Accountants’ Careers Add Up to Hall of Fame

Movie actors have the Oscar statuette and stars emblazoned into Hollywood Boulevard. Athletes are celebrated in ESPN specials and can show off trophy after trophy for their achievements on the playing field.

Some of the more ordinary members of the work force, those who toil over financial ledgers and bank statements, take recognition where they can get it--at Cal Poly Pomona’s Accounting Hall of Fame.

It’s a long way from Cooperstown. But for hundreds of accountants working anonymously in offices across Southern California, the Accounting Hall of Fame is considered a career pinnacle, a sort of Academy Awards for the spread-sheet set.

The facilities are modest. Actually, they’re in a box. The exhibit is being moved from Cal Poly Pomona’s accounting office to a classroom. Membership comes with a catch--to qualify, accountants must have some connection to Cal Poly Pomona.

Yet inductees gush about the honor like a Nobel Prize recipient.

“This culminates everything,” said new inductee A. B. Brand, the 64-year-old chief deputy controller of San Bernardino County and the hall’s 34th member. “It ties together all the aspects of my career and my life.”

The hall was created in 1989 by the school’s accounting department, which was seeking to boost its profile and donations and to honor an oft-overlooked profession.

“Accountants are people who watch money. You don’t hire a flashy accountant. You want them to be fairly quiet,” said John Karayan, a Cal Poly Pomona accounting professor. “We’re the honest measures.”

Some of the titans of the green-eyeshade realm are included in the hall’s ranks. Charles Axelson is already in “Who’s Who in America” and was a pioneer of using computerized accounting during his days at U.S. Gypsum in the 1960s.

John Bonacci Jr. was a groundbreaker in U.S.-Japan accounting relations during his time at Price Waterhouse in the early 1980s, when he established a unit to provide services to Japanese businesses arriving in the United States. And former Cal Poly Pomona accounting professor Clarence Jackman, dubbed “Father of the Accounting Internship Program,” pioneered Cal Poly Pomona’s often-duplicated internships for students.

“These people make me feel important. They’re such an inspiration,” said accounting student Elizabeth Chen, 41, of Monrovia. “When you . . . hear what these people do and give it’s so impressive.”

A year of appropriately methodical consideration of nominees by a nine-person selection committee culminates in an annual award banquet where new honorees are feted and accountants from across the region can shuck their gray flannel suits and let their hair down.

Somewhat.

A white stretch limousine ferried some guests to recent ceremonies. A dining hall in Cal Poly Pomona’s School of Restaurant Management was decked out with white tablecloths and floral centerpieces. About 100 elegantly attired accountants sipped white wine and chatted with tuxedoed professors and networking Cal Poly Pomona accounting students. A harpist strummed sedately in the background.

In this low-profile crowd, some even appeared downright glamorous.

Take for instance, Mark “Mickey” Segal, an inductee and co-founder of the Century City firm of Nigro, Karline, and Segal, specializing in services to the rich and famous.

This Hall of Famer--who looks a lot like “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander and sounds like Danny DeVito--wants the public to know “that accountants aren’t necessarily the guys sitting in the back of the room with a green eyeshade.”

Segal and two colleagues were fresh out of school in 1981 when they founded his firm, which provides an only-in-L.A. service of discreetly running the finances of the super-rich. “On the westside of town,” Segal said, “they call it business management.”

Segal buys mansions and luxury cars for his clients and must occasionally devise ways to deliver money to them in European resorts at 3 a.m. He once had to arrange comfortable cross-country transportation for an entertainer’s dogs.

Brand, the San Bernardino County controller, represents the opposite pole of the accounting world--a career bureaucrat, who holds the No. 2 post in his county. Judges were impressed by his deftness at reining in an unruly county bureaucracy and his steady rise from an accountant-trainee.

“It doesn’t get any lower than that,” Brand commented on his entry-level post.

Inductees Brand and Segal followed proper awards etiquette by thanking their families as they clutched their prize: a heavy wood plaque. And there was the obligatory crack about account transfers.

Both inductees will have their 8-by-10 inch photographs added to the Hall of Fame display, and their names will be added to a larger plaque listing Hall of Fame members.

Brand, who spent 20 years in the Air Force and saw combat in Vietnam, explained why an obscure award from his alma mater and a banquet in Pomona could be described as “the greatest honor” in his life.

“It’s recognition by my peers,” Brand said. “The greatest recognition you can get is from your peers.”