Job #10: United World Federalists II, June 1963–March 1964

             So it was on to UWF, or back to UWF, however I wanted to think about it. The organization was in a new office, near Thomas Circle, not far from the old one on Thirteenth Street. If I felt like it, I could walk from my apartment just north of Dupont Circle, on 19th Street, but it was almost a mile, and I was not much of a walker in those days. In the fall, after I had moved into the  communal living arrangement we then called a co-op, but later came to be known as a commune, a few blocks up 19th Street, one of the male residents there occasionally gave me a ride on his motorcycle, but I didn’t want to encourage him.

            I worked for Al Mark, who was director of public relations and also membership. UWF did direct mail drives, both for renewal of current members and to solicit new ones. I don’t think I ever knew where the mailing lists for new member solicitations came from. But I’ve always remembered that a 10% return (which doesn’t sound like much) on a direct mail mailings was considered very good. My boss also collected publications from “the other side,” including “Red Channels” and the “National Review,” and documents from HUAC and organizations like the American Nazi Party and the John Birch Society. As I filed these, I’d read bits and pieces, but it was sometimes hard for me to understand their points since what they described bore no relationship to anything I was familiar with.

            More interesting, and more pivotal for me, was that UWF now had an Antioch co-op, someone I knew from my freshman first quarter. Janet was working on the Student Federalists, which had first been formed in the 1940s, then joined UWF in the early 1950s as its youth division. Specifically, she was working on organizing a conference to be held in New York City in late November. And personally, she stressed that I should return to Antioch College. I had already started taking courses at American University, a political science class on international affairs that summer and in the fall a class on 19th century American novels. (One book I read was Moby Dick; I skipped all the chapters about whales. Another was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, based on his time at the utopian Brook Farm; I didn’t at the time understand his skeptical attitude toward the communal community, perhaps because I was on some level taking seriously the communal community I had just moved into. More about that later.)

            1963 had many political events worth remembering. At the end of August was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I was eager to go, but Susan, my roommate, had reservations. For some reason, she believed rumors that with many residents attending the march, there would be a rash of burglaries; she intended to stay home to protect our apartment. This seemed ridiculous to me, though I didn’t have the political sense to call out her implicit racism. I went with Anne, a co-worker. The day was easygoing and friendly. As Anne and I walked along Constitution Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial, we got into conversation with a teenage girl from North Carolina, who’d come on a chartered bus that had traveled all night. It was exciting to meet someone from a part of the country I knew only stereotypes of. The whole Mall was filled with groups of people; this was long before police corralled demonstrators between and behind barriers. People walked as close to the Memorial as they could, where speakers, including John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, orated all afternoon. It was hot, and the crowd was thinning where I stood. I decided to make my way home, but I’d only gotten halfway across the Mall when Martin Luther King Jr.’s words caught my ear; it was partly his repetition of his “dream,” but his mention of “the red hills of Georgia,” where “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” stopped me. I stood there to the end of his now famous speech, feeling touched and elevated by this appeal to the best in human nature, and still too naïve to imagine the worst that was to come later.

            A few days later, Susan moved into her own apartment, and I needed to find a new place to live. How did I find the commune? Michael, the resident manager, was a grad student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, which the center where Susan worked was connected to, so I may have learned about available space that way. I met him at a civil rights meeting and had an instant crush — he was just my type, blond, blue eyes.

            He was resident manager of two adjoining buildings, also on 19th Street, just a couple of blocks from my partment: one a rooming house, the other with two upper floors that became a communal home for six people with a political purpose.  We were to be a research group for peace candidates in the 1964 elections, called the Political Action Information Service, or PAIS. “We” consisted, in mid-September, of Peter, a political lobbyist for the United Auto Workers, and also an Antioch College dropout; Ed and Gerald, undergraduates at George Washington University; and me. There needed to be six of us for the rent to be reasonable (was that $50 a month per person?). Will, a leftist who worked as a messenger, was part of our group, but living in the rooming house. (Will had been dishonorably discharged from the army, perhaps because, during the Cuban missile crisis the year before, when one of the NCOs had said, “We might be going down there,” Will had replied, “You might be going down there, but I’m not.”) There was also a teenager, recently graduated from high school, named Doug. Theoretically, he was going to be a paid worker for PAIS, but he didn’t stay long, then left, supposedly with our mailing list, and went to work for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.

            We were soon joined by one more male person, a guy named Jack. Jack was from Kansas, had come to D.C. a month earlier, and had been looking for an apartment at a bulletin board at George Washington University when he was told about us by a person whose name was unfamiliar to any of us. Will was immediately suspicious: “He’s from Kansas, he must be from the FBI.” The rest of us thought Will was taking us more seriously than the FBI was. Besides, Jack’s constant uniform of gray sweatshirt and sweatpants was not usual FBI attire. Jack moved in.

            I was in a room for two, sharing with Janet until she returned to Antioch for fall quarter, so we needed one more girl. One came for a meeting. Since we were an organization, we wanted to know that whoever moved in was aligned with our actions; this girl seemed to have little interest in politics, so she was nixed. Next, I thought I might find a roommate among the girls I’d met at NIH; I’d kept in touch with Norma, one of the college-age schizophrenics being studied at the Clinical Center, who told me her therapist thought she could live outside the institution. Perfect, I thought, why not move in with me? Norma thought that was a good idea, but I think the commune was too chaotic for her. She moved into our shared room on a Friday, but by Sunday evening she’d become more and more dissociated from reality; by Monday morning she’d returned to the security of NIH. It was the first time I had ever seen a person have a psychotic break; it was alarming and scary.

            Living in the commune was a combination of study and play. Peter would hold educational sessions in which he’d name a congressional district and we were to name the congressman in that seat. Ed was clearly studying; he knew a lot. Gerald knew some, but not as many. I was mightily impressed; I knew my congressman was Richard Schweiker (I was still registered in Pennsylvania, where my parents lived), but neither of my senators. Jack thought it might be a fun enterprise, but he didn’t engage. He was more interested in drinking and in playing bridge, as were others in the commune, so I attempted to learn. We played with Janet and Peter.

            Meanwhile, I was getting other political lessons. Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, had come to the U.S. to stir up stronger support for her country against North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters. (A digression: I had first heard of Vietnam at age 12, reading the September 1954 issue of “My Weekly Reader,” a newspaper of current events for students. On the left side of page 1 was a story about the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. On the right side was a story about the end of the Vietnamese war of independence against France, its division into North and South, and that Catholics were fleeing the North because it was controlled by communists. Having leftist parents who told us communism wasn’t the evil we were told it was on TV, I was confused about why people would be “fleeing” communists. And “Vietnam” stuck in my mind.)

            Madame Nhu was scheduled to speak at the National Press Club in October, and the politicos in the commune decided to picket her appearance. Along with some other groups I wasn’t aware of (an internet search now says they included SDS and Women Strike for Peace), the demonstration was scheduled for lunch time on a Friday. The National Press Club was not far from the UWF office, so I went there on my lunch hour. When I arrived there was no one in front of the Press Club, but maybe a dozen people were across the street, walking in a circle with signs. Apparently, the police had arrested several people, including everyone I knew, because the police said they were blocking the sidewalk and the picketers refused to move, claiming they weren’t blocking the sidewalk—in fact, the police trying to persuade them to cross the street were the ones blocking the sidewalk. But I knew none of the remaining demonstrators. I’ve mentioned my shyness. This wasn’t like the March on Washington, where I was one of hundreds of thousands. Now I was uncertain.

            Further down the block, however, I saw another line of picketers. These men were members of the American Nazi Party, swastikas clearly visible on their clothing and signs. I knew that the American Nazi Party had its headquarters nearby, in Arlington, Virginia. It was upsetting to see swastikas so near, but as I stood on the sidewalk trying to decide what to do, it felt clear to me that to do nothing would somehow mean that I didn’t see any difference between those protesting against Madame Nhu and the swastika-wearing Nazis. I had to show that there was a difference, so I overcame my nervousness and stepped into the picket line of people walking, walking, walking in the circle. Some smiled at me, and I felt welcomed into this small community. This was my first real political activism.

            (P.S.: About a month later, there was a trial for the demonstrators who’d been arrested. Before a jury? probably not. Must have been before a judge. The verdict? Maybe it’s in an SDS history somewhere, but I don’t remember.)

            Then there was the tragedy in November. Around lunch time, after all of the department heads had left for lunch, the husband of one of the secretaries called — and she told us that Kennedy had been shot. That was more shocking than anything I’d ever heard. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. This didn’t happen in the United States. Could it be real? I called home and reached Gerald. Yes, he said, the president has been shot and there was no word about his condition.

            The office was silent. No one knew what to say or what to do. After a while, I thought someone should find our bosses to let them know. But when I stood outside the restaurant, I could see there was a TV above the bar — they knew. They didn’t need me. Back at the office, nothing much got done, especially when we got word that Kennedy had died. We just stared at each other, mumbled about how insane this was. Our bosses came back from lunch and sent us home.

            That evening I had a date with a guy named Lee, a musician, I think. We were supposed to see a movie at the Washington Film Society, but nothing was normal anymore. We went to a bar or café, sat at a table, and mostly just stared at each other, numb. Lee suddenly stood and went to talk to someone he saw at the entrance. “We’ve got to leave,” he said, back at our table. We drove to his apartment, where he flushed something down the toilet. A friend had just told him the police might be looking to search his apartment, so he had to dispose of a batch of magic mushrooms. This didn’t feel more outlandish than what had happened in Dallas that afternoon.

            That evening there was a candlelight vigil in front of the White House. Gerald and Jack were among a few who’d also gone to the White House with different motives. Jack later reported that Gerald started to chant, “Ding-dong the witch is dead,” but Jack shut him up, not wanting to get them killed. Kennedy was not loved on the left.

            (P.S.: Almost 30 years later, Oliver Stone made “JFK,” Jim Garrison’s conspiracy theory that the CIA killed Kennedy. In one scene, Donald Sutherland, playing an anonymous but in-the-know informant, tells Kevin Costner, playing Garrison, the New Orleans D.A., that all phones in Washington, D.C., went dead the afternoon Kennedy was shot. This is not true. I was there. Phones worked.)

            The following weekend was Thanksgiving, but because many of us would be away, we’d planned to have a Thanksgiving dinner that Sunday. We sort of sleep-walked through the preparations. After our midday dinner, I was in the kitchen cleaning up and listening to the radio — the radio had been on all weekend — and heard the in-real-time report that Lee Harvey Oswald had just been shot as police were moving him from one place to another. This was really too much. I didn’t drop a dish, just walked upstairs to tell everyone else that Oswald had been shot. More numbness. More nothing feels real.

            (P.S.: Conspiracy theories cropped up almost immediately, too many to describe. None made any more sense than the unbelievable events themselves. Neither Jack nor I ever thought it was more than what it appeared: a lone gunman got a lucky shot, and too many people in Texas can walk around with guns everywhere, even police headquarters.)

            Thanksgiving weekend was the Student Federalist conference in New York City. I got a ride with Ed (was he attending?) and Gerald (who wasn’t), listening to the radio for news about the assassinations (JFK and Oswald). I must have been there to work, at registration, giving out materials, helping to make sure the conference went smoothly. The only speaker I remember was Amitai Etzioni, perhaps because his name was so unusual. He was then teaching sociology at Columbia, but I have no recollection of what he spoke about. Perhaps this photo was taken at that conference.

            Working as a secretary even at a liberal organization like UWF, I felt like a lower form of humanity without a college degree. The Case of the First Names, as I called it in the paper I wrote to get work credit at Antioch, for example. There was the staff, the people with job titles, and the secretaries and guys in the mailroom. The staff people called everyone by their first names, but the secretaries addressed staff members as Mr., Mrs., or Miss last name. One day I called my boss by his first name, and he seemed fine with it, but I didn’t work that closely with other staff members, so didn’t feel comfortable addressing them familiarly. It seemed unfair that such a minor issue had meaning, yet I was sure that if I had a college degree I could be on a first-name basis with all my co-workers.

            I had not yet committed to reapplying to Antioch, and at the end of December applied to Columbia University’s School of General Studies, a part-time version of Columbia’s program. But in January Janet was back in D.C. and now my roommate, and soon I’d written to Antioch and gotten transcripts sent to the college for the two classes I’d taken at American University. She wasn’t back at UWF, but awaiting notice whether she could work at the Peace Corps. That didn’t work out because she was associated with a known subversive; Peter, the UAW lobbyist, was refusing to cooperate with the draft, and by the next year had started a three-year prison sentence. (On receiving letters from the Selective Service System, he would write back: “Please take me off your mailing list.”)

            Work at UWF continued, as my association with the organization moved from interest, engagement (joining a weekly seminar that read Louis B. Sohn’s “World Peace Through World Law”), to disillusion. A meeting of the national executive committee revealed its members thought of themselves as “respectable revolutionaries,” an oxymoron to me; they now seemed as much part of the Establishment as the politicians they wanted to persuade to give up to a world government their power to engage in war. I was ready to move on to politics somewhat more radical. My boss took a month’s vacation in January, so I may have been working for others in the organization. Meanwhile, I started dating Jack. Antioch readmitted me, so I could start back in the spring quarter, in April. My last day at UWF was March 20, and the next day I was in New York City, joining my mother and sister on a cruise to the Bahamas.

       On returning to Antioch, I wrote papers to get work credit for the jobs I’d had in the previous two years. Here's the title page of the one I wrote for United World Federalists — on tissue paper of what was called a carbon set. What did I mean by that title: “The Cause and the Calling”? Did I think a “calling” was more important than a “cause”? Was a “calling” more internal than a “cause”? Was it more admirable to feel a “calling” than to follow a “cause”? These are all my thoughts now, but what did I think at 21?

SOLSC 24: A Slice from Fall 1961

I was still attending Antioch College, but had to find my own jobs for part of my sophomore fall quarter. One short-lived one was as a market surveyer, the old-fashioned version of a telephone survey today.

            For a couple of days, I sat in a motel conference room with maybe a dozen others, mostly women, some my age, but mostly older. The trainers didn’t tell us exactly who the client was, but it was clear from the survey form that it was advertisers. We were told to follow the script, don’t ask leading questions, don’t suggest possible answers. On the third day, we were given a list of streets, taken into the nearby town of Ardmore (Pa.), and dropped on various street corners. Then I was on my own.

            It was a working-class neighborhood. My street was lined with duplex shingled houses with a driveway on either side. It was quiet, since children were all in school. I was nervous. My stint as a salesgirl the previous spring had not cured my shyness; the idea of knocking on strangers’ doors and “barging in” terrified me. But other people could do this, so why couldn’t I — and maybe I’d be lucky and no one would be home.

            At first my luck held. There was no answer at the first few doors where I knocked or buzzed. At the next door, a short, rotund woman came to the door, but did not speak English. At another door, a Black woman in a white uniform answered and said the man she cared for was napping; since I was only supposed to talk to the primary resident, I was free to go on. A few more “no answers,” and I realized everyone must be at work. Then, luck failed.

            The woman who came to the door was a bit older than my mother, but not as old as my grandmother, white, about my height, gray hair, wearing a thin sweater and jersey skirt, socks in slippers. I gave my introductory spiel about gathering information about what people watched on television.

            “Come in, come in,” she said, waving me in. “I’ve got a friend here, but we’d be happy to answer your questions.”

            She led me down a narrow hall to the kitchen, which looked out on a concrete yard, with a couple of lawn chairs piled together. There was a faint odor of dishwater and maybe something cooking. The woman, let’s call her Alice, introduced me to her friend, let’s call her Marie, sitting at the formica-topped table, and we sat with her. I took out my folder of questionnaires.

            “Did you watch television last night?” Of course, they had, and Alice and Marie started arguing over which program they had watched last night, or was it the night before, or was it what they expected to watch tonight. Wait, wait, I said. I wasn’t supposed to direct them or make suggestions, but I could focus them by listing the possibilities, since there were only three channels in Philadephia in 1961: ABC, NBC, and CBS. “I need to know only what Alice watched,” I said, then gave her the three shows that aired at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night.

            Once Alice settled on the show she’d watched, I then asked, “Do you remember any advertisements on that show?” Here, again, she consulted with Marie, and I decided to let them talk and record whatever Alice seemed most confident of.

            “What was it that was most memorable about this advertisement?”

            More discussion between Alice and Marie, down to the detail of where the model must have gotten that dress. Now that I was “in the field,” I was beginning to understand the rationale for the survey: what commercials did people remember and why? Was I scrupulously going to stick to the script or get enough information to fill in the bubbles on the survey and write in the details that seemed most relevant? At 19, I was no friend of big corporations, although my lefty parents did work at a large pharmaceutical company.

            We went through the survey, hour by prime-time hour, advertisement by advertisement. After more than an hour, I figured we were finished and got up to leave. Alice offered me coffee, a snack, and I politely refused, thanking them for their help with the survey, but I did have other places to go to. As I left, I felt their desire for me to stay as almost entertainment; I was like the TV shows they watched day and night, living lives they didn’t have but wished they did. It was profoundly depressing.

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I’m participating in the 15th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 24 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

 

Job #3: Saks-34th St. (first Antioch co-op job)

 This is part of a series of memoirs about all the jobs I have ever had. By "job" I mean any work I was paid for not by my parents. There will be 20 or 21 of these whenever I finish.       

How the Antioch College work-study system worked

This was one of the appealing features for me. Its cooperative education work-study program was not anything like “work-study” in colleges and universities today. In Antioch’s program, everyone spent time on campus taking traditional classes, and an equal amount of time off campus at any of hundreds of regular jobs around the country. The student body was essentially two student bodies, or divs (for divisions): one half on campus while the other half was off working. (Just to complicate matters in telling this story, my class was the last for many years in which everyone in our class started in the fall. In 1961 began two entering classes, one in the summer, the other in the fall, which lasted for perhaps 15 years.)

My class was divided into three divs: one group of students went off on a job after the fall quarter (Antioch wasn’t on a semester schedule), another group after the winter quarter, and the third group after the spring quarter. I was in the second div, so somewhere around the middle of winter quarter we visited the co-op office to look through the jobs lists for jobs (1) we were interested in doing, (2) we were qualified for, and sometimes most important (3) located in a place we wanted to go. And I, my roommate, and our closest friend (we dubbed ourselves the Traumatic Triumvirate) most definitely wanted to be doing anything at all in New York City.

I no longer remember what other entry-level jobs were available, but all three of us ended up as department store sales clerks: my roommate, known as Charlie, went to Lord & Taylor’s (at $45/wk.), our friend, Connie, at B. Altman (at $55/wk.), and I to Saks-34th ($50/wk.). There’s interesting retail history around these three stores, but I’ll save that for later.

The job

Our jobs started in early April; this is when I filled out my first W4 forms. Then three days of training. There were five or six other women being trained with me, but they all hoped to be staying on. We had to learn how to operate really old cash registers, with rows of raised “pedals” for the numbers and a handle on the side to record each price as you entered it. Then there was complexity of counting out at the end of the day. You had to get the register to total the daily transactions and then count up the cash in your envelope—and those numbers better match. Mine always did.

What else did we learn? When and for how long we could take a break and go for lunch; to be friendly and gracious to customers. What our employee discount was and how to use it. Did we have to punch a time clock? I don’t remember. And there was no mention of a union.

Once trained, I was assigned to the costume jewelry counter on the first floor, near the entrance from 34th Street. I shared the counter with a couple of other women who were much older, so we didn’t commune much. Did I say I was terminally shy? The hardest part for me was standing behind the counter, facing out toward potential customers, and trying to look helpful. If I saw someone pausing to gaze into the cases, I would edge gradually in her direction while hoping she would move along or leave before I got close enough to have to say, “Can I help you?” On the other hand, if someone knew exactly what she wanted, I enjoyed picking out the bracelet or necklace or pair of earrings, packing them neatly into a box labeled “Saks-34th,” and ringing up the sale. Mostly, I walked up and down behind the counter, rearranging items on display either on the counter or inside the cases. Time passed very slowly.

Near the costume jewelry counter was a free-standing triangular table with a few dozen watches individually chained on display. Every now and then I was assigned to “handle” that table, which meant I had to stand out on the floor near the table and look alert, ready to address anyone who stopped and picked up a watch, though they usually hurried off if I did approach. Here time passed even more slowly, though it became a sort of game to straighten out the watches to make parallel and aiming toward one point of the triangular table or another.

At least a couple of times a week, someone would stop by the counter and ask where housewares was. The first few times this happened, I was confused—we didn’t have any housewares. “But there was an ad in the paper,” the woman would say, showing me the page that clearly said Macy’s or Gimbel’s. Saks-34th was on the south side of 34th Street, while Macy’s was across 34th, and Gimbel’s was on the other side of Saks, on 33rd. Eventually, I realized that people came up from the subway and didn’t know where they were, and I felt superior pointing out where they needed to go.

Lunch was either at the Nedick’s tucked into the corner of Macy’s or the Woolworth’s lunch counter next door. Can’t remember what I ordered at the counter, but sometimes I would buy a box of melba toast and a can of smoked oysters—eating raw oysters would come later—take them back to the break room at Saks, and eat oysters on toast for lunch, feeling extremely sophisticated and elegant.

I knew about the sit-ins and picketing of Woolworth’s the year before, but those seemed over by spring 1961. The political issue I was aware of April of 1961 was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an abortive anti-Castro attack that Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower. That and the possibility of nuclear war. (Current research tells me that the nuclear test moratorium wasn’t breached until fall 1961, but my fear of imminent war that led to personal events that summer must have been based on something. Were there stories hinting that various countries might violate that moratorium?)

One day while having lunch at Nedick’s, I heard the squeal of brakes and gasps from those around me. A gray-haired man lay in the middle of the street, hit by a car that sped off. From inside of Nedick’s I could see only a trickle of blood by the man’s head; in my memory his body is larger than the people gathering around. I looked away, but not quickly enough.

Outside the job

The job was the least reason I wanted to be in New York. Once we had our jobs lined up, we next had to find a place to live. Here, too, Antioch’s co-op office had lists of apartments where Antioch students had lived in the past. Somehow, we settled on a one-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, which when we arrived in early April 1961 turned out to be tiny. The bedroom barely had room for a double bed, a single bed, and two small bureaus. It was weird sleeping with another woman in the same bed, but we did it for three months.

This apartment was the first place I saw a cockroach—yuck! Did we actually cook any meals there besides breakfast? I remember none.

I do remember boys, however. Charlie invited over two boys (we still called young men around our age “boys,” while we called ourselves “girls”) who worked in the stock room at Lord & Taylor, and they brought along a slightly older guy named Rudy. We sat around our apartment drinking, playing music, laughing. We must have gotten really loud because someone called the police. And when the police came to our door, we were terrified, and then astounded when they knew Rudy! The police were pretty cool, just told us to keep it down.

One night Rudy took Charlie and me for a ride in his red Corvette, with the top down. I was in the front seat as we went down to the Village, and driving around Washington Square, Rudy started chatting up a young woman with a suitcase, walking along Waverly Place. Somehow he finagled her into the car, even though there was no place for her to sit. Her suitcase went into the back, and Charlie, who’d been squeezed into a space with no seat got out and took the subway uptown. The new woman climbed over me and sat on the gearshift, hopping up whenever Rudy needed to change gears. She had a bottle of liquor in her hand, and possibly she was drunk. She kept shouting, "I'm Nell McCafferty!" Was she famous? Should I know who she was? I felt pushed into the shadows, excited yet confused. Was she going to invite us into some situation I wouldn’t know how to handle? I thought of the previous summer, when walking around the Village with a high school girlfriend, she got us picked up by a much older man. (Another story, another day.) It hadn’t ended badly, but what now? After driving around the park a few times, we let her off, somewhere.

I discovered the Scribner Bookstore on Fifth Avenue and bought perhaps my first hardcover book: Katherine, by Anya Seton. I had read this historical novel, about real-life people in 14th century England (the female romantic lead was Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-law), when I was 14, and it was one of the books that attracted me to history. I bought a pale yellow hat one day because that’s what I’d read grownup women do when they feel down in the dumps. I also bought a pair of white gloves, because grownup women wore gloves in the summer as well as the winter. But nothing sticks in my memory about going to a museum or any other cultural space. The museums were known to me since my mother had taken us to MoMA and the Museum of Natural History when we visited her parents in Brooklyn. 

Aftermath

At the end of June, our jobs were over; Connie and I went home for a week, then returned to Antioch College. Charlie, however, had her financial aid cut so much that she couldn’t return. The last I heard of her, she was living with a graduate student in NYU housing in the Village. This guy drank too much, Charlie said, and she would pour his liquor down the drain. But he always got more. Where did she work? Did she stay at Lord & Taylor? I don’t know. She went out west at some point, and was friends with Connie’s sister, but then she disappeared. I admired her when we were at school, as I admired many girls in those days, but she deserves her own story. 

To get co-op credit for our jobs, we had to write a paper. The paper could be on anything: how the job compared to or contrasted with our coursework; something that happened during the co-op; what we learned about life; maybe even something creative, like a piece of fiction or poetry, or a song or music. I must have written a paper about being a sales clerk, but I did not keep a copy, and I doubt that Antioch College kept co-op papers from 60 years ago. Too bad — I'd have liked to look back on what I wrote at age 19 about a thoroughly boring job. And my taxable income for 1961 was $677 (equivalent to $6,546 today).

Now about those department stores

Lord & Taylor’s was the oldest, the first American department store, founded in 1826 and closing its physical stores in 2021. B. Altman was founded in 1865, and its flagship store, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, closed in 1989. It’s now the site of the CUNY Graduate School. 

West 34th Street was the first New York City location, in 1906, for the Saks & Co. store that been founded in Washington, D.C., in 1867. In 1923 Saks merged with Gimbel’s (owned by a cousin), and the following year the owners of the company opened Saks Fifth Avenue—but kept the store on 34th Street as Saks-34th. Although Saks-34th and Gimbel’s were owned by one company, they operated as separate businesses. So maybe those people who thought they were in Gimbel’s weren’t as confused as I thought they were. However, Saks-34th closed just a few years after I worked there (its closing the result, according to a 1995 story in the New York Times, “of poor layouts, no escalators, a confused identity”), replaced first by Korvette’s, then a vertical mall in the 1980s, and it’s now an outpost of the Swedish H&M stores.

Remembering Connie (1943–2022)

Connie died on January 1, at the beginning of the month in which she was born. She stopped short of her 79th birthday.

 

Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio

            I met Connie in September 1960, our first week of college in “the southwestern subculture” of Ohio — so said our college acceptance packet. We were in the same hall, and somehow we gravitated toward each other. She was petite, with dark curly hair, and expressions that flashed between sober and gleeful. She had a way of walking that looked almost like dancing, and she sometimes went to Friday night folk dancing on Red Square (this was a place on campus paved with red brick).

            She was from Long Island, as was my roommate, Eileen, who wanted everyone to call her Charlie. We called ourselves the Traumatic Triumvirate. We thought being neurotic was the thing to do and could have been models for Jules Feiffer’s neurotic young women in the Village Voice, which we hadn’t yet seen.

            Connie had spent several years with her family in France, which was very exciting to me. Her father’s job? I think he was a journalist. She played the flute and introduced me to the music of a jazz flutist named Buddy something — I want to ask her, but she can’t answer me. Many years later, when she lived in New England, she happened to meet Susan Palma, a flutist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (a group that my husband, Jack, and I have had a longstanding subscription to), and played with her; was it a performance? a workshop? just hanging out together?

            Our first or second week, we walked into the village where our small liberal arts school was located. On the way to Xenia Avenue, aka Route 68, the main drag, we passed a gift shop. “Let’s go in,” Connie said. Inside, we wandered from display to display, admiring necklaces, earrings, rings. One ring in particular appealed to me. It had a mottled green stone, set in a silver band, surrounded by flattened silver balls, and etching covering the band. It was beautiful, but it was expensive: $5. (That would be almost $50 today.) I passed it up. When we left the shop, I noticed that Connie had bought the ring. I knew she wasn’t rich and thought, if she can afford that, so can I. I went back to the store, but the identical ring wasn’t in the case. There was one with the same stone, but no etching on the band. It wasn’t quite so beautiful, but I wanted it anyway. More than 60 years later, I still have it.

            After folk dancing, people sat on the Student Union steps and sang folk songs. Did she date any of the folksingers? One of the songs on the steps was “Freight Train,” lyrics by Elizabeth Cotton. Her grandson Gabe sang it at her memorial. She also came to the rock and roll dances in the North Hall Common Room on Saturday nights.

            Connie taught me how to smoke. I was terribly shy, had never learned how to just talk to people, especially someone I might be attracted to (read, boys). I noticed at the library that people went to the lobby to smoke, and if you had a cigarette, it was normal to ask for a light. Asking for a light might lead to more things to say, or do. If I learned to smoke, maybe I’d learn to talk to strangers.

            Connie smoked Kents. I asked her for a cigarette in the ladies’ room; I didn’t know this was called “bumming.” I lighted a match, held it to the tobacco end, breathed in—but then what? I coughed. Everyone coughs on their first cigarette. “Here,” Connie said, “inhale the smoke into your lungs. Watch me.” That seemed impossible, but I watched her and tried it myself, and soon I looked like a grownup in a movie, holding the cigarette between the first and middle fingers of my left hand.

 

New York City, I

            Connie, Charlie, and I all wanted to be in New York City for our first Antioch co-op jobs in the spring of 1961. (Antioch College had what was called a co-operative work-study program. Students spent three months on campus taking academic classes, then three months on a real job, usually paid, anywhere in the United States. To get co-op credit for the job, students wrote a paper, about the job, about how the job linked in to academic work, or even something creative. Students did not pay tuition for the time that we were not on campus.)

            We didn’t care what we were doing, so long as we were in New York City. So we all got jobs at now defunct department stores, me at Saks-34th Street ($50 a week), Charlie at Lord & Taylor ($45), Connie at B. Altman’s ($55). We rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment on West 87th Street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, from a list of apartments regularly rented by Antioch students in New York City. (This apartment was my first sighting of a cockroach.) We had another Antioch student roommate because she needed an address; her Antioch College boyfriend had his own apartment on West 72nd Street, rent paid by his father, and that’s where she spent all her time.

 

Antioch College II

           Back to school for the summer quarter (Antioch was now open year-round), we lost Charlie because her financial aid was cut. Connie and I roomed together in a small dorm that used to be a private house. She had a boyfriend named Larry in a boys’ dorm called Orton. So, for Antioch’s regular joke photo, the girls in our dorm dressed up in bathing suits and called ourselves the “Orton Piece Corps.” (Larry’s parents were both psychologists, and he became proof to us that being a psychologist was no guarantee that your children would be without emotional problems.)

            In the fall Connie went to Detroit for her co-op job, at a mail-order bookstore selling spiritual and esoteric books. I think she came back for the winter quarter and then returned to Detroit for her spring co-op job — while there I think is when her father died, and she couldn’t come back to Antioch. We both dropped out of Antioch at the end of the spring quarter of 1962, Connie staying in Detroit and, I think, taking some classes at Wayne State University, and I was in Washington, D.C., which is where my co-op jobs had landed me.

            It was winter 1962 that we had strange weather. One day in January it was 14 degrees below zero; your breath crackled as you exhaled, moisture in your breath freezing instantly. In March it was balmy, in the 60s. Connie asserted that when the seasons speeded up like this, the world was coming to an end—and her claim has stuck with me. (We hadn’t yet heard of climate change or global warming.)

            Connie’s sister, Chris, was living in California and was for a while in touch with Charlie, aka Eileen, from our freshmen “traumatic triumvirate” days. But neither of us ever saw Charlie again.

 

New York City II

            By the summer of 1963, Connie was back in New York, in an apartment on Madison Avenue and 69th Street. In July I came up from Washington to visit her; I don’t remember what we did together, but I know I sat out by the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel to experience the solar eclipse and was disappointed. It didn’t get dark enough to be scary, as I’d read people felt in earlier times. In the fall of 1963, the weekend after JFK was assassinated, I came to New York for a weekend work assignment and stayed at Connie’s, though she was not there that weekend; maybe she had gone home for the weekend? Either later that year or early the next year, Connie came to Washington to visit me in the communual house I was living in then. I set her up with a man named Jim Pivonka, who lived in our building but was not part of our commune. Jim was a really sweet guy, but according to Connie, he had some strange sexual inclinations. They spent another weekend together, but that relationship did not continue.

            In 1964 Connie moved to the Lower East Side, at 59 East 7th Street, between First and Second Avenue, but not for long. Just a year ago she found a picture of that apartment in the British Guardian, in a photo feature of New Yorkers showing off their wonderful apartments. This apartment still had the bathtub in the kitchen and, Connie wrote in her e-mail to me about it, “The apartment looks just the same, only a little more cluttered and ‘decorated,’ but just as shabby now as then.” I’ll bet the rent is way higher now than in 1964. If you want to see that tub in the kitchen, go here. It’s the third photo down.

           By 1965, I had moved to New York City and married Jack, and Connie and I saw each other more. We had lunch, she came for dinner (the photo on the right was probably one of these times), or we had dinner at her place. In October she had a party—was this when she moved in with Paula Sherman, one of my colleagues at Bantam Books, on Eighth Avenue near 53rd Street? In early December I made sukiyaki in my electric skillet (the big kitchen technology of the time) and Connie came to dinner, and on Christmas Eve we ate at Connie’s. We also often went to a bar on the corner of 54th Street that had Christmas lights and decorations year-round.

            In November 1965, I had plans to visit Connie after work because she had a TV, and Jack and I didn’t; CBS was scheduled to broadcast a National Citizenship Test, and I wanted to see it. When the lights went out all over the Northeast shortly after 5 p.m. that evening, it wasn’t such a long walk from where I worked to her apartment. Clearly, we never saw the National Citizenship Test that night.

            Connie was working at Matthew Bender, the legal publisher, by then, but not yet dating Don. Her boyfriend at that time was Dave Sachs, and he and Connie helped us move from one apartment on West 82nd Street to another a block away at the end of 1965. They’d met when they both worked at the Paragon Book Gallery, which specialized in Eastern books. I found this memory from her in a 2013 e-mail: “Paragon Book Gallery on Lexington and 59th St. I don't think Dave worked there for very long — I myself was only there for about a year. Seems unlikely that that building is there anymore; it was an old wood-floored, 3-story building, with a very ancient, very slow elevator, complete with elevator operator. From its window I watched the Beatles drive down 59th St. followed by screaming masses. It was above a chicken roasting shop, so the odor of roasting chicken wafted up all day long. I remember sitting with you guys in your apartment (which one doesn't matter) drinking beer, listening to Bob Dylan and telling stories.” Dave also sold marijuana. One night the four of us went out to dinner with Gerald, a good friend of mine and Jack, and Gerald’s brother, Tom, from Memphis and still in high school. Dave impressed Tom in some way, and after he and Connie left, Tom asked us, “Who was that?” Jack, wanting to show off, said, “My connection.” Tom said, “Mike Connechi?”

            Connie was seeing a therapist, and also sleeping with him. When she told me that, I thought he must be taking advantage of her, but when I said so, she didn’t agree. She told me he’d said it would help her with her other relationships, and she thought that might be right. Connie had always seemed more adventurous than I was, but was this really adventurous?

            In late January 1967, Connie started a new job, at the American Bureau of Shipping. What was this? Had she started dating Don and was there a policy at Matthew Bender preventing employees from dating? My datebook records a couple of times in the spring going shopping with Connie, and in June there’s a note about “Connie’s dress.” Was she thinking or planning on getting married that year? I hope she told someone about this memory, because it eludes me.

            Sometime in 1966 or 1967, we met Don. He was staying at the Essex House, in an apartment, Connie told me, that belonged to his mother. Don was much older than we were. I still remember him chuckling at some point, and saying, “You kids today.” He sounded very condescending to us.

 

Vermont I

            On February 13, 1968, Connie and Don got married, and she became a stepmother. I wish I remembered more about this. Was it at City Hall? Sometime in 1968, she and Don moved to Guildhall, Vermont, and she was living there in September 1972 when I came up to Vermont with another college friend to visit yet another college friend who then lived in South Ryegate. Connie came down to visit with Julie, then 3 years old, and I had Christie, a three month old, with me. Connie had just found out she was pregnant with Kerry. She told me then she felt fairly isolated in Guildhall; there were few people our age or younger, since as soon as people grew up, they left the area. In my journal, I noted: “Connie had thought there would be a strain between us [because she’d moved away, had a kid], but didn’t feel any. I hadn’t thought about that, but I did feel it.” She referred to letters we’d exchanged, and I kept six, from 1973 to 1997. And e-mails, of course. Now I’ve sent the letters to Kerry.

            Kerry, did she tell you the story of why she thinks you were born three to four weeks early? She wrote to me that it was because January 24 was her birthday, and “I gorged myself on beef fondue and other goodies. At 2 a.m., I was suffering all the usual penalties of eating too much, heartburn, bloated feeling and needed to go to the bathroom. At which point the membranes ruptured.... Labor was induced by intravenous something or other (they kept missing the vein) on the 26th in St. Johnsbury. The whole birth process was very spirit-raising.”

           A couple of years later (1974 or 1975?) Connie and Julie came over to Adamant, Vermont, where my aunt and uncle lived, and Jack and Christie and I were visiting. That’s where the photo Julie posted on Facebook (and on the left) was taken. Julie was extremely shy, hardly spoke to any of us strangers. But Connie looks very happy. Connie sometimes talked about her stepchildren and sometimes having problems with them, or maybe they were problems she wasn’t sure how to solve. It seemed to me that Connie felt overwhelmed by becoming a “stepmother,” suddenly having these kids already into their middle school years when she was still pretty young herself.

 

New Hampshire

            My address books say Connie moved from Guildhall to Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1977, and stayed there until 1981. I think this is when she was attending Franconia College, an experimental liberal arts college rather like Antioch. In fact, one of the faculty at Franconia was Richard “Dick” Ruopp, who had been our co-op adviser our freshman year at Antioch. I don’t know if Connie ever talked about this, but I was very skeptical about Dick Ruopp. Every first-year student, in our first quarter, took a class called Introduction to Antioch. Everyone in our hall, however, were some sort of experiment Dick Ruopp was running. Once a week he would meet with all of us as a group, and when we asked him what we were supposed to be doing or learning, he would say, “This is your group. You decide.” We were 18 years old, it was 1960, just coming out of the “conformist ’50s”; we had no idea what this meant or what we could or might do. By the time Connie got to Franconia, she may have developed different thoughts about this free-form educational style—but alas, I don’t remember.

            Connie was in Franconia for a few years after the college closed because of bankruptcy, in 1978. In 1980 she sent me a Christmas card and mentioned taking a class in classical Greek mythology and psyche, which, she wrote, “offers a whole new way of seeing experience that is based in western cultural tradition. But I guess there’s no instant cure for whatever it is that ails me. Things are moving in usual fashion—one step forward, 2 steps back.” She said that Julie was in a wonderful school, but that “K., J. & Don complain I’m never at home so I’m feeling both guilty and resentful, but otherwise things are averagely O.K.”

            By 1981, she was in Littleton. I visited her there a few times. My daughter, Christie, went to camp in New Hampshire, and in 1984, 1985, and 1986 Kerry went to the same camp. In 1985, Christie and I went up to Littleton after camp and spent the night—we were on our way to Quebec. I think this was the time that Connie suggested that if I didn’t want milk on my cereal (milk makes the cereal, ugh, soggy), I could use yogurt instead. Thank you, Connie, for that brilliant idea! This may also have been the year that Connie told me about Don’s fight with the town of Littleton, which had put up an enormous cross in a public park on a hill overlooking Connie and Don’s house. That fight made it into Don’s obituary in 2009.

 

Vermont II —> India

            Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Connie moved to Montpelier, Vermont, I think to join the community connected to the one in India. My aunt Nita lived in Adamant, just outside of Montpelier, and Connie had already met her. Connie sent me a letter in spring 1997 soon after hearing from me that Nita had died. Connie wrote that she had run into Nita occasionally in Montpelier, and that Nita “had invited me to have lunch, or some kind of contact, when I felt ready, especially with respect to finding work.” But, Connie wrote, “I never did feel ready, so it never happened.” That is too bad, especially since Connie also wrote, “I remember maybe 2 heavenly afternoons spent with you, and you and Jack in Adamant.”

            Later in this same letter, Connie described what she was doing in Kullu: “mainly I watch my mind and how I get identified with it, see how attached I am to my personality, and, through meditation, slowly change that identification to identify with the Source of all of that.” She continued: “These days I seem to run up against the same recurring thoughts, that I’m really crystallized and can’t change the aspects of my personality that have to do with interacting. But then I have moments... when I see that none of that exists—or rather when it actually doesn’t exist. It’s just a thought, and if I hold onto it I make it real; if I ignore it, or rather if I put my attention on something more positive and expanded, it doesn’t exist. I have to change my identification from body & mind, from Connie who’s always had certain characteristics and ways of thinking, to one who knows herself as much vaster than the limitations & boundaries she learned to rope herself in with.”

            I think this is when the differences between Connie and me became sharper. Her fascination with this way of thinking about her life and problems did not attract me. I don’t seem to want aspects of my personality that I don’t like to not exist, but rather for those aspects to not bother me in a negative way. I don’t know whether I ever conveyed this to Connie. I hope I did, but I may not have, and now I’ll never be able to.

           After Don died in 2009, Connie was back in the States to settle his estate and came to New York for a weekend. She sent this in an e-mail: “It was like old times—because that connection never seems to change—but also slightly different, because we seem more ‘grown up,’ more ‘up-to-date’ — like we've matured, and we're more established and accepting of who we are.” I wonder if this is the visit when I asked her what appealed to her about Swami Shyam, and she replied, “He’s so certain about everything.” Here again is another way in which we diverged: Connie seemed to need that kind of certainty, while I distrust certainty and feel more in tune with ambivalence and ambiguity.

            Connie was back in the States in late summer of 2013 for dental work and to renew her driver’s license. I took the train to Vermont and we spent a few days together, visiting Julie in West Rutland and Kerry in New Hampshire and hanging out. I remember we went for a walk on a wooden boardwalk over a marsh. Very peaceful. Later, I was able to send her info from the latest Antioch College directory of alumni she was interested in, but I don’t know whether she ever contacted any of them.

            In 2014, my daughter and I signed up for a tour in India. Connie and I e-mailed several times to see if I could attach a visit to Kullu, but in the end, that didn’t happen. She wasn’t able to meet me in Delhi, and I was developing physical impediments that hindered my traveling to Kullu on my own. We did have a Skype visit, so I saw where she lived and the view of the valley below her home. We exchanged e-mails occasionally, including during the first year of the pandemic, but nothing after spring of last year. Was that when she was beginning to be sick?

            Writing these reminiscences has kept Connie alive for me, so much so that I feel quite frustrated that she’s not here to answer my many questions where there are holes in my memory. It’s sent me to my journals, where I’ve found thoughts and facts I’d forgotten, related to Connie, but also to other people in my life. Despite the differences in our outlooks, or perhaps because of them, I always enjoyed our time together. It’s sad that this plunge into reminiscence can never again connect to her side of things. I also feel sad in finishing this and sending it into the world, as though Connie will really be dead when I am no longer writing about her. About 10 years ago, Connie wrote in an e-mail: “This morning I was thinking about my father. He seems so long ago (he died when I was 21). So then, was he really there? Did I make him up? Am I making him up now?” It’s too soon for me to be making up Connie — but am I?

SOLTuesday: My Life in 50 Objects, part 4

I’m trying to document the objects I have that my relatives may wonder about after I die and am no longer around for them to ask. (I’m not planning to die anytime soon, but it’s better to do this before I need to. My mother said she’d do it for her jewelry, and she never did.) So here are some small objects, mostly sitting on my bureau.

            The penny jar is a holdover from my college days. At Antioch College, we were given several booklets of “food stamps” to use in the cafeteria, campus coffee shop, and the Inn, the campus restaurant for visitors. The stamps were in denominations comparable to coins, but there were no penny stamps. So students would accumulate pennies over the course of a quarter (no semesters at this school), and since many of us had empty Chianti bottles, those became our default “penny jars.”

            Once I left school, saving pennies had become a habit. This jar holds around $12 worth when it’s full, and as you can see, I recently redeemed its contents. Since the pandemic lockdown, I haven’t used cash for anything, and who knows when I will again. Maybe there won’t be anymore pennies for this jar.

           

This sadly tarnished silver dumbbell was a baby gift for our daughter from the parents of a very old friend. They lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and we met them only a couple of times, but we really appreciated the gift, a teething object that Christie used quite a bit as a baby. I’m bad at the kind of maintenance this would require. Maybe putting a photo of this in public will force me to clean it up.

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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.

SOL4: Skip, or Catch-up?

Yesterday was too busy a day, even though I had some time in the morning, but because I feel tied to the idea that a “slice of life” has to be a slice of TODAY’S life, I didn't post then. So here’s what happened yesterday.

            There was a movie I wanted to see, “Beanpole,” a Russian film that was the topic for a movie discussion group I missed while on vacation. So that was my first activity of the day. More about movie later. Next, I had to eat lunch. Third, the gym. By the time I was done there, it was almost time to meet my women’s group, but fourth, a stop at the bank.

            Then, women’s group at a restaurant, where we discussed politics, travel plans, and then our topic of the month, which was continuing through a series of life assessment questions that one of our members uses with her undergraduate class on Biography. This evening’s questions included “What is your biggest regret?” “What would your friends say is your best trait?” and “What would you say is your worst trait?”

            The three women who were divorced all said their biggest regret was marrying the man they later divorced. My biggest regret: leaving my second Antioch College co-op job in L.A. (if you don’t know, this school alternated three months of school on campus with three months of a job anywhere in the country; the college was resurrected nine years ago after being killed off five years before that); it was fall 1961, I was barely 19, there were only two other Antioch students in jobs in the Los Angeles area, and I knew no one else. If only I had recognized my fear and loneliness as severe homesickness instead of an incipient nervous breakdown. Fortunately, I made it back to Antioch that winter, and two more jobs in the spring and summer of 1962.

            Once home from the women’s group, I had another project to work on for a workshop on women in Eastern Europe I’ve been co-moderating for almost 30 years. It wasn’t until almost 11:30 that I realized I hadn’t sliced yet. And there was so much I could have offered.

            And about the movie? I’m going to slice twice today, and hope that is not cheating.

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I’m participating in the 13th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 5 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

Blogging A-Z: F Is for Flying

            I first flew in a plane when I was 19, in 1961. I was going to my second Antioch College co-op job, in Los Angeles. In those days, there was something called “student standby”: if you had a student ID, you could show up at the airport two hours before a scheduled takeoff, and if there was a seat available, you got it for some discount. (This was before deregulation, and flights routinely had empty seats.)

            I was at the airport before 6 a.m. and got on an 8 a.m. flight. Not a particularly adventurous person, I expected to be nervous: inside this metal cannister, tens of thousands of feet in the air. But once inside the plane, buckled into my seat, and staring out the window at puffy clouds and the green and brown earth below, I felt serenely safe. The flight was smooth, and I couldn’t help feeling that my jet was attached by a firm pole to a truck on a highway below. Of course I knew this wasn’t true, but it felt like it could be true. I’ve loved flying ever since, especially that moment when the airplane that’s been lumbering along the runway gracefully lifts off and the ground falls away.

            Jack took his first plane ride, with me, a few years after this. We were on a shuttle flight to Boston before switching to a tiny DC-3 to Montpelier, Vermont. Jack thought he would be nervous, and he was very nervous. He had to have a drink before we boarded, and another as soon as the refreshments were wheeled around. After a few more flights with Jack, his nervousness became contagious; I tried not to be as nervous as he was, but it was hard.

            As the years went by, Jack became somewhat less nervous, but I found it easier to fly without him.

            He did come up with one of his classic teases on a flight to his home in Kansas with our daughter when she was about eight. Looking down at all the lights as we flew over Cleveland, Jack said, “ Look down there. It’s a light-bulb farm.” Christie glanced out the window, gave him a quizzical look, and replied, “That’s just another one of your lies.”

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April’s writing challenge is to blog every day, with each post beginning with a letter of the alphabet from beginning to end. We skip Sundays, except for April 1, so as to have 26 days in the month.