Fort Riley employee receives honors for 40-year service

By Parker Rome, Fort Riley Public AffairsApril 13, 2012

Fort Riley employee receives honors for 40-year service to post
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

FORT RILEY, Kan. -- Mary Reed said the key to a long career is to take it day by day.

Reed should know -- she was recently recognized for her 40 years of service at Fort Riley.

A food program manager for the Directorate of Logistics, Reed was honored by Garrison Commander Col. William Clark during a special ceremony April 3 at DOL.

"It's an honor for me to come here and meet somebody who has served that long in such a capacity and has made such a difference," Clark said.

Clark presented Reed with a certificate honoring her achievement and a letter from Installation Management Command, as well as a garrison commander's coin.

Larry Githerman, director, DOL, said, "we're lucky we got her."

"I've never signed an adjustment document in all the years I've known Mary for anything lost -- nothing missing, ever. I've never had a unit call and say, 'I didn't get what I needed out of food service,' or 'I didn't get what I needed out of (Troop Issue Subsistence Activity.' That's a pretty good record."

Reed hit the 40-year mark last December.

"It doesn't really seem like it's been that long," Reed said. "You just do it day by day because there are so many days that are really a joy to come in to work. I wouldn't have stayed doing it if it wasn't a joy."

Reed credits the people she has worked with for making her career so positive.

"You hear people say the corny stuff about how it's all about the people, but it is all about the people," she said. "We have a good group of people that we work with, and I enjoy coming in, and we have a few laughs. It makes it so much more enjoyable. I've always been under the belief that if you can make everybody feel kind of like a Family, that it really works best because you can trust each other and work together, and that's what I have going now."

For the past 29 years, Reed has worked for DOL, but she first started working on post at the Fort Riley Commissary as a checker in a student program for nine months when she was 16 in 1968.

She came back the Commissary after a couple of years in December 1971. From there, she took a typing test and took on several clerk jobs across post, including at the Commissary, Irwin Army Community Hospital, Publications, and finally, at the Directorate of Industrial Operations, which is now DOL.

She started moving up the ranks at DOL from a supply intern to a supervisor.

"When I first started as a supervisor, I had about six or seven men working for me," she said. "I was only in my 30s, and they were taking bets about how long I would last or how fast I would be leaving because they didn't think I'd make it, but it didn't work. I stuck around."

Eventually, she said they realized she was in for the long haul.

"They just learned that after a while, I actually had a good head on my shoulders, and I actually had some good questions to ask them, and I knew what I was doing. I remember my mom being so proud of me because I had gotten a job as a supervisor, where it had always been men before me, and I was the first woman doing it."

About a year ago, Reed became the food program manager. Her responsibilities include being the accountable officer for TISA, which handles operational rations, and the system administrator for Army Food Management Information System.

Reed administers all of the post dining facilities, acts as a point of contact for food service for the garrison commander and commanding general and works with the 1st Infantry Division assistant chief of staff, who operates the dining facilities.

"It's a good thing for me," she said. "I'm learning new and different things and getting to work with people. It's been a challenge because there was a lot of years where I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. This is getting toward the end of my career, and it's a good opportunity to challenge myself because I haven't really done much of that."

The biggest change Reed said she has seen during her career was technology.

"When I first started working out here, everything was basically manual, even like the checkers, she said. "I think about it, and it was a heck of a lot of work. Even when I started at TISA, everything was done basically manually. You had the computers, but they were the gigantic computers, where you had to put in punch cards to get out your inventory. Everything was done manually with an awful lot of writing."

Reed said she had to learn to embrace computers.

"Now, everything is pretty much computerized -- thank God," she said. "You cuss it, but when you get in to working with these large numbers like field exercises, trying to do it manually would be very difficult to go back to."

Reed has lived in Junction City her whole life, where her father's Family has been since 1855. She graduated from St. Xavier Catholic School.

"I don't have a college degree, but I've just been real fortunate that I've been able to hold down a variety of jobs and provide for my Family," she said.

Reed said her brother, Pat Beavers, has worked in the etymology department at Directorate of Public Works for the past four or five years.

"I've been out here a lot longer than he has," she said.