In the 48
hours after leaving New York for Antioch College, I must have called Jack four
or five times. We agreed that I should come home, to him, immediately. It began
to seem crazy that I had even considered going back to school without Jack. (There
was no way he was going to come with me to this tiny village in southwestern
Ohio when he had just fallen in love with New York City.) The day after I
arrived at Antioch, I was on a bus back home, sitting next to our friend
Sylvia, and our moods were the reverse of each other: I was returning to Jack,
while Sylvia was leaving her boyfriend, Kenny, back in Yellow Springs.
Within
days, I was at an employment agency, and within two weeks had an interview at Scholastic Magazine, another with a
private welfare agency based in Family Court, and started work at Bantam Books.
The job
Bantam then
was independent, solely a mass market paperback publisher, in its 20th year of
existence. Its books cost between 50 and 95 cents (approximately $4.70 to $8.50
today; that top price is about what a mass market book costs now).
I was hired
to be secretary to the high school and college managers in the sales-promotion
department. Sales wasn’t at all my interest in publishing, but the two people I
was to work with were friendly and encouraging, so I decided to learn as much
as I could and see what other work might become available.
I did the
usual secretarial duties of opening the mail, typing letters, and filing
correspondence. A major aspect of the job might sound boring—answering requests
by teachers and professors for exam or desk copies of books and typing up
address labels—but after some months, it eventually opened up to some
creativity.
Bantam
published a line of classics, literature and history. When college professors
assigned a book as required reading, they were entitled to a (free) desk copy;
if they wanted to consider requiring a book, they could request a (free)
examination copy. The federal government had started providing more funds for
education in the ’60s, and even high school teachers were moving away from
relying solely on textbooks and starting to use paperbacks.
There could
be letters from a high school teacher in Silver Spring, Md., or Kansas City, Mo.,
or Spokane, Wash. One might be teaching American literature in the 10th grade
and wanted an exam copy of The Scarlet
Letter; another would be teaching American history and wanted a copy of The Red Badge of Courage. Then there
were letters from professors; one might want the dual-language Canterbury Tales (Middle English on one
page, modern English on the facing page), another could use Rats, Lice and History, by Hans Zinsser,
for any variety of history courses.
I could
take care of these myself: type up an address label and include the code number
for the book or books requested. Every book had a letter, which designated the
price, followed by four numbers. Pretty soon I learned that F books were 50
cents, H books 60 cents, S books 75 cents, and a few N books were 95 cents. By
the time I left Bantam two and a half years later, there were even Q books, at
$1.25. The labels went into a package sent to Bantam’s warehouse in Des
Plaines, Illinois. (I was told there was a warehouse worker who couldn’t read,
but she could match the image of letter and number on the label to what was on
the spine of the book. Was that true?)
There were
also letters from mostly high school or junior high school teachers who didn’t
know what they wanted. They had a course to teach, they knew low-cost
paperbacks were a good idea, but had no idea what books Bantam published that would
be appropriate to their students or the subject. At first I would give the high
school requests to Ward, the high school director, and the college requests to
Margaret Ann, the college director, and they’d write some book codes on the
letters and hand them back to me to type the labels. (And yes, even though I
still didn’t have a college degree, I could call my bosses by their first
names. The whole office had an informal feel, which I appreciated.)
Eventually,
I became familiar with Bantam’s list and I too could suggest titles to the many
who requested them. Besides a library of Bantam books lining the walls of our
big room, there was also the order form, a six-page foldout, listing all the
books by price. Some titles, I learned, were clearly not appropriate for
school, like Louis L’Amour’s westerns or Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. But Bantam Classics always fit, and some dual-language
books could work in literature classes. Modern literature, like A Separate Peace by John Knowles, might
also be good for junior or senior high school English classes. I liked being
let loose to suggest any selection of books for teachers who needed guidance.
Bantam was
already developing a reputation for “instant” books, publishing the mass market
paperback of the Warren Report, on JFK’s assassination, shortly after the
government’s report was released in 1964; then “Churchill: In Memoriam” the day
after he died in January of 1965 (it was written by New York Times staff), and
yet another in the fall, commemorating Pope Paul VI’s visit to the U.S. The
first two titles at least could fit into a current events or history
curriculum.
Another
part of Margaret Ann and Ward’s job was
to attend a variety of academic conventions known by their initials: AHA, NCTE,
MLA (American Historical Association, National Council of Teachers of English,
Modern Language Association), among others. My job was to make sure that
sufficient copies of catalogs and order forms aimed directly at whoever the
target audience was—historians, English teachers, science teachers, etc.—were
sent to the convention site. I don’t think I had to make travel arrangements.
Margaret Ann and Ward wrote the text for these catalogs.
The workday
began at 9 a.m. and ended at 5. I am not and never have been a morning person.
But if I arrived at work at 9:15 or 9:30, I made sure to stay until 5:15 or
5:30. No matter. After several months, other secretaries complained that I came
in late, so a sign-in sheet was instituted. No sign-out, though. This irked me.
If I did come in at 9:15, I wanted it recorded that I stayed until 5:15 or
later, and I did my job.
The office
was on Madison Avenue and 40th Street, leading me for the first time to be in Midtown
East. I only needed a quarter to get to work in the morning in 1965: 15 cents
for a subway token, 10 cents for the New
York Times. Toward the end of the week, Jack and I might run out of money
before we got our paychecks, but we always had enough empty Coke bottles to
redeem and get us the quarter or 50 cents necessary. Across the street from
Bantam was my go-to place for lunch, Chock Full o’Nuts, the Starbucks of its
day. Its cream cheese sandwich on whole wheat–raisin bread with an orangeade cost
35 cents; adding a hot dog made it 50 cents.
The sales
department consisted of two big rooms, ours, the educational sales team, and
the other the more hard-core salesmen. They were almost all men; only one
woman—and she was old, almost as old as my grandmother—was in charge of
something, and I never quite figured out what it was. She played golf with the
men, and that registered as important to her job. For a while my desk was right
next to the water cooler. When one of the salesmen (Rudy?) came to the water
cooler, he would hang around, leering down at me. It made me uncomfortable,
thought I wasn’t quite sure why. I just wanted him to go away. We didn’t yet
have the consciousness, the language of sexual harassment on the job.
I was
impressed that my typewriter was an IBM Selectric; this new model had a
revolving ball with all the letters on it. The ball moved along the page from
left to right, and when you hit the
carriage return key, the ball moved back to the left. The machine looked
elegant, and its working seemed very cool.
Filing:
somehow I hated doing this housework task one document at a time. Carbon copies
of letters and other papers piled up on my desk, sometimes 12 inches high or
more. But I knew everything that was in that pile, and if Margaret Ann needed
the correspondence from the organizer for the AHA conference after Christmas, I
knew how far down in the pile it was. Once the pile got high enough, I’d spend
an hour over by the file cabinet, storing all the paper where it belonged.
Among my
co-workers: Susan was secretary to the head of the educational sales division.
She was around my age, married and lived in Brooklyn, and soon had a child. We
were friendly, but had little in common besides the job. Paula was secretary to
the foreign sales manager, who was a foreigner himself, British, with a
charming accent. Paula and I became friends—she started dating one of Jack’s college friends who’d moved to New York,
and also moved in with my college friend Connie, who’d been forced to drop out a
couple of years earlier when her father died and money for college evaporated. I
think it was 1966 when Anne joined the educational sales staff. She had grown
up in a military family, and when I came in one day very excited about the
antiwar march Jack and I had been on over the weekend, she was shocked. I think
her mouth literally dropped open. But we also became friends and remained in
touch even after we had both left Bantam.
My first
experience of one of the publishing world’s perks: screenings of movies before
they open. In this case, it was to a totally forgettable Disney flick called
“That Darn Cat.” Bantam must have published the book. And I could have any
Bantam Book I wanted, the most amazing and wonderful perk of all. (I still have
some of those now very yellowing Bantam paperbacks.)
The great blackout of
1965
In early
November, I planned to go to Connie and Paula’s apartment to watch a CBS
program called the National Citizenship test — Jack and I did not have a TV (and
wouldn’t for another three years). But shortly before Paula and I were to leave
work, the lights in the office flickered, flickered again, and then went out.
Was it just our office? our building? We rushed to the windows and were shocked
to see darkness where there would have been the normal spangle of light. What
had happened?
I had
brought sneakers since we planned to walk to Paula and Connie’s apartment at
53rd and Eighth Avenue, so it was easy to just continue on. It was a balmy day
for November, and as we walked, we’d stop occasionally where people had turned
on their car radios and opened their doors so passers-by could listen.
I already
had a skeptical attitude toward the government and half expected that LBJ had
caused this blackout in retaliation against antiwar protests, and there would
be tanks in the street. Fortunately, that was not the case; the blackout was
caused by a cascade of overloaded electricity grids from Ontario down through
New York State, much of New England, and south to Maryland. Connie had dinner
for us when we arrived. But after an hour or so of sitting around their
apartment in candlelight, I decided I wanted to go home.
Landline
phones, the only kind that existed then, still worked because the phone company
had emergency generators, so either I called Jack or he called Connie’s to say
that he’d be working all night. (At this point he’d been working as a copyboy
at the New York Post for several months. Later he told me he’d been assigned
the job of walking up 12 flights of stairs to let Dorothy Schiff, the
publisher, know what had happened. Once he arrived, very out of breath, he was
offered a drink, and not plain water.)
Walking up
Eighth Avenue, then Central Park West, I saw few people, but everyone was
helping. Flashlights were the major light source, some people pointing them out
of their windows, others at the entrances of buildings. I got home to our
apartment on West 82nd Street with no trouble. By the time Jack got home early
in the morning, our power was back on.
1965 culture
One evening
we went uptown to a revival theater in Washington Heights to see The Man with the Golden Arm and The Moon Is Blue. I was eager to see
these films because when they were released in 1955 and 1953, respectively, the
Catholic League of Decency was so strong in West Haven, Conn., where I lived in
those year, that movie theaters followed its edict that no one under the age of
16 could see them. Of course, I wanted to know what I wasn’t supposed to see.
Was I disappointed! The Moon Is Blue
was so sedate. Oh, there was a lot of talk about sex, and in one scene, Maggie
McNamara and David Niven get caught in the rain, he takes her to his apartment
to dry off, and you see her in his terrycloth bathrobe so you know she must
have taken off her clothes. But nothing happens, unless you count Niven lightly
brushing lint off of the bathrobe in McNamara’s chest area, and you certainly
don’t see any body parts you wouldn’t see on the street. And The Man with the Golden Arm could easily
be seen as an antidrug movie, since Frank Sinatra goes through agonizing
withdrawal.
I didn't record our seeing a lot of
other movies besides Judgment at Nuremburg, Bertolucci's Before the
Revolution, and Henry V. But we went to a lot of our friends'
parties and also played bridge almost every week.
In October,
we went to Bob Dylan’s famous concert at Carnegie Hall, the one where he
scandalized most of his fans by going electric. The first half of the concert
was his usual, monotone acoustic set. But the second half made me want to get
up and dance, and that’s what I loved about rock and roll. Dylan played with
the Band, as all around us purists were groaning and complaining that this
wasn’t real folk. No, it wasn’t. It was rock ’n’ roll, and I loved it. We also
went to clubs: Oscar Brown Jr. at the Café au Go-go; Dave von Ronk somewhere
else in the Village.
As for
theater, we saw “The Zoo Story” and “The Dutchman” at the Cherry Lane; free
Shakespeare in Central Park; “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” on Broadway; and
“Danton’s Death” at Lincoln Center, which I did not understand; it was full of
didactic speeches, with Robespierre invoking “The People” with singular verbs
(“The people is virtue”).
Antiwar protests in
1965
I’d already
become sensitized to the war in Vietnam, and Jack was too. There was an antiwar
march and rally in Washington, D.C. in April, and we got a ride there with
Gerald’s friend Alice, who he knew from Goddard College. (She was another
red-diaper baby, though we didn’t yet know we had that in common.) The New York Times said there were 15,000
attending, mostly peaceful, largely students, but somewhere I have the number
25,000 in my memory. (Newspapers got their counts from the police, and we were
sure the cops always underestimated.) We started out marching back and forth in
front of the White House, until someone got the idea that we should try to
encircle the White House. Jack and I were in a group that turned down 17th
Street. A few National Park police appeared, perhaps two or three, but we were
at least 15 abreast. So as the park police tried to stop our line at one end,
the rest of us surged forward and past the police, who would rush over to our
end of the line, and then the other end would surge forward. We felt so
powerful, outwitting and outmaneuvering the authority figures. And everyone was
polite and lighthearted, no violence of any sort.
Did we go
to an antiwar rally at Madison Square Garden on June 8, a Tuesday night?
According to an online history of Vietnam War protests, 17,000 people paid to
go to this rally where Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Coretta Scott King,
Bayard Rustin, and Dr. Benjamin Spock spoke. It’s written in my datebook, but I
don’t think we paid money to go to an indoor rally. Madison Square Garden was
then at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue, in a cavernous yet rickety-feeling
building.
Thanksgiving
weekend was the next march in Washington, but not primarily organized by SDS.
In a letter to my parents, I was rather scornful of it: “It’s not even an ‘End
the War Now’ march, just a ‘Negotiated Settlement Now’ march.” It was billed as
a “March for Peace,” which apparently was too meek for me, and the march
slogans were vetted by SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy,
an organization of “grownups,” not students—at age 23, I still didn’t think of
myself as a “grownup.” But the estimate of attendees was 35,000, quite an
increase in just seven months.
1966: Back to work
At the end
of 1965, Jack and I moved from one block on West 82nd Street to another block
on the same street, from an essentially one-room apartment plus kitchen in an
old brownstone (rent: $90 a month) to a two-room plus kitchenette in a
renovated building (rent: $135 a month). I now had a choice of two subways to
take to work: I could continue with the B train, which had somewhat newer cars,
at 81st and Central Park West, or try the #1 at 79th and Broadway.
At the
beginning of 1966, however, there was an almost two-week subway strike—Mike
Quill, head of the transit workers union, was standing up to the new mayor,
John Lindsay. I walked to work along Central Park West at least one day when
weather was nice, but usually walked part way, then took a taxi or got a ride,
once with a stranger on his way home because his secretary lived on Long Island
and couldn’t get into the city so he couldn’t do any work, another time with a Red
Cross van moving volunteers and picking up strangers because there was room.
I began
going to the educational conventions where publishers had booths showing off
whatever titles they had appropriate to the particular field. For conferences
in New York City, at first I just brought supplies and left them for the
salesmen to hand out to teachers who stopped by. In March, there was one at the
Statler Hilton in New York. In April, I got the chance to go to Cincinnati and
be one of the people to talk to teachers; a tall, avuncular salesman was my
mentor. He showed me how to look inviting to passersby, and to remember to hand
out catalogs before those who stopped by left the booth. (Readers of earlier
essays may remember my first Antioch job as a salesgirl, when I did whatever I
could to not look inviting to strangers walking by my counter. Four years
later, I was somewhat less shy; besides, talking about books was much easier
than trying to sell costume jewelry.) At the end of the year, I went to the
American Historical Association’s conference, in New York.
My mentor in
Cincinnati also took me to dinner. Even though he was old, almost as old as my
father, I thought, he was sexy. I would have been happy to sleep with him, but
he was very proper and did not take advantage of this young married woman.
I was still
focused on college. Antioch students sang “Antioch Blues,” with the refrain:
“Save your money, honey/ don’t put it in a sock./ And when your kids grow up/
don’t send them here to Antioch./ Save your money./ CCNY is free.” Those days
it basically was. City College had no tuition, and you lived at home, so no
room and board. There was a registration fee, but I could save for that. For
the spring semester, I signed up to take a class that met Tuesday and Thursday
nights, but I had to take it as a non-matriculated student, because I was told
I shouldn’t take something that I might get transfer credit for. In the fall, I
took two classes at night: Speech (a required course, otherwise I would never
have taken it) and something called Fundamentals of Math. It had been almost
eight years since I’d taken any advanced mathematics, and all I remember from
this class was calculus, the math of moving objects. I got an A.
Meanwhile,
Jack was promoted from copyboy to editorial clerk at the New York Post, working
sometimes in the Business section, sometimes in the Entertainment section. But
we were feeling wanderlust. Jack talked about moving to Morocco, but I nixed
that idea; I knew he thought he might become a buyer and seller of drugs, and I
was sure this would get him arrested and sent for many years to a Moroccon
prison. What about Mexico? We started thinking about moving to Mexico, and I
started reading Mexican history.
1966 in antiwar
protests
I had
started reading the articles and books coming out from the college teach-ins
about the war in Vietnam (one was Marvin Gettleman’s collection of documents,
history, and essays), and we continued going on whatever antiwar march there
was. On March 26 we were among maybe 25,000 people marching down Fifth Avenue
in New York City, along with many marches across the country that day. One of
Jack’s co-workers at the New York Post was a Trotskyist, and his group was one
of the organizers. Somehow, he managed to persuade us to be parade marshals,
which meant we got to wear black armbands and would walk alongside the mass of
marchers, supposedly to keep people in line and not let gaps develop between
groups of people. We both hated being told how to march, but we somehow got
persuaded nonetheless. Mostly, we just walked next to the marchers and didn’t
tell anyone what to do. And we started collecting buttons, which were for sale
along the march route.
The mass
antiwar marches were now dubbed the Fall Mobilization (or Spring Mobilization)
to End the War in Vietnam. In November,
there were several in major cities, and I think we stayed in New York for this
one, too. Each march was getting bigger and bigger, and there may have been
twice as many people in November as there had been in the spring. More and more
drafted Americans were being sent to fight, essentially in support of an
oppressive government in South Vietnam.
1967
By now, I
was writing lots of catalog copy, as different constituencies and events needed
to be given different collections of Bantam titles. High school teachers at the
NCTE conference wouldn’t get the same catalog as professors at the MLA. This
part of the job was hard, but I enjoyed it—it was writing. I became so
proficient that when I returned to college in fall 1967 and wrote my first book
report, the professor noted that it wasn’t a real paper, but read like ad copy.
Got it.
In early
February, there was a blizzard. Women couldn’t wear pants to the office, and
even my winter coat, which I had made myself, was mini-length; it was
unpleasant walking the three blocks from the Seventh Avenue subway to Madison
Avenue with icy snow pelting my pantyhosed legs. My boss wore snow pants under
her skirt, which she then hung on a hook on the back of her office door.
1967 in antiwar
protests
The April
15 antiwar march in New York iwas the biggest so far. Around 300,000 gathered
in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, then marched to the United Nations. Here’s a
photo of a couple of our friends.
The Fall
Mobilization aimed at the Pentagon. We took the train to Washington Friday
night, and now feeling like full-fledged grownups, we stayed at a hotel instead
of some friend of a friend’s floor. Friday evening we met friends to go to a
rally downtown, but as we neared the government buildings, we could hear
shouting and smell the unmistakable tear gas. I was wearing contact lenses and
we all agreed that being gassed was not what we wanted to do.
The next
day we joined 100,000 on a march from the Lincoln Memorial, across the Key
Bridge over the Potomac, to the Pentagon in Virginia. It was a long day, and we
were ambivalent about engaging in the planned civil disobedience. As we reached
the outer ring of parking lots, I wanted to hang around to see what would
happen—would Abbie Hoffman actually levitate the Pentagon? But Jack thought
we’d done enough, and it was time to repair to a bar. That was the extent of
our March on the Pentagon.
Vacations
Bantam was
the first place I worked long enough to be entitled to a vacation. The first
year I only took a few days off at a time; once, Jack and I visited my parents
in their Philadelphia suburb home, and in the fall, we went to Washington (not
for a march), stocking up on cigarettes for ourselves and our friends (2
cartons Kents, 2 Parliaments, 3 Kools, none of which Jack or I smoked, we were
into Marlboros and Pall Malls). Cigarettes were incredibly cheap in D.C., 20 or
25 cents a pack, instead of 30 cents in New York. (In New York there was a
cigarette machine at a bar called the Old Reliable, on East 5th Street, where
cigarettes were only 20 cents.)
In 1967 we
began our annual visits to my aunt and uncle in Vermont. Aunt Nita was my
mother’s sister, and her husband, Ben, taught history. They were in Vermont
because he’d gotten a job teaching at Goddard College in 1959, but he could not
abide Goddard’s New Agey atmosphere (when a student asked a staff member where
the ladies room was, she got the reply, “Where would you like it to be?”) and
soon moved on to Plattsburgh State College, across Lake Champlain in New York State.
They kept the 1840 farmhouse they’d bought on a dirt road just outside of
Montpelier, and it was their summer place for many years. Ben also wrote novels
and was a terrific storyteller. To recount those summer visits would be a whole
other story. This first year, in June, we flew to Boston, then took a small
prop plane to Montpelier, where the airport was a grassy field.
Moving on
In summer
1967, Bantam released the paperback of Valley
of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann’s first novel. In hardcover, it got poor
reviews, but it was the bestselling book of the year, and Bantam’s paperback
sold so many copies that every employee got a bonus at the end of the year.
I missed
out on the bonus. In March, Jack had gotten a tryout as a reporter and became
one officially in May. The previous year we had been talking about moving to
Mexico. Now Jack had his dream job and asked what I wanted to do to make up for
not going to Mexico. Go back to school full-time, I said. I still wanted to do
something in publishing that was editorial, not sales, and I was sure the
degree would help. (Bantam had an editorial department, but it was on a
different floor from sales. I never had a working reason to go up there, and it
never occurred to me to just go and wander about. Shyness? Fear of breaking
rules?)
Okay, Jack
said. His raise as a reporter would cover our basic expenses, so I quit the
beginning of September. And we moved once more, three blocks north on Columbus
Avenue, to a one-bedroom (rent: $75 a month) above a bar so dodgy even Jack
wouldn’t drink there.
