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.
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