#FlashbackFriday: Read About an Associate Who Started in 1919—and Retired in 1964

In its March 1958, issue, the Exchange Post featured a story on Raymond D. Conner, the Exchange’s longest-running associate at the time. Conner, who was 62 in early 1958, started working for the Exchange on Oct. 9, 1919, after he answered an ad in a San Antonio newspaper. Nearly 40 years later, he was the retail manager of the Fort Sam Houston Exchange (he’s pictured above, helping a customer).

During World War I, Conner (who was born in 1895, the Exchange’s “birth year”) served at Fort Sam as an Army Field Clerk— the equivalent of a warrant officer. It was nearly a year after the signing of the Armistice that he saw the ad.

When Conner began working for the Exchange, Camp Travis was a major portion of Fort Sam Houston. Troops were returning from overseas assignments for Stateside duty.

“Exchanges … were a far cry from today’s modern PX,” Conner told the Exchange Post. “During the ’20s and part of the ’30s, we used ‘canteen’ books for the credit of enlisted men and a charge account for officers. In fact, very little money crossed the counters except on pay days.”

Conner added that in 1919, there were no coffee breaks or time clocks, and that 40 hours a week “would not have gotten the job done.”

“Never will I forget that first building housing the [PX] when I began my career with the organization,” he said. “The ceiling was so low, it was like an oven in the summer and like the Antarctic polar region in the winter. We didn’t dare drop any money;  it would have gone through the cracks in the floor. We had an old-fashioned potbellied stove to heat that tar-papered building.”

Conner started as secretary to the bill clerk for the Exchange officer, and worked through a couple of other jobs before Maj. Arthur M. Harper, the Exchange officer in 1929, appointed him retail manager of the main PX.

“I still think the post exchange is one of the finest organizations in the world,” he told the Exchange Post. “ Since I was born in 1895 …  I can’t help but feel that that makes me a life member of the system.”

Conner died in June 1975 at age 80. According to his Exchange Post obit, he retired from the Exchange in 1964 after nearly 45 years with the organization—the longest service record at the time.

But records were meant to be broken.

Today, the longest-serving Exchange associate is Kaiserslautern Military Community Center Human Resources assistant Antje Zirkel, who celebrated her 60^th anniversary with the Exchange in 2024. Read about her in this Exchange Post story from July 2023.

Source: Exchange Post archives