6
‘I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me’
FEBRUARY, 1933, was a terrible time to be out of a job. The ‘Help Wanted - Female’ section of the papers offered ‘Egg Candler - Piecework basis’—and ‘Solicit Magazine Subscriptions at Home’. The employment agencies had very few jobs but were packed to overflowing with applicants—the overflow often sagging wearily against the walls clear around corners and down to the elevators.
Every day found a little better class of people selling apples on street corners and even tips about jobs from friends were embarrassingly unreliable, I learned, when I applied for a supposedly excellent secretarial job and was coldly informed, to my horror, that they weren’t quite ready to interview new applicants as the former secretary had only just jumped out the window.
Business colleges persisted in the attitude that getting a job was merely a matter of dressing neatly (which according to their posters meant wearing a small knot, a short lumpy blue suit and medium-heeled black Oxfords), being able to write shorthand, even words like ‘onomatopoeia’ and ‘psychotherapeutic’ 150 words a minute, typewriting without errors or erasures, and not putting ‘he don’t’ or ‘I seen’ in business letters.
Either they didn’t know or were ashamed to mention to their students that in those days when any kind of labour was a glut on the market, an inexperienced girl, even one with a nice fresh diploma in switchboard, comptometer, mimeograph, dictaphone, calculator, adding machine, multigraph, business law, business English, business spelling, shorthand, typewriting and arm movement hand-writing, could seldom get an interview, especially in those low-heeled black oxfords.
How well I remembered my first experience with experience. I was sixteen, it was Christmas vacation and I didn’t want to work. I wanted to stay home, paint Christmas cards, dress dolls for Dede and Alison, make Christmas cookies and be cosy. But Mary had tactlessly got herself a job and was clogging the ‘Will Call’ section of every department store in Seattle with partially-paid-for rich gifts for the family; Cleve was delivering packages for a little gift shop and had already brought home Mother’s Christmas present, a fruit basket painted gold and orange and bearing on one side, like a huge lichen, an enormous white plaster calla lily; and with such stiff competition I knew I would not be able to hold up my head Christmas morning if I gave the usual ‘made-it-myselfs’ of handkerchief cases, sachets or my water-colour of ‘Our Quince Tree in Springtime’ slipped into an old picture frame. I had to get a job too.
I asked Mary how to go about it and she said, “Just go down to the department stores and apply. When they say, ‘Have you ever worked before?’ say, ‘Naturally’, and name a store other than the one you’re in.”
Unfortunately I was too timid to lie and when I made the rounds of the department stores I said, “No experience but willing to learn.” “No experience” they scoffed. “Run along—don’t waste our time—get out!”
“You can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job”, I tearfully told Mother and so she called up her friend Chauncy Randolph, who owned a large department store and told him what good grades I had got in school and how nicely I kept my room and he said, “Of course, Sydney dear, we’ll find something for Betsy to do. Send her in to see me tomorrow.” So I went and Mr Randolph, who looked and talked like ‘Dear grandfather’, Mother’s father, was gracious and charming and escorted me to his employment manager. The employment manager, even though he didn’t recognize me as the little worm he had scorned and thrown out of his office the day before, didn’t seem over glad to see me.
“Ever worked before?” he sneered as soon as dear old Mr Randolph had left.
“Not in a department store”, I said humbly. “Well, what kind of work have you done?” he asked, his pencil poised over some sort of form.
“I’ve taken care of children and helped around the house”, I said. “Oh, my God!” he said. “What makes you think you’ll fit in here?”
I could have said, “Because my mother’s a friend of the owner, yah, yah, yah”, but I didn’t. I got tears in my eyes and said, “I don’t know.” So the employment manager looked out of the window for a minute or two and then picked up his phone and told somebody naming Burke that he had a new girl for the stockroom. Adding, “redheaded friend of Randolph’s—no experience of any kind” (deep sigh).
He had just hung up the phone when Mr Randolph came beaming back to see how we were getting along, and to further cement our friendship by taking a little black pocket comb out of his vest pocket, running it through my hair, pinning back several loose locks with a large tortoise-shell hairpin, and saying as he surveyed me, “Now we look pretty and neat and are ready for work. I’ve just checked downstairs and they can use you on the first floor in neckware. How would you like to sell Spanish shawls, Betsy?”
“Oh, I’d love to”, I chirped, “I’m majoring in art in college.”
“I know, dear, your mother told me”, Mr Randolph said, taking my arm and leading me toward the elevators. I turned to say good-bye to the employment manager and was alarmed to find him looking exactly like our cat the day we took the baby robin away from him.
I didn’t do very well in neckwear. I made many mistakes in my sales slips, especially in addition; I infuriated the buyer by advising customers not to buy the ugly shawls, and I laid away more presents than I could pay for, but I got experience.
The next year when I applied for a job I threw back my shoulders and said, “Experience, of course—two years”, and was immediately given a job selling imitation leather goods.
I never did learn to enjoy applying for jobs like Mary did, and I never conquered my fear of employment managers, whose intent glances and prodding questions could crush my ego like an eggshell and expose a quivering and most unemployable me—I even hated the smell of employment offices—the hot, varnishy, old-lunch-baggy, desperate smell—‘but at least’, I told myself after Mr Chalmers’ office closed, ‘now I’ve got experience’. I was a private secretary of almost two years’ duration and could lower a blind or kill a fly with the best of them.
So I made the rounds of the employment agencies.
Mary said, “Remember, tell them you can do anything, and in any language and check all the machines.”
At the first employment agency I heard the woman at the desk turn down about twenty applicants because of lack of experience. “Sorry, kids,” she said, “but these days you gotta have experience.” Instinctively I brightened. But when it came to my turn to be interviewed, the woman glanced at my card, on which I had checked typewriting, shorthand, filing, stencil cutting, legal forms, dictaphone, calculator, switchboard, addressograph, adding machine, multigraph and book-keeping, in spite of never having seen most of the machines, and said sadly, “Too old.”
“Too old!” I said in amazement. “I’m only twenty-four.”
“Sorry”, she said. “For general office work, most firms want girls around eighteen.”
At the next place I didn’t check quite so many machines and the woman offered me a job as cost accountant for a lumber broker. I got as far as the elevator with the little white card and then I began to think about all that dividing everything by twelve to say nothing of trial balances, linear feet and trying to remember whether it was No.2, or No.3 that had the knotholes, so I tore up the card and went to the next place.
The next place was crowded but there was a brisk steady movement in and out like cans on a belt going through a labelling machine. “Must be some big plant opening”, I heard the woman in front of me say to the woman in front of her. “Everybody’s being sent out on a job”, I heard another one say jubilantly to her friend.
I filled out my card, lying about my experience and claiming proficiency in even more things like power machine operation, pattern draughting, advertising layouts and lettering, but when my turn came I saw immediately why everyone was getting a job. The woman at the desk was taking cards out of a file box at her elbo
w and without looking at either the applicant or the card was sending them out.
Little old ladies were handed jobs as usherettes, requirements—age 25 or under, bust 34, waist 25, hips 34; stenographers were sent out as waitresses and factory workers were sent to work in beauty parlours. As she handed out the cards, the woman rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Sure, there’s a job for everybody. Sure, I’m just keeping them for my friends. I like to see people out of work, sure I do.” The card she handed me said, ‘Chuck’s Speedy Service - tyre repair - boy to park cars at night - salary $12.00 a week.’ The card was dated 2 July 1928.
The next employment agency was across the street and was run by a woman Mary loved who had got her hundreds of jobs. I showed her the card for Chuck’s Speedy Service and she said, “That poor old woman’s really slipped her trolley—she’s always been queer but this depression has finally got her. Now let’s see, what’s come in this morning. Nursemaid, practical nurse, experienced furrier, medical secretary, waitress and car hop. Things are tough, Betty, they really are. What’s Mary doing?”
“Selling advertising”, I told her. She said, “Well tell her to scout around for you. You’ll stand a lot better chance of getting a good salary.”
I said, “Are things really so bad?”
She said, “Things are terrible. A little girl I knew committed suicide and before the papers had been on the street ten minutes the company had had about fifty calls for her job.”
I said, “I was one of the calls. A friend of mine told me about the job but neglected to mention why it was open.”
“Well, if it’s any comfort, the job required book-keeping experience and I know that’s not one of yours or Mary’s strong points. Well, keep in touch with me and you know I’ll call you if anything good comes up.”
Even Mary’s unofficial employment agency went through a slump that year but we, her steady customers, stayed close to her anyway because just being around her was so invigorating and gave us so many new slants on the employment situation.
“More girls have lost their jobs because of red fingernail polish, than for any other reason”, Mary told Dede one day, pounding on the table in a tea-room so emphatically to prove her point that a muffin bounced into the cream pitcher.
“Absolutely the only way to get a job,” she announced another time, “is to pick out the firm you want to work for, then march right in and announce that you are going to work there because they need you.”
I said, “What if they say they do not?”
Dede said, “Show them your colourless nail polish. They’ll hire you.”
Another time when she wanted me to take a job as a practical nurse, Mary said that there was no point in even trying to get an office job any more—that girls in offices were past history—that from now on everything was to be machines.
Somewhere in between red fingernail polish and the machine age, Mary got me several different jobs. The first she heard about from a friend of an office boy who used to work for a shipping firm she sold advertising to. The job was described as being private secretary to a mining engineer, which at the time seemed too good to be true.
The mining engineer was staying at a small but elegant hotel and we were to meet him at two o’clock on the mezzanine. We repaired to Mary’s advertising agency to wash our faces and put on fresh make-up and for a briefing on my two greatest assets.
At exactly two o’clock we appeared in the mezzanine lounge, rainsoaked but clean and ready to lie and say I could do anything.
The mining engineer, a Mr Plumber, who was not only very prompt, but had aristocratic silvery hair and a firm handshake, got right down to business.
“Do you like to dance?” he asked me.
“Yes, I do”, I said.
“Do you have some girl friends who also like to dance?” he asked.
I looked over at Mary and she was shaking her head and spelling something out with her lips. I said, “I thought this was a secretarial job.”
Mr Plumber reached over and patted my knee and said, “It is, ha ha, but, ha ha, you girls will work at the placer mine, ha ha, and the boys down there like to dance in the evenings and would a little girl like you be afraid to stay up at a beautiful mountain camp in California, with a lot of handsome young engineers sitting around the campfire in the evening strumming guitars and singing?”
I was just going to say, ‘Ha ha, I should say a little girl like me wouldn’t. When do we start and can I bring the children?’ when Mary grabbed my arm, stood us both up and said, “Come on, Betty, we’ll be late for that appointment. Mr Plumber, the job sounds fascinating but we’ll have to talk it over with the family.”
He said, “Fine, fine, and what about your girl friends?”
Mary said, “We’ll send them down to see you.”
Mary kept a firm grip on my arm but didn’t say anything until we got to the lobby. Then she rushed into a phone booth and began dialling furiously. “What are you doing?” I asked.
She said, “Calling the Better Business Bureau. That man’s a white slaver. Secretaries, indeed. He’s shipping prostitutes to California.”
“How come California?” I asked. “I thought they had a lot of their own.”
“The Orient”, Mary hissed, only now that she was on the trail of the biggest white slave ring in America she said, ‘Oddient’.
But the Better Business Bureau didn’t get the point at all. They kept talking about interstate commerce and they wanted Mary to come down and get a lot of forms for Mr Plumber to fill out. Finally in exasperation Mary said, “Oh, my God!” hung up and went up to see a friend of ours who was a lawyer.
He said, “Probably just some lonely old buzzard who wants to meet some girls.”
Mary said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Andy. This man’s a white slaver. Why he didn’t even ask Betty if she could type. All he was interested in was whether or not she could dance.”
Andy said, “Maybe he’s a front man for Arthur Murray.”
“No wonder this country’s rotten to the core!” Mary said. “You business men are such ostriches you refuse to recognize the fact that eighty per cent of our high school graduates are being shipped to the Orient as prostitutes.”
“Do they require a diploma before shipment?” Andy asked, and Mary said, “You wouldn’t do anything about a white slave ring if it was operating in your desk drawer”, and slammed out of the office. She was very pleased the next day to be able to call Andy and report that the Better Business Bureau had called her and told her that Mr Plumber had checked out of the hotel, minus his brace of secretaries who could dance, and had left no forwarding address.
The next morning, I was in the store closet under the basement stairs, covered with cobwebs and surrounded by old dance programmes, photographs, boxes of broken beads, all my college art work and all our old sheet music, reading an embarrassingly pompous theme I had written for college freshman English entitled ‘Literary Debris’, which took to task every writer since Shakespeare with the possible exception of James Branch Cabell and Upton Sinclair, the crumbs of whose works were obviously still around my mouth, when Mary called and said, “Well, I’ve found you the perfect job.”
“Any campfires or dancing?” I asked, my spirits soaring out of my early morning black despair like eagles released from a dark cage.
“It’s at the Western Insurance Company being private secretary to a perfectly darling man named Welton Brown”, Mary said. “Welton puts out the monthly magazine for the insurance company and I went in this morning to see him about an ad and he told me his secretary is leaving and offered me the job. I told him I already had a job but you didn’t and so he asked about you and I told him and he told me about his job and we both decided that you are perfect for it.”
“Is it a regular secretarial job?” I asked.
“No,” said Mary a trifle too enthusiastically, “and that’s what makes it so interesting and why, because you’re so talented, you are the only person who can do it.??
?
Instantly alerted for trouble whenever Mary started telling me how talented I was, I tried to keep my voice normal as I asked, “Just what have you told this Welton Brown I could do, Mary?”
Mary said, “Stop interrupting and you’ll find out. Because Welton gets out a magazine, his secretary has to be able to type and take shorthand, know all about insurance, be familiar with advertising and layouts, draw well enough to illustrate the magazine and be able to write and edit articles. He’d really prefer someone who has been published.”
“Well,” I said, “A: I’m only mediocre to rotten in shorthand and typing; B: I don’t know anything about advertising or lay-outs; C: I majored in art in college but we never drew anything but plaster casts; D: I can’t write and I’ve never had anything published and all my insurance information is mixed up with chickens.”
Mary said, “Listen, Betty, I’ve known you for twenty-four years and you’ve never thought you could do ANYTHING! Now there’s a depression and jobs are hard to find and you’ve got two children to support and it’s about time you grew up and changed your thinking to things you can do instead of things you can’t do. Mull over your talents and build up your ego. A: You have to know insurance—you were married to an insurance salesman; B: You have to know advertising—you don’t but I do and I can teach you; C: You have to be able to draw and you say you can only draw plaster casts—and what may I ask, could be more ideal training for an insurance company with all their accidents? D: Shorthand and typing—if Welton Brown thinks he can get a court reporter who can do all those things he’s a bigger jackass than I think he is. E: You have to be able to write and that is one thing you have to admit you can do. What about your children’s stories—what about ‘Sandra Surrenders’?—I’ll bet the Ladies’ Home journal would snap it up if we ever finished it.”
I said, “I’ll go down and I’ll meet you for lunch afterwards.”