People in H&S: Jerry W. Kolb;

              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
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