February 14, 2002
Profile: UW custodian never defined by his job description
Ben Santos has never been plagued with doubts about who he is. In any discussion about his life he will tell you, “I am a salesman. I love marketing. Give me a product that you want to sell and I will sell it for you.”
Of course, Santos’ job description doesn’t always match who he is. Right now, for example, he’s a custodian on campus — has been for 17 years. But that doesn’t change anything. If a friend comes to Santos and says, “I’m looking for this little dish; I saw it in a catalog,” Santos will track down the wholesaler and ask what is the minimum number of units he can purchase at wholesale price. He’ll buy that number of units, sell one to his friend and keep the others on display in his house until they’re sold too.
He smiles widely and leans toward you as he tells this story. “I’m a promotional man,” he tells you. “I can sell anything.”
You can sense he’s always believed that to be true, without any degree to prove it, but he learned the technical elements of his craft right here, more than 50 years ago. He was living in his native country, the Philippines, then, and he came to the University of Washington to study business. Or rather, his father sent him here to study medicine, but Santos soon realized that would take way too long.
“I was young; I was happy-go-lucky,” he says. “I felt like I could do any job and I wanted to get out and work.”
So a business degree is what he got, returning to the Philippines in 1949 and immediately starting work for Procter & Gamble as a salesman. The company sent him out into the field, where, Santos says, he “topped the charts” every year, earning a promotion to sales manager.
He chuckles as he admits the money was what drove him — a salary plus commission was heaven for a super-salesman like him. But he was restless, and soon left Procter & Gamble for another firm, then started his own company, a food-packing business.
His touch continued to be golden and the money rolled in. “Workaholic” isn’t a term Santos uses, but he says, “I was traveling all over the country. I sometimes wouldn’t see my wife more than once in 30 days. I couldn’t stand to stay home. I had to be out in the field all the time.”
Then the roof fell in. Santos had a shipment worth about $500,000 ready to go, and there was a longshoreman’s strike that lasted six months. The shipment was lost and the money with it. Though he kept the business, Santos had to also go to work for Westinghouse, where his brother — a UW-educated engineer — was a high-ranking executive.
“My wife — she’s very religious — said it was because I didn’t pray, I only thought of money,” Santos says. “Maybe she was right. I don’t know, but it changed my attitude. I said, ‘Lord, just give me enough to support my family. That’s all I need.'”
Losing a great sum of money was quite an upheaval in Santos’ life, but there was a bigger one ahead. The oldest of his three children was high school age, and his wife began to plead with him to come to the United States. The children could get a better education here and have a better chance at life, she said. A teacher by training, she had gone ahead and applied for a job at a school in Nebraska.
Santos knew she was right about the children’s future, but he vetoed the Nebraska idea. If they were going to move to the United States, Seattle was the place he wanted to be. So in 1968, almost 20 years after earning his degree, he returned to a greatly changed city to start over.
Gone were the big risks and big riches of his youth. Now Santos wanted secure income and he wanted it fast. So he applied to be a cannery worker in Alaska, and for two months that’s what he did. Then he noticed that the Westin was building a hotel in Seattle, so he applied for work there. He became the room service captain, the first Filipino to be hired by the hotel.
Santos spent 13 years at the Westin, bringing in that secure money. But he couldn’t stay away from sales. He opened a small Filipino store in the International District, running it in the daytime while he worked at the Westin in the evening. For two years he also worked at the Navy commissary on the weekend.
“Then my lawyer said to me, ‘You’re working too hard. All your money goes to taxes. Take it easy,'” Santos laughs.
He wound up selling the store to a friend because owning it would make it easier for the friend — a Filipino immigrant — to stay in this country. Meanwhile, Santos was thinking about his retirement plan, which at the Westin was not good. And that’s why he took a job as a custodian at the University he graduated from, cleaning — among other things — the dean’s suite of offices in the College of Arts and Sciences. It’s there that Denis Martynowych, director of facilities and planning for the college, met him.
“Through all his varied experiences he has kept his humor, hope and warm heartiness,” Martynowych says of Santos. “Sometime we get to talking and I am always amazed at another part of his life I get to glimpse from those conversations.”
He won’t be having them much longer, however. Santos plans to retire at the end of the month — something he could have done a long time ago, given that he’s 78. But he went on working to finance his passion for travel. He’s hit just about every country in Europe, along with northern Africa and China. Next in the plans is a trip to Greece.
No doubt he’ll be continuing his wandering ways to the extent he can, but when asked about what he’ll do in retirement, Santos smiles and gives a predictable answer. “I’m going to put up my own business,” he says. “I’m going to sell products out of my home.”
