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When athletes turn out to have feet of clay, they are criticized for not being "role models." When kids go wrong, it's convenient to say it's because they didn't have appropriate "role models."
It seems "role models" has become the buzz term for the '90s. Yet folks who deserve the label seem to be in short supply. With the exception of Vera Sheffield.
She isn't an athlete, but Sheffield does possess strength, agility and-stamina. And to paraphrase Lee Iacocca, former Chrysler CEO and pitchman: "If you can find a better role model..."
For 40 years now--first as a single mom working three part-time jobs and going to Wayne State, then as a young black woman working her way through the mostly lily-white ranks of FTD, and later as manager and part-owner of her own telemarketing company--Sheffield has been the dogged, determined, keep-plugging-away paradigm of role modeling.
Want to make something of your life? Do it Vera's way. Want to get ahead in business? You'd do well to follow her blueprint.
Sheffield's company, Budco Teleservicing, Inc., was honored recently by the Greater Detroit Chamber of Commerce as one of its Future 50 companies. A news release about the luncheon where winners were feted says the award "provides well-deserved recognition to...the future stars of the southeastern Michigan business community."
If the only thing you knew about Sheffield was that she was the president of a fast-growing young company that had been honored by the Greater Detroit Chamber as a star of tomorrow, you might be forgiven for assuming that Sheffield, like her company, was something of an overnight success.
But that would be to diminish her accomplishment, and to diminish, as well, a life well-lived. Hers is anything but an overnight success. It began in early childhood
The year is 1936. Robert Steele is a night watchman at two factories in Lockland, a suburb of Cincinnati. He has a wife and four daughters, a middle-class family, and a home right between the two factories. Life is good--or seems to be.
But at the. age of 32, he dies of tuberculosis. Vera, the youngest, is two. His wife, Dora, and the kids move north to Detroit. Family takes care of family, and her family is in the...