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Jerry W Kolb He started off when he was way underage, a high school boy working during his vacations on the inventory of supplies at Jim Beam. Twenty years later that early start in a whiskey house doesn' t seem to have done him any real harm, for Jerry Kolb at thirty-six is a perfectly healthy man, and an extraordinarily busy partner of Haskins & Sells in the Chicago office. Some who know him well rank him among the hardest working and most productive people in our entire organization. He has been around the Chicago office since 1956, when he put in two months as an intern while on summer vacation from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, in a day when student interns were uncommon. 'I really relished the work, the people and the clients," Jerry says now, looking back on that experience. So it was a natural step for him to have accepted an H&S offer of full-time employment when he graduated in February 1957, a valedictorian of his class. Jerry was soon impressed with the work load of an active H&S office in winter. One week after starting with the Chicago office as a regular employee, and two scant weeks after he was married, he was shipped off to a utilities company audit in Wabash, a hundred miles downstate. Later in the year, Jerry asked for a few days off to study for the November CPA examination, but things were booming and he could not be spared from the staff. So he carried a textbook around with him and stole moments here and there for quick reviewing. Suddenly, greetings from Uncle Sam landed in the Kolb mailbox. 'I took the Army physical exam on Tuesday, and sat for the CPA exam on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday," Jerry recalled recently for H&S Reports. "I had expected to cram — I am a crammer — but the Army physical exam interrupted my schedule. I crammed all through the examination week, and stayed up late the last night working on law. Matter of fact, law was the part I thought I might have flunked." The scene shifts to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, on a day when Pvt. Jerry Kolb is on KP. The company orderly room sends word that the KP's wife is on the telephone with an important message. "Nuts!" says the mess sergeant. Just another goof-off scheme. This boy isn' t getting out of KP to go to the phone. — So it was not until some time later that Jerry received word that his examination papers had received the highest grades in the country at the November 1957 CPA examination, and that he was the winner of the Elijah Watt Sells gold medal. Back at the Chicago office in 1958 with the Army and certification behind him, Jerry continued his studies in the evening at DePaul University and received an MBA degree in 1962. Then he taught accounting courses at DePaul, and shortly thereafter started teaching sections of the DePaul review course for the CPA examination, an activity he has kept up for the past seven years. His course load used to be heavier; now it is down to eight or ten 3-hour sessions each semester. To hear Jerry talk about his teaching is to observe him at his most enthusiastic: 'Teaching a course is one of the best possible ways to organize your thoughts. It stimulates you to review your manner of presenting accounting ideas, and to keep up with what's new. Teaching is an excellent training discipline for the teacher. "In most of these examination review classes there are eighty or ninety people, and at some sessions there are more than two hundred, all of them graduates with excellent credentials. I lose maybe two or three pounds in an evening of teaching. I stand, I walk around, I work the blackboard. The discipline of preparing to go in front of these people motivates me to master the subjects they ask about. And this helps me in dealing with our clients." Well organized, composed, articulate — these seem to be appropriate descriptive words for Jerry Kolb. In the office he takes on a heavy load of client and administrative responsibilities, yet he appears unruffled most of the time, and doubtless is. The hours count, and the minutes. He values his time, yet he never seems in a rush. In speaking he cuts fast to the heart of a matter that seems complex on the surface, and he explains clearly and patiently how he did so. There is no verbal padding in his speech, no cliche jargon; he comes directly to the point. And no ten-dollar words when an ordinary one will do. Like every good teacher he knows that communication depends on clarity, orally and in writing. As in the classic chicken or the egg question, it is hard to say whether Jerry speaks and writes clearly because of his practice as a teacher and his experience writing articles for the 16 Copyrighted -- License from Black Star
Object Description
Title |
People in H&S: Jerry W. Kolb |
Author |
Anonymous |
Contributor |
Haun, Declan |
Personal Name |
Kolb, Jerry W. Hoffman, Reynard H. Schwertfeger, Arthur E. |
Portrait |
Kolb, Jerry W. |
Office/Department |
Haskins & Sells. Chicago Office |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 09, (1972 summer), p. 16-17 |
Date-Issued | 1972 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte; Photograph by Declan Haun, Black Star |
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_1972_Summer-p16-17w |