My parents lived in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, what was called the Main Line, referring to the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 19th century. Some of Philly’s richest towns are on the Main Line, including Gladwyne, where my parents lived — some homes further down our road looked like European mansions — and we may have been the first Jewish family to move there, in 1959, but we were far from rich.
I was not happy to be there; I had gone off to college primarily to get away from home. (There was a lot going on in the family at that time, but as this series is about my jobs, I will stick to that.) After I’d been home for a few weeks, my father insisted that I should get some kind of job. Since I was planning to go back to Antioch College in January, whatever job I got would have to be a temporary one — I thought it would be dishonest to get a “regular” job, then quit in a couple of months. So I read the help wanted ads for temp work and after a few weeks found what turned out to be doing a marketing survey.
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, 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.
More no answers, and one elderly woman who couldn’t remember what she had watched or any of the advertisements. By the time I felt free enough to take the bus home, I had four filled out surveys. I finished the week, with about the same number of surveys a day, but I couldn’t bear to knock on any more doors.
Since I still needed a job, and it was almost Thanksgiving, I applied to department stores, which always needed extra help at Christmastime, and there would be no problem when I quit at the end of the year (to go back to school). Strawbridge & Clothier was the Philadelphia department store that hired me. I spent a couple of days being trained and was then assigned to the accounting department. I was given a stack of 4x6 cards, each representing a customer with a store credit card and his or her purchases for the previous month, and a large filing box for names J–O. My job was to sort the loose stack of cards by last name and if the last name started J through O, I was to find that person’s name and previous cards and add this new card.
The job was boring. At first I paid attention to names, imagining what someone with a name like Blumberg or Winchester was like. Was Mrs. Jack Ruttenberg the mother of my classmate Roz, or her aunt? (And yes, most women’s cards had their name as Mrs. <husband’s name>. But what entitled Mrs. Elsie Doolittle to have her own first name? I never asked.) Was Mrs. Anthony Drexel related to the family that founded the local Drexel Institute? When this game palled, I paid more attention to addresses: how many were in towns or areas I knew? how many were in the city and in what neighborhoods? Then I paid attention to what they had bought and how much it cost.
But it wasn’t the tedium of the job that drove me to quit after only a few days. It was the commute. I got a ride into the city (between 45 minutes and an hour depending on traffic) with my parents, but their jobs at the company then called Smith, Kline and French were in the opposite direction of where I worked. They would drop me off, and I would take a bus further downtown, then another bus. Then I had to come home by myself, since they left work an hour before I did, which entailed a bus to the train station, waiting for a train, and once I got to Ardmore, there was another bus home. All in all, it was more than an hour each way, tacked onto an eight-hour day, and I just quit. That was it for working that fall.
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