Today is National Professional Secretaries Day. I know this because for twenty-two years I was a secretary. For eleven of those twenty-two years, I was a corporate secretary and had five secretaries under me. Let me tell you each one of those ladies earned their pay. Keeping the corporate world straight is a damn hard job.
Each year, our boss thanked us for being meticulous in our duties by sending us bouquets of flowers and buying lunch. Even during tough times, he managed to send a thank you and we appreciated him for appreciating us.
I never knew when this tradition started, so I decided to look up its origin and share it with the PFS readers.
The first National Secretaries Day was celebrated in 1952. Its founder was Mr. Harry Klemfuss, who handled the Dictaphone Corporation account for the Young & Rubicam advertising agency. He thought secretaries deserved recognition and wanted to encourage more people to enter the field.
Mr. Klemfuss along with the National Secretaries Association (now called the International Association of Administrative Professionals) and a few office product manufacturers persuaded Charles Sawyer, then the secretary of commerce, to proclaim the first National Secretaries Week.
Mr. Klemfuss passed on July 30, 2009. Let us also remember him today.
