Carol White’s tenure at her first job gave no indication of her staying power.

She made it through one day at an Eldora, Iowa, factory that made Johnny Jump Up doorway jumpers and knew she couldn’t go back.

“It was tedious,” Carol says. “It was just awful.”

Compare that to her current work record: On Tuesday, July 17, Carol marks 40 years with TSP and its legacy firms in Marshalltown.

Once—just once—did she think about taking a job someplace else.

“I went to Lennox and interviewed,” Carol says, referring to the air conditioning and heating company with a manufacturing plant in Marshalltown. “When they said, you’re here 8 to 5, you don’t take time off for PTA meetings, you don’t take off for family things, I thought, this big-company business isn’t for me.”

Carol’s late husband, Sam, was a traffic controller for JBS USA, which processes beef, pork, and lamb. She describes his hours as atrocious. As the White family grew to include three children, she knew when someone had to be home with an ailing child, it would have to be her. TSP understood that, too, she says.

Plus, she liked her coworkers.

“I’ve just been fortunate to have worked with guys that are good to work with, good people, and family oriented,” Carol says.

She met her best friend at TSP. When Carol started as a secretary-receptionist, she became acquainted with Susie Barz, who handled all of the bookkeeping and served as office manager. They worked together for 14 years, and Carol still remembers her sadness the day in 1991 when she learned Susie’s husband’s employer was moving his department to Texas and their work relationship would end.

That didn’t halt the friendship, though. Carol and Susie and Mel Barz have taken several extensive trips together, most recently a cruise that traveled from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to Budapest, Hungary.

Carol grew up on a 360-acre farm north of Wellsburg, Iowa, where her family raised every farm animal possible except for goats. “My mother hated them,” Carol recalls. “They would eat everything, even the laundry.”

She learned how to use a typewriter in high school, taking to it so effortlessly that her instructor would stand behind her, admiring how quickly her fingers flew over the keys. Carol and a brother would play dueling typewriters at home, competing to see who could type the fastest.

Yet, after high school, she tried factory work first, beginning at the Johnny Jump Up factory, where she had to string rough cords with her bare hands, then at a company in nearby Grundy Center, Iowa, where she trimmed the excess from plastic molds.

“Oh, golly, the hours would just drag,” Carol says. “Then they went on strike, and I went to Hawkeye (Tech) after that.” Today the Waterloo school is known as Hawkeye Community College. She took a medical-secretary course. Her first job after graduation was working the second shift at the hospital in Marshalltown. That ended when she lost her carpool companion, and her father voiced his concern about her traveling alone at night in the pre-cell phone age when it could be difficult to call for help.

Her next job was at the boys training school in Eldora. It was while she was there that she and Sam were married. He was uneasy about her 30-minute commute, and three months after her wedding she started at what was then known as Cervetti-Weber-Mikkelsen-Pollard, Inc. Since 2006 the firm has been known as TSP, Inc.

“I clicked with the people when I interviewed,” Carol says. “I interviewed with Morris Mikkelsen, and I really liked him.”

When she started, anything that left the office went through her typewriter, familiarizing her with the projects. Now, with advances in technology, she handles little of the correspondence since it is done directly. Forty years ago, she also became intimately familiar with mimeograph and blueprint machines.

“I would spend eight to 10 hours just doing specs, then have to run them off on the mimeograph, collate them, punch them, bind them, run all the prints,” Carol says. “It was hours of being on your feet, smelling the ammonia from the blueprint machine.”

Carol’s family includes three grown children and two “beautiful, intelligent” grandchildren, 10-year-old Jaxon and 8-year-old Selah, who live five hours away in Cambridge, Minn. Her children are Kelly Jo Brenneman, born in 1980, followed by Matthew Jay in 1983, and Samantha Jo in 1985. Matthew works for Union Pacific and lives in Marshalltown, while Sam resides in Portland, ME, and is considering medical school.