By Chip Cutter

They joined before email and smartphones -- and outlasted recessions, strategy shifts and an ever-rotating cast of CEOs.

Across American corporations, a small, dwindling number of employees have spent decades inside the same company, their careers spanning several eras of work.

At a time when the typical employee stays in a job for about four years, The Wall Street Journal set out to find the outliers: the longest-tenured workers inside some of the biggest and best-known U.S. companies. After all, who has more perspective on how work has changed and where it might be headed?

Many of them started when working for one employer over the span of a career was still possible, if not an outright aspiration. Over a half-century, in many cases, they experienced job-transforming technologies -- bar codes at Target, robots at Ford Motor -- and the diversifying of workforces as more women stepped onto and climbed the management ladder.

Some staffers credit work with helping them to stay active even into their 80s. Nearly all cite a willingness to embrace change as key to their success. Several got hired with only a single interview, a contrast to the often monthslong recruiting process today's applicants experience.

Here's what eight of them told us:

Jacqueline Graf at Target

Guest advocate (among other jobs)

Age: 80

Hired: 1970

The early days: Bar codes hadn't yet been introduced when Graf, who lives near Denver, started at the retailer in 1970. Cashiers typed in a long string of digits to ring up orders. Cash registers punched holes into paper tape to record sales; the tape would then be sent to headquarters each day and fed into a computer to analyze sales. "I always called it our ticker-tape register," Graf says. "All these little punch holes were going into a jar."

What Target sold: At the time, Target stores still had wig departments and a restaurant that served three meals a day. Burgers, cold-cut sandwiches and fries were staples on the dinner menu.

The hiring process: Graf was working at an insurance office and a dress shop near Denver when she applied for part-time work. She got hired in Lakewood, Colo., at what was then Target's seventh store nationwide. Target, an offshoot of department-store chain Dayton Hudson, had opened its first store in Minnesota eight years earlier. Graf interviewed on a Sunday, and started work the following day. "I didn't have to do the little test, or anything else. I got hired on the spot."

Various roles: In those 55 years, she has worked as a cashier, in security and, for the bulk of her tenure, as a guest-services team lead, running the front of the store and hiring or training hundreds of new staffers. She's watched as Target's stores became more automated, with more sophisticated systems for managing inventory, and as consumer habits shifted and people bought more items online. "I thrive on change, " she says. "Some people can't do it."

Her nickname: Graf, who often puts in 40 hours a week still, is now widely known at the store as "the Queen," a nickname owing to both her longevity and, yes, she jokes, her age. Of Target's roughly 400,000 employees, she is the most tenured. Still, retirement isn't in the picture. "I don't want to stay home and look at all the walls," she says. "People's what keeps me happy."

Harold Gainer at Tiffany

Master engraver

Age: 82

Date hired: 1961

The career: Gainer started working at Tiffany when he was 17. He just retired a month before his 82nd birthday.

The job: In his more than six decades at the famed jeweler, Gainer engraved 15 Vince Lombardi Trophies for Super Bowl champions, and many other silver pieces, from heart-tag bracelets monogrammed with the initials of teenage girls, to a large serving platter for the pianist Arthur Rubinstein that listed all the cities where he played. He rose from the art department to become a master engraver -- one of only two people at Tiffany to hold that title.

The path: John F. Kennedy was in the White House when Gainer joined Tiffany in 1961 as an apprentice. It wasn't an obvious place for a kid from Queens to end up. His father worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, driving trolleys and, later, buses. His mom was a homemaker. Gainer credits his junior-high-school guidance counselor for urging him to apply to Manhattan's High School of Art and Design, after she saw his portfolio, which included paintings of automobiles and clowns. He majored in sign and brush lettering, graduating in the top 2% of his class.

Learning the ropes: Gainer started in the art department learning the different fonts and, after six months, moved to engraving. It took three years of training before he was allowed to engrave small pieces for customers.

How it works: He likens engraving to wood carving. First, he'll paint the silver with a special type of quick drying white watercolor paint. Then, he'll draw the monogram, crest or other design on the painted silver. Next, he uses a steel pointed pencil to scratch the design into the silver and washes off the paint. He finishes with special tools that carve out the metal and leave an indentation.

Risk of automation: Gainer practiced a craft that hasn't changed much since the 1800s, when Tiffany was founded. "I don't think it'll ever change," Gainer said, brushing off the suggestion that perhaps one day a robot could do his job. No machine can match the artistry, he says.

Toughest assignment: It was engraving a globe-shaped trophy for the New York Yacht Club that was the size of a beach ball. The globe had been cut in half while he worked on it, and he held his breath as he put the two sides together -- praying that the countries, latitude and longitude lines would match. They did.

-- By Suzanne Kapner

Bobby Bransfield at Prologis

Head of Americas fund management

Age: 60

Date hired: 1994

The biggest change he has witnessed at work: "The time, speed and pace has changed dramatically. The early days of being in the office had a lot more nights and weekends involved because you just didn't have the mobility. Business just moved slower in terms of how fast you could gather information to make a decision."

The early job: Bransfield, based in Boston, got hired as an acquisition analyst when Prologis -- now the world's biggest industrial real-estate company -- employed 60 people and had one office, and kept rising. Today the company has 2,700 employees and operates in 20 countries.

How the workday now differs from the early '90s: "There was definitely a beginning and an end [then]. And I would say today, it's a blur, but that creates challenges around how you manage work-life balance for your teams, because your teams get pushed pretty hard."

Why has work sped up? "Technology has enabled it, but competition has demanded it. Those companies that want to thrive have to move faster, and they have to adapt, and they have to be able to be capable of processing change on the fly."

"We didn't have pagers [in the '90s], but I certainly remember when those individuals got a BlackBerry or a cellphone -- that was like a status afforded to only certain levels. And then it worked its way down, " Now, he adds: "It's an appendage to all of us."

Arthur 'Art' Porter and Calbert Wright at Ford Motor

Porter is an autonomous guided vehicle tender at Chicago stamping plant

Age: 86

Date hired: 1961

Wright is an assembly utility operator at Chicago stamping plant

Age: 85

Date hired: 1963

Chicago connection: Ford's two longest-serving employees, both in their 80s, work at the same facility, the Chicago Stamping Plant, which produces parts like doors and liftgates used on models such as the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Aviator.

Early days: The plant opened in 1956, and got its start making components used in the Ford Galaxy, Taurus and Thunderbird. When both Porter and Wright joined, the factory didn't employ any women -- the first were hired in the early '70s. Automation was limited, too, as was the air circulation across the facility. "It'd be 100 degrees in the plant," Wright says. "You'd get all that heat out of the basement coming up, blowing in your face."

First assignments: Wright's initial job included stocking materials throughout the plant and loading fenders; Arthur Porter worked as a welding operator.

Robot problems: The first robots arrived in the 1970s and were often slower than humans and prone to errors -- frequently blowing holes in parts that later had to be scrapped. As automation improved, Ford added hundreds of additional robots to the plant. "Now you don't have that problem. Robots are consistent," Wright says. The automation made the jobs safer for humans, too. "It's a lot easier now," Porter says.

The key to longevity: Porter says, "I just try to stay busy. My mom said, 'You stay busy, you have a chance to keep that dirt off your head.' And that's what I've been doing, staying busy." Wright says, "One day I'm going to wake up and say, 'I'm not going in there no more.' " His doctor advised that he keep working as long as he is able to climb the plant's stairs. "If you sit down, you'll be on the couch," Wright says. "Your body's going to lock up on you. Keep moving, whatever you do. Don't sit down. Don't lay on that couch."

Vincent Stanley at Patagonia

Director of philosophy

Age: 73

Date hired: 1973, the year Patagonia was founded

The hiring process: "There wasn't much. As a matter of fact, the first day I showed up for work, my boss had gone surfing. The 54-year-old bookkeeper looked at me with great trepidation, and taught [me] how to do accounts receivable in about two hours and I just started from there."

How did you hear about the role? "Nepotism. Yvon [Chouinard, Patagonia's founder] is my uncle."

The first job: "I was hired as an invoice typist, packer, and I forget what else. I had three little jobs. It wasn't the clothing company yet. It was Chouinard Equipment that made mountain-climbing gear. We did less than a million a year. There were about 10 employees. When the waves were good, everybody else would be out surfing. I didn't surf, so I answered the phone. That's how I got into sales. I was the only one actually taking down orders."

The early years: "We created the logo and the first three products that first year. I had no intention of staying. I was going to make some money, save some money, and go travel again. I was 21. I just got engaged. I liked the atmosphere of the place. It was informal, sort of anti-authoritarian. The products were high quality. The community, the people we dealt with were decent folks, so I just stayed."

What surprises you about how work has changed? "Everybody is so roped to whatever technology they're using, to the computer screen. Their work is tied to a system that is often influenced by whatever system is being used to gather sales information or to run logistics."

The consequences: "I remember talking to some of our younger designers. We just started to go down to our sample room, and started to sew samples of clothes. They had lost touch with that. They were designing everything on the computer and it would create problems with the factory because they didn't really understand how the shoulder would fit on the body of the garment. This is going to be a big question for our time [with AI]."

-- By Lindsay Ellis

Ron Stafne at 3M

Manufacturing engineer

Age: 79

Date hired: 1965

Early days: Stafne joined the company at age 18, not long after graduating from high school. He grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, where he learned to fix just about anything, and stopped by 3M after he saw a classified advertisement in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. (At the time, it was still Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing.)

The initial thinking: 3M had manufacturing and production lines, but Stafne wanted to join a group focused on new products and business ventures, thinking the work would be less repetitive.

What that meant: "It was very exciting at that time. It was just doing a lot of product work before it was going into full production in another plant or something.... One of the products was Scotch tape. If you have Scotch tape, you have the green and the white tab. We had a machine in there that would make those tabs and stuff like that. That was one of the jobs."

How work changed -- and hasn't: "You didn't have, for sure, computers. Everything was handwritten, and telephone.... But I'm still doing really the same concept work."

What he does now: He is a manufacturing engineer at a 3M plant in Menomonie, Wis., which makes ceramic fibers used in airplanes and spacecraft. Stafne walks the manufacturing floor, answers questions from other engineers and troubleshoots maintenance issues. Co-workers call him the "godfather of fibers," and "Obi- Ron Kenobi" for his ability to spot a problem deep in the manufacturing process.

The key to working for decades: Stafne wakes at 4 a.m. daily and tries to do at least 50 push-ups and seven minutes of planks. (If he's in the mood for half push-ups, he'll aim to do a few hundred.) The calisthenics then continue in his office, where he often does more push-ups. "That gets me started and gets me a feel-good start for the day," he says.

Retirement? He isn't considering it yet. "If I can come to work each day, be useful and share my information and be productive for the group and for the company, I think that's a win."

Derek Punch at Qualcomm

Principal engineer/manager

Age: 61

Date hired: 1987

Early days: Qualcomm's longest-serving employee moved to San Diego after college, looking for warm weather. He saw a classified ad in the San Diego Union-Tribune in 1987 and applied for a role as a technician. He was 22. "I had no idea what the company was," he said. Qualcomm would go on to power the technology used inside millions of cellphones and other devices, with Punch working on many of the company's key projects.

What's surprised you about work all these years? "The speed of automation. We just have a lot more to do with a lot less people." What also surprises him is that social connections are more important than ever. "These connections and these interactions with people matter more than anything else, despite all the changes that you've seen."

The job today: "I am a people manager. I'm a principal engineer, and I manage a team of people doing millimeter wave design. And so we take the chips that Qualcomm makes, you integrate them into a device, and we evaluate, test and proof of concept through extensive testing."

His top career advice: The people inside a company are essential to longevity. "If you end up at a place where you don't like going to work because the people, for whatever reason, annoy you, you're not going to be very productive, you're not going to be your best self," he says. "You're doing this for 8,10,12-plus hours a day. It better be something you like doing, or with people you like doing [it with], at a minimum."

Stanley Heilbronn at Merrill Lynch

Managing director, wealth-management adviser

Age: 82

Date hired: 1965

The job then: "One of the jobs I had was to post what the Dow Jones average was doing on a pegboard, every hour," says Heilbronn, who is based in New York, and is now among the longest-serving employees at Bank of America, parent company of Merrill. "If I needed a [stock] quote -- using AT&T as an example -- I would have to dial a number on the phone with the code for AT&T and listen to what price the stock was selling, and what the bid and the ask was. That evolved into looking at a workstation that was, in today's world, extraordinarily primitive."

The job now: "We're in a world of much more sophisticated financial planning. We have models that we use, that I use extensively for our clients, depending on their risk tolerance, their age, future needs that they have. So it's evolved from just picking AT&T hypothetically to a basket of securities that meet the criteria's risk tolerance and needs moving forward."

The key to career longevity: "I like change. It's really simple. It's worked really well for me over the decades."

Multigenerational work: Heilbronn has two sons on his team, and they're now working with the children of longtime clients, too.

How he'll know how long to stay in the job: "As long as I'm healthy and have a lot of energy," he says. "People that have retired are doing a lot of things that I just have no interest in doing. I don't want to go to the doctors and the cleaners everyday."

Chip Cutter is a Wall Street Journal reporter covering workplace and management issues. Email him at chip.cutter@wsj.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 09, 2025 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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