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?

SOL Tuesday: Digitally Documenting Kid Stuff

             I save too much stuff. Mostly, I save papers and/or objects because I have a project in mind. Sometimes, though, it’s pure sentimentality. Here’s one from the latter category.

            In the mid-1970s, a company offered to families a cute way to save small children’s artwork; paper on the refrigerator door doesn’t last that long. This company sent some sort of specially treated paper the child would draw on; parents then sent the paper back to the company, which fused the drawing onto a Texas Ware melamine plate, which then became the child’s own dinner plate.

            I no longer remember whether I found out about this or it was something my mother or aunt sent us. So I had my then maybe four-year-old daughter do three of these plates, and this is the last one I have. I offered it to my now 50-year-old daughter whether she wanted it, and she said no. (She has little sentimentality.) Since she has no kids herself, there’s no one in the direct family who’d have any interest in it. 

            So I am now free/required/forced to throw it away. Here's the plate. If anyone reads this and might have some sort of use for it, speak now and I’ll mail it to you. 

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Job #9: Three psychoanalysts, winter-spring 1963

            Drs. Chodoff, Legault, and Kneipp shared an office on the second floor of what might have once been a private home, with a couple of white columns in front. However, I rarely used the front door, since it took way less time to walk out the back door of our apartment, go up to the alley, then up the fire-escape stairs to the psychoanalysts’ office.

            I was what was called a girl Friday, meaning I did everything: answer the phone, make appointments, send out bills, order office supplies (which included making sure there was plenty of coffee, cream, and sugar), maintain the office accounts (writing checks, including my own paycheck), and keep up the magazine subscriptions. There was little typing, since the doctors only made handwritten notes that went into patients’ files. But some of Dr. Chodoff’s patients were men or women who had been victims of Nazi persecution in the 1930s or were survivors of concentration camps; the West German government paid reparations after receiving reports on what the person had suffered. Dr. Chodoff would see these people for two or three visits, then prepare a report that I would type up. These were harrowing for me to read. And coincidentally, Dr. Chodoff was coauthoring a paper with Dr. Friedman at NIH, the same doctor I’d worked for the previous spring who was studying stress in the parents of children with leukemia, and I typed a long final draft of it.

            Around the same time, I discovered the New Yorker, one of the magazines the doctors subscribed to for the waiting room, and this winter, Hannah Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann appeared in that magazine. I was riveted by her account.

            Dr. Chodoff was also treasurer for the Washington Psychiatric Society, so I was writing checks for that account. And Dr. Legault put me in charge of all of his bookkeeping. Every month, he gave me a pile of personal bills and his checkbook, and I was to pay everything and note on a ledger what expenses were tax deductible, which meant I had to learn about tax deductibility.

            Writing my own paycheck presented another task: did I want to be paid weekly, twice weekly, twice a month, or monthly? There was a booklet from the IRS that provided guidance for how much federal tax should be deducted based on the time period, and I calculated that I preferred to be paid twice a month. Then I had to be sure that the amount withheld from my pay was paid to the U.S. government.

            Soon after I started with the psychoanalysts, Susan coming home from work passed men carrying out piles of books and boxes from a building on our street. It turned out to be a raid on Scientology offices, written up here in the Washington Post; I sent the clipping to my parents. Susan had wondered who the Scientologists were and called to ask for information; she was told they’d send a brochure, which they never did. She picked up one of the booklets littering the street, but never got involved.

            At first, I missed the sociability of the UWF office. There wasn’t much interaction with the doctors, in fact, I had nothing to do with Dr. Kneipp, since he sent out his own bills and made his own appointments, but he did drink the coffee. As weeks went on, though, I got more friendly with Dr. Chodoff and Dr. Legault, as well as relishing the occasional free time I had to read the New Yorker and other magazines. I was intrigued to learn that Dr. Legault did needlepoint while he listened to his patients — did they mind, I wondered? He did some very lovely patterns and took the finished canvases to a shop that turned them into pillows.

            I did enjoy going home for lunch, which was often a boiled hotdog, mustard as the vegetable. Maybe I also had the corn relish I made from a New York Times recipe, because I had already started collecting recipes and cooking. Susan and I both enjoyed cooking. This did save money: no having to buy lunch or pay bus fare to get to work.

            This was the period of Polish jokes and little moron jokes, and Susan often called me at work with the latest one she’d heard. I don’t know why, but these just didn’t seem funny to me.

            I was settling into this job, when on Memorial Day, I received a telegram at home. United World Federalists wanted to know if I’d consider coming back. I had never been sought after before, and this was yet another offer I couldn’t refuse. So I went back to UWF in mid-December.

SOLTuesday: Rats!

There were rats, rats, rats as big as cats,
In the store, in the store.
There were rats, rats, rats as big as cats,
In the Quartermaster's store.

 

Maybe I first heard this song on a Burl Ives album, or from Pete Seeger. Wikipedia says it’s an old folk song, dating at least to World War I, or even older, perhaps to the English Civil War of the 17th century. I thought of it this morning.

            I grew up mostly in the country and suburbs, so I never saw a rat until I was living in a city, in Washington, D.C. I was walking home from work and happened to glance to my left, where an alley opened to the street. There was a creature, not as big as a cat, but big, just sitting there, staring out, its eyes red in the twilight. I scurried past it quickly.

            Moving to New York City, the occasional rat has run past me away from the trash bags waiting for the Department of Sanitation. Last year, one was rummaging through a trash basket at the end of my street, and I tried to call the city help line to report it. Perhaps I was successful,
because I haven’t seen any near that trash basket since.

            Then, this morning, out for a walk along Riverside Drive before it got hot, I saw this creature. Obviously dead, dried blood streaking the pavement. What had happened to it? Was it poisoned? Or had some larger creature attacked it? I wasn’t sure which was more unnerving, having a rat run past me, or seeing a dead one on the street. I thought about Albert Camus’s The Plague.

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Job #8: United World Federalists I, fall 1962

            After being fired by the lawyers, I was nervous about a new job. But United World Federalists seemed perfectly satisfied with my typing and I was hired, as receptionist and secretary to Albert Mark, the public relations director. Public relations director may sound grand, but he was one person supervising a staff of one person, me. I read some of the brochures that UWF sent to those asking for information on the organization, and learned that UWF was part of a world movement to create if not a world government, at least a world system of law that everyone would agree to. “World Peace Through World Law” was a common slogan.

            I went to work there shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, and one of the first things I saw UWF do was send a telegram to President Kennedy that said, essentially, we support whatever you as the president of the United States do, but if we had world peace through world law, we wouldn’t be facing this kind of crisis. A book that the organization sold was World Peace Through World Law, by Louis B. Sohn and Grenville Clarke. I took a copy home, but could not wade through it. The idea sounded good, and I became a member — and I even recommended my parents join, but I don’t think they did.

            I began to learn a bit about how such an organization worked. For one thing, we sent out newsletters to the various chapters of UWF around the country. These were typed on special mimeograph stencils (which had to be perfectly typed because it was nearly impossible to make corrections), then wrapped around a cylinder that was inked, and then hand-cranked to produce the finished pages. Only one page could be done at a time, so one task involved piles of each page of the document laid on a table, and everyone in the office walked around the table, collating one page at a time, and stapling the completed document with a heavy-duty stapler. “Everyone,” in this case, meant the secretaries and the office manager, that is to say, the women. The men, the heads of the various “departments” (public relations, membership, business, political), sat in their offices doing their important work.

            Just a couple of weeks after starting at UWF, however, I heard an offer I couldn’t refuse. While having dinner at Susan’s parents’ home in Bethesda, one of her father’s colleagues, another psychoanalyst, calling to report that his receptionist/secretary had just quit and did Susan know of anyone who wanted a job. What appealed to me the most was that the job was literally around the corner from where Susan and I lived, and the pay was $80 a week instead of $75. I gave UWF two weeks notice and started working for three psychoanalysts in the middle of December.

Job #7: Law firm, fall 1962

            The law firm was called Krieger & Jorgensen, and its office was in a townhouse, up several steps to the front door. The front room, what might have been the parlor, was the lawyers’ main office, while the secretary and clerk-typists were in a small room in the back. I was one of the two clerk-typists and was paid $70 a week, with the promise of a raise to $80 in a month if I worked out satisfactorily.

            The secretary, who also headed the office, was a tall, middle-aged Black woman who wore her hair in a 1940s style. She was stern and correct. There was no kidding or casual banter. I don’t remember her name, so let’s call her Mrs. C.

            I came in, sat at my desk, and did the work assigned to me. And while it’s easy to describe, it was not so easy to perform.

            The firm represented clients to the FCC, so clients were radio and TV stations, including some of what was then called educational TV, and most of the work the firm did was to help the stations renew their licenses to broadcast, which was required then every three years. These stations were all over the country, so communication between the lawyers and their clients was primarily by letter. The lawyers thus wanted these letters to be or at least look perfect. No mistakes, or anything that looked like a mistake.

            This was still the days of white paper and carbon paper; carbon sets may not yet have existed, and copying machines were certainly not common in small offices. One carbon copy was the minimum (original letter to the client, one copy for the file), but if a letter was being written to the FCC, that meant two copies: one for the client, one for the file. Sometimes we might need to make four copies.

            Nobody is a perfect typist. What happened if one made a mistake? Liquid paper, a precursor to Wite-Out, existed, but Mrs. C would have none of it. It revealed that there had been a mistake. And we did not yet have electronic typewriters that let you backspace and retype a wrong letter on the same line. Mrs. C was a genius at erasing a mistake so that it looked like it had never happened, and not only on the bond paper original, but also the carbon copies.

            In those days there was a hard rubber eraser shaped like a flat wheel with a metal circle in the center and a brush attached. The trick was first, roll the paper and copies up a few lines so you could reach the copies, then erase the mistake on the carbon copies, brushing off any debris, next erase the mistake on the bond paper, then carefully roll the paper back to original position, and type the correct letter. Erasing was tricky; you couldn't do it so hard that you abraded the surface of the paper, but it had to be hard enough to remove all visible ink. This was hard.

           There was also filing, tons of it, because of all the correspondence, but also copies of all the applications and supporting documents. I tried to read as much of the documents I was filing as I could, thinking I'd learn something about communications law.

            Mostly I remember trying to master this erasure trick, because I could not type perfectly, no matter how slowly and carefully I went. Often I had to toss what I’d typed and start over. Documents were the hardest, because they were many pages, and if I made a mistake near the bottom of a page, it was impossible to do the roll up/erase/roll down/retype; I’d have to retype the entire page. There was little chitchat in the office, either, because Mrs. C believed in coming in, doing the work, and going home.

            The only client I remember this firm representing was Pacifica, the listener-supported station in California, but why do I remember that? Pacifica did not have a station in Washington, D.C., but perhaps the fact that Pacifica’s license was being held up by the FCC that year, which was investigating the Pacifica Foundation for “communist affiliations,” made it stick in my mind.

            I'd barely started working here than world affairs turned dangerous. My first week, rumors were all over Washington about something happening regarding Cuba. At the end of the weekend we learned that President Kennedy was going to address the nation on Monday night, and since my roommate, Susan, and I didn’t have a TV, she called her father, who picked us up after work and took us home with him for dinner and the speech. Soviet ships were sailing toward Cuba, and American ships were out there going to stop them. We were terrified, though her father tried to talk us down. Back home, we discussed what we would do when (not if) we heard the air-raid sirens. There was a fallout shelter in a public space just a block away from our apartment, at Dupont Circle. Would we rush to the shelter? Or would we start drinking all the wine we had? (Ten years later, I wrote in my journal: "I don't think then I really believed in my own death. I think I was as much excited as I was terrified.")

            Susan worked at Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies, and her boss, S.L.A. Marshall, had just written an article on Cuba for the New Republic, which almost predicted something like this. All that week, he was "the Expert" on Cuba, getting phone calls from reporters wanting to pick his brain. At the end of each day, the director would say, “See you all tomorrow [pause], God willing.” The weather in Washington was warm for October, and on Wednesday I ate my lunch in the little park between K Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. To the south, dark clouds piled up. A storm approaching? a harbinger of the nuclear war that might happen any minute?

            By the end of that week, the Soviet ships on their way to Cuba had stopped and turned around. There was no nuclear confrontation. Life could go back to normal.

            Outside of work, I had finally moved in with Susan, the young woman I’d met at NIH. We lived a block above Dupont Circle, a neighborhood of small row houses, many turned into apartments. Our apartment was the literal ground floor, the front door four steps down, and it also had a back door that led to an alley down the middle of the block, which opened onto Q Street. (Washington has lots of alleys. This alley will play a role in a later decision concerning job #9.) The office was a straight line down New Hampshire Avenue from Dupont Circle, and often I walked there and back instead of taking a bus.

            I was dating a boy named Aldace Newton Howard III (he liked to recite that sometimes), called Aldie, who’d been a transfer student to Antioch, then dropped out and enlisted in the Navy. Veterans Day (not yet a federal holiday) weekend he had leave and came up to Washington so we could spend the weekend together. Since he arrived on Friday, I called in sick that day — I know, calling in sick when you haven’t even been working somewhere for a month is probably not a good idea, but I was still a kid, barely 20.

            I came to work on Monday, the actual Veterans Day, and was surprised to find the office mostly dark (it hadn't been a holiday where I went to high school) and only one lawyer on the premises. Let’s call him Mr. M, since I don’t remember any of their names. Mr. M called me into his office and very gently told me that he was sorry, but this job did not seem like the right one for me. He said I was a smart girl and he was sure I would find the best place elsewhere — and I could have two more weeks.

            I was being fired. Was it because I’d called in sick on Friday? Was my typing really that awful? I wasn't going to get that raise. It was back to the employment agencies.

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.

SOL Tuesday: How Not to Wake Up in the Morning

            I have a sleep-monitoring app on my phone—because I think a device will tell me what time I’ve gone to sleep and how long I’ve been awake in the middle of the night better than my memory will. I know, that’s probably a wrong assumption, but there it is.

            Anyway, the sleep-monitoring app wants my phone to be near the head of my bed, and since I don’t have a night table, I place the phone on the shelf of my headboard. The app also has an alarm, unlike any alarm I’ve ever had—it plays a succession of musical notes in a rising sequence, starting from lower or higher notes, and starting quietly, then gradually getting louder. It runs through this pattern for perhaps three minutes, stops, and a few minutes more it starts again. To my surprise, it actually does wake me up, but always in the best way.

            Yesterday morning, the app woke me, but not fully. Then my real alarm, the beeping of my clock radio, woke me harder, and I wanted to turn off the humming of the phone app. I fumbled for the phone in a still half-awake state, and knocked the phone out of the headboard—and somehow into the narrow space between the headboard and my bed.

        Let me explain this setup. I have a captain’s bed with three drawers on each side. There is no “under the bed” space. When I bought this bed a few years ago, to replace the previous captain’s bed whose drawers were falling apart, I also bought a new headboard. The previous headboard was also old, given to my husband by a former employer decades ago. It was also separate from the bed, so if something fell under the headboard, we could move the bed to reach it. 

            When the new bed was delivered, the deliverymen installed the headboard, then started bolting the bed to the headboard. I was surprised. I thought of asking them not to do that, because I imagined that I might drop something under the headboard, and then I wouldn’t be able to move the bed to get to it. But I didn’t. I let them bolt the two structures together, and for seven years I was careful to push the mattress as close to the headboard as it would go, to not leave any space for something to fall through.

            Until yesterday morning. There was the phone, lying on the floor under the headboard, out of reach. As if injected with adrenaline, I fairly leaped out of bed, grabbed the headboard, and yanked. Somehow I managed to move the whole structure maybe five inches away from the wall (I’m almost 80 and have been to the gym only sporadically because of Covid the past couple of years, but that adrenaline really works).

            Next I marched to the kitchen to get the arm extender that had been my mother’s, a foldable tool with a handle at one end, a grabber at the other. I managed to use that tool to reach the phone and edge it close to where I could reach in and retrieve it. Whew!

            Then I had to move the whole contraption back against the wall. I could pull with my arms, but I couldn’t push. Instead, I sat on the floor, back to the bed, feet against a dresser in a convenient place. It was hard, but I did manage to push the bed/headboard back against the wall.

            Success! Yet exhaustion. I really hadn’t wanted to wake up that way. It was several minutes before I got out of bed for the day.

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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. Add one of your own.

 

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.

SOL Tuesday: My Day

I may have mentioned that the trade magazine I freelance for is having its 150th anniversary this year, and it is putting together a special issue, for which I am doing all the copyediting, as well as trafficking every story through the production process in a timely fashion.

            We’re in the closing section this week, as have the 272 pages have to go to the printer next Monday and the rest next Tuesday. So I spent all of today in the office, reading captions and pull quotes, cleaning up text files, notifying the art department what was ready for them. Noticing little details, like a cross-reference in one article to another article that may actually not be relevant, or questioning whether three sets of ellipses in a pull quote are really necessary.

            I am grateful when an editor or author says, “fine with me,” when I make a suggestion.

            Now I have to go to bed. More to do tomorrow.

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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.

 

Poem-a-Day 3: Haiku Golden Shovels

A three-line headline calls for a haiku golden shovel. Here are two.

What is history
But loss and beauty hammered
Into a burnt home.

Here's your history
Bound by tinsel and hammered
By tears into home.

Poem-a-Day 2: War?

The bombs fall in the predawn for

Maximum fear. If they are real. A meta

War sends bombs upward toward workers

Pulling strings on paper planes. The rules

Require no casualties in a beta test of

Fantasy dreams death cleansing war

Of fear and blood, while the bombs keep

Falling down and up, down and up, shifting.

 

A golden shovel based on a New York Times headline.

Poem-a-Day 1: Who Is Free in a Free Market

For National Poetry Month, I’m trying the golden shovel format with New York Times headlines again. Too busy yesterday to start on day 1, so will try to get another poem before today ends.

 

Workers at Amazon on Staten Island, not all

But a majority, all that were needed to hail

A new union, one of their own creation. The

Organizing, phone calls, crowdfunding send a scorching

Message to owners: we are not robots, our labor

Comes in human bodies. We are not free in a free market.