ACOFP: OUR CONTINUING HISTORY 17 THE FOUNDING AND EARLY YEARS scheduled to be held in San Francisco the following February. Although the board meeting was held in secret, Mr. Hank somehow discovered the plans even before the meeting had been adjourned, a fact that baffled many board members in the years that followed. The board’s records appeared to reflect a growing apprehension among many members with the continued association with Allied Appraisals. Possibly sensing this unified concern for the first time, Mr. Hank doubled the efforts of his organization to collect dues, and in December 1977, he reported to the board that he had collected $79,385 in dues for the upcoming year. The March 1978 ACOFP Board minutes also reflected that Mr. Hank, the executive secretary, proposed that his salary as a full-time director would rise to $5,000 per month with a $500 bonus for increases in membership above a set point in the past year. Further, Mr. Napoli would be paid $50 per hour for his contributions to the operations of the AOBGP. These were substantial sums considering the median household income in 1978 was $15,060. With the prospect of a good financial bottom line, many on the board saw an opportunity to break with Allied Appraisals. The Board of Governors rejected Mr. Hank’s proposal, and Dr. John Sevastos relates: We were just trying to get back what belonged to us, including the records and equipment of the College. I dare say it was without the blessing of Jack Hank. Larry Koplovitz and I were assigned to pick up the accounting books from a man who worked in the Chicago stockyards and who supposedly had a computer. I remember we approached a cab driver to take us to the stockyards and he looked at us very quizzically and said, “Are you fellows sure you want to go to the stockyards, we don’t take people out there?” We said, “this is where we are going, and we have an address and we’ve got to go see a man.” So, reluctantly the cab driver took Larry and I out to the stockyards. We waded our way through very smelly corridors, up a back stairway, and finally down a dimly lit corridor where we came across this gentleman who supposedly had our records on his computer. We received some semblance of documents, but certainly nothing like we had expected. From there we left and went to the bank. Larry and I walked in and asked for the president of the bank. We introduced ourselves and told him that we were there to close the ACOFP account and pick up whatever documents were available to us. He was rather taken aback and said I first had to get permission from our executive director. We said that wouldn’t be necessary as our executive director was terminated and we needed to go on with our organization. We were in shock to find out that not only did we not have any office equipment, but that after twenty-five years of existence we had very little money. This was a devastating shock to Larry, Joe Guzik, Del Maddox, Bob Hayman, and me. We had arrived in Chicago to go with the truck that the executive director had hired to pick up the belongings of the ACOFP. This semi moving van could not enter the streets of downtown Chicago until after six p.m., so Maddox, Guzik, and Hayman ended up going in the dark to meet the big van. When they got there, they went to the offices and were shown a stack of boxes that probably could have been put in a pick-up truck rather than a huge van.
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