Street Art, spring 2020

Someone sent me this 2-minute video of trompe l'oeil, and it is taking up too much space on my laptop hard drive. Maybe I can load it up here and delete it from my laptop. Fingers crossed. It is very clever. Do watch it.

Job #3: Saks-34th St. (first Antioch co-op job)

How the Antioch College work-study system worked

This was one of the appealing features for me. Its cooperative education work-study program was not anything like “work-study” in colleges and universities today. In Antioch’s program, everyone spent time on campus taking traditional classes, and an equal amount of time off campus at any of hundreds of regular jobs around the country. The student body was essentially two student bodies, or divs (for divisions): one half on campus while the other half was off working. (Just to complicate matters in telling this story, my class was the last for many years in which everyone in our class started in the fall. In 1961 began two entering classes, one in the summer, the other in the fall, which lasted for perhaps 15 years.)

My class was divided into three divs: one group of students went off on a job after the fall quarter (Antioch wasn’t on a semester schedule), another group after the winter quarter, and the third group after the spring quarter. I was in the second div, so somewhere around the middle of winter quarter we visited the co-op office to look through the jobs lists for jobs (1) we were interested in doing, (2) we were qualified for, and sometimes most important (3) located in a place we wanted to go. And I, my roommate, and our closest friend (we dubbed ourselves the Traumatic Triumvirate) most definitely wanted to be doing anything at all in New York City.

I no longer remember what other entry-level jobs were available, but all three of us ended up as department store sales clerks: my roommate, known as Charlie, went to Lord & Taylor’s (at $45/wk.), our friend, Connie, at B. Altman (at $55/wk.), and I to Saks-34th ($50/wk.). There’s interesting retail history around these three stores, but I’ll save that for later.

The job

Our jobs started in early April; this is when I filled out my first W4 forms. Then three days of training. There were five or six other women being trained with me, but they all hoped to be staying on. We had to learn how to operate really old cash registers, with rows of raised “pedals” for the numbers and a handle on the side to record each price as you entered it. Then there was complexity of counting out at the end of the day. You had to get the register to total the daily transactions and then count up the cash in your envelope—and those numbers better match. Mine always did.

What else did we learn? When and for how long we could take a break and go for lunch; to be friendly and gracious to customers. What our employee discount was and how to use it. Did we have to punch a time clock? I don’t remember. And there was no mention of a union.

Once trained, I was assigned to the costume jewelry counter on the first floor, near the entrance from 34th Street. I shared the counter with a couple of other women who were much older, so we didn’t commune much. Did I say I was terminally shy? The hardest part for me was standing behind the counter, facing out toward potential customers, and trying to look helpful. If I saw someone pausing to gaze into the cases, I would edge gradually in her direction while hoping she would move along or leave before I got close enough to have to say, “Can I help you?” On the other hand, if someone knew exactly what she wanted, I enjoyed picking out the bracelet or necklace or pair of earrings, packing them neatly into a box labeled “Saks-34th,” and ringing up the sale. Mostly, I walked up and down behind the counter, rearranging items on display either on the counter or inside the cases. Time passed very slowly.

Near the costume jewelry counter was a free-standing triangular table with a few dozen watches individually chained on display. Every now and then I was assigned to “handle” that table, which meant I had to stand out on the floor near the table and look alert, ready to address anyone who stopped and picked up a watch, though they usually hurried off if I did approach. Here time passed even more slowly, though it became a sort of game to straighten out the watches to make parallel and aiming toward one point of the triangular table or another.

At least a couple of times a week, someone would stop by the counter and ask where housewares was. The first few times this happened, I was confused—we didn’t have any housewares. “But there was an ad in the paper,” the woman would say, showing me the page that clearly said Macy’s or Gimbel’s. Saks-34th was on the south side of 34th Street, while Macy’s was across 34th, and Gimbel’s was on the other side of Saks, on 33rd. Eventually, I realized that people came up from the subway and didn’t know where they were, and I felt superior pointing out where they needed to go.

Lunch was either at the Nedick’s tucked into the corner of Macy’s or the Woolworth’s lunch counter next door. Can’t remember what I ordered at the counter, but sometimes I would buy a box of melba toast and a can of smoked oysters—eating raw oysters would come later—take them back to the break room at Saks, and eat oysters on toast for lunch, feeling extremely sophisticated and elegant.

I knew about the sit-ins and picketing of Woolworth’s the year before, but those seemed over by spring 1961. The political issue I was aware of April of 1961 was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an abortive anti-Castro attack that Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower. That and the possibility of nuclear war. (Current research tells me that the nuclear test moratorium wasn’t breached until fall 1961, but my fear of imminent war that led to personal events that summer must have been based on something. Were there stories hinting that various countries might violate that moratorium?)

One day while having lunch at Nedick’s, I heard the squeal of brakes and gasps from those around me. A gray-haired man lay in the middle of the street, hit by a car that sped off. From inside of Nedick’s I could see only a trickle of blood by the man’s head; in my memory his body is larger than the people gathering around. I looked away, but not quickly enough.

Outside the job

The job was the least reason I wanted to be in New York. Once we had our jobs lined up, we next had to find a place to live. Here, too, Antioch’s co-op office had lists of apartments where Antioch students had lived in the past. Somehow, we settled on a one-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, which when we arrived in early April 1961 turned out to be tiny. The bedroom barely had room for a double bed, a single bed, and two small bureaus. It was weird sleeping with another woman in the same bed, but we did it for three months.

This apartment was the first place I saw a cockroach—yuck! Did we actually cook any meals there besides breakfast? I remember none.

I do remember boys, however. Charlie invited over two boys (we still called young men around our age “boys,” while we called ourselves “girls”) who worked in the stock room at Lord & Taylor, and they brought along a slightly older guy named Rudy. We sat around our apartment drinking, playing music, laughing. We must have gotten really loud because someone called the police. And when the police came to our door, we were terrified, and then astounded when they knew Rudy! The police were pretty cool, just told us to keep it down.

One night Rudy took Charlie and me for a ride in his red Corvette, with the top down. I was in the front seat as we went down to the Village, and driving around Washington Square, Rudy started chatting up a young woman with a suitcase, walking along Waverly Place. Somehow he finagled her into the car, even though there was no place for her to sit. Her suitcase went into the back, and Charlie, who’d been squeezed into a space with no seat got out and took the subway uptown. The new woman climbed over me and sat on the gearshift, hopping up whenever Rudy needed to change gears. She had a bottle of liquor in her hand, and possibly she was drunk. She kept shouting, "I'm Nell McCafferty!" Was she famous? Should I know who she was? I felt pushed into the shadows, excited yet confused. Was she going to invite us into some situation I wouldn’t know how to handle? I thought of the previous summer, when walking around the Village with a high school girlfriend, she got us picked up by a much older man. (Another story, another day.) It hadn’t ended badly, but what now? After driving around the park a few times, we let her off, somewhere.

I discovered the Scribner Bookstore on Fifth Avenue and bought perhaps my first hardcover book: Katherine, by Anya Seton. I had read this historical novel, about real-life people in 14th century England (the female romantic lead was Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-law), when I was 14, and it was one of the books that attracted me to history. I bought a pale yellow hat one day because that’s what I’d read grownup women do when they feel down in the dumps. I also bought a pair of white gloves, because grownup women wore gloves in the summer as well as the winter. But nothing sticks in my memory about going to a museum or any other cultural space. The museums were known to me since my mother had taken us to MoMA and the Museum of Natural History when we visited her parents in Brooklyn. 

Aftermath

At the end of June, our jobs were over; Connie and I went home for a week, then returned to Antioch College. Charlie, however, had her financial aid cut so much that she couldn’t return. The last I heard of her, she was living with a graduate student in NYU housing in the Village. This guy drank too much, Charlie said, and she would pour his liquor down the drain. But he always got more. Where did she work? Did she stay at Lord & Taylor? I don’t know. She went out west at some point, and was friends with Connie’s sister, but then she disappeared. I admired her when we were at school, as I admired many girls in those days, but she deserves her own story. 

To get co-op credit for our jobs, we had to write a paper. The paper could be on anything: how the job compared to or contrasted with our coursework; something that happened during the co-op; what we learned about life; maybe even something creative, like a piece of fiction or poetry, or a song or music. I must have written a paper about being a sales clerk, but I did not keep a copy, and I doubt that Antioch College kept co-op papers from 60 years ago. Too bad — I'd have liked to look back on what I wrote at age 19 about a thoroughly boring job. And my taxable income for 1961 was $677 (equivalent to $6,546 today).

Now about those department stores

Lord & Taylor’s was the oldest, the first American department store, founded in 1826 and closing its physical stores in 2021. B. Altman was founded in 1865, and its flagship store, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, closed in 1989. It’s now the site of the CUNY Graduate School. 

West 34th Street was the first New York City location, in 1906, for the Saks & Co. store that been founded in Washington, D.C., in 1867. In 1923 Saks merged with Gimbel’s (owned by a cousin), and the following year the owners of the company opened Saks Fifth Avenue—but kept the store on 34th Street as Saks-34th. Although Saks-34th and Gimbel’s were owned by one company, they operated as separate businesses. So maybe those people who thought they were in Gimbel’s weren’t as confused as I thought they were. However, Saks-34th closed just a few years after I worked there (its closing the result, according to a 1995 story in the New York Times, “of poor layouts, no escalators, a confused identity”), replaced first by Korvette’s, then a vertical mall in the 1980s, and it’s now an outpost of the Swedish H&M stores.

Job #2, Robin Hood Dell usher

             Robin Hood Dell was an outdoor concert space in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Concerts were free for people who didn’t mind sitting on blankets on the grass. But there were a few thousand permanent folding seats close to the raised stage where the orchestra sat, and these seats were for those who paid for a season. There were also jobs for young people to be ushers (all girls) to take the season ticket holders to their seats, and also to be valets (all boys) to park the cars of the season ticket holders. There were concerts several times a week for a six-week summer season, and ushers who worked three nights a week were paid $5 a week.

            Ushers arrived at the park about an hour before concert time. Most likely no one would need our services so early, but just in case... We brought a piece of cloth to wipe off the seats, which were clean anyway, but just in case... Then three or four of us stood around chatting, about what else we were doing that summer, who was dating whom, where we were going to college in the fall. I became friends with Lois, a friendly, red-haired, slightly plump girl who was starting at Penn (University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, not to be confused with Penn State, out in State College). Lois was dating Barney, one of the valets.

            As couples, or groups, many middle-aged or elderly, arrived, we would approach them with a helpful expression on our faces. This was the hardest part for me. I was intensely shy, didn’t know how to talk to anyone, let alone strangers. But here there was the framework of the job. I would hover near the area where people walked in and try to look friendly. A little smile? The man, and it was usually a man, would hand me the tickets. I would look at the seat numbers, then lead the couple or group to their seats. There, I would fold down the seat, wipe it with my cloth, step back to they could get to their seats, and hand the tickets back. The man would then hand me a coin, for a tip. It was usually a quarter. (The equivalent today of $2.35.) By the end of an evening, I might have accumulated $2 or $3, and could have gotten more if I were more assertive in approaching ticket holders.

            One elderly couple was notable. They were older than most. And after I’d wiped their seats and let them move into their row, the man would hand me a dime with a little smile. I couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a magnanimous amount or the least that I deserved. But a dime? (Less than a dollar today.) Even then, it seemed stingy. I wanted to throw it back at him, but I never did. But I never forgot.

Job #1: Babysitting

            Is babysitting a job? Not if it’s only now and then. Not if I hated it. I was only comfortable if the baby/child/children were asleep when I arrived, which they usually were. There was the occasional child I had to put to bed, but  nothing memorable to make permanent imprint on my memory. The number of times I baby-sat may not have reached double digits.

            All of my babysitting happened in Levittown, Pa., where my family lived for three years, when I was in high school. Levittown was divided into sections with cutesy names: the section I lived in was Snowball Gate, and all the streets in Snowball Gate began with the letter “S.” My street was Sweetgum. Maybe there was a sweet gum tree planted somewhere in Snowball Gate.

            How did I get these jobs I didn’t want? Maybe my mother saw a sign in a neighborhood store. I would call, find out the date and the time range — it couldn’t be too late even if it was on a weekend. I would either walk to the home where the children lived or be picked up by the father and driven to the home if it was beyond walking distance or it was dark out. I often didn’t know either of the parents, and it felt weird to be in a strange house, even if the layout was similar to my own home. Snowball Gate had four different home layouts, and they alternated down the street: layout A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, you get the idea.

            If the baby or children were asleep when I arrived, I was vastly relieved. This meant I could sit in the living room and watch television or read the book I had brought or do my homework. I could have explored these strange houses, looked through their books, eaten food in the kitchen, but I did none of these things. I was afraid, but not quite sure of what. Maybe I would disturb something, and the parents would be angry. Maybe I would eat food they were planning to eat the next day. Maybe I would find something I didn’t want to know. I had already poked around my own parents’ bedroom and found a book about sex from the Soviet Union; it described a young man who had rigged up some sort of alarm system that would wake him during the night so he would never miss an opportunity to masturbate. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but it gave me an unpleasant feeling.

            Mostly I just wanted to walk in the door, sit in a chair, hope the children would remain asleep until their parents came home and the father would drive me home after putting some wrinkled bills in my hand. I didn’t talk in the car, and the father usually didn’t ask any questions. Oh, when the parents walked in the door, the mother would ask how everything went, did the children stay asleep.

            I hated it if the phone rang. I would have to answer, because the ringing phone might wake the children. But I didn’t know phone etiquette. “Hello,” I would say. When they asked for Marge or Harry, I’d mumble, “They’re not here. I’m the babysitter.” If I was lucky, they’d say, “Oh, I’ll call back tomorrow.” If I wasn’t, the person would want to leave a message; I would have to find a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and then worry that I wasn’t understanding what the person was saying. I didn’t know that I could just ask them to repeat. And then I’d have to remember to tell the parents, when they got home, that there had been a phone call.

            I didn’t worry too much about someone breaking into the house. Crime wasn’t an issue that I was aware of in Levittown. A few years earlier, when we had lived in the Connecticut countryside, there was a spate of UFO sightings. One evening I was babysitting my own brother and sister, and on the phone with a girlfriend. She told me there had been some strange lights in the sky over the area where I lived.  I was in the living room in front of a big picture window and slowly turned around to look out into the dark night. No lights in sight. But I remained staring out the window, unable to turn away from where the aliens might be coming from. In Levittown, I could tune out any unknown house creaks and cracks by turning on the TV. But the presence of a house on either side of the one I was in was reassuring.

            That is all the paid work I did in high school, other than the chores I had to create to justify asking for an allowance from my parents. My father didn’t understand why my brother and sister and I might want an allowance. If we wanted anything, all we had to do was ask — and maybe we’d get it, if the parents thought it was a good idea. That we might independently want to decide to get something — a book, a soda, a candy bar, a sweater — didn’t fit into their idea of child-rearing. So when I was 17, I created a list of chores (such as setting the table, clearing the table, doing the dishes), a schedule of who would do what when, and presented the list to my father with the suggestion of $5 a week. To my surprise, he accepted it. The list was posted on the side of the refrigerator.