
One of them attracted the attention of a company in Rochester, New York, that was about to embark on one of the most remarkable expansions in corporate history. The company was Xerox, and it was desperate for people like John List.
Chapter Five
Until the early 1960s, few outside of Rochester had heard of Xerox; then, almost overnight, it was one of the hottest new companies ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange. After years of floundering, Xerox had finally come up with an office photocopier—its revolutionary model 914—that not only worked but was relatively dependable, affordable, and compact. The office would never be the same.
Suddenly, Xerox needed lots of people not only to help manufacture, market, and service its new copiers but also to help manage its phenomenal growth. And it needed them fast. This was a company whose operating revenues were $37 million in 1960—and $528 million in 1966. In 1960, it employed about 2,000 people; within ten years, Xerox would have 55,000 employees.
John List couldn’t have picked a better time to show up with his eager manner and his impressive résumé. Sutherland, only too happy to see him go, sent him off with an inflated job title and a glowing recommendation. The Xerox personnel office, with its voracious appetite at the time, was delighted to hear from him.
These were heady days indeed. Xerox offered him $12,000 a year—to start. Neither he nor Helen could believe it. That was almost $3,000 more than he had been making in Kalamazoo. On the phone, he said he’d have to think about it. Helen smacked him playfully, hard, on the arm. In the next breath, he said he’d thought about it.
Rochester, located east of Buffalo and just south of Lake Ontario, lies in a part of New York State that manages to deftly combine cultural elements both of the Midwest and the East Coast. Helen, who had loathed Michigan, liked Rochester immediately. And John, who distrusted the liberal influence of the eastern megalopolis, soon decided it was enough like Michigan to relax.
In any case, his new job quickly began consuming most of his time. Unlike Sutherland, Xerox was a company moving fast, a company where a junior executive was expected to remain in the office long after subordinates went home to dinner. This was a quite different corporate culture; there would be no opportunities to dash off and answer a diaper call at Xerox.
In the summer of 1961, John and Helen bought a ranch house at 149 Clearbrook Drive in Irondequoit, a suburb. As before, Helen stayed home with the children, but the move had improved her outlook. Patty, who had become a little chatterbox, would start first grade in September. It was summer, the time Helen liked best. John seemed on the verge of success at last. Alma was back in Michigan. There was a new president in the White House, John Kennedy, a man she admired (and her husband despised). Overall, there seemed to be a new spirit about. Some weekends, they even hired a babysitter and went out together to parties, to dinner, to the movies. At Helen’s prompting, John did something his staunch father would have considered unthinkable and his mother was not told about: Helen would not have to endure another pregnancy. He had a vasectomy.
He enrolled the family in a Lutheran church, Missouri Synod, of course. For a time, Helen even resumed attending Sunday services. But that new resolve faded fast. The truth was, Helen just did not care for church.
John conveyed his concerns about his wife to the pastor of Faith Lutheran in Rochester, the Reverend Edward Saresky. “Helen expected great things of him,” he said. John gave the strong impression that he feared he wasn’t managing to live up to her expectations.
In Rochester, certain conditions of their marriage had become quite clear. Helen was willing to be an active partner, so long as John ensured her of a good time and material comforts. This coincided well enough with John’s own strong desire to honor the List family name through career success. So long as that condition prevailed, a semblance of a smooth marriage could be maintained. But it had become a marriage built on a very shaky foundation. And in Rochester, the ground would start to tremble underneath.
But not right away. Again, John was riding high in a new job. After he accrued enough vacation time at Xerox, he and He
len took their first real vacation together. Leaving the children in Rochester in the care of Helen’s mother, the Lists made the grand tour, Helen’s first visit to Europe and John’s first as a civilian—to Ireland, England, and Germany, where John made a tearful pilgrimage to the List family redoubt in Rosstal, Mittel Franken, in what had once been the kingdom of Bavaria.
One of the gifts the Lists brought back for Helen’s sister Jean, reflected John’s interest in genealogy. It was a plaque John had bought in Ireland, and on it was the name “Morris” and the family coat of arms, under which John had an engraver inscribe these words:
“Si Deus nobiscum, qui contra nos.” If God is for us, who can be against us?
Jean thought the plaque was beautiful. But she didn’t have a clue as to what the Latin quote meant. The line was familiar to John, given his interest in classical music, especially German composers, as the title of a soprano aria, No. 52, from Handel’s Messiah. Handel had taken it from a scriptural source, the Letter of Paul to the Romans. The entire passage, which John was very familiar with, was eerily prophetic:
“What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:
‘For thy sake we are being killed all the day long;
We are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’”
During the years the Lists were in Rochester, the Syferts lived in Illinois with their three boys, where they were even then looking forward to and making plans for Gene’s retirement from the air force. Except for the year John and Helen went to Europe, they spent their summer vacations visiting Jean and Gene. Gene, an easygoing man with a routinely bemused air, even found himself tolerating John somewhat better, though he still couldn’t put the term “mama’s boy” out of his head when he saw John do something like pull on a sweater and a hat and look worried whenever the sun disappeared behind a cloud.
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