I quit my full-time job at Bantam when I went back to school full-time, but both Jack and I thought I should do some sort of temp work. It would not be good for either of us if I had to ask him for money for cigarettes or what we called walking-around money, and I agreed.
Marble Collegiate Church
I don’t remember what temp agency I went through, but my first assignment was at Marble Collegiate Church, the home church of Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was a Reformed Church minister famous in the mid-20th century for his book “The Power of Positive Thinking,” as well as syndicated newspaper columns. I’d had to read his Sunday column in the Philadelphia Inquirer every week for my 12th grade Social Problems class (which was taught by the school’s football coach, who thought that when the Bible mentioned wine, it really meant grape juice). I remember the column as platitudinous and clichéd. (In our current times, we’ve learned that Donald Trump’s parents attended the Marble Collegiate Church, and his sisters were both married there. But in 1967, the Donald was still in college, and we knew nothing about him.)
I was the secretary every Thursday, and it felt weird to be working at a church. I spent some time in conversation with the assistant minister. At first he wanted to talk with me as a Jewish person, but when he learned I was an atheist, he seemed fascinated. It seemed he wanted to understand how I knew right from wrong without following a religion. He also did counseling and was interested in what I’d picked up working for the psychoanalysts. Talking with him was certainly less boring than sitting at a desk and typing all day. One drawback: I wasn’t allowed to smoke in the office—so I would sneak a cigarette in the ladies’ room. I think I only worked there until Christmas.
I did some catalogue copywriting for Franklin Watts, a publisher of children’s and reference books. One of my former bosses at Bantam worked there and I did occasional copywriting for her for a couple of years. Wish I’d kept some of these catalogues as well.
Political typing
At the end of May I went to Manpower, one of the temp agencies — and in 1968, it didn’t occur to me to question the name. The following week I was sent to the Statler Hilton, where I was among 15 women sitting at rows of typewriters and compiling voter information for a candidate running for Congress. This struck me at the time as wrong. Candidates were supposed to have volunteers do this sort of work; just a couple of years earlier, I had joined a friend doing exactly this work for William Fitts Ryan, a liberal Democrat then running for his fourth term as an Upper West Side congressman. Why didn’t this candidate have volunteers? What was wrong with him?
The candidate I was being paid to work for was a Democrat (whose name eludes me; I never wrote it down and don’t want to spend too much time searching the internet to see if it’s findable), but a more centrist one, and maybe one who hadn’t taken a position against the Vietnam War? So I decided it was okay to do a bit of sabotage: why not mistype a phone number here and there? Who would ever notice?
Of much more significance, however, was that my first day of work was also the day of the California primary. This was 1968: Lyndon Johnson had announced the end of March he wasn’t going to run for reelection because of national divisions over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Sen. Eugene McCarthy had been running since before LBJ’s announcement as an openly antiwar candidate, while Robert Kennedy entered the race, also against the war and with the charisma of the Kennedy name. Kennedy and McCarthy jockeyed back and forth in the primaries. (We just happened to buy our first TV in the spring, maybe a week before LBJ’s announcement. Jack was writing profiles of actors and actresses in the New York Post, and he figured he had to be somewhat familiar with the work of the people he was interviewing. When we heard that Johnson was making some announcement on a Sunday night, we thought the appropriate way to greet it was to turn on the video, turn off the audio, and have sex in front of the TV.)
Our old friend Gerald, who’d dropped out of his Ph.D. program at the University of Rochester and was staying with us, woke us up early the morning after the California primary to announce that Kennedy had won, but he’d also been shot and was in critical condition. This was the second major assassination of the year, Martin Luther King Jr. having been killed in Memphis just two months earlier. The early morning air had the same unreality as when Kennedy’s brother had been killed five years earlier.
I went to the Statler Hilton to report for work and sat with the other women who’d showed up for an hour or so until we were sent home. Kennedy died the next day, and I continued mistyping occasional phone numbers for the rest of the week.
L.A. Champon, import-export
A month later I started working for L.A. Champon, an import-export company whose primary business at that time was importing essential oils. The aromas of sandalwood, eucalyptus, and other scents sometimes overwhelmed the office. But there were other businesses, including the franchise to sell Fords in Saigon. Was I working for a prowar company? Maybe, maybe not. Champon might have been selling Fords in Saigon even if the U.S. weren’t supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government.
Most of my work involved typing letters, on special airmail stationery, from Dictaphone disks. I slipped the disk into a small machine, put on a pair of headphones, and pressed a foot pedal to play the disk. I did not have to be a perfect typist, I could make corrections. It was a small office, I think three men, who were the bosses, and their secretaries, plus me. The secretaries sometimes sat together while we ate lunch. I was still smoking at that point, and would often have a cigarette after lunch. One of the secretaries had stopped smoking some years earlier, but, she said, she still wanted a cigarette and gravitated toward anyone who was smoking, just to inhale their smoke. This alarmed me, that one could stop smoking yet still remain in thrall to those small white, tobacco-filled sticks. I had been smoking for seven years and was already trying to stop. Would I always remain chained to cigarettes?
I continued to work for Champon occasionally through the summer, fall, and winter, until I finally graduated from City College in May 1969.
I first learn of copy editing as a job
While taking a course on African History, I read a biography of an African anticolonial politician. The book was so full of typos and ungrammatical sentences that it was difficult to read. I couldn’t help writing to the publisher, Praeger, with a list of the worst ones. I was startled to receive a letter back that included a copy editing test. This was a job? I read through the test, made some corrections, read it again, found more mistakes. But this all took a few weeks, and I couldn’t believe that I might be able to do this for pay. I’d never studied grammar, so how could I know I was right? After more than a month, it seemed way too long since I’d gotten the test, and I decided it was too late to return it.
There’s also a note in my datebook about talking to one of my professors about copy editing, but I don’t remember anything coming of that.
Antiwar protests
The Fall Mobilization 1967 aimed at the Pentagon. We took the train to Washington Friday night, and now feeling like full-fledged grown-ups, we stayed at a hotel instead of some friend of a friend’s floor. The next day we joined 100,000 on a march from the Lincoln Memorial, across the Key Bridge to the Pentagon. It was a long day, and we were pretty sure we didn’t want to engage in the civil disobedience that was planned. As we reached the outer ring of parking lots, I wanted to hang around to see what would happen, but Jack thought we’d done enough, and it was time to repair to a bar. So that was the extent of our March on the Pentagon.
Every year, there continued to be a spring march and a fall march against the war, even as U.S. involvement continued, despite the North Vietnamese Tet offensive at the beginning of 1968.
University unrest, 1968 and 1969
In the spring of 1968, Columbia University announced it would build a gym located in neighboring Morningside Park; it would allow local people to use the gym, but they would have to use a separate entrance. This angered the neighborhood, as well as students, who were already up in arms against what they saw as university complicity in the war and the presence of ROTC drills on campus, and the Columbia Uprising began. Jack was assigned by the New York Post to cover the story, and he came home every night, really angry, wrote his story, and wouldn’t tell me what had happened, especially when the administration called cops to clear students out of buildings they were occupying—I had to read his stories in the paper. I wanted to stop by Columbia and join the protests (I passed the university on the bus up Amsterdam Avenue on the days I went to City College), and he resolutely refused; he didn’t want to be worrying about taking care of me while also doing his job.
The following year, City College had its own uprising, this one focused on admissions and the creation of a Black and Puerto Rican Studies school. The students presented five demands <https://fivedemands.commons.gc.cuny.edu/> in the winter at the same time as budget cuts were aimed at CUNY. In late April Black and Puerto Rican students went on strike and took over the South campus for at least two weeks, and in solidarity white students took over North campus (these two campuses were only a few blocks apart along Convent Avenue in West Harlem). The City College president, Buell G. Gallagher, held several meetings with students. Early in the occupations, a “convocation” was held at which several hundred students and faculty met, with group leaders explaining what the demands were. Lewis Cole, a leader of Columbia’s uprising the year before, spoke to tell us how great we were doing. Then we were broken up into small discussion groups. As I wrote to my parents (this did not stick in my memory), I was in a group with two faculty, six minority students, and seven white students, one of whom I described as a “rabid moderate” because she repeatedly said, “I understand the validity of your demands, but...” but then went on to reveal that she didn’t understand them at all. There was one student from Progressive Labor who talked about oppression and the class struggle, while another student from SDS also talked about oppression, but not so much about class struggle. The rest of us, I wrote, “were moderate radicals with no particular ‘line’ ” but almost all supporting the demands.
While classes were canceled, one of my professors who supported the student strike held his seminar at his home. While Gallagher continued to negotiate with students, one of the Democratic candidates for mayor got a court order and police came in to arrest students and end the occupation. Gallagher resigned, and faculty were left to deal with the students as they saw fit; one of my professors said he’d give a final to anyone who didn’t do well on the midterm and wanted a chance to raise their grade, but no final if they didn’t think they needed one. No one failed a course, with only grades of A, B, or C, plus P for pass, or J, the equivalent of dropping a course with no penalty. I wrote a paper, possibly for my Constitutional Law—Individual Liberties class, about “The Crisis at City College and the Five Demands,” in which I analyzed the five demands and explained the ones I thought were widely misunderstood.
I graduated in May, though didn’t go to any ceremony; somehow, accepting a ceremony-as-usual felt like spitting in the face of the student strike.
1968 Election
Hubert Humphrey got the Democratic nomination after a wild convention in Chicago, with student protests in the streets countered by police violence, and inside the convention center protests against police behavior by delegates were met by Mayor Richard Daley shouting “F*** you!” if you could lip-read on TV. Just a week before the Soviet Union had sent troops into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, and now a week later, Chicago police were crushing student and other people’s protests in the streets—and we watched it all on television.
I couldn’t vote for Humphrey (he never opposed the war), even though it meant one less vote against Richard Nixon. Instead, I voted for Dick Gregory, on the Freedom and Peace Party line. Was that a mistake? Who knows. Watergate exposed the corruption of money—and unbelievably, Nixon did accomplish some good things, the Clean Air Act and the EPA.
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