“Now they are”, I said. “They’ve all signed pledges saying they will. Anyway, Anne Marie isn’t a Kick-Me-Charlie. She’s smart, pretty and very independent. She just couldn’t get another job.”
Mary said, “Nonsense. Anybody can find a job.”
I said, “They can not. You know very well if it hadn’t been for you we would have stayed home and starved to death.”
“Which,” said Dede, “would have been a welcome change from some of the jobs Mary got me.”
Alison said, “Lorene, a girl in my room at school, says her mother and father are Communists. She says they go to meetings all the time and they say that the bricks on the Federal Office Building where you work, Betty, are only stuck together with chalk and the whole building’s going to crumble any day and the relief shoes are made of cardboard and the commissaries give people horsemeat.”
Mary said, “You tell Lorene that if she really wants to taste awful food she should go to Russia and if her mother and father are so sure about the chalk instead of mortar in the Federal Office Building they must have put it there.”
Dede said, “Let’s not get an X put on our gate or whatever Communists do to mark their enemies. Alison, you tell Lorene that every cloud has a silver lining and hard work never hurt anybody.”
Alison said, “Lorene says her father doesn’t ever work. He just makes beer and hits her mother.”
Cleve said, “Sounds like a natural executive to me. Surely you could fit him into your programme somewhere, Mary?”
Alison said, “Lorene says that when the Communists take over everything she is going to have an ice skating costume with white fur on the skirt and white figure skates that cost twenty-three dollars.”
Mary said, “You tell Lorene that when the Communists take over all she’ll get will be a job in a factory, cabbage soup and a book on birth control.”
Mother said, “Do you really think the NRA can do any good?
I said, “Well, of course I’ve only worked there seven hours.”
Cleve said, “Plenty long enough for a Bard to become an expert.”
I said, “Well right now it seems to be mostly a matter of everybody signing the President’s Re-employment Agreement and singing ‘America the Beautiful’ but later on there will be wage and hour and fair trade practice laws.”
Mary said, “A man who sat next to me at the Ad Club luncheon yesterday, said that it is too late for the NRA and we might as well give up, because Standard Oil owns everything. He said they own Standard Brands, which in turn own Safeway Stores, which in turn own Pacific Fruit and Produce, which in turn has mortgages on all the farms. He says they are responsible for all the wars and that we are all just slaves being allowed to exist until the time comes when we can go into the trenches to protect Standard Oil.”
Dede said, “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, Standard Oil or the Communists—what do you want: a soldier’s uniform or white fur on your skating costume?”
Mother said, “In Butte people used to say there was no use going on because the IWW’s controlled everything.”
Cleve said, “There was an old fellow in Alaska who stayed drunk for three years because the German Jews owned everything. He said he’d invented a cure for cancer and the American Medical Association wouldn’t accept it. He said it was a mixture of ground beets and whale blubber and all you had to do was rub it on the cancer and pouff, it disappeared. I asked him how he knew it would cure cancer and he said he’d used it on his mother. I asked him where his mother was and he said she was dead and began to sob. ‘She was killed by them German Jews. The Jews own everything. They even own the American Medical Association lock, stock and barrel.’”
“What did his mother die of?” we asked.
Cleve said, “Some say she died of cancer, but I think she died in self-defence because you see she had cancer of the stomach and the only way Sonny could get his magic formula on her cancer was to make her eat the ground-up beets mixed with whale blubber.”
Rhodsie said, “Let’s heat up the coffee and have one more cup before we go in. We’ll drink to the New Deal for America and Betty’s new job.”
Mother said, “That’s a fine idea. Alison, you and Anne and Joan start carrying in the dishes.”
While we waited for the coffee we sat at the cluttered picnic table and watched a thin little moon come up over the fir trees at the end of the alley. Shrill cries of ‘Alle, alle outs in free’ came winging over from the children playing in the next street and overhead the leaves of Rhodsie’s cherry tree rubbed against each other with soft rustling noises like old tissue paper. The air, fragrant with new-cut grass, rose up from the ground thick and warm like steam from the dishpan.
Suddenly from three houses down the street a radio ripped apart the soft summer evening with the strident cheerful strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The children sang as they carried in the dishes.
‘Oh, say can you see
Any red bugs on me
If you do, take them off
They make very good broth.’
Rhodsie said, “Well, you’ve got the world by the tail now. You’re all healthy and Betty’s got a job with the Government. Government jobs are awful good for women. You get sick leave and annual leave and you can cash your cheques anywhere.”
Dede said, “The only flaw I can find is that I’ll have to take Betty’s place with Mary. I can hear her now. ‘Dede, dear, stop whatever you are doing and come right down town immediately. I have a marvellous job for you. It’s working for a perfectly darling man in a diamond mine in South Africa and the cattle boat leaves Sunday morning.’”
Mary said, “A job like that would be too good to give away, I’d take it myself.”
Everybody laughed but I felt sad. As sad as a poor but carefree girl who has married a big, dull, rich man and knows that security can never take the place of romance.
I stayed with the NRA until the office closed on 31st December 1935, and true to Mary’s predictions I rose from a four-dollar a day typist to a one-hundred-and-twenty dollar a month secretary, to a clerk at one-hundred-and-thirty-five dollars a month and finally to a labour adjuster at one-thousand-eight-hundred dollars per annum.
Those were vital, exciting times, my work was intensely interesting, I could bask in the warmth and security of accumulative annual and sick leave and old age retirement, and best of all, better than anything, I was at last on the other end of the gun. Somebody else was now worrying about getting my thoughts down in her note-book. That to me was success.
I could tell the day I started to work there that the Treasury Department and I were worlds apart.
In the first place they had people working for them who had never made a mistake; in the second place they chose to ignore all previous experience not gleaned in that department and started everyone, no matter who they were or what they had done, even brilliant former labour adjusters who had their own secretaries, at the very bottom, and in the third place they thought that all Treasury Department employees, even those crawling around on the bottom, owed loyalty and should be at attention ready for a call twenty-four hours a day.
But it was the Government with sick and annual leave and they seemed to have no objection to employees with broken legs, so I filled out, in triplicate, all the forms accounting for every minute of my time since birth, took my oath of office and set to work abstracting bids at $100 a month.
“We do not allow mistakes”, I was told and so my hands shook and I made lots of mistakes. All mistakes were immediately noticeable because the wrong person got the bid and the angry low bidder pounded on the counter in the outer office and wanted to know what in hell was going on around there.
This was the Procurement Division of the Treasury Department and we were buying supplies and letting contracts for the WPA, which was a very large order.
Every day for weeks and weeks from eight-thirty to four-thirty, or seven-thirty, or ten-thirty, I entered names and prices on big sheets of paper, and tried
to find a comfortable position for my broken leg. From the Award Section I progressed very slowly to the Contract Section where the atmosphere was much freer but there was ten million times more work and no more money.
Even though we worked a great deal of overtime, we were always behind in our work and got many little pencilled letters on lined paper, addressed to the Treasurer of the United States and pleading for the money long overdue for rental of a team. ‘I can’t buy no more oats and I need new harness. Please send me my money’, Charlie Simpson would write and I would get tears in my eyes as I took out his file and found that we were returning his invoice for the fourth time because he had only sent one copy, or had not put on the certification or hadn’t signed it.
For months I worked overtime and almost gave myself ulcers trying to make our contractors do things the Treasury way, and trying to make the Treasury do things in a way not quite as frenziedly hurried as glacial movement, but not quite as slow as the decomposition of ferns into coal.
Then finally I became resigned and became a regular but happier Treasury employee. When a pitiful letter came in pleading for long overdue payment, instead of getting choked up and running from department to department, I would callously throw it into the enormous ready-for-payment stack, say, ‘Old X-3458962 is screaming for his money again’, and go out for coffee.
I found that I had to have an entirely different sense of values in the Treasury Department. There, the big issues were not that we were spending millions of dollars in an effort to rehabilitate Americans; not the fact that Charlie Jones hadn’t been paid for months and was in danger of losing his truck; not that the money we were spending was actually our own and it was up to us to see that it was put to the best possible use; but, whether the files should be kept by purchase order number, by requisition number or by voucher number; whether invoices should be in six or three copies; whether being late should be knocked off our annual leave; or whether we should turn in the stubs of our old pencils when we got new ones.
I had been working for the Treasury Department a little less than a year when it came time to make my Christmas cards. I drew a nice little design, bought an enormous stack of paper that would take water colour, obtained permission from the office boy to use the office mimeoscope and stylii, one stencil and the office mimeograph, and one night my friend Katherine and I stayed on after work and ran off my Christmas cards. The paper I had bought was too thick, and had to be fed through the machine by hand, so by the time I had run off my usual four or five hundred cards, which I wouldn’t have time to paint and didn’t have enough friends to send to, it was after midnight and all the janitors and watchmen had gone home.
The next morning when I arrived at the office, flushed with accomplishment and bearing a painted sample of my artwork, I was greeted by furtive looks and whispered conferences. “What in the world’s going on?” I asked, thinking they had at last uncovered some enormous bribe or misappropriation of funds.
“Someone broke into the building and used the mimeograph last night”, a frightened co-worker whispered. “They’re holding a conference about it downstairs now.”
“Well I used the mimeograph”, I said. “I got permission from the office boy. I’d better go tell them.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you”, she said. “It is a pretty serious offence and everybody’s very upset.”
“Nonsense”, I said “I’m going right down.”
Just then the office boy came tearing into the office. He was pale and frightened. “Don’t tell them I gave you permission,” he gasped. “Please don’t.”
“Okay”, I said. “But why?”
“There’s a big meeting going on downstairs”, he said. “They’re going to send for you in a minute.”
They did and I went down and was confronted with the evidence—a spoiled Christmas card saying ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Betty Bard.’
“What do you know about this?” the officer in charge of mimeographing said.
I said, “It’s my Christmas card. I stayed down here after work last night and ran them off on the mimeograph.”
He said, “Betty, that mimeograph is Government property—it is against the law to use Government property for private use.”
I said, “I asked permission to use the mimeograph—anyway I always used the mimeograph at the NRA to make my Christmas cards.”
He said, “That was the National Recovery Administration. This is the Treasury Department.”
I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.”
He said, “Being sorry isn’t enough.”
I said, “Well, I’ll pay for the stencil and the ink, then.”
He said, “I can’t accept payment because there is no proper requisition or purchase order authorizing you to purchase them from the Government.”
I said, “Well, what do you want me to do?”
He was so solemn about it all that I thought for a moment he was going to hand me a pistol and tell me that he would leave the room while I took the only way out. He didn’t though. He looked out of the window. Stared straight ahead. Leaned back in his chair and jingled coins in his pocket and finally said to me, “Well, I’m going to forget the whole thing. I’m just going to pretend it never happened.
“But don’t . . . ever . . . let. . . such . . . a . . . thing . . . happen . . . again . . . while . . . you . . . are . . . in . . . the . . . employ . . . of. . . the . . . Treasury . . . Department.”
I took great pleasure in sending one of the Christmas cards to every single person in the entire Treasury Department, many of whom I didn’t know. I could just see them burning them in ash trays and burying the tell-tale ashes in old flower pots.
I finally collapsed with tuberculosis and was wheeled away from the Treasury Department. When I got well again I went to work for the National Youth Administration.
The NYA and Mary would have seen eye to eye about a lot of things. Executives for instance. Mary believed that everybody but our collie was a potential executive and the NYA proved it.
Never have there been so many directors directing directors, supervisors supervising supervisors, or ping-pong games. To this day the click of ping-pong balls brings to my mind a nostalgic picture of a big bundle of executives back from coffee and ready to go to work.
Another thing the NYA and Mary had in common was a belief that if you had to you could. I was originally hired as a secretary to one of the executives, a man who believed strongly in the proprieties of his rank and was wont to buzz for me to put out his cigarette, or listen to a poem he had written on a field trip, but who had a delightful sense of humour, a degree in history and didn’t care how long I took for lunch.
However, during my three years with the NYA, except for the memorable time I was asked to take, but fortunately never to transcribe, verbatim testimony at an enormous hearing, my secretarial ability was the least of my worries.
My worries, to name a few, were: looking up all historical data and writing brochures for the State Highway Department about a floating bridge which floated, and a suspension bridge which collapsed; writing publicity releases on NYA for the papers; teaching youth workers the art of silk screen reproduction; thinking up designs for posters, book covers, murals and pictures; supervising the writing, editing, illustrating, mimeographing and assembling of numerous house organs and bulletins for non-profit organizations such as the Government, YWCA and Boy Scouts; helping organize the Youth Orchestra try outs; buying groceries and cooking Leopold Stokowski’s lunch; teaching spastics to typewrite and run the mimeograph; producing artists to paint murals for schools; designing progammes for various government-sponsored activities such as an Indian Reservation Totem Pole Carving Project celebration, and a smelter employees’ recreation hall; planning and maintaining booths at the state fairs; supervising the typing of statistical reports for the juvenile court; reading manuscripts and giving encouragement to young writers; giving prenatal advice to pregnant youth
workers; furnishing vocational guidance and trying to find jobs for the others; while filling out in tentuplicate millions of forms for the ‘older youths’ who headed the organization.
To accomplish these little missions I was given anywhere from forty to ninety-five youth workers who presented a problem in supervision, but were for the most part university, art school, trade school and business college students who knew much more about what I was trying to teach them than I did.
My memories of the three years I spent with the National Youth Administration are fragmentary but vivid.
The smell of coffee percolating in the requisition office.
A pale young artist wearing a large Jesus Saves button, running the silk screen and trying futilely to fend off the amorous advances of Thelma, his well-developed assistant.
A small Negro sleeping behind a stack of Army signs, his body in its faded jeans and frayed dirty shirt as thin and relaxed as a cat, his hand still clutching a half-eaten banana. His report at the end of the day, ‘Four hours spent guardin’ them Army signs.’
A very intense eccentric young artist given to wearing purple stockings, and chopsticks in her bright red hair, trying to explain her mural design to a group of hesitant graduate social service workers. The mural design, which was enormous and gruesomely realistic, bore in its four comers large leering likenesses of Death, Disease, Famine and War, each standing knee-deep in white skeletons, eyeballs and blood. All this the social service workers understood and approved of. What baffled them and what the artist was unable to explain to their satisfaction, even though in exasperation she finally kicked off her shoes, danced around in her purple stocking feet, hummed Stravinsky and swore, was the big red satin valentine filled with red roses which she had placed dead centre from Famine, Death, Disease and War.
“I, uh, er, uh, don’t get the significance of this, uh, er, uh, red, uh, heart”, said one of the glibber of the graduate social service school members.