SOLSC 16: Ukraine

My mother’s parents, Liz and Sam, met in New York City in the early 20th century. Both came from what is now south-central Ukraine, a town called Khotin, or Chotin, or Hotin, depending on whether you spoke Russin, Yiddish, or Ukrainian. (There were also Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish names, but I didn’t record them when I worked as part of a team of 12 copy editors on a massive revision of the Columbia Gazetteer in the late 1990s. Khotin was ruled or had residents who spoke all of these languages over the ages, and it was named first in the third century. It was also at the northern tip of what was also called Bessarabia.)

            Liz’s family ran a small restaurant in their apartment for “landsman,” people from their region of the world. Khotin became part of Romania between the wars, but when WWII came, Romania pushed many of its Jews across the Dniester River, where the German, and some Ukrainians killed as many as they could. (It doesn’t seem to be part of what is now called Transnistria, though that name was applied to the area when Jews were killed en masse.)  Liz corresponded with her family back in Khotin until the war, but after, my mother told me, there was silence.

            So, while I know there is no more family in Ukraine, I still closely follow the news coming from there now, hoping the war will stay away from that city (last population around 10,000). Many around the world are watching with horror what is happening, and those with families still there are much more connected than I am. Yet I still feel connected to a place I have never been and know almost no family stories about.

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SOLC 15: More Cooking

Today I followed a recipe. It’s a very good recipe. I had made this dish before. Cod & Harissa Tagine with Olives and Almonds. I found it in a magazine called Milk Street, published by the man who 

started America’s Test Kitchen and put out “Cooks Illustrated,” a magazine in which articles described how the recipe testers tried different methods, which ones worked and which ones didn’t. I still follow their method for roasting vegetables. 

       The cod tagine is Moroccan, and the harissa is a somewhat spicy red-chili paste. The harissa is cooked with garlic and thinly sliced fennel, while the cod fillets marinate in a harissa-turmeric-olive oil paste. When the fennel is soft, the fish goes into the pot with just a bit of water to scrape any browned bits in the bottom of the pan. The fish cooks pretty quickly, just giving me time to zest a lemon and squeeze out its juice. When the fish is done, stir in the zest and juice.

            It’s to be served with toasted almond slices and chopped stuffed green olives. I do add the almonds (often not toasted), but I’ve never liked stuffed green olives so leave them out. I should have taken a photo of my plate, but here are my leftovers. 

           (Sorry for the amateurish layout. Blogger is very poor at this.)

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SOLSC 12: Am I a Wuss?

            I was supposed to meet a friend downtown to see a movie, in a theater! (First time in months.) Just 3 blocks to the subway from my home, and three blocks from the subway to the theater.

            At 3 p.m., I left my building to walk up from Riverside Drive to Broadway. There’s a slight hill — and a stiff wind coming off the Hudson River. I walked halfway up the block with walking sticks and felt all right — but then I thought ahead. I’d be coming home in the evening, the wind could get worse, there’s snow predicted.

            I turned around to feel the wind in my face. It was strong and steady. I remembered a day last year when I was so battered by wind crossing a broad street that I retreated to near a building until the wind weakened. I do not want to fall. I felt like a wuss. But I decided not to take the risk.

            Back in the lobby of my building, the super told me five older people in our building have fallen walking down our block. I’m almost 80. My husband fell on slushy ice and was dead two years later. Now back in the safety of my apartment, I keep telling myself, “You’re smart, you're not a wuss.” Maybe “I’m a smart wuss.”

 

 

 

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SOLSC 11: More Notes from the Copy Editor

My freelance work involves copy editing book reviews for a trade magazine, and the next day, cleaning up the digital files after the editors have dealt with my queries, and the queries of their boss. Most of the time, editors accept my changes or rephrase in response to questions. I feel particularly happy when an editor notes: “good catch.”

            Today I had one “good catch.” The reviewer of a science fiction story referred twice to “the Dream City”; I queried whether that was exactly how it was called in the book, or was it simply “Dream City.” Indeed, no “the” was needed, and the editor thanked me. In another science fiction review involving the revival of ancient humans, a character was called “Homo ergaster”; I queried the spelling since I’d never seen “ergaster” before. The editor deleted the weird word and replaced it with “erectus,” and Homo erectus is definitely the term for early hominids.

            I also untangled a couple of murky sentences, after which I queried: “this what’s meant?” It

seemed to be yes.

            Then there’s spell-check. A character in a romance novel was described as a “hotty.” I’d read right over that on my first pass, but when the spell-check stopped, I looked it up, and M-W says the correct spelling is “hottie.” (Who knew?) Spell-check stopped at “peppiness” but went right past “benzodiazepine” (in a memoir review); “benzodiazepine” is in Adobe’s dictionary? We're not a medical magazine.

            The managing editor thinks there are too many hyphens, so I’ve started a hyphen check. I sometimes think I spend half my time determining whether a term is one word, hyphenated, or two words: “lakefront”? one word; “bedrest”? two words; “dayslong”? needs a hyphen. Then there’s the accidental catch. Spell-check went right past “page-tuner” — “tuner” is a word, after all. But my hyphen-check stopped, and my brain noticed the missing “r” in “page-turner.”

            I love these questions and solving the word problems.  It’s not a job for everyone, but it’s certainly worked for me.

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SOLSC 10: To Recipe or Not

            About 25 years ago, I wrote a short essay for a friend’s small magazine about my relationship with cooking and recipes. Then, in my mid-50s, I was trying to find my way from relying on recipes, as my mother did, to thinking about the ingredients I had and what I could do with them on my own, as my aunt (my mother’s younger sister) did.

            Finally, well into my 70s, I think I’ve finally made it. Today, I had a small piece of leftover

chicken in the refrigerator and about a cup of orzo and a quart of chicken stock in the pantry. What could I do with that? Chicken soup!

            I only needed to get a potato and carrots at the supermarket. In the kitchen, I put the stock on and brought to a boil while I cut up the potato and peeled and cut up two carrots. Everything when into the boiling stock and cooked, while I cut up the chicken. The chicken went into the pot when the potato and carrots were softened, just to heat up. Done in less than 30 minutes—and 2-3 servings.

            The only thing missing was a thyme sprig from the packet in the fridge. Next time!

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SOLSC 9: A Dead Day

Dead because the weather and my sleep patterns are conspiring against me. I have a pair of walking sticks to use in snow or slush, and in the winter I keep them by the front door. Last weekend, when it was springtime warm, one of the sticks had fallen over, and I thought, I won’t need these anymore—and put them in the closet.

            Mother Nature noticed, and gave me, and the rest of us, a chilly slap. Rain, then snow, and rain again today. No walk for me.

            And not just because of the weather. My sleep the past few weeks has become erratic—either not falling asleep for hours, or waking too early and remaining awake for hours. Today, I felt too tired to tackle the slippery streets even with those walking sticks.

            Here’s hoping my sleep improves tonight; the weather is supposed to get warmer, at least.

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SOLSC 8: A Workday Poem

Tied to her laptop

The copy editor addresses language.

How to gracefully ID a writer

Whose first book has the same title

As his blog.

How to spell Uyghurs (or Uighurs).

Should she leave that list of names

In all caps,

Or normal upper and lower case?

Which version of the story she was sent

Is the one she should work on?

After an hour of work,

She takes a break,

Goes for a walk,

Stops for a Covid test,

Just in case.

 

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SOLSC 7: Current Work

             I am technically retired from Publishers Weekly, but I still do freelance copy editing for them. Currently, I am working on the magazine’s special issue for its 150th anniversary — yes, it started in 1872.

            Today I got a phone call from the editor in charge of the issue while I was out for a walk before the rain my weather app told me was due in half an hour. He told me that a file I had been asking about for a few days, he had sent to me three times, including today. I knew I hadn’t gotten

it because I had cleaned out my work e-mail right before I went for a walk. What could have happened?

            Then it hit me, because this had happened before. Somehow I accidentally told Outlook that one of his e-mails was junk, and Outlook had dutifully sent all of his subsequent e-mails to the junk folder.

            Sure enough, as soon as I got home, I checked the junk folder, and there were about 20 e-mails, including three with work I need to do. What a bummer. However, now it is fixed — and I have a lot of work to do.

            Do you use Outlook? Has this ever happened to you?

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SOLSC 5: I Could Have Been a Tourist

             It was in the upper 60s in New York City today, and I needed a cereal I couldn’t find in my neighborhood grocery store. There are two supermarkets further downtown where I might find it, so I decided to combine that search with my daily walk.

            Took #1 train to 79th Street and walked down Broadway to Fairway, at 74th. They had what I wanted, and I was through the self-service lane quickly. My walk continued down Broadway to 64th Street, where I stopped at a little park opposite Lincoln Center, as my old orthotics no longer cushion my feet as well as they used to. I felt like a tourist, taking out my notebook to write what I’d just done. A man nearby was reading his phone. A young woman with a large orange dog (breed unknown) sat opposite, soon joined by a young man. At another corner of the park, five men in their older years chatted in a circle. An older woman stopped to sit down and look at herphone; after a few minutes, she stood and continued down the street, pulling a small wheeled case. Fewer people were wearing masks, even older ones.

            It was almost balmy, and I could have sat there for hours, but it was almost 4 p.m. I had planned to walk to Columbus Circle, but as I continued down Broadway, that was only five blocks from the park, so I walked on down to 50th Street, where I got on the subway home. At a stand near the park  with flyers for various events around the city, I made my other touristy move: picking up a brochure for places to see and things to do in lower Manhattan. There are streets down there I know I’ve never set foot on (Beaver Street) and museums I haven’t seen enough of (Museum of Jewish Heritage; Poets House).

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SOLSC5: Black Lives Matter on the Street Corner

From June into November 2020 in my upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights, there was a daily demonstration, prompted by the killing of George Floyd, to support Black lives. Anywhere from 12 to 25 people were at the corners of 111th and Broadway, with handmade or custom designed signs — “HONK IF YOU SUPPORT BLACK LIVES,” “RACISM IS A PANDEMIC TOO,” etc. — and so many appreciative honks from passing cars, trucks, and buses that some with small children needing to be put to sleep in buildings overlooking our corner complained.

            After the election, on the day Biden was declared the winner, there was a spontaneous gathering of a couple hundred people at the intersection where we had stood. But the daily demonstrators dissipated. However, a few of us knew the issue of Black lives and police accountability persisted, so we have continued to stand at our corner, for 15 minutes every Saturday, for the past almost year and a half. That’s where I was today, with three other women — there’ve been as many as nine, as few as two. The wind felt arctic, though the air temperature was over 40.

            We get honks, and sometimes disparaging comments from passersby. The latter are why we have to be out there.

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SOLSC 4: Writing

I was telling a friend today who’s always only written for publication what the Slice of Life Community was like. So I wrote this to explain my relationship to writing, which is quite different from hers.

 

            At some point I realized I have often/always? been writing. There's a scrap of paper I'm having trouble finding right now on which I wrote as a child: "My name is Sonia and I am 5 and a half. There is a boy, his name is Mark and he is 4. The baby is Carla, and she is 2. Mommy is 30 and Mr. Jaffe is 31." (yes, at 5 I wrote about my father as though he was a stranger.)  I remember being 11 or 12, sitting in our car in town while my mother shopped, writing furiously in one of those black and white composition books about who knows what, because rereading it a year or so later, I was disgusted at my younger self and threw the notebook away. Did that a couple more times through high school, always throwing away. In 9th grade i wrote a very derivative short story about a girl who dressed up as a boy so she could do something interesting (this was a Western, she was a cowboy on a ranch; I had been reading Zane Grey). When she's injured, either falling off a horse or trying to rope a calf, the boy who's her co-worker, and who she has a crush on, has to take off her shirt and discovers she's really a girl. I forget whether they fall in love or she's humiliated and runs away.

            Started a diary again in college, which I kept up sporadically for a few years. But made the mistake of showing something I'd written to the young man (Jack) who I eventually married; don't remember what he said to me about it, but I read a letter he wrote to his best friend in which he made snide comments about it, so I stopped writing again. (A few years ago, after he died, I found a packet of letters he'd written to that friend, who'd returned them to Jack a few years earlier. Reading through them, I realized that in that period of his life, he was snide about *everyone* even people I know he liked and considered friends. And I also noticed that there was nothing else in the packet after a letter about having met me. I think he threw out all the later letters with their snide or less flattering comments about me — just the sort of sweet thing he would have done.)

            The summer before I got pregnant, I was reading Anais Nin's diaries and thinking, I want to keep a diary. This time I will really do it, and I won't throw it away if I reread bits and don't like the person I seemed to be at that time. So that's how my 50+ years of writing, sometimes a lot, sometimes not so much, in what's now called a journal came to be. And eventually I became a writer who occasionally gets published.

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SOLSC 3: Food

I love to cook. Even after my husband died six years ago, I continued to cook the amounts I’d made before, so  extras into the freezer or lots of leftovers (I love to cook, but not every day).

           
I also used to eat out a lot. I’d eat dishes I didn’t want to cook myself (mussels, lamb shanks) or cuisines I don’t have all the ingredients for (Chinese, Japanese). Since Covid, however, eating out has been limited to weather warm enough to sit outside. So I’ve had to cook more often.

            Like today. I had some shiitake mushrooms from the local farmers’ market and maybe two cups of kasha left over from a meal a couple of days ago. So I sliced maybe three ounces of the mushrooms and a small onion, sauteed them, then added the rest of the kasha to warm it up. Ate that for dinner with the last of baked sole and some sauteed kale. There’s still a few servings of the kasha left, so that will take care of more meals. There’s also lentil stew I made a couple of days ago. But tomorrow I’ll think about what protein to stock up on to go with that kasha.

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SOLSC 2: What I Liked and Hated About a Job

 
More from my journal 50 years ago. I was working as an associate editor for a book publisher (Bobbs-Merrill) that no longer exists, and working myself into a tizzy between the parts of the job I liked and those I hated.

“I do know what I’m good at: I’m a good editor. I am very good at rewrite and organizing and putting a ms. into good shape, into a workable book. I’m also a good copyeditor. The thing is, I don’t want ot have anything to do with authors. In my mind they beocome enemies to be fought with, not over what they’ve written, but over non-editorial matters like scheduling, ads, promotion, jackets, titles, things an author isn’t supposed to worry about.”

            So could I continue to work for a small publisher, when I would have to be involved with those parts of the job I hated, or could I go work for a large company as a manuscript editor where I would have to deal with bureaucracy and paperwork, which I knew I also hated. In a way, it was fortunate that I was also five months pregnant, which once my daughter was born became a legitimate reason for me not to go back to full-time work there.

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SOLSC 1: Anger as Camouflage

I’ve got a personal archive: my datebooks back to 1963, my journals starting in mid-1971. I’ve been rereading my journals looking for any interesting “Fifty Years Ago Today” items, but this one, from February 6, 1972, is more interesting to me as a look into my psyche. I had been having a fantasy about having an argument with a man in my therapy group, who I often had actual arguments with. (It’s also worth noting that I don’t easily, then or now, actually get angry with anyone in real life.)

“Had an insight into why perhaps I keep having these really fruitless, frustrating fantasies. In a sense, it’s laziness. I have all this energy which I could be putting to some useful use—like writing, for instance—but that’s work and I’m afraid to try it. So I direct to this fantasy. Get into an argument that will take up a lot of time. Then you won’t be able to do anything else. Anger as camouflage.”

Fifty years later, I still have annoying fantasies that involve getting angry with someone about something, either which I have no control over, or some issue that might not even require me to become angry. I wish I’d realized how smart I was back then.

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Street Art, spring 2020

Someone sent me this 2-minute video of trompe l'oeil, and it is taking up too much space on my laptop hard drive. Maybe I can load it up here and delete it from my laptop. Fingers crossed. It is very clever. Do watch it.

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

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

How the Antioch College work-study system worked

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

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

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

The job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside the job

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

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

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

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

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

Aftermath

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

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

Now about those department stores

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

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

Job #2, Robin Hood Dell usher

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

              Robin Hood Dell was an outdoor concert space in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Concerts were free for people who didn’t mind sitting on blankets on the grass. But there were a few thousand permanent folding seats close to the raised stage where the orchestra sat, and these seats were for those who paid for a season. There were also jobs for young people to be ushers (all girls) to take the season ticket holders to their seats, and also to be valets (all boys) to park the cars of the season ticket holders. There were concerts several times a week for a six-week summer season, and ushers who worked three nights a week were paid $5 a week.

            Ushers arrived at the park about an hour before concert time. Most likely no one would need our services so early, but just in case... We brought a piece of cloth to wipe off the seats, which were clean anyway, but just in case... Then three or four of us stood around chatting, about what else we were doing that summer, who was dating whom, where we were going to college in the fall. I became friends with Lois, a friendly, red-haired, slightly plump girl who was starting at Penn (University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, not to be confused with Penn State, out in State College). Lois was dating Barney, one of the valets.

            As couples, or groups, many middle-aged or elderly, arrived, we would approach them with a helpful expression on our faces. This was the hardest part for me. I was intensely shy, didn’t know how to talk to anyone, let alone strangers. But here there was the framework of the job. I would hover near the area where people walked in and try to look friendly. A little smile? The man, and it was usually a man, would hand me the tickets. I would look at the seat numbers, then lead the couple or group to their seats. There, I would fold down the seat, wipe it with my cloth, step back to they could get to their seats, and hand the tickets back. The man would then hand me a coin, for a tip. It was usually a quarter. (The equivalent today of $2.35.) By the end of an evening, I might have accumulated $2 or $3, and could have gotten more if I were more assertive in approaching ticket holders.

            One elderly couple was notable. They were older than most. And after I’d wiped their seats and let them move into their row, the man would hand me a dime with a little smile. I couldn’t tell whether he thought this was a magnanimous amount or the least that I deserved. But a dime? (Less than a dollar today.) Even then, it seemed stingy. I wanted to throw it back at him, but I never did. But I never forgot.