It took some arm-twisting, but Alma Mesecher finally capitulated and accepted a limousine ride to Bankers Trust Co. the morning of April 7. She’d take the bus, she argued, just as she has almost every workday for the past half century. Besides, the stretch limo wasn’t scheduled to deliver her to the door of the bank’s corporate headquarters at 665 Locust St. until 8 a.m. That would make her more than an hour late, no small compromise for a woman whose work ethic is as sturdy as the venerable bank’s reputation.

Renee Hardman, the bank’s senior vice president of human resources, had to get tough with the woman whose soft, kind-hearted nature is legendary at Bankers Trust. A co-worker, Jerry Johnson, showed up at her Windsor Heights home to make sure she’d take the ride in the limousine, Mesecher’s first ever in her 79 years.

“Just drive on,” Mesecher told the driver when she saw the crowd of colleagues in the bank lobby. They waved signs congratulating her on 50 years of service at Bankers Trust – a milestone no other employee there has matched. They craned their necks, curious to see the reaction of a no-frills woman co-workers described as “a giver, not a taker.”

“Speech! Speech!” they cried.

“Let’s get to work,” Mesecher replied.

Her milestone was celebrated throughout the day. She received more than 100 cards from bank employees, former colleagues and friends. When pressed to choose a gift to commemorate the anniversary, she resisted, but finally agreed to accept a cross necklace she’d seen at her favorite jeweler’s store. (Her first thought had been to merely serve as a pass-through vessel for a monetary gift that would be used to pave the parking lot at her church, Our Saviour Lutheran Church LCMS.)

Mesecher said the entire hullabaloo over her 50-year anniversary – 13,000 working days under seven bank presidents and 13 supervisors – wasn’t necessary at all.

J. Michael Earley, Bankers Trust president and CEO, respectfully disagrees. He uses superlatives liberally to describe Mesecher -“charming disposition”; “unbelievable smile on her face’; “amazing” – and praises her ability to adapt as bank operations became more and more automated. When Mesecher began her job at Bankers Trust in 1953, account numbers were nonexistent and checks were still manually posted by customers’ names. The switchboard, which she operated for a time, was the old-fashioned kind, requiring the operator to manually connect calls.

Earley marvels at her attendance record. Inclement weather doesn’t keep her home. Amid fears the Y2K computer glitch could interrupt bank operations, Mesecher spent New Year’s Eve 1999 at the Des Moines Marriott, located across the street from the bank, so she would be nearby in case of an emergency. She rarely takes a sick day, and even when she was entitled to eight weeks off to recuperate from foot surgery, she returned to the bank after only a half-day.

During the company’s annual community service days, Mesecher is always there, pitching in to help paint a house or clean up a property. “She’s an avid gardener and ends up doing some of the hardest work,” Earley said. “She’s out their chopping down trees, bushes and saplings. She’s amazing.”     If she suffers the aches and pains of aging, she doesn’t complain. “I’m 60,” Earley confessed, “and I hurt when I get out of bed.

“All of us the bank could learn a lot from Alma as it relates to her work ethic and her attitude about being a team player,” he said.

“She’s as close to a perfect employee as anyone could be,” said Kip Albertson, the bank’s senior vice president, chief financial officer and senior trust officer. “She’s the consummate team player at Bankers Trust Co.

“She’s very compassionate and really appreciates what she has in her life,” he added. “We can all learn a valuable lesson from that.”

“Just being around Alma’s sweet spirit and kindness – she gives more to other people just by her presence,” Hardman said.

Share the comments others have made about her, and Mesecher immediately becomes uncomfortable. She’s a giver, after all, not a taker.

Understanding why Mesecher still works so hard requires an understanding of where she has been.

The daughter of first-generation German immigrants, she didn’t speak English until she went to primary school in rural Audubon.

Transportation to and from the country schoolhouse cost $1 a week, an expense her parents could ill-afford during the Great Depression, so dropped after her freshman year of high school. She assumed at the time that she would live out her life on her farm and a diploma wouldn’t be necessary, but that proved not to be the case. When her father became ill, the family moved off the farm to an acreage in town. She began exploring her options, and moved to Des Moines when she turned 21.

During the worker shortage of World War II, the American Institute of Business in Des Moines relaxed its entrance standards and accepted students who hadn’t completed high school. AIB placed her at the former Capital City State Bank on East Fifth Street and Grand Avenue. She earned $90 a month, and supplemented her salary by working at Bishop’s Cafeteria at night for her meals.

Mesecher has never been a stranger to hard work. She and her sister, their parents’ only children, labored on the farm as soon as they were physically able. “It was hard work on the farm every day,” she recalled. “We picked corn, put up hay and milked cows – I can’t believe how hard I really worked.”

She was still working a second job at Bishop’s when she married Thearl Mesecher in 1949. In fact, that’s where they met. In 1953, her supervisor the restaurant reasoned that since Mesecher and her husband were both working, she might want to consider quitting the night job. She declined, saying she and Thearl needed the money. That’s when her co-worker told her about a higher-paying job at Des Moines Bank and Trust, which merged later that year with Bankers Trust.

“When I first came up here, I didn’t like it,” Mesecher said of the larger banking organization that resulted from the merger. “It was too big.”

She and Thearl moved to Wisconsin after she became a Bankers Trust employee, but were back in Iowa before two months had passed. She asked for her old job back, and began her 50-year tenure on April 6, 1953.

Her initial unhappiness at working in such a large organization has dissipated. Today, her co-workers are like family, and the bond is illustrated in countless ways. For example, last year she accepted an offer from a co-worker, April Marmon, to type the handwritten diaries Thearl Mesecher had surreptitiously kept as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. Michael Luick-Thrams, executive director of TRACES, a non-profit educational organization created to preserve the stories of people from the Upper Midwest and Germany who encountered each other during World War II, had heard about the diaries and wanted to include them in his project. (Excerpts of the diaries can be found at www.traces.org.)

The entire Bankers Trust organization celebrated that, too, and the story was splashed across three pages in the bank’s internal newsletter, BANKnotes.     Well past retirement age, Mesecher said, “God has given me the health to come to work every day,” and she has no plans to leave her job. Her husband died 20 years ago. “I’d just get bored at home,” she said. “If I weren’t working, I really would miss my friends here at Bankers Trust.”