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PEOPLE IN H&S Clancy Houghton Photogrpah not included in Web version 'My undergraduate days were no great shakes, believe me. I was carrying a very heavy load and squeezed three years' work into a year and a half. And with all the things I did to earn money, I never had any time of my own. But when you realize that you don't have any time to waste you learn to make every minute count." Today H&S partner Clarence W. Houghton can stretch his lean, six-five frame across his bright corner office on the twentieth floor of the Wells Fargo Building overlooking San Francisco's financial district, and laugh as he reflects on his struggle to make ends meet while supporting a young family and earning a degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Although he seems so much at home in colorful and exciting San Francisco with its NOW people, Clancy Houghton was born thousands of miles away and thirty-seven years ago, in Walpole, New Hampshire, a village of about 300 people. His father was a dentist there. As a junior in high school, and a star on the basketball team that was runner-up in the state championship two years in a row, Clancy met Ritva Pajunen, the daughter of a lumbermill owner, newly arrived from Finland. Within a short time, "Rit" became the main reason Clancy decided his future was to be in the West. Just as it had for several previous owners, the lumbermill went bankrupt and Rit's parents moved to California, with the agreement that she would finish high school and then follow. Clancy, in the meantime, had applied to all the Ivy League schools... and the University of Southern California. As fortune would have it, USC was the first to respond. "They said, 'Yeah, come on out,' " Clancy recalls. "So four days after high school graduation I left for California, But I guess you would say the decision to go to California wasn't entirely objective. There was some emotion involved." During Clancy's freshman year at USC, his father had a stroke and Clancy saw that he would have to put himself through school. So, knowing that he would have to go into military service anyway and wanting to take advantage of the GI Bill of Rights for his education, Clancy decided to join the Air Force. But first, at nineteen, he married his high school sweetheart, and Clancy and Rit began their odyssey of Air Force bases, a journey that was to bring an ambitious young man face to face with the accounting profession. "We really moved around," Clancy recalls. "First to upper New York state, and then Texas. I took the accounting specialist course in Texas. We were told that the men who finished the highest in the course would get to choose their next assignment, and at that time the Air Force was sending people either to Korea or Thule, Greenland. I worked hard and managed to get assigned to a base in Fairfield, California, about 50 miles north of San Francisco. After a year there I went to Britain... to a base in Sealand, North Wales, that was in the process of being closed. A lot of the officers had already transferred out. One of those transferred was the budget officer. "I had spent about two weeks there when the controller asked if I had ever worked on budgets. I told him that I had once helped in the preparation of one but that most of my part was in preparing specific schedules that someone else requested. He indicated that relative to the other people on base, that made me the expert and I was made an instant budget officer. I got a copy of the Air Force manual on budgeting and read it at night. What I would read at night, I'd do the next day Although my first budget was reasonably successful I was only an airman first and the budget officer was supposed to be a captain. That didn't look very good to the brass, so they promoted me to staff sergeant. "When the base finally closed a year later, we moved to Burt on wood Air Force Base in Lancashire, where I was the NCO in charge of all property accounting, with about thirty people on my staff. I was introduced to computers while I was there. The Air Force was installing the first business computer in Europe and one of my jobs was to implement a computerized inventory control system." With such experience behind him, and a young family to support ("Wendv was 18
Object Description
Title |
People in H&S: Clancy Houghton "..as soon as possible" |
Author |
Anonymous |
Personal Name |
Houghton, Clarence W. |
Office/Department |
Haskins & Sells. San Francisco Office |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 10, (1973 winter), p. 18-19 |
Date-Issued | 1973 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | HSReports_1973_Winter-p18-19e |