I worked with John W. Queenan;

              "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-