Back to Work at 80, It’s Her Attitude That Really Counts : Seniors: Banking has been Dorothy Andrews’ love since 1952, so why stay retired? Younger colleagues have to race to keep up.
Thick wads of green bills fly between Dorothy Andrews’ hands in a back room of Guaranty Bank in Santa Monica. She opens each envelope in a pack of bank deposits from McDonald’s, flips the bills into piles of ones, fives, 10s and 20s, then jots down the total of each stack.
Then she adds them--in her head.
“I don’t use adding machines more than I have to,” Andrews explains. “To tell you the truth I wish it was like the old days. I don’t like all these computers and fancy machines.”
The old days would be 1952, when Andrews, nearly 40 years old, started her second career. After 25 years of heavy factory work, she spent another 2 1/2 decades at Crocker Bank (now Wells Fargo) until retiring at age 65.
Itching to get back to the work she loved, she applied at Guaranty in 1984. Now 80, she works four days a week as a utility clerk.
In those nine years, says Guaranty President William Graham, “she’s been working and setting a standard for the younger people around here that most of them can’t keep up with.”
The daughter of Serbian immigrants, the Pennsylvania-born Andrews never finished seventh grade. At 14, she assembled roller-bearings for about $4 a day. Married at 18 and a mother by 20, Andrews later joined the leagues of women in World War II defense factories, inspecting helmets, building detonators and drilling holes in rocket shells.
In 1951, she and her family moved to Los Angeles from McKeesport and, after a brief stint waitressing at Ma Webster’s Lemon Pies, (“They let me go because I wasn’t fast enough”) she applied, with trepidation, to work as a bank teller at Bank of America in 1952.
“I thought, what a wonderful job,” she recalls. “Everybody had such respect for bankers. You never saw people coming in and yelling. I thought, could I ever do that? I thought you must need a college education.”
Andrews switched to Crocker, then named Citizen’s Bank, the following year. The Beverly/Fairfax location, where stars Red Skelton, Bing Crosby and Errol Flynn were among the clientele, provided some of her most memorable moments.
Among the tellers there, Andrews remembers, was “a chubby German boy,” Carl Reichart, who now serves as Wells Fargo Bank’s board chairman.
“I asked him how he liked it,” she chuckles, “and he said, ‘I’m not going to stay here. I’m going to the top.’ ”
She saw her first bank robbery at that branch as well.
“It was marvelous,” Andrews says, beaming. “I enjoyed it. The man jumped over the counter, and he went from one teller to another. Just kept opening drawers and stuffing his bag. All you could hear was the drawers opening and closing. We pressed all the buttons and alarms but the police didn’t come until 10 minutes after they left.”
Subsequent robberies paled in comparison, she says.
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When her career ended with her mandatory retirement 15 years ago, Andrews found that far from being restful, the unlimited leisure bored her.
Although Social Security and retirement income comfortably met her needs, she returned part time to Wells Fargo for a year, then started at Guaranty doing what she terms “garbage jobs” three days a week.
Graham disagrees that Andrews’ contribution is garbage work.
“If she wanted to work five days a week, I’m sure we’d say yes,” he says. “If she wanted to work nothing we’d be extremely upset.”
Andrews’ supervisor, Isabel Garcia, says that while Andrews stamps her foot at technology, she’s as accurate and efficient as any employee there, and is measured by the same standards: “Just because of her age, I do not ease up the work. If the work has to get done, it has to get done.”
Andrews’ animated manners and impish smile take a decade or two off her appearance. And one privilege of age is the right to say whatever’s on her mind.
“She chases people around and makes sure they do their job,” Graham says.
“I’m really bossy in the bank,” Andrews agrees. “When the young kids don’t do what they’re supposed to, I’m bawling them out. You’d think they’d get mad at me but they don’t. I bawl them out and then I hug them and love them.”
Martha Gomez, a 21-year-old vault teller, says Andrews has scolded her to be more specific about her work and write her 9s more clearly. But Gomez says she doesn’t mind because it’s done with affection: “Like she says, she’s like a great-grandmother to me. If I ever get to be 80, I wish I could be like her.”
Senior Vice President Colleen O’Rourke says that she’s learned from Andrews’ work ethic too: “When you’re given a job to do, whether you like it or not, you put your best foot forward and do a good job. You don’t do an adequate job. You do the best job you can do.”
Indefatigable outside her work as well, Andrews rises each morning at 5:30 to read a newspaper cover to cover, starting with finance and sports. A Dodger hater, she watches them “to hope they lose.”
She travels extensively, and has toured Yugoslavia three times, visiting relatives and keeping up her fluency in Serb. “I would have gone this year if they didn’t have all those problems,” she says.
Instead, she’s planning a trip to England with her daughter--who retired this year herself at 60. But only if she can get four weeks paid leave, since she has no intention of quitting now.
Says bank chief Graham: “People think at 65 you stop working and life stops. I think she’s an inspiration to everyone. To hell with retirement. If you like what you’re doing, keep doing it.”
