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"I WORKED WITH JOHNW QUEENAN" MARGARET E. CANNY EVERETT J. SHIFFLETT JOHN L. CAREY RALPH S.JOHNS I met Mr. Queenan for the first time in June 1933 at the Chicago Office, when he was one of the in-charge accountants— we usually call them seniors now. In those days the Chicago Office was in the Harris Trust Building, at 111. West Monroe Street. On the afternoon of the first day I was in the office, the people there passed around a box of candy and told me: "One of our top in-charge accountants sent this to us. He and his wife just had a son." A couple of days later John Queenan came into the office and someone introduced him to me as "the father of the son—the young man who sent in the candy." We became well acquainted in the Chicago Office that year, before Mr. Queenan was transferred to Newark in 1934. But while he was working in the Newark Office he used to come back to the Midwest to interview students at the University of Illinois and the University of Notre Dame, and on those trips he always used to stop at the Chicago Office. He had a very close relationship with the people at Kimberly- Clark, International Harvester, Quaker Oats, John Deere & Company and at some other engagements he had worked on in Chicago, and I believe he kept up contacts with these clients on his various recruiting trips. Mr. Queenan became a partner in the Firm in 1939, and in September 1940 he came back to the Chicago Office from Newark. He became the partner in charge of assignments, and I worked directly with him because I had been handling staff assignments while he was in the Newark Office. In those days Mr. Queenan was receiving many requests to give talks and to write papers, so he asked me if I would mind doing some of the secretarial work for him to help him meet those commitments. He would dictate a great deal, and his knowledge of his subject and ability to dictate a complete thought without changing his mind in mid-sentence made it a pleasure rather than a task to work with him on these talks. He was very thorough in the way he would prepare the talks that he would give at professional meetings. One thing about him that impressed me very much after I started working for Mr. Queenan was his ability to memorize his entire talk. He never seemed to need to look at his script when he delivered it. He would always take the copy along with him, and I would also make up a set of 3 x 5 cards with perhaps the first sentence of a paragraph on them, or just a few words of the first sentence. I remember years ago being taken by some of the staff to a luncheon meeting in Chicago where Mr. Queenan was to give a talk that we had worked over long and hard. I was fascinated watching him give that talk, because he didn't refer to his script or to those card notes once. I remarked about it to some of the H&S men and they said, "Oh, he never reads from his notes." Mr. Queenan is a very patient man, but I've been around him long enough so that I can tell by his voice when he is really upset. I don't think other people can tell, though. I can be at my desk and he may be in the next room talking with someone in person or on the phone, yet I am quite sure that the person he is speaking with is not aware of his annoyance at all. He has infinite control—which I don't. Maybe I should have taken a few lessons from him. He can have something come up which is frightfully important, that may drain him of practically all his energy, and yet in the middle of it he can turn around and give you a smile and appear completely relaxed. I don't know how he does it. And it doesn't mean he has forgotten the important matter, either; but when he does go back to it, he looks as if he had been given a fresh supply of energy from some outside source. His sincerity, enthusiasm and thoroughness, as well as his fairness in dealing with people, his warmth and genuine liking for people, his ability to delegate work and his way of expecting nothing less than top performance from those around him, and his very real enjoyment of his work—these qual-