Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Job #6: Public Health Service, statistical clerk, summer 1962

             At the end of June, I moved out of the Clinical Center in Bethesda and into an apartment in Washington, D.C., where I was to room with another Antioch student, Susie S., who had already been there through the spring quarter. The apartment was on Irving Place, a block away from Rock Creek Park and the city’s zoo. On quiet nights, I could sometimes hear the lions or tigers roar, and one night, writing in my journal, a cigarette in one hand, a drink on the lamp table, I could sense a giant cat padding up the stairs and just on the other side of the doorway; it was a scary yet thrilling feeling.

            The Public Health Service was in one of those huge, blocky government buildings in S.E. Washington, south of the Mall and east of all the tourist sites. There was no Metro yet, wouldn’t be one for another 14 years, so I rode maybe two buses, one downtown, another to the government buildings.

            I spent my time in a large room without windows, some cubicles along one wall, a long table against another wall, and three offices, for the supervisors, on a third. Perhaps three or four other people my age worked in our office during that summer. I was shown how to use a Friden calculator—a noisy machine much larger than a typewriter, but small enough to sit on a desk, it had a keyboard of nine rows up and 10 across. One of the young men spent most of his time figuring out how to make the calculator beat out a rhythm, by entering a 10-digit number, then multiplying, or dividing, by one number. I think one combination was 7755777557 divided by 7, and the mechanical sound of the calculator figuring out the answer sounded like bada, bum, bada, bum, bada,bum, bum, bum—but I have no calculator to test this.

            The Public Health Service at that time was just concluding a series of trials to determine whether giving women a regular test called a Pap smear would catch cervical cancer early enough to save lives. The data from the trials would eventually be fed into a massive computers somewhere. But first that data had to be gathered into a usable format—and that format was numbers on sheets of paper, one for each state. Each sheet had a form, down the left side a row for age groups in five year increments (0-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc.), and across the top headings for two columns, “white” and “Negro.”

            My job was to take the voluminous 1960 census reports and fill in the correct numbers for each column and row. It may sound tedious, but I still remember marveling that in Vermont, say, there were only 5 Negro women ages 85-90. I tried to imagine who those five women were, where did they live, what were their lives like. (Many years later, on one of my husband and my visits to my aunt and uncle who lived in Vermont, we ate lunch at a restaurant in Montpelier and noticed a Black woman walking down the street. An unusual enough event that we mentioned it to my aunt, who immediately said, “Oh, that must have been Maria Johnson. She teaches at the college.” Imagine there being so few Black women in a town that my aunt would know them by name.)

            Did it take me more than a week to fill out those forms? Maybe. There were always those Friden calculator games to play. And because so many college students worked in government agencies or for congressmen (and the vast majority were men; women made up only 3% of the House of Representatives), there were occasional lectures for us. One featured then senator Hubert Humphrey talking about the proposal for health insurance for the elderly. That bill was being widely attacked as socialism, so I was surprised, and pleased, to hear Humphrey say, “Well, if this bill is socialism, I’m all for it.” An American senator saying he was all for socialism? We must really be out of the age of McCarthyism.

            The building where my office was had a cafeteria on a high floor, a very good idea since there was no other place to eat in easily walkable distance. The food wasn’t bad and not too expensive. One of my favorite dishes was sauteed chopped zucchini and onions, something I don’t think I’d ever eaten, but which I have made many times over the years. The cafeteria had two walls of big windows, and the sunshine always lifted my mood.

            Sometime in July, my parents came to Washington for the bar mitzvah of the son of one of their friends, and I went with them. Later, we drove around Rock Creek Park (my father loved to drive) and I told them I wanted to drop out of college. They were aghast.

            “What will you do?” my father asked. “I’ll get a job,” I said. “But what kind of job can you get without a college degree?” His voice dripped condescension. His sister, he pointed out, didn’t have a college degree, and the only jobs she’d had were as a secretary. Clearly, he thought being a secretary was beneath me.

            My mother took a different tack: “College is where you’ll meet the man you’re going to marry.” This surprised me. It was something no one had ever mentioned, that I was in college to find a man to marry. And I recoiled from the idea. Of course I would get married, that was taken for granted. But I’d been in college for two years and still hadn’t had a boyfriend, though I was no longer a virgin.

            I had already written my letter of withdrawal from Antioch, so all their protestations were beside the point. I was dropping out, and I would manage.

            In September, I told my boss at the Public Health Service that I wasn’t going back to Antioch and was looking for a job. He said it was okay if I took time off to go to job interviews. One interview, at some large corporation (maybe AT&T?), led to lunch with the person interviewing me; she brought along a colleague, and they talked about how great it was to work for this company and how much opportunity for advancement there was. But I really wasn’t interested in a corporate job. Another interview was at a nonprofit representing Arab American rights; I was very interested in this job, but the people interviewing me thought I might not be “comfortable” working for them, since they criticized Israel. (How did they know I was Jewish?) I tried to make it clear I had not particular interest in Israel, but they really weren’t interested in me. At the time, I didn’t think of this as antisemitism, which I then thought of as hatred of Jews; rather, I thought they were captive of assumptions they applied to me. I guess that is the source of discrimination, but it never occurred to me to protest against this.

            Eventually, I was offered a job as typist, working for a small law firm that represented clients at the FCC. My boss at the PHS said it was okay if I left before the co-op job was up at the end of September. So on to job #7.

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