Anybody Can Do Anything (24 page)

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 suppose 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 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 telltale 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 humor, 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 arts of silkscreen 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 tryouts; buying groceries and cooking Leopold Stokowski’s lunch; teaching spastics to typewrite and run the mimeograph; producing artists to paint murals for schools; designing programs 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 silkscreen 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 corners 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 center 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.

“Oh, my God,” said the young artist, jerking one of the chopsticks out of her hair and gesturing with it. “It is the most obvious thing in the world. I simply cannot understand how you people can be so deliberately obtuse. This dark gray background represents the depravity of civilization. Here is Warr, here is Fameen, here is Deeseese, here is Death and here, in the center, the only bright spot, is epitomized Social Service.”

“We don’t like it and we don’t understand it,” was the verdict, however, so I gave the problem to another artist. The other artist produced a sketch showing a lot of cripples on cots, in wheelchairs and on crutches working their way toward a big ginger-colored building labeled Social Service and from whose wide front door and down whose wide front steps bubbled nurses, doctors and kind-faced people with their arms outstretched to the approaching cripples.

“Now, uh, er, uh, that uh, is what uh, we uh, had in mind,” said the delighted graduate school of social service.

“Oh, my God in Heaven,” said the purple-stockinged artist. “It looks like an advertisement for the Blue Cross.”

A smart, most efficient youth secretary, who, after an unexplained absence of several weeks, came swishing into my office, dressed in black satin and monkey fur and resigned. “I wish to resign as I have obtained private employment,” she said smiling happily.

“How nice for you, Muriel,” I said. “What kind of work are you doing?”

“Helping a lady,” she said.

“Housework?” I asked.

“No, not exactly,” she said. “But I take care of my own room.”

On her card I wrote “Reason for leaving—private employment—mother’s helper.” Two days later I was informed by a police matron that my youth worker was on record as a regular prostitute and had reported for a medical checkup. I changed the notation on her card but I harbored no ill will toward her. I didn’t like shorthand either.

A small, pearl-skinned girl fresh from a convent who shattered into a million little delighted giggles every time a boy looked at her. “Oh, Miss Bard,” she told me breathlessly at the end of the first week, “I love the NYA. I’m never going to try to get a job.”

A spastic girl, so timid and convulsed by embarrassment that she couldn’t fill out her employment card or tell us her name for several weeks, but who finally valiantly learned to cut stencils and run mimeograph.

An arrogant young director who inspected us as though he were poking through a dustpan with the toe of his shoe.

A lone young colored office worker whose loud footsteps and slamming doors always made me think of a little boy whistling to keep up his courage.

The smell of baking bread from the nursery school kitchens in the basement.

A small gray official who threatened to report my friend Katherine and me to President Roosevelt because we put a padlock on our restroom door and wouldn’t give him a key. “Wherever I have worked I’ve always used the women’s restroom,” he told us, adding almost tearfully, “I’ve never before been refused a key.”

The old red brick school building, one of Seattle’s oldest, where the NYA had its first projects. The stair treads, rounded and scooped out by thousands of shuffling feet, creaked and groaned menacingly even under the slight weight of the nursery school children. The draughty halls always dark even on sunny days. The towers at each end of the top floor reminding me of the olden days, especially during storms when the wind screamed in the eaves, the rain lashed at the windows, the building shifted its weight from one foot to the other and the tower seemed suspended on its hill above the misty city like a castle in a fairy book.

A woman with long greasy curls, sagging purple cheeks and a tarnished gold turban, who demanded that I give her a job teaching charm to youth. “I’ve been on the stage for yeahs and yeahs,” she said. “I’ve met all the big names—know all the famous people. I could give them kids some tips they’d never get anywheres else.”

A young artist who rode a motorcycle, belonged to a motorcycle club whose insignia was in silver nailheads on the back of her wide black belt, and often reported to work with heavy casts on one or more of her limbs.

A handsome boy who talked like a dead-end kid, had three brothers in reform schools, wore a black satin shirt, and was gentle and good and worshipped his mother. “De old lady
wants I should be an artist, see?” he told me the first day he reported for work. “I ain’t never done much but I can copy anything,” He wasn’t much of an artist but he was a fine craftsman and became an expert silkscreen operator. “I seen one of them artists snitching a sable brush,” he told me one day rolling down his black satin sleeves. “I had to bloody his nose a little but I got the brush back.”

A young Japanese girl giggling with a girl friend while the mimeograph ran off five thousand extra copies of page
three.

The mother of a young artist who “just had to come down and tell you how artistic we all are. There’s one of us layin’ around on the floor colorin’ or cuttin’ out any time of the day or night you come around.”

It was very fortunate for me that at the time of the Leopold Stokowski Youth Orchestra tryouts, the executive in charge of me (also the originator of the Publicity Project) was a Mr. Morrison, a man who knew a bassoon from an English horn as he had for several years, before coming to NYA, handled the publicity for Seattle’s largest school of music and art and for most important local impresarios.

Immediately after the first announcements of the Youth Orchestra tryouts, we were besieged by music teachers in flowing capes and foreign accents and by eager mothers who insisted on trying to force their little geniuses and their harps into our small office. The tryouts were to be held at the Cornish School, we announced in the papers, over the telephone and on the radio, but still mothers came and unleashed Mervin and his cornet solo right in the midst of our project.

I kept fervently thanking somebody for setting the age limits at fourteen to twenty-four—because at least I was spared all the seven-year-old Darleens with their white diamond-studded accordions and the nine-year-old Rudys in their dress suits and violin solos a quarter-tone off.

The first thing that was accomplished at the preliminary Youth Orchestra tryouts was the elimination of anyone who played the “Flight of the Bumblebee” on anything. Then we weeded out the
“Caprice Viennois”
violinists, the gasping wind-instrument players and the mothers.

After that came the semi-finals, which were held in the Cornish School auditorium and were judged by some of the faculty at the University, a local violin teacher, a symphony conductor, a composer and some members of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. I listened and kept the tally, even though the judges’ reasons were as far above my head as Mother’s hocks and withers talk when she got with horsey people.

I loved the tryouts because I enjoy any amateur contest and in addition I learned the names, shape and sound of many instruments such as the timpani, and I had the pleasure of hearing the oboe, my favorite instrument, played for hours at a time.

I was very impressed with the importance of the work I was doing for Mr. Stokowski and I grew weak with excitement at the prospect of meeting him. Everywhere I went I talked Stokowski and orchestra, trying to give the impression that I was Leopold’s personal representative here on the Coast. At home I turned the symphonies up to full volume on the radio and tried to force the family to evince more of an interest in great orchestra music. I even toyed with the idea of starting Anne and Joan on flute and oboe lessons.

Nobody was at all cooperative. They all liked orchestra music all right but only certain orchestras. Dede liked Glenn Miller, Alison liked Artie Shaw and Anne and Joan wanted to be members of a horrible orchestra run by some music institute in which huge groups of untalented little children all played together on little tiny violins.

One Maudie, a little girl in our neighborhood, who had been taking tap dancing lessons since she was nine months old, belonged to this institute and insisted on bringing her tiny little violin over to the house and sawing out “Home on the Range” on it. Anne and Joan thought she was wonderful. When I refused to let them join the institute they were furious, wouldn’t listen to any more of my orchestra talk and fought loudly when the symphony was on.