Bob McTeer—In His Own Words
The American Way
That good-looking young fellow in the picture is me, standing in front of my family home in June 1949. My only memory of that house is returning from school one day and discovering that it was missing. I had forgotten that it was to be moved that day about a quarter-mile up the road. Once it was relocated, my dad added a couple more rooms to it. A few years later, when his income permitted, he expanded the other side of the house.
Later, we bricked it and added more rooms, plus a carport that I helped my dad build by hauling dirt to it, one wheelbarrow load at a time. It took all summer.
I think of that house and the way it grew over time as a metaphor for income growth. My dad's was no Horatio Alger story, but his income probably rose from the lowest rung of the income distribution to the highest during his working life and then back down a notch or two.
Excerpted from the 1995 Annual Report, "By Our Own Bootstraps: Economic Opportunity and the Dynamics of Income Distribution," Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
That's not a picture of my grandfather...but it could have been. My grandfather was a blacksmith, as was his father. My dad, however, was part of the evolutionary process of the churn. After quitting school in the seventh grade to work for the sawmill, he got the entrepreneurial itch. He rented a shed and opened a filling station to service the cars that had put his dad out of business. My father was successful, so he bought some land on the top of a hill and built a "truck stop." (The quotation marks are to distinguish his modest version from the interstate behemoths we see today.) Our truck stop was extremely successful until a new interstate went through 20 miles to the west. The churn replaced U.S. 411 with Interstate 75, and my visions of the good life faded.
Excerpted from the 1992 Annual Report, "The Churn: The Paradox of Progress," Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Work
I remember when they called them service stations. When I started out pumping gas at my dad's station, I used to check the oil and wipe the windshields whether they needed it or not. I didn't know it at the time, but I was part of the service sector. Even so, I could still tell people what I did and they knew what I was talking about. Or, they could just look at my fingernails.
It's more ambiguous these days. I guess I'm still in the service sector. But when I have to fill in the little blank that asks my occupation, I hardly know what to write. Lately, I just put central banker. In any case, newsprint has replaced car grease on my hands.
Excerpted from the 1994 Annual Report, "The Service Sector: Give It Some Respect," Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
When I was about 10 years old, I picked a little cotton on Billy Joe Hopper's farm about three miles up the road from my house in North Georgia. My ambition was to pick 100 pounds in a day. At three cents a pound, I would earn three whole dollars. As I recall, the adults, who knew what they were doing, could pick 300 pounds or more in a day. They could make $10. The money doesn't sound like much today, and I guess it really wasn't much then either, but it sure gave me some good memories. The best is the memory of total exhaustion, with my back hurting so badly I could hardly stand up, as I rode home at dusk on top of a load of cotton.
Excerpted from Agriculture, Technology and the Economy, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Fall 1996
Monetary Policy
My dad’s name was Doyal, and I literally grew up in Doyal’s Truck Stop—open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in rural Georgia. We ate our meals there. Doyal worked days from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Little Doyal (that’s me) worked 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.—except Saturday night, when I started at midnight, if I had a date, which, of course, I always did.
The hard part of the job was mopping the floors every night and changing truck tires. The miserable part of the job was trying to sleep in the daytime in the summer without air conditioning. But the scary part of the job was the fear my dad instilled in me that I might accidentally put gasoline into a diesel truck and diesel fuel into a gasoline truck. Either way, you ruin the motor and you ruin your life.
My high school was too small to have a football team, so basketball was our major sport and I played on the varsity my junior and senior years.
My major fear there was that in the confusion of play I would get turned around—especially in a jump ball situation—and shoot a basket on the wrong end of the court. I didn’t want to be "Wrong Way McTeer."
So what do putting gasoline in a diesel engine and shooting basketball on the wrong end of the court have to do with the economy and monetary policy?
I’ll tell you—I still have a fear of zigging when I should be zagging. It would be very bad to ease monetary policy just as inflation was about to pick up. It would also be bad to tighten monetary policy just as we’re about to sink into a recession.
Fortunately, most of the time the question is whether to zig or not to zig. When you are contemplating a zig, a zag is usually not even a consideration.
It’s the same with zags. To zag or not to zag. Don’t even consider zigging.
But every now and then something comes along to cloud the situation. Something that would make the consequences of a wrong move more serious, without clarifying what would [actually] be a wrong move.
Excerpted from a speech to the Arlington (Texas) Chamber of Commerce, June 4, 1998