Job #11: New York Times, fall 1964

             Why did I apply for this Antioch co-op job? I had never worked on a newspaper at school, but by this time in my life, I was reading them avidly. I even subscribed to the Antioch Record while I was dropped out and had a letter to the editor published. It was exciting to see my name and clever words in print.

            But the primary reason? I wanted to be in New York City. Jack and I were still a couple, and after we’d made a weekend trip to New York the previous winter, before I went back to school, he had decided the city was where he wanted to be. In May, he found his way there, via a two-week-long detour to Antioch, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. In New York, he got a job as a waiter at a coffee shop at the Hotel Meurice on West 58th Street. I spent the break between spring and summer quarter with him in New York and throughout my summer quarter on campus, I made three trips to see him—someone was always driving to New York for the weekend. Was I in love? I don’t know, but I was certainly in lust. We had great sex, and our senses of humor meshed delightfully.

            The New York Times job was for upper-classmen; I applied, was accepted, and reported for work on September 28 — and moved in with Jack on the Upper West Side.

 

The job

            I was a copy”boy”—even though I was a girl. There just was no job title of copygirl, and I was the only female in my role on the news floor. The newsroom was immense, stretching from 43rd to 44th Street, and we copyfolk (there were three or four other copyboys, all around my age) stood near one end, waiting to be called to work.

            Our duties were simple: wait for a copyeditor on one of the three nearby desks — city, national, foreign — to call out, “Copy!” One of us would hurry over and take the marked-up story, on one or more sheets of paper, and return to our stand. There, we’d roll up the story, place it in a plastic case, latch the case and place it in a pneumatic tube that would whisk it upstairs to the composing room. We did this many times a day, and while we waited for the call of “Copy!” we read the day’s paper, joked with each other, argued politics. One of the copyboys was conservative, and he and I had an ongoing argument when a white civil rights worker was killed; he insisted that that woman should never have gone South because she had children and her first responsibility was to her children, while I suggested that her responsibility to improve society was also a benefit for her children. Neither of us persuaded the other.

            These three copy desks were like spokes of a wheel, all pointed to where we copyboys stood. Behind us and behind glass doors was the wire room, where stories came in on teletype machines from distant correspondents and the Associated Press. We would collect those stories and take them to either the national or foreign desks. This is how we learned that Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union who had begun the process of admitting Stalin's crimes, was deposed, in October, just a couple of weeks after I’d started work. That was my first thrill learning the news before anyone else in the city.

            One day I got a tour of the composing room and the pressroom. In the composing room, enormous Linotype machines lined one wall. Operators sat at attached keyboards and retyped each story into the machine, which would then spit out hard-type, individual metal letters, and those would be placed in forms by compositors. An editor looked at each form, but because of union rules, the editor had to stand on the opposite side of the form from the compositor and was forbidden to touch the type; thus he (usually a “he”) had to develop the skill of reading upside down and backwards. Each form was inked and a piece of paper pressed on it to produce a galley, so other editors could read in a normal fashion. On another day, I was taken to a large room with a handful of older men reading those galleys; they were proofreaders, but it was strange to learn they were reading yesterday’s paper. They were workers who’d lost their jobs to automation, and this was a union-negotiated way to keep them working. Once they retired, these jobs would be retired as well. Having grown up in a pro-union family, this made a certain sense to me, but I wondered if the men could have been taught a new skill instead.

            On another day, I was shown the pressroom, where enormous, and enormously noisy, presses rolled out the daily paper. I had no idea at the time that almost everything I saw at the New York Times that fall was soon to become obsolete — and the unions would have a hard time negotiating soft landings for their many members.

            Beyond the three copy desks were rows and rows of tables, four chairs at each with a tall manual typewriter in front of each chair. Here’s where the local reporters sat and wrote their stories. Some of these were rewrite men: reporters out on the street called in facts and quotes, while the rewrite men (and they were mostly men) put the information into a readable story. When the writers were done, they’d call, “Copy!” and one of us would take their story to the city desk, no, excuse me, this was the period the city desk was being transformed into the metropolitan desk. More about this later.

 

First a copyboy

            The first six weeks at the Times, I worked as a copyboy. I learned who the writers were behind their bylines: Gay Talese was extremely sexy. R.W. Apple sometimes came down from Albany, David Halberstam arrived from Vietnam for a few days. Only one woman, Edith Evans Asbury,  sat among the local reporters. She was in her 50s and short, almost dwarfed by her large manual typewriter.  Almost all of the staff were men, with a scattering of women who worked as secretaries to the top editors. One secretary, I noticed, sometimes worked on the copy desk on the weekends. (I think this was Deirdre Carmody.) She later became a full-fledged reporter, one of the few before women’s liberation led to a meeting with the then managing editor. But that was in the 1970s, almost 10 years after my Antioch co-op stint. 

            The 1964 national election happened in my sixth week — and my first chance to vote for a president. This was the election between Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had become president the year before after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was working to unite Southern and Western Republicans against what they called the Eastern elites; when he said in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue,” those words enabled Democrats to paint. Goldwater as dangerous. Their campaign TV ad, shown only once, capitalized on “extremism” by showing a small child counting the petals of a daisy, until a voiceover countdown to a nuclear explosion. I had already read about the Tonkin Gulf “confrontation,” which seemed bogus to me, so I was not inclined to vote for LBJ, but there wasn’t a chance I’d vote for Goldwater. I was registered to vote at my parents’ address in Pennsylvania, so applied for an absentee ballot as a student. My protest vote went to Ho Chi Minh, president of North Vietnam, possibly the only vote for him in the state. 

 

Election night at the Times

            On election night, I was one of three copyboys assigned to work in the special room set up for election coverage at the New York Times. Many of the big names were in that room: Tom Wicker, newly head of the Times's Washington Bureau and not yet a columnist; James Reston, the former Washington Bureau chief and then an associate editor; Anthony Lewis (I called him Tony in my letter to my parents), another former Washington Bureau chief; and others from the Times’s Washington bureau, as well as the top editors from the national desk. Everyone authorized to work in that room was given a tag, a small round piece of cardboard on a string that we pinned to our clothing — and there was an actual guard at the entrance to keep out anyone who didn’t have the tag. I personalized mine by drawing the Ban the Bomb symbol; no one commented except the other copyboys.

            The election room had a direct wire to the headquarters of CBS’s Voter Profile Analysis — which I think must have been either early exit polls or actual counts from precincts — while two copyboys at the 44th Street entrance to the Times building brought up material motorcycled over from CBS. Every time a bulletin came from the CBS VPA, a little bell rang, and everyone got all excited. Even though VPA called the election for LBJ shortly after 9 p.m., there was still a paper to get out and lots of stories to write, so everyone continued to work into the night.

            Around midnight, Tom Wicker stood up and in his heavy Southern accent, he declared, “I demand a copyboy go out and get me a beer.” So a copyboy went out and brought back a case of beer, but we copyboys had to buy our own six-pack — or so I told my parents. Can that be true? The Times wouldn’t let us have any of the case of beer?

            At 3:30, the third edition was finally put to bed, and I was able to leave. Out in the newsroom, there were piles of the earlier editions, quite a few reporters and copyeditors at the national desk, but the rest of the newsroom was eerily quiet and dark. I was given money to take a taxi; as a young female, I couldn’t be expected to take the subway at this ungodly hour. The boy copyboys were on their own. (Years later I learned that the next Antioch girl student at the Times as a copygirl was the last; the Times didn't want to deal with all these young females.)

Next, a news clerk

            Because the Times was a daily newspaper, I did not have weekends off; my schedule was Friday–Tuesday. After election day, I had two days off, and when I returned, I was no longer a copyboy. I had been promoted to news clerk. This meant I spent three days a week at the metropolitan desk and the weekend days at the foreign copy desk. I began to see a bit more about how the paper worked, and also the personalities of some of the editors.

            The metropolitan desk. The editor in charge was A.M. Rosenthal, and his deputy was Arthur Gelb.  Why was it no longer the city desk? The name had changed about a year before, and I never got a clear answer to why, but it seemed that “city desk” didn’t sound dignified enough. Was this Rosenthal’s opinion? He clearly thought the name was important, because if Gelb called a reporter to the city desk via the P.A. system, Rosenthal would correct him, and he would have to repeat the call, "to the metropolitan desk."

            The metropolitan desk consisted of two tables. At one, Rosenthal and Gelb faced the long rows of reporters desks and I sat on the other side of the table, directly opposite Rosenthal. But he did not see me. Literally. I might have been transparent as far as he was concerned. One day it seemed to register to him that a girl was sitting three feet away from him as his eyes focused on me. He asked a question, I don’t remember what; I answered, and he promptly forgot me. I wondered if there was some way I could be more interesting, and didn't yet have the confidence even to think, “he’s an asshole.”

            But there was no chatting among anyone at the metropolitan desk. Reporters wrote their stories and brought them to the desk. Gelb or Rosenthal read them, made marks, called the reporter to the desk and told him (it was mostly “him”) how to improve, and then the story was taken by a copyboy to the metropolitan copy desk.

            What did I do? I opened voluminous amounts of mail and distributed it to the appropriate people after it had been properly marked. I answered the phone, and you might or might not be surprised at the number of crazy people who call a newspaper. Well, they weren’t always crazy, but their reasons for calling often seemed ludicrous. One week there was a dental convention in town, so the PR person for the dental association called every day to repeat to me the events at the convention that day, even though he had already sent us a press release listing the daily events at the convention. One was an exhibit of Brigham Young’s denture, which was made in 1851 by the first Jewish convert to Mormonism. A blind woman called to express her appreciation for the newspaper helping her find her canine companion 10 years (!) ago, and continued to talk for several minutes. I thought it would be rude to hang up on her, but after 15 minutes, I was told that I should just do that.

            The foreign copy desk was somewhat more interesting, but had its own idiosyncrasies. All the foreign stories came via the teletype machine, and in numerous “takes.” My job was to keep track of all the stories coming in, collate all the pages, and when a story was complete, I attached the pages with a paperclip and handed the story to the foreign copy chief. Stories did not come in sequence, either; sometimes I’d get pages 2, 4, 5, then 3, then 1. I learned that a story was complete when a page had “30” or “###” typed at the end. I also learned that there is a right way and wrong way to attach a paperclip. The foreign desk copy chief insisted that the small part of the clip be on the front. It had never occurred to me that one way was better than the other, but I learned to pay attention.

             The foreign desk copy chief handed completed stories to the copy editor who had the proper expertise: the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain. The only copy editor I remember is Betsy Wade, because she was the only woman on the foreign, or any, copy desk. (Wade was lead plaintiff on the landmark 1974 sex discrimination case against the Times.) It never occurred to me to talk to her, and there’s no reason she would have talked to me; there certainly was no time. The copy desks were always busy. Even though we were working on what was called the “dayside,” and as a morning paper, the Times’s busiest times were in the evening, there was still always work to be done. There might be chatting about a story someone was working on, perhaps a question of fact one copy editor wasn’t sure of or couldn’t remember, but there was no casual conversation.

 

How the New York Times was different then

            In the paper I wrote to get co-op, or work, credit, I marveled at what the Times produced. What other newspaper printed the entire text of the Warren Commission’s summary report on the assassination of JFK and the killing of his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in  September 1964? What other newspaper printed the entire text of the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the church in the modern world, in November 1964? What other newspaper continued to publish updated election results for days after the election? Nowadays, in the time of the internet, nothing like these documents are printed in any newspaper, though they might be published as instant books — think the Mueller Report. Much of this information goes online, where it has to be sought out by anyone who’s interested.

 

Meanwhile, there was personal life

            Jack had rented an apartment on the Upper West Side, 82nd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. On the corner of Columbus was a bodega run by Cuban exiles. When Jack went there to buy beer, he thought it was funny to sing revolutionary songs; they just laughed, they were safe in the capitalist U.S. of A. On Columbus was a diner-type restaurant called Joe’s Seafood, where we ate many cheap meals; our kitchen was minimal, a stove so old it stood on legs and maybe only about two feet wide. And Jack found a civil rights group affiliated with CORE to join, which met in a storefront on the other side of Columbus Avenue.

            A few weeks after I moved in with Jack, my father, in town for business, called to invite me to dinner. (There had not been a phone in the apartment until I moved in. Jack seemed to think it was cool to be incommunicado with the world.) Dinner turned out to be an ordeal. My father had come by my address and noticed my name and Jack’s name on the same mailbox. My mother also arrived for dinner from their Philadelphia suburb, and they both behaved like any conservative parents of the 1950s, even though it was well into the 1960s and they were far to the left politically.

            I got home just after Jack had returned from a CORE meeting, furious at my parents, who would be fine about our living together if we were planning to get married. Jack said, why don’t we get married? I wasn’t thinking about getting married, I had just gone back to college and still had more than a year to go. On the other hand, I was a girl raised in the 1950s. I thought I had to get married — and maybe no one else would ever ask me. I could say yes, mollify my parents, and if it didn’t work out, we could always get divorced. When I called my parents a couple of days later to announce we would be getting married, my father said, “We’re not forcing you to do this, are we?” “Oh, no,” I replied, silently furious at them.

            (I called a few New York relatives who I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and Esther, one of my mother’s aunts, married to Morris, said, “Is he Jewish? [pause] Morris wants to know.” A question, to their credit, my parents never asked. And he wasn't.)

            We got married at City Hall the day before Thanksgiving, with only our best friend Gerald attending, and went to Top of the Sixes to celebrate. I wore a cream-colored crocheted dress I’d bought at Macy’s (and never wore again) — why did I think I should wear any near-white color? Then we went to Sylvia’s, another good friend, where we helped prep for Thanksgiving dinner the next day, then played bridge late into the night. Very romantic.

            A week earlier we had gone to a Progressive Labor party at a huge apartment on Riverside Drive. Jack sat in an Eames lounge chair, and I sat on his lap and told him this was a very expensive chair. I wonder now whether the hosts were among the radical chic Tom Wolfe wrote about six years later.

            I noted in my datebook a few movies — Topkapi, Point of Order, Beckett — saw Dave Van Ronk at Carnegie Hall, and the Messiah at Lincoln Center (I had sung the Hallelujah Chorus in high school and loved this music). My last day at the Times was December 26, and we took the bus to Washington, D.C., for a New Year’s Eve party. I took an overnight bus back to Antioch College on January 2.

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.

Job #5: NIH Normal Control, Spring 1962

            What, you may ask, is a “normal control”? She (or he) is the person in a scientific study who represents those not the subjects of the study, those who those sujects are measured against or compared to, to try to determine what in the subject is causing the problem the scientists are studying.

            Why did I want to be a normal control? As I’ve mentioned before, I felt through my teen years, and I was still 19, that I was deeply neurotic, and I had some vague sense that if I volunteered to be a normal control, the experts—the doctors and scientists at the National Institutes of Health—would either reject me, confirming my sense that I was not normal, or accept me, thus certifying that I was, really, NORMAL, after all.

            I don’t remember if there was any kind of test for the job, but in the beginning of April I was on my way to Bethesda, Maryland, where for three months I would live in the Clinical Center, essentially a large hospital with many doctors’ offices. So room and board were provided, and I had some sort of small stipend. This turned out to be one of those life turning points, which I didn’t recognize at the time.

            This being a hospital, each floor was divided into two wards, with 10 rooms per ward, and in the middle a large common area where we had our meals. My ward was 7West, and as the only “girl” I had a room to myself, but the men shared, two to a room. There was one other Antioch co-op, Gary, who aspired to be a doctor (which is what he ultimately became, according to the alumni directory), three or four men who were conscientious objectors and serving as normal control for their alternative service, and there were perhaps another four men who were prisoners. (These men were serving time for relatively mild offenses, and had volunteered to be normal controls so as to not be in actual prison. They all stayed at one end of the hall, along with the two guards who followed them Everywhere. One day we played a kind of pickup softball game on the NIH grounds, and the two guards stood way out in the outfield, shouldering rifles, in case any of the prisoners took it into their heads to try to escape.)

            I was the only girl, but the way I made myself feel comfortable was to think of myself as “one of the boys.” I was almost 20, but I still had never had a boyfriend, though I wasn’t a virgin either. So while I had a crush on one of the conscientious objectors, I didn’t know how to flirt or otherwise show my interest. My crush was Skip, who was older, close to 30, and a CO for political reasons. He was handsome and sexy, dark hair, not much taller than me, a little burly, but he showed no romantic interest, instead he may have tried proselytizing, but seemed too intense in his theory. Virgil was a CO for religious reasons, a member of the Church of the Brethren, and from Ohio. Had he heard of Antioch College, also in Ohio, or was he from some other part of the state? We had a date, but later, after I’d left NIH and moved into D.C. for my next co-op job, but more about that later. Mostly, the group of us, along with some of the young people also living at the Clinical Center (more about them later), hung out as a group, not much pairing off.

            NIH grounds. This was a fairly large complex, north of Washington, D.C., with numerous buildings for administration, laboratories, and I think animals. The laboratories were surrounded by rose bushes, which in June put out intoxicating scent. The big lawn in front of the Clinical Center was bordered by large firs, with their own competing aroma. One warm night in early June I was out for a walk and lay down on the thick lawn grass, staring up at the star-filled sky. I knew each of those tiny sparkles was a star, possibly like our Sun, and here I was on a planet looking out at eternity, feeling as much a part of the universe as each of those stars. An enormous exaltation filled me, a connection to those stars billions of miles away, just as much a part of nature as they were. Perhaps this was a spiritual experience, but coming from an atheist family, I didn’t have that language. I just knew it was a wonderful feeling.

            So what did I do at the Clinical Center? I think I took part in only a couple of studies, and I remember only one of them. A dentist wondered how human saliva differed when it was provoked by different tastes—salty, sour, sweet, maybe another—and whether the saliva from the different glands was the same or also different. I spent a couple of hours on a couple of days sitting in a dental chair with tubes in my mouth to collect saliva while different substances were applied to my mouth. Not very comfortable, and I never learned what if anything was learned from what dripped out of my mouth. At least I was never told there was anything abnormal.

            What did I do with the rest of my time? I was essentially free labor for any doctors who needed it, and I was assigned to a psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Friedman, who was studying how people reacted to chronic stress. His subjects? The parents of children with acute leukemia, which in the early 1960s was still incurable. Doctors at NIH were studying possible treatments, and as the largest hospital in the South working on possible treatments, most of the parents who brought their sons or daughters for treatment came from the South. Dr. Friedman or people on his team interviewed these parents at length—and my job was to transcribe those audiotaped interviews.

            The job was both tedious and fascinating. Tedious because I sat at a desk all day long, headphones on, learning how to operate the recorder for playback. Fascinating because each set of parents was different, unique, unlike anyone I knew. I learned to decipher different regional accents. In some couples, the husband did most of the talking, in others it was more equal. They often talked about their child’s illness in great detail, how it started, what they first noticed, how they’d come to NIH expecting, hoping for a miracle. It was most painful to listen to those parents whose child was dying; some seemed able to accept that it could happen, but most kept hoping that yet another remission would occur. I had no regular hours, just coming to Dr. Friedman’s office a few hours a day, transcribing as much as I could. Sometimes I would finish all the tapes there were and would wait until he’d let me know there were more.

            At NIH, I began reading the newspaper more regularly. The Washington Post was delivered to our ward, and I’d read over breakfast. I noticed stories about a country called Laos near Vietnam. Vietnam stuck in my memory from 1954, when the division of the country into North and South had been on the front page of “My Weekly Reader,” a student newspaper from Scholastic, along with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. Those 1962 news stories kept me attached to the Vietnam situation as it developed over the following years.

            What else was there to do? There was that softball game. One June night there was an excursion to some local venue for music, and we hung out the porch waiting for the music and watching huge June bugs fling themselves against the ceiling light and fall, burned, to the floor.

            There were quite a few young people living at the Clinical Center for various studies of mental illness. Some were part of a study of families of schizophrenics, and I learned an important lesson from one of them. Norma was about my age, Normal Norma we called her—but not to her face. When she was okay, I noticed, she was just like all the normal people I knew, not focused on herself, not anxious, not worrying what other people thought of her. But one evening I went down to her ward to see if she wanted to hang out—and the ward was locked. “Can I see Norma?” I asked a nurse through the door. “Norma is having a break,” the nurse replied. Another day, I was in Dr. Friedman’s office transcribing. The office doors had large glass windows, and when I looked up, there was Norma, on the other side of the glass, her hands up as though trying to claw through the window. She could easily have just opened the door, but that was beyond her at that moment. A nurse came along and walked her away from the door. The lesson: perhaps neurotics didn’t have psychotic breaks like Norma’s, on the other hand, being “normal” didn’t assure you would always be so.

            There was another girl, Susan, a year younger than me, working at NIH. She had started dating Gary, but we also became friendly. She had been kicked out of the University of Illinois the previous year for violating what were then called “parietal rules”; for example, girls had to be in their dorms no later than 11 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on weekends, and boys could not be in a girl’s dorm room, or if it was, he had to keep both feet on the floor. Antioch College had no such rules, we could be out as long as we wanted and have boys in our room so long as it didn’t inconvenience our roommate. This state of affairs was so well known that boys from nearby colleges often came to Antioch and roamed the girls’ dorm halls on Friday and Saturday nights looking for what they assumed must be wild parties. We girls found them just boring.

            Susan was living at home and wanted to get her own place, but needed a roommate. And here came the turning point. I had been wondering whether I should return to college. The previous quarter I had gotten nothing but C’s, which as far as I was concerned might as well have been F’s. What was I doing in college anyway? I knew that when I returned to Antioch in the fall, I would have to create a Five-Year Plan, declaring a major and figuring out whether the required courses would be available on the quarters I would be on campus over the next three years. I was no nearer to figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, let alone what my major might be. I’d never set foot in the theater, the only English class I’d had was boring, philosophy was “sentences about sentences,” and the history professor everyone adored I hated. Maybe I should take some time off and, now that I had some experience, get a job and stay put in one place for a while.

            And here was Susan, looking for a roommate. We talked, we agreed. I had another Antioch co-op job to go to in Washington for the summer, and a roommate already lined up for that, but sometime in the summer, I’d officially withdraw and move in with Susan wherever she found an apartment.

Job #4: In Los Angeles, and Then Not

Why did I choose Los Angeles for my next Antioch Co-op job? Maybe it was because it was about psychology. The job was receptionist and only full-time person at the Graduate Psychology Clinic at the University of Southern California, where students getting master’s degrees of Ph.D.s could see clients, and then discuss with their advisers. Maybe I thought I might get some free therapy—I still thought I was extremely neurotic, which was how I explained my general unhappiness.

            To get to L.A., I was going to fly for the first time. At that time, 1961, there was a ticket called “student standby”: if you were a student, you could show up at the airport, and if there were empty seats on the flight you wanted, you got to fly for cheap. I don’t remember how cheap; my parents must have paid for this.

            I had met a very un-handsome man—short, stubby face, grayish buzz cut—who was stationed at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (the words “Peace is our profession” were huge on the fence banner surrounding the base)—men from nearby colleges and Wright-Pat hung out at Antioch because they’d heard there were open dorms and no house-mothers. When he heard I had to be at the Dayton Airport at 6 in the morning to have a chance of getting on the first flight, he offered to take. This meant I hung out at his apartment all evening and night. At first it was like a party—his friends, my friends who hadn’t left for their jobs yet—then it was night. We sat up talking, necked a bit. I had lost my virginity that summer, but wasn’t eager to continue; he had a wife somewhere. It was still dark when we set out for the airport.

            Etta James’s “At Last” was the hit song of the summer, and we heard it dozens of times that evening, night, and on the drive to the airport. That song still evokes my apprehension and excitement, sends little thrills down my back. Was I going to be afraid of flying, as I heard some people were? There were only two other Antioch students going to jobs in the L.A. area; what would it be like to be totally on my own? Dawn brightened to our right as we neared the airport; it was the first time I had seen a sunrise. We kissed chastely as he dropped me near the entrance, and I carried my suitcase inside. (No wheelies yet.)

            I was able to get on the first flight to L.A.; in those days, airlines were required to fly the number of flights in their schedule, no matter how few passengers. Flying turned out to be delicious; I didn’t feel detached from the ground, even when we were 30,000 feet up. I had the absurd feeling the plane was attached by an enormously long pole to a truck down below, so felt perfectly safe.

            The Schecters met me in L.A., old friends of my parents I had never met. I was to stay with them for a few days until I found a place to live and started my job. Their house, near Beverly Hills, was very quiet. One day I had dinner with Robin, the Antioch student who was just leaving the job. She was friendly and warm, told me I would love the job, cued me in to the various professors and students. It was dark by the time I returned to the Schecters’, taking a bus that left me at Wilshire Boulevard and their street. Houses sat behind large lawns, but the quiet—no kids playing on the street, no people sitting outside—was so unnerving that the click-clack of my heels on the sidewalk felt like it was attracting some crazy person that a lone woman was out here. I took off my shoes to walk barefoot. When I arrived at the Schecters, I was told that NOBODY walked in Beverly Hills, and it wouldn’t have surprised her if I’d been stopped by the police and asked, what was I doing?

            Apartment hunting was also a bit unnerving. L.A. seemed full of garden apartment complexes in U-shape around a swimming pool, looking like a motel, with rent way more than I could afford. I still hadn’t found anything by the Sunday before I was to report for work. So the Schecters dropped me at the YWCA in downtown, near a bus route that would take me to the university. There I shared a room with a woman maybe in her 40s, who suggested I try rooming houses near USC. I finally found a place on the third day of work, and Thursday morning, I carried my suitcase to my new home before setting off to work. After work, I took the bus to a shopping street where I could stock up on food for my new home, and was surprised to find one aisle entirely filled with beer and wine. In Pennsylvania, where I’d lived all through high school, all liquor was sold in “package stores”; was this a way to make it harder for minors to acquire it? I bought way too much food, three bags worth, and this is the days before grocery bags had handles. I had a hard time making my way off the bus and walking the two blocks and up the stairs to my room on the second floor. My room, which was utterly silent because I had no radio.

            I put away the food in the tiny half refrigerator and sat down on the couch that would turn into my bed. It was quiet, too quiet. No sounds of passing cars or people walking under my window, as there had been in New York City. I had no radio, having left mine back at school—it didn’t fit in my suitcase. I had asked the Schecters whether they could help me find a radio, and they said they’d give me one. They hadn’t, yet. But the quiet was oppressive, frightening. I was used to the sounds of roommates, hallmates, and especially the radio, tuned to music.

            There was a pay phone in the hall outside my room. I called the Schecters, asked about the radio, trying not to sound like I was begging. Mrs. Schecter was curt; her husband was very busy at the moment, they’d see what they could do when they had a chance. I went back to my room, disconsolate, sat on the couch, and started to cry. I sobbed, for what felt like forever, and wondered if I was going crazy. I couldn’t stay here—and by “here” I meant more than this room in this rooming house. I called my boss, who had given me his home number in case he was needed in the office on days he wasn’t scheduled to be there. “I can’t stay here,” I said, shakily, “I think I need to go home, but I don’t want to mess up the job for Antioch.” He said, “Don’t worry. Meet me at the clinic.”

            I had decided I had to “go home,” though I didn’t really want to, but it was the only thing I could think of to get out of this situation. Once I’d made a decision, I began to feel better, more sturdy, that there was solid ground beneath my feet. My boss offered to let me spend the night at his home; his wife was used to students showing up. I called my parents; my mother asked, hesitating, “Are you all right?” How did I know she meant, “Are you pregnant?” I reassured her I was not.

            The next day, Friday, I went to work for the last time. A very handsome graduate student took me out to lunch—we sat outside in the sun. He’d heard that I was leaving and tried to persuade me to stay. But now I felt stuck; I’d made a decision, and if I changed my mind, I’d seem flighty, unsure of myself, and uncertainty was exactly what I needed to escape. Grownups didn’t waffle. I was 19, but was sure I was a grownup.

            The next day I was on a plane to New York, and on to Philadelphia, where this story continues...