The law
firm was called Krieger & Jorgensen, and its office was in a townhouse, up several steps to the front door. The front room,
what might have been the parlor, was the lawyers’ main office, while the
secretary and clerk-typists were in a small room in the back. I was one of the two clerk-typists and was paid $70 a week, with the promise of a raise to $80 in a month if I worked out satisfactorily.
The
secretary, who also headed the office, was a tall, middle-aged Black woman who
wore her hair in a 1940s style. She was stern and correct. There was no kidding
or casual banter. I don’t remember her name, so let’s call her Mrs. C.
I came in,
sat at my desk, and did the work assigned to me. And while it’s easy to
describe, it was not so easy to perform.
The firm
represented clients to the FCC, so clients were radio and TV stations, including some of what was then called educational TV, and most
of the work the firm did was to help the stations renew their licenses to
broadcast, which was required then every three years. These stations were all
over the country, so communication between the lawyers and their clients was
primarily by letter. The lawyers thus wanted these letters to be or at least
look perfect. No mistakes, or anything that looked like a mistake.
This was
still the days of white paper and carbon paper; carbon sets may not yet have
existed, and copying machines were certainly not common in small offices. One
carbon copy was the minimum (original letter to the client, one copy for the
file), but if a letter was being written to the FCC, that meant two copies: one for
the client, one for the file. Sometimes we might need to make four copies.
Nobody is a
perfect typist. What happened if one made a mistake? Liquid paper, a precursor
to Wite-Out, existed, but Mrs. C would have none of it. It revealed that there
had been a mistake. And we did not yet have electronic typewriters that let you
backspace and retype a wrong letter on the same line. Mrs. C was a genius at
erasing a mistake so that it looked like it had never happened, and not only on
the bond paper original, but also the carbon copies.
In those
days there was a hard rubber eraser shaped like a flat wheel with a metal
circle in the center and a brush attached. The trick was first, roll the paper
and copies up a few lines so you could reach the copies, then erase the mistake
on the carbon copies, brushing off any debris, next erase the mistake on the
bond paper, then carefully roll the paper back to original position, and type
the correct letter. Erasing was tricky; you couldn't do it so hard that you abraded the surface
of the paper, but it had to be hard enough to remove all visible ink. This was hard.
There was also filing, tons of it, because of all the correspondence, but also copies of all the applications and supporting documents. I tried to read as much of the documents I was filing as I could, thinking I'd learn something about communications law.
Mostly I
remember trying to master this erasure trick, because I could not type
perfectly, no matter how slowly and carefully I went. Often I had to toss what
I’d typed and start over. Documents were the hardest, because they were many
pages, and if I made a mistake near the bottom of a page, it was impossible to
do the roll up/erase/roll down/retype; I’d have to retype the entire page. There
was little chitchat in the office, either, because Mrs. C believed in coming
in, doing the work, and going home.
The only
client I remember this firm representing was Pacifica, the listener-supported
station in California, but why do I remember that? Pacifica did not have a
station in Washington, D.C., but perhaps the fact that Pacifica’s license was
being held up by the FCC that year, which was investigating the Pacifica
Foundation for “communist affiliations,” made it stick in my mind.
I'd barely started working here than world affairs turned dangerous. My first
week, rumors were all over Washington about something happening regarding Cuba.
At the end of the weekend we learned that President Kennedy was going to
address the nation on Monday night, and since my roommate, Susan, and I didn’t have a TV, she
called her father, who picked us up after work and took us home with him for
dinner and the speech. Soviet ships were sailing toward Cuba, and American ships were out there going to stop them. We were terrified, though her father tried to talk us
down. Back home, we discussed what we would do when (not if) we heard the
air-raid sirens. There was a fallout shelter in a public space just a block away from our apartment, at Dupont Circle. Would we
rush to the shelter? Or
would we start drinking all the wine we had? (Ten years later, I wrote
in my journal: "I don't think then I really believed in my own death. I
think I was as much excited as I was terrified.")
Susan
worked at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies, and her
boss, S.L.A. Marshall, had just written an article on Cuba for the New
Republic, which almost predicted something like this. All that week, he was "the Expert" on Cuba, getting phone calls from reporters wanting
to pick his brain. At the end of each day, the director would say,
“See you all tomorrow [pause], God willing.” The weather in Washington was warm
for October, and on Wednesday I ate my lunch in the little park between K
Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. To the south, dark clouds piled up. A storm
approaching? a harbinger of the nuclear war that might happen any minute?
By the end
of that week, the Soviet ships on their way to Cuba had stopped and turned
around. There was no nuclear confrontation. Life could go back to normal.
Outside of
work, I had finally moved in with Susan, the young woman I’d met at NIH. We
lived a block above Dupont Circle, a neighborhood of small row houses, many
turned into apartments. Our apartment was the literal ground floor, the front door four steps
down, and it also had a back door that led to an alley down the
middle of the block, which opened onto Q Street. (Washington has lots of
alleys. This alley will play a role in a later decision concerning job #9.) The
office was a straight line down New Hampshire Avenue from Dupont Circle, and
often I walked there and back instead of taking a bus.
I was
dating a boy named Aldace Newton Howard III (he liked to recite that
sometimes), called Aldie, who’d been a transfer student to Antioch, then
dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. Veterans Day (not yet a federal holiday)
weekend he had leave and came up to Washington so we could spend the weekend
together. Since he arrived on Friday, I called in sick that day — I know,
calling in sick when you haven’t even been working somewhere for a month is
probably not a good idea, but I was still a kid, barely 20.
I came to
work on Monday, the actual Veterans Day, and was surprised to find the office
mostly dark (it hadn't been a holiday where I went to high school) and only one lawyer on the premises. Let’s call him Mr. M, since I
don’t remember any of their names. Mr. M called me into his office and very
gently told me that he was sorry, but this job did not seem like the right one
for me. He said I was a smart girl and he was sure I would find the best place
elsewhere — and I could have two more weeks.
I was being
fired. Was it because I’d called in sick on Friday? Was my typing really that
awful? I wasn't going to get that raise. It was back to the employment agencies.
