This California woman has worked for 50 years at her dream job – and has no plans to retire

For more than 50 years, Joann Ayerza has been working her dream job at the Bank of America in Kerman.

The 78-year-old moves swiftly behind the counter when she’s at work, counting cash, depositing checks and looking up accounts. She wears an Apple Watch strapped to her left wrist, and when she speaks, her silver earrings dangle below her cropped white hair.

Although much has changed since she started in 1962, Ayerza has remained in the same building where she started. And she has no plans to retire.

“Even when I was younger, I always wanted to work in a bank,” she said. “I just love the job and the customers.”

In the 1960s, Ayerza worked with the newest technology. Called the NCR Post Tronic, the large machine recorded transactions and prevented errors. Ayerza got paid $1 an hour and had to fill out everything by hand, make phone calls and even walk to the post office to mail bills for customers.

Now she uses a computer to do most everything. She doesn’t miss the old ways, she says. Ayerza even uses a phone app to do her own banking.

She says working at the bank has always been about more than the job. It’s how she has met so many people in the community, some of who have become family.

“The old-timers, when I first started here, they would bring in their children,” she said, “and I knew a lot of the kids because my kids were their ages.”

She recalls meeting the girl years ago who would grow up to marry her son.

“She came in with her father when she was maybe 16, and I opened their accounts. I didn’t expect it to be my daughter-in-law,” she laughed, “because I didn’t know her then, you know.”

Ayerza has worked continuously at the bank except for about five years in the ‘60s when she took off to start a family: two sons and eight grandchildren, ranging from 11 to 24 years old.

Mary Cottrell, one of Ayerza’s regulars, describes her as “such a sweetheart.”

Cottrell was in the bank on her 57th birthday (before she left, Ayerza remembered to wish Cottrell happy birthday). Cottrelll says she’s known Ayerza since she was a kid.

“My mom and dad banked here. She always smiles and she’s the only one I go to.”

Reward: Trip to meet the CEO

To commemorate her 50 years with Bank of America, she was invited to the bank’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, to meet CEO Brian Moynihan.

But to get there, she had to face her fear of flying.

“I was really bad that whole week before we went,” she says. ”In fact, that Sunday I think I was going to cancel. I was just a nervous wreck.”

She didn’t get any sleep the night before, and she had a Dramamine pill ready to go, just in case. But her first-ever flight was smooth.

Ayerza joked that her grandkids doubted her.

“They kept saying, ‘Grandma’s not going to North Carolina,’ because they’ve been trying to get me to go to Hawaii for like, five or six years now.”

So is Hawaii in the future?

“Let’s not push it, but I said maybe I’ll get on the plane,” she told her grandkids. “I can go again as long as the weather’s good.”

No reason to leave

She said Moynihan was amazed that she had been at the same branch since 1962.

“A lot of people get transferred out,” she said. “I wasn’t one that wanted to travel or transfer out because I wanted to be close to my kids the whole time they were at school and stuff, and it worked out really well for me. It was my career.”

Ayerza enjoys staying active and wants to work for as long as she can.

“I like to deal with the customers and seeing them,” she said. “None of them want me to retire.”

This story was originally published November 26, 2019 at 12:25 PM with the headline "This California woman has worked for 50 years at her dream job – and has no plans to retire."