MIKE MOORE: The antique concept of loyalty on the job

BY MIKE MOORE
Journal Times

Thursday, June 26, 2008 11:49 PM CDT

When it came to company gatherings, the choice was easy for Tony Casciaro.

If spouses were invited, he’d be there. If not, he’d tell his co-workers to have fun and he’d see them back at work.

Loyalty was his specialty, and not just to his wife. Rainfair plucked the Racinian out of UW-Madison when he graduated, and he kept the job for 62 years.

A Journal Times business story in 1995 highlighted his career, which by then spanned 55 years. The guy refused to leave until the new owners hauled the last of the rain-gear-making equipment out of Racine.

Casciaro, who died Monday at 93, was part of a shrinking breed. Labor statistics show workers in every age group put in fewer years at their companies than employees did 25 years ago. A typical worker has a whopping four.

My restless generation doesn’t feel bad about it. We look at six decades with one company as a quaint historical relic, not something to emulate. Gotta set that internal alarm clock or we’ll end up frozen in place.

I see that firsthand; after a dozen years here, I must seem like a relative fixture. Co-workers ask if I remember when tapped kegs sat in the newsroom. Sorry, wasn’t around for the introduction of the electric typewriter either.

Loyalty like Casciaro’s will be a collector’s item someday. Craig Leipold, who owned Rainfair for a decade, predicts it’ll be as rare as baseball stars playing their entire careers for one team. Yep, Casciaro was the Robin Yount of chemistry.

OK, Yount did have that blip early on, threatening to trade the bat for a three-wood if the Brewers didn’t pony up. Though his expertise made Casciaro an icon in his field — relatives say he was thinking green long before it became an environmental buzzword — nobody remembers him grousing about his pay.

He had higher priorities than cash, and he would prove it by driving through winter with a smashed-out rear window. Or by faithfully drinking powdered milk that was cheap as dirt — and, to Leipold, tasted like it.

“He gave me a drink and I thought I was gonna throw it up,” the former owner joked.

Coming out of college, Casciaro had other offers out East. There was a teaching gig in Ohio, younger brother Ed Casser said, but the chemistry whiz chose to stay here.

There was no testing the waters, no wanderlust. Just go to work.

Casciaro met his wife, Angie, early in his tenure. She died in 2004. Rainfair got its money’s worth from the couple, who combined for more than a century of output within its walls.

“This wasn’t sexy kind of work, but this was always what he was meant to do,” Leipold said.

So, if the local plant were still spitting out rain suits, would he have stayed till the day he died?

“No doubt in my mind,” Leipold said.

As long as IRAs are afloat, few of us worker bees will see a need to grind it out into our 80s. Won’t be piling up 60-year pins at one place, either. Companies discarded the notion of loyalty by whacking jobs by the hundred and repainting promises of pension and health care as suggestions.

Younger generations are thrilled to be the anti-Yount. We’ll take the perks of free agency, thanks. But Casciaro had other traits that kept their value.

“There isn’t a picture we found without a big smile on his face,” Racine firefighter Gary Solfest said of his great-uncle. “He would relate to the positive side of a person, rather than pointing out something he didn’t like.”

And that’ll be the key to everyone’s ultimate performance review.

Local news columnist Mike Moore can be reached at (262) 631-1724 or

mike.moore@lee.net

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