At an informal ‘minireunion’ with her General Electric finance division co-workers, Betty Puleri got to see her ‘family’ again | Central Berkshires

LENOX — Back in General Electric’s heyday, Betty Puleri could always get a good party together for her co-workers.

Now 92, Puleri worked in the finance department at “The GE” in Pittsfield until her retirement in 1986. Along the way, she gained lifelong friends in Ross “Raggedy” Pane — so dubbed back in the day for his overgrown hairdo fresh off a tour in Vietnam — Glenn “Turkey” Grogan, whose moniker was also due to long hair; and Jerry “Mullen” Mullen, who never got a nickname but is referred to affectionately as “The Clown.”

In turn, those three men called her “Apple” — as in, “Apple Betty.” The bond between all of them remained intact, even through the contractions of the company they worked for, in part because of Puleri’s efforts to get people together outside of work hours. Her parties gave that core group a chance to grow closer.

All together, the four worked together for close to 15 years, Pane said. It had been decades since they all were in the same room together.

But Puleri reprised her role and put together a party for them just for old time’s sake. At a “minireunion” at her home in Lenox on Wednesday, the GE veterans picked up right where they left off.

The co-workers used to get together after spending 10 or 12 hours at work some days, Pane said, just to enjoy each other’s company. He recalled the first Monday of August each year where everyone hauled inventory through one of the GE plants, and the annual tradition of going to a bar or restaurant afterward to have some drinks and “reminisce about the horrors of the day.”

“This is one of the things that made it a family,” Pane said.

Putting the price tag on GE transformers

Puleri and her co-workers served as cost accountants for General Electric, spanning from the late 1960s into the 1980s. As such, their job responsibilities involved assigning prices for the company’s famed transformers, which often cost over $1 million, Pane said.

The process began, Pane said, with a purchase order and an estimate for the parts, materials and labor needed to fill the order. The cost accountants reviewed the cost of every component inside the transformers exhaustively to arrive at the final price for the unit before they shipped.

In those days, Puleri was a “go-to person” for everyone in the finance department’s bullpen, including Mullen, who said that the accounting work wasn’t easy with the equipment of the day. That was “before calculators, before computers,” he said.

“So we had paper and pencil, and we had this monstrosity of a machine called a ‘Friden’ on my desk,” Mullen said. “If you wanted to do anything, you had to punch it in like a big typewriter.”

Mullen was referring to a Friden mechanical calculator, a precursor to the electronic calculators in use today, which somewhat resembles a cash register interface. The Friden wasn’t easy to work, he said, but it was an improvement over “comptometers,” another mechanical calculator that was once in rotation at the company.

Anytime the accountants had a question about working the machinery, which often had steep learning curves, or reviewing their paperwork, Puleri was there to lend a hand.

“Working with Betty was an experience,” Mullen said. “She really was my mentor.”

Despite her role as a go-to resource for the cost accountants, Puleri was never their manager or even their boss. Her leadership role was unofficial — but even to this day, her co-workers remember her as a guiding light in the department.

“She was our group leader,” Pane said.

A found family

It wasn’t a straight path to the finance department for just about anybody at the reunion.

Grogan started working on the factory floor, spending time in the company’s transformers and plastics divisions right out of high school. He attended classes at Berkshire Community College and North Adams State College before moving to finance. Puleri, similarly, worked for a few months as a nurse before taking the job at GE.

For Pane, it was his first job after coming back from a year of conscripted service in the Vietnam War. Returning to the states afterward was harrowing, he said — he had to make a cross-country trek from Seattle back to his hometown of Pittsfield.

He was spit on twice, he said. He also recalls a woman walking so far out of his way with a baby stroller that she was brushing against the windows as he passed.

Pane’s co-workers at GE were among the first people to really welcome him back, he said.

“When I came back, things were very different back then,” Pane said. “You were kind of stuck in a hole. When I got into this group, things warmed up.”

While the others have remained in the Berkshires, Pane relocated to East Texas for another job with GE. Pane and Puleri still talk on the phone every month, he said.

At the reunion on Wednesday afternoon, there wasn’t much talk about the “Tank Shop” and the buildings being demolished where GE once stood in Pittsfield. Instead, the afternoon was mostly filled with fond memories of office chats long past and toasts raised to colleagues who were more than just co-workers.

There was no anniversary or special reason for Puleri to convene the reunion, she said. It had simply been too long since everyone had seen each other.

“They’re really family to me,” Puleri said. “They just are. We were blended together at ‘The GE.’”