Job #6: Public Health Service, statistical clerk, summer 1962

             At the end of June, I moved out of the Clinical Center in Bethesda and into an apartment in Washington, D.C., where I was to room with another Antioch student, Susie S., who had already been there through the spring quarter. The apartment was on Irving Place, a block away from Rock Creek Park and the city’s zoo. On quiet nights, I could sometimes hear the lions or tigers roar, and one night, writing in my journal, a cigarette in one hand, a drink on the lamp table, I could sense a giant cat padding up the stairs and just on the other side of the doorway; it was a scary yet thrilling feeling.

            The Public Health Service was in one of those huge, blocky government buildings in S.E. Washington, south of the Mall and east of all the tourist sites. There was no Metro yet, wouldn’t be one for another 14 years, so I rode maybe two buses, one downtown, another to the government buildings.

            I spent my time in a large room without windows, some cubicles along one wall, a long table against another wall, and three offices, for the supervisors, on a third. Perhaps three or four other people my age worked in our office during that summer. I was shown how to use a Friden calculator—a noisy machine much larger than a typewriter, but small enough to sit on a desk, it had a keyboard of nine rows up and 10 across. One of the young men spent most of his time figuring out how to make the calculator beat out a rhythm, by entering a 10-digit number, then multiplying, or dividing, by one number. I think one combination was 7755777557 divided by 7, and the mechanical sound of the calculator figuring out the answer sounded like bada, bum, bada, bum, bada,bum, bum, bum—but I have no calculator to test this.

            The Public Health Service at that time was just concluding a series of trials to determine whether giving women a regular test called a Pap smear would catch cervical cancer early enough to save lives. The data from the trials would eventually be fed into a massive computers somewhere. But first that data had to be gathered into a usable format—and that format was numbers on sheets of paper, one for each state. Each sheet had a form, down the left side a row for age groups in five year increments (0-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc.), and across the top headings for two columns, “white” and “Negro.”

            My job was to take the voluminous 1960 census reports and fill in the correct numbers for each column and row. It may sound tedious, but I still remember marveling that in Vermont, say, there were only 5 Negro women ages 85-90. I tried to imagine who those five women were, where did they live, what were their lives like. (Many years later, on one of my husband and my visits to my aunt and uncle who lived in Vermont, we ate lunch at a restaurant in Montpelier and noticed a Black woman walking down the street. An unusual enough event that we mentioned it to my aunt, who immediately said, “Oh, that must have been Maria Johnson. She teaches at the college.” Imagine there being so few Black women in a town that my aunt would know them by name.)

            Did it take me more than a week to fill out those forms? Maybe. There were always those Friden calculator games to play. And because so many college students worked in government agencies or for congressmen (and the vast majority were men; women made up only 3% of the House of Representatives), there were occasional lectures for us. One featured then senator Hubert Humphrey talking about the proposal for health insurance for the elderly. That bill was being widely attacked as socialism, so I was surprised, and pleased, to hear Humphrey say, “Well, if this bill is socialism, I’m all for it.” An American senator saying he was all for socialism? We must really be out of the age of McCarthyism.

            The building where my office was had a cafeteria on a high floor, a very good idea since there was no other place to eat in easily walkable distance. The food wasn’t bad and not too expensive. One of my favorite dishes was sauteed chopped zucchini and onions, something I don’t think I’d ever eaten, but which I have made many times over the years. The cafeteria had two walls of big windows, and the sunshine always lifted my mood.

            Sometime in July, my parents came to Washington for the bar mitzvah of the son of one of their friends, and I went with them. Later, we drove around Rock Creek Park (my father loved to drive) and I told them I wanted to drop out of college. They were aghast.

            “What will you do?” my father asked. “I’ll get a job,” I said. “But what kind of job can you get without a college degree?” His voice dripped condescension. His sister, he pointed out, didn’t have a college degree, and the only jobs she’d had were as a secretary. Clearly, he thought being a secretary was beneath me.

            My mother took a different tack: “College is where you’ll meet the man you’re going to marry.” This surprised me. It was something no one had ever mentioned, that I was in college to find a man to marry. And I recoiled from the idea. Of course I would get married, that was taken for granted. But I’d been in college for two years and still hadn’t had a boyfriend, though I was no longer a virgin.

            I had already written my letter of withdrawal from Antioch, so all their protestations were beside the point. I was dropping out, and I would manage.

            In September, I told my boss at the Public Health Service that I wasn’t going back to Antioch and was looking for a job. He said it was okay if I took time off to go to job interviews. One interview, at some large corporation (maybe AT&T?), led to lunch with the person interviewing me; she brought along a colleague, and they talked about how great it was to work for this company and how much opportunity for advancement there was. But I really wasn’t interested in a corporate job. Another interview was at a nonprofit representing Arab American rights; I was very interested in this job, but the people interviewing me thought I might not be “comfortable” working for them, since they criticized Israel. (How did they know I was Jewish?) I tried to make it clear I had not particular interest in Israel, but they really weren’t interested in me. At the time, I didn’t think of this as antisemitism, which I then thought of as hatred of Jews; rather, I thought they were captive of assumptions they applied to me. I guess that is the source of discrimination, but it never occurred to me to protest against this.

            Eventually, I was offered a job as typist, working for a small law firm that represented clients at the FCC. My boss at the PHS said it was okay if I left before the co-op job was up at the end of September. So on to job #7.

SOL Tuesday: How Not to Wake Up in the Morning

            I have a sleep-monitoring app on my phone—because I think a device will tell me what time I’ve gone to sleep and how long I’ve been awake in the middle of the night better than my memory will. I know, that’s probably a wrong assumption, but there it is.

            Anyway, the sleep-monitoring app wants my phone to be near the head of my bed, and since I don’t have a night table, I place the phone on the shelf of my headboard. The app also has an alarm, unlike any alarm I’ve ever had—it plays a succession of musical notes in a rising sequence, starting from lower or higher notes, and starting quietly, then gradually getting louder. It runs through this pattern for perhaps three minutes, stops, and a few minutes more it starts again. To my surprise, it actually does wake me up, but always in the best way.

            Yesterday morning, the app woke me, but not fully. Then my real alarm, the beeping of my clock radio, woke me harder, and I wanted to turn off the humming of the phone app. I fumbled for the phone in a still half-awake state, and knocked the phone out of the headboard—and somehow into the narrow space between the headboard and my bed.

        Let me explain this setup. I have a captain’s bed with three drawers on each side. There is no “under the bed” space. When I bought this bed a few years ago, to replace the previous captain’s bed whose drawers were falling apart, I also bought a new headboard. The previous headboard was also old, given to my husband by a former employer decades ago. It was also separate from the bed, so if something fell under the headboard, we could move the bed to reach it. 

            When the new bed was delivered, the deliverymen installed the headboard, then started bolting the bed to the headboard. I was surprised. I thought of asking them not to do that, because I imagined that I might drop something under the headboard, and then I wouldn’t be able to move the bed to get to it. But I didn’t. I let them bolt the two structures together, and for seven years I was careful to push the mattress as close to the headboard as it would go, to not leave any space for something to fall through.

            Until yesterday morning. There was the phone, lying on the floor under the headboard, out of reach. As if injected with adrenaline, I fairly leaped out of bed, grabbed the headboard, and yanked. Somehow I managed to move the whole structure maybe five inches away from the wall (I’m almost 80 and have been to the gym only sporadically because of Covid the past couple of years, but that adrenaline really works).

            Next I marched to the kitchen to get the arm extender that had been my mother’s, a foldable tool with a handle at one end, a grabber at the other. I managed to use that tool to reach the phone and edge it close to where I could reach in and retrieve it. Whew!

            Then I had to move the whole contraption back against the wall. I could pull with my arms, but I couldn’t push. Instead, I sat on the floor, back to the bed, feet against a dresser in a convenient place. It was hard, but I did manage to push the bed/headboard back against the wall.

            Success! Yet exhaustion. I really hadn’t wanted to wake up that way. It was several minutes before I got out of bed for the day.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. Add one of your own.

 

Job #5: NIH Normal Control, Spring 1962

            What, you may ask, is a “normal control”? She (or he) is the person in a scientific study who represents those not the subjects of the study, those who those sujects are measured against or compared to, to try to determine what in the subject is causing the problem the scientists are studying.

            Why did I want to be a normal control? As I’ve mentioned before, I felt through my teen years, and I was still 19, that I was deeply neurotic, and I had some vague sense that if I volunteered to be a normal control, the experts—the doctors and scientists at the National Institutes of Health—would either reject me, confirming my sense that I was not normal, or accept me, thus certifying that I was, really, NORMAL, after all.

            I don’t remember if there was any kind of test for the job, but in the beginning of April I was on my way to Bethesda, Maryland, where for three months I would live in the Clinical Center, essentially a large hospital with many doctors’ offices. So room and board were provided, and I had some sort of small stipend. This turned out to be one of those life turning points, which I didn’t recognize at the time.

            This being a hospital, each floor was divided into two wards, with 10 rooms per ward, and in the middle a large common area where we had our meals. My ward was 7West, and as the only “girl” I had a room to myself, but the men shared, two to a room. There was one other Antioch co-op, Gary, who aspired to be a doctor (which is what he ultimately became, according to the alumni directory), three or four men who were conscientious objectors and serving as normal control for their alternative service, and there were perhaps another four men who were prisoners. (These men were serving time for relatively mild offenses, and had volunteered to be normal controls so as to not be in actual prison. They all stayed at one end of the hall, along with the two guards who followed them Everywhere. One day we played a kind of pickup softball game on the NIH grounds, and the two guards stood way out in the outfield, shouldering rifles, in case any of the prisoners took it into their heads to try to escape.)

            I was the only girl, but the way I made myself feel comfortable was to think of myself as “one of the boys.” I was almost 20, but I still had never had a boyfriend, though I wasn’t a virgin either. So while I had a crush on one of the conscientious objectors, I didn’t know how to flirt or otherwise show my interest. My crush was Skip, who was older, close to 30, and a CO for political reasons. He was handsome and sexy, dark hair, not much taller than me, a little burly, but he showed no romantic interest, instead he may have tried proselytizing, but seemed too intense in his theory. Virgil was a CO for religious reasons, a member of the Church of the Brethren, and from Ohio. Had he heard of Antioch College, also in Ohio, or was he from some other part of the state? We had a date, but later, after I’d left NIH and moved into D.C. for my next co-op job, but more about that later. Mostly, the group of us, along with some of the young people also living at the Clinical Center (more about them later), hung out as a group, not much pairing off.

            NIH grounds. This was a fairly large complex, north of Washington, D.C., with numerous buildings for administration, laboratories, and I think animals. The laboratories were surrounded by rose bushes, which in June put out intoxicating scent. The big lawn in front of the Clinical Center was bordered by large firs, with their own competing aroma. One warm night in early June I was out for a walk and lay down on the thick lawn grass, staring up at the star-filled sky. I knew each of those tiny sparkles was a star, possibly like our Sun, and here I was on a planet looking out at eternity, feeling as much a part of the universe as each of those stars. An enormous exaltation filled me, a connection to those stars billions of miles away, just as much a part of nature as they were. Perhaps this was a spiritual experience, but coming from an atheist family, I didn’t have that language. I just knew it was a wonderful feeling.

            So what did I do at the Clinical Center? I think I took part in only a couple of studies, and I remember only one of them. A dentist wondered how human saliva differed when it was provoked by different tastes—salty, sour, sweet, maybe another—and whether the saliva from the different glands was the same or also different. I spent a couple of hours on a couple of days sitting in a dental chair with tubes in my mouth to collect saliva while different substances were applied to my mouth. Not very comfortable, and I never learned what if anything was learned from what dripped out of my mouth. At least I was never told there was anything abnormal.

            What did I do with the rest of my time? I was essentially free labor for any doctors who needed it, and I was assigned to a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Friedman, who was studying how people reacted to chronic stress. His subjects? The parents of children with acute leukemia, which in the early 1960s was still incurable. Doctors at NIH were studying possible treatments, and as the largest hospital in the South working on possible treatments, most of the parents who brought their sons or daughters for treatment came from the South. Dr. Friedman or people on his team interviewed these parents at length—and my job was to transcribe those audiotaped interviews.

            The job was both tedious and fascinating. Tedious because I sat at a desk all day long, headphones on, learning how to operate the recorder for playback. Fascinating because each set of parents was different, unique, unlike anyone I knew. I learned to decipher different regional accents. In some couples, the husband did most of the talking, in others it was more equal. They often talked about their child’s illness in great detail, how it started, what they first noticed, how they’d come to NIH expecting, hoping for a miracle. It was most painful to listen to those parents whose child was dying; some seemed able to accept that it could happen, but most kept hoping that yet another remission would occur. I had no regular hours, just coming to Dr. Friedman’s office a few hours a day, transcribing as much as I could. Sometimes I would finish all the tapes there were and would wait until he’d let me know there were more.

            At NIH, I began reading the newspaper more regularly. The Washington Post was delivered to our ward, and I’d read over breakfast. I noticed stories about a country called Laos near Vietnam. Vietnam stuck in my memory from 1954, when the division of the country into North and South had been on the front page of “My Weekly Reader,” a student newspaper from Scholastic, along with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Those 1962 news stories kept me attached to the Vietnam situation as it developed over the following years.

            What else was there to do? There was that softball game. One June night there was an excursion to some local venue for music, and we hung out the porch waiting for the music and watching huge June bugs fling themselves against the ceiling light and fall, burned, to the floor.

            There were quite a few young people living at the Clinical Center for various studies of mental illness. Some were part of a study of families of schizophrenics, and I learned an important lesson from one of them. Norma was about my age, Normal Norma we called her—but not to her face. When she was okay, I noticed, she was just like all the normal people I knew, not focused on herself, not anxious, not worrying what other people thought of her. But one evening I went down to her ward to see if she wanted to hang out—and the ward was locked. “Can I see Norma?” I asked a nurse through the door. “Norma is having a break,” the nurse replied. Another day, I was in Dr. Friedman’s office transcribing. The office doors had large glass windows, and when I looked up, there was Norma, on the other side of the glass, her hands up as though trying to claw through the window. She could easily have just opened the door, but that was beyond her at that moment. A nurse came along and walked her away from the door. The lesson: perhaps neurotics didn’t have psychotic breaks like Norma’s, on the other hand, being “normal” didn’t assure you would always be so.

            There was another girl, Susan, a year younger than me, working at NIH. She had started dating Gary, but we also became friendly. She had been kicked out of the University of Illinois the previous year for violating what were then called “parietal rules”; for example, girls had to be in their dorms no later than 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends, and boys could not be in a girl’s dorm room, or if it was, he had to keep both feet on the floor. Antioch College had no such rules, we could be out as long as we wanted and have boys in our room so long as it didn’t inconvenience our roommate. This state of affairs was so well known that boys from nearby colleges often came to Antioch and roamed the girls’ dorm halls on Friday and Saturday nights looking for what they assumed must be wild parties. We girls found them just boring.

            Susan was living at home and wanted to get her own place, but needed a roommate. And here came the turning point. I had been wondering whether I should return to college. The previous quarter I had gotten nothing but C’s, which as far as I was concerned might as well have been F’s. What was I doing in college anyway? I knew that when I returned to Antioch in the fall, I would have to create a Five-Year Plan, declaring a major and figuring out whether the required courses would be available on the quarters I would be on campus over the next three years. I was no nearer to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, let alone what my major might be. I’d never set foot in the theater, the only English class I’d had was boring, philosophy was “sentences about sentences,” and the history professor everyone adored I hated. Maybe I should take some time off and, now that I had some experience, get a job and stay put in one place for a while.

            And here was Susan, looking for a roommate. We talked, we agreed. I had another Antioch co-op job to go to in Washington for the summer, and a roommate already lined up for that, but sometime in the summer, I’d officially withdraw and move in with Susan wherever she found an apartment.

SOL Tuesday: My Day

I may have mentioned that the trade magazine I freelance for is having its 150th anniversary this year, and it is putting together a special issue, for which I am doing all the copyediting, as well as trafficking every story through the production process in a timely fashion.

            We’re in the closing section this week, as have the 272 pages have to go to the printer next Monday and the rest next Tuesday. So I spent all of today in the office, reading captions and pull quotes, cleaning up text files, notifying the art department what was ready for them. Noticing little details, like a cross-reference in one article to another article that may actually not be relevant, or questioning whether three sets of ellipses in a pull quote are really necessary.

            I am grateful when an editor or author says, “fine with me,” when I make a suggestion.

            Now I have to go to bed. More to do tomorrow.

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It’s Slice of Life Tuesday over at Two Writing Teachers. Check out this encouraging and enthusiastic writing community and their slices of life every Tuesday. And add one of your own.

 

Poem-a-Day 3: Haiku Golden Shovels

A three-line headline calls for a haiku golden shovel. Here are two.

What is history
But loss and beauty hammered
Into a burnt home.

Here's your history
Bound by tinsel and hammered
By tears into home.

Poem-a-Day 2: War?

The bombs fall in the predawn for

Maximum fear. If they are real. A meta

War sends bombs upward toward workers

Pulling strings on paper planes. The rules

Require no casualties in a beta test of

Fantasy dreams death cleansing war

Of fear and blood, while the bombs keep

Falling down and up, down and up, shifting.

 

A golden shovel based on a New York Times headline.

Poem-a-Day 1: Who Is Free in a Free Market

For National Poetry Month, I’m trying the golden shovel format with New York Times headlines again. Too busy yesterday to start on day 1, so will try to get another poem before today ends.

 

Workers at Amazon on Staten Island, not all

But a majority, all that were needed to hail

A new union, one of their own creation. The

Organizing, phone calls, crowdfunding send a scorching

Message to owners: we are not robots, our labor

Comes in human bodies. We are not free in a free market.