‘Temp’ Finally Calls It a Day--After 60 Years

Mary Eatman started working for the Hartwell Corp. in 1940, when the company was just a year old and had but six employees. It was fate, she said, that brought her to that small office on Second Street in Los Angeles. The young woman from Gadsden, Ala., was hired through an agency as a temp to process billings with a Comptometer--a precursor to the adding machine--and never left.

Hartwell was her first and only, employer.

But after more than 60 years with Hartwell, now a national aerospace manufacturing firm based in Placentia with 400 employees, Eatman is retiring today. Somewhere in her early 80s, but blushing before she’d give an exact age, Eatman plans to spend time in her garden in Brea, travel and volunteer in the community in some sort of business-related capacity.

Her trademark hats, gracious manner and 1990 white Lincoln Towncar she received as a company gift on her 50th anniversary will mark an end to an era for Hartwell--a period that began when the business was family owned, before casual Fridays, when it was considered poor judgment to jump from job to job.

Eatman grew up in a world of music lessons, ballet and elocution, but her real passion was in business, which grew after a brief office management course taken after high school.

She never married. She was too swept up managing newly opened Hartwell offices in Detroit and Dallas. She helped manage accounts for the Hartwell Credit Union in Los Angeles after it was founded by the company in 1958, and served for many years as the secretary to the president and the corporation’s board of directors.

“Mary was a little bit scary when I first met her,” said Derek Sweem, Hartwell’s vice-president of operations, who was hired in 1977.

Her longtime knowledge of the company, and close ties to founder Clark Hartwell and his family gave her a position of authority in the company.

“If Mary needed something,” Sweem said affectionately, “by golly, you jumped.”

Born in a city named after a Civil War Confederate general, Eatman has remained the consummate Southern woman and still speaks like one. She never goes out without a hat, and her lipstick is always in place.

“That’s just the way I was reared,” she said, her hair coiffed in loose ringlets on the left side of her face. “You’re a lady. You always look your best when you go out. That’s just a part of who I am.”

Her remarkable career started when she came out to Los Angeles with her mother while her brother attended a local school for airplane mechanics. Her father, a veterinarian, stayed home in Alabama while the others went off for what was supposed to be a few months in California.

“I was on vacation,” she recalled. “But I said, ‘I need to be doing something. I don’t want to be idle.’ ”

That’s when her decision to visit a temporary employment agency landed her a 60-year career that involved travel to Europe for air shows. She moved with the company to Placentia during a corporate move in 1968.

“I had no real interest in business before because I didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “In those days you either got married or you became a schoolteacher. There was no way I wanted to be a schoolteacher.”

It was the company’s continued interest in its employees--and its family-like structure--that kept Eatman working there so many years.

Clark Hartwell was the type of boss who trusted his employees to make good decisions. He wanted to see them be the best they could be, and for Eatman that sometimes meant hiding the fact she’s a woman.

“I used to sign all my correspondence ‘Mary,’ but he said, ‘Don’t put your name, put your initial. You’ll get more respect.’ ”

It was years, she said, before many people in the industry realized that M. Eatman wore dresses.