Comments:
Looking back Janice is thankful that in school she took typing and business courses, because she needed “a few pennies.” When split sessions started, her coursework earned her a part time job with the Hawes Insurance Agency in Sea Cliff. She liked it so much she decided she should leave school and work full time, but Mrs. Hawes sat her down and said, “Janice, you can’t do that. You have a mother and she’s worked very hard.” That was an understatement. One day when she was about eleven her father, a Painter by name and painter by profession, came home from work, went upstairs to lie down before supper and died of a heart attack. To support Janice and her older brother Bill and younger brother Gordon, her mother took a job in Marie Burke’s dress shop in Locust Valley. Billy took care of Janice and Gordon.
Janice knew immediately Mrs. Hawes was right, but by 1957 she also knew she wanted to continue in the insurance business and she did. The Hawes Agency, she says, gave her excellent on-the-job training. “Everybody thinks the Hawse Agency was a little agency in Sea Cliff, but their agents were all over. I had a lot of opportunities because of them.”
Janice, well trained in insurance and looking for new challenges, left Hawes to work with the Greyhound company’s insurance business as an underwriter. These were the years of women’s liberation movements, but Janice says, “it didn’t help me at all. Insurance underwriting was a man’s world.” She nevertheless broke the glass ceiling in that part of the business, becoming Greyhound’s first woman sales rep in the US.
She left Greyhound in 1981 as an accomplished sales person. She took up a new career selling durable medical goods. “I was a very good seller. I believed in what I sold.” She stayed in that business for twelve years before retiring, or almost. By chance the Hawes Agency was about to wind up their business and Bob and Abbey asked her to come back and help.
She now lives with her brother Gordon in the new and rapidly growing Gulf shore Florida town of Spring Hill. Her mother died in 2008 at age 102 plus, in full possession of her faculties. “She never had a primary care doctor and she never took a pill,” Janice said. Janice is a walker, and one day while walking she came upon “a dog tied to a tree without food and water. I kept going back to see about it and finally, I asked the owner, ‘Would you mind if I walked your dog?” She enjoyed the walking company and volunteered with the local ASPCA for whom she walks dogs and feeds them.
She would not return to Long Island or Sea Cliff, but “I tell everybody down here that I grew up in the best village in the United States.”
