Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (104 page)

Because of the commitment in this type of work, the amount of hours per day, per week, per month you put in, there’s a burn-out process. Usually guys last here two years and they just burn out. It’s just physically too much—and emotionally, God! That’s what happened to Bud. (Laughs and indicates his colleague seated nearby. )

 

 

In the past ten years I find myself unable to sit through it for another ten hours. You just become emotionally sick because of your powerlessness. You’d like to pick up a gun and get that cop who beat up that thirteen-year-old kid. You prepare that one brief and file that one complaint and go before the jury and get twenty-five bucks for a kid that’s had his skull split open by five police officers. You know it’s bullshit. Maybe the best way is to give the kid a gun and say, “Okay, square it.” But those are the depressing moments.

It’s a matter of maintaining a grasp on hope—that more people will become aware. Maybe things will get better in my lifetime. Maybe twenty, thirty, forty years from now. You’re overwhelmed by so much, you just gotta turn off and say, “Man, I can’t go back for two days.” This happens a lot.

You live for two years in the ghetto and you get so absorbed, you don’t see what’s going on outside. I need more escape from this job than from my old one. At the insurance company you’re not being battered from all sides. You have a few hassles but they’re meaningless. Here, things are so heavy . . .

I have no regrets. On my bad days I feel I have wasted three years working here in the ghetto. But not over-all. It has helped me see a lot of things and make me aware of what’s going on in our society—what the system does to people. I would have died on the other job. I would have become an alcoholic or a drug addict or something. It would have driven me to that, I’m sure.

 

I was the first television producer the agency had hired. They had done a Wildroot commercial and the client didn’t like the negligee the girl wore. Somebody said, “The only way to do it right is to hire a woman.” So I was hired.

I didn’t think I ever worked on anything I thought was terrible, really. Though I didn’t think there was that much difference between Wildroot and someone else’s shampoo. I know Coty has one kind of smell and another has another kind—a new lipstick, there’s not that much difference.

I took pride in what I did. I made myself do it right. But it became increasingly ridiculous to spend all that time and energy making sure a print got to the station on Thursday the twenty-second at six ’. I dropped the film off myself on the way home because you couldn’t be sure a messenger would get it there on time. What difference did it make if the film was there on Monday or Thursday? I felt, to live miserably under such pressure, to knock yourself out—it should be for something more important. Life was too short for this.

It was obvious, too, that the men were getting much more than I was. They were getting raises more regularly. They were getting twice as much as I was getting for the same work. That kind of stuff—which any woman gets used to, after a while.

Every time they’d lose a big account the pink slips would come out. Is it going to be me? Or somebody else? This is nervous-making. There’d be times when you were terribly busy and times when you’d sit around with nothing to do. You’d try to look busy. You’d sit there and knit or read or do double-crostics. You had to be by the telephone in case somebody’d call. I never took my work home with me. I took the tension home. You couldn’t help doing that. If you’re going to be tense, it should be for something worthwhile.

I could probably have stayed at the agency for ages. Perhaps being squeezed into one thing or another. The time would come when they’d say, “You will clean the film or get out.” It happened to some people. They certainly weren’t going to keep a sixty-five-year-old film producer. (Laughs.) So I had to think of something else.

I had known so many women—the only thing they could do after they left their jobs was to be a receptionist. I had seen too many ladies that had to earn their living doing these miserable things—receptionist, companion. Or going back to being a secretary. I didn’t want this. Suddenly I had the inspiration. Why didn’t I go to library school?

In the winter of 1960, I started thinking about library work. I don’t know whether it was my sense of insecurity at the office or whether I just felt I had to get out. I heard there was no age limit, that you could be a librarian until you practically keeled over. I accepted the notion that I would probably work until I dropped. Anyway, I think people and books are a nice combination. It was comfortable to feel that you could probably do this for as long as you wanted to. So I went to Columbia Library from seven till eleven at night for four years.

 

 

I had never been behind a library desk in my life. At library school there is no practice teaching. It was another world. There was no pressure, nothing. There were books. The worst thing you could think of is whether the kids are gonna remember to unlock the library on Sundays so it’ll be open. Nobody behaved as if I’d never been in a library before. The kids were great. There hasn’t been a tense day since. A charmed life. Don’t miss the city, don’t miss the job, don’t miss the expense account (laughs), don’t miss any part of it.

There was another reason I didn’t want to get stuck as a little lady receptionist, smiling and directing someone. I’d go out of my mind. On this job, you can
use
your mind. Things that are challenging. Find out what some of the new math phrases mean. Selecting books is a complicated matter. If you have thousands and thousands of dollars in your budget, it doesn’t make that much difference if you make a few mistakes. But we’re limited here. I must be very frugal.

It’s one big room. We’re bursting now. Last week we had fifty-eight kids there and there are only seats for fifty-seven. It’s a tribute that they like to come there. It’s an agonizing night, though, when you have to go around shushing. It’s just too much. I’m old-fashioned. I think it has to be a quiet place.

We don’t lock our doors here at the house. It never occurs to me. In the city, you would go to the subway and follow everybody and try to get a paper. Here I drive down to school and just make a turn at the corner and see the whole Appalachian spread out for miles and miles. And I’m ready to go to work.

I feel free as a bird. I’m in a unique position because I’m the boss. I buy what I like. I initiate things. I can experiment with all kinds of things I think the kids might be interested in. Nobody interferes. For me, it’s no chore to go to work. I’m fortunate. Most people never get to do this at any time in their lives.

My father was a mechanical engineer, hated every day of it. He couldn’t wait forty-six years, or whatever it was, until he retired. When we were little, we knew he loathed his job. One of the things he hated most was having to take customers out for dinners. He almost didn’t make it because he had a very bad heart attack a couple of months before retirement age. Fortunately, he lived for almost twenty years afterwards. He retired at sixty-five and started to live. He took guitar lessons, piano lessons, art lessons. He was in little theater productions. Work for him was something he hated. He went through the motions and did it very well. But he dreaded every minute of it.

I assumed he became an engineer because his father was one. He attended the same university. His brother was an engineer too. It was just assumed. But it wasn’t for him. I have a sister who can’t wait until next December, ’cause she’s going to retire at a bank. She’s just hanging on. How terrible.

I don’t think I could ever really retire. There’s not enough time.

 

In Italy I was working in marble a little bit. I was a young kid. In Lucca, a young kid do this, do that. Little by little I learned. When I was about twenty I came to this country here. I couldn’t do anything like that, because of here we had a Depression. From ’27 year to ’55 I was a butcher. For twenty-eight years . . .

I started to get a little ulcer in my stomach. I had sciatica. So I hadda quit. So I stay for one year, I don’t do nothing. But after, I feel I could do something. The plaster business, the tomb business. As soon as I started it, I started to feel better.

 

BOB:
He was about fifty-five years old when he started this business again. My mother thought he was losing his mind. But he insisted. Everybody from the area where he came from in Tuscany has a relative or somebody in the art business. You have Florence . . .

 

There’s change a lot. We use rubber to make a mold now. We used to use some kind of glue. It was only good for about ten pieces. Now with a rubber mold we can make three hundred, four hundred pieces. In Italy you gotta go to school one year to make a mold. Before, I used to make one piece, stone or marble. Maybe you a millionaire and you want to make it your bust. Okay, how much you pay? Now nobody want to spend that much money. Over here I don’t see so much good stone to work with.

 

BOB:
We used to sell statuary and fountains: a nymph holding a jug, pouring water. All of a sudden, with the ecology bit, people want to hear water running. In the city they want to be close to the country. So there’s a combination of art and nature. When we started, I was quite against if. Who’s going to buy a fountain? We put ’em indoors now as humidifiers. People are putting statues in their yards. There is such a demand for it we built a factory.

 

I remember when I quit the butcher business, I was sick. When I started this business, I became better and better and I feel good and enjoy myself.

 

BOB:
For grave sites people in the old days wanted a certain statue, St. Anthony or St. Anne or something like that. We don’t have much call for saints these days, especially now with the Church . . .

 

People will laugh. Every time they see me, they see me better and better. I used to work in the basement. They say, “You eat too much dust down there, and you getting better and better. Before you work in the butcher shop, very nice, very airy, everything, you used to be sick. How come?”

 

BOB:
My dad had another man that didn’t feel too well at what he was doing. He worked with my father in this—what he did as a kid, too—and he got healthy and fat and stuff like that. (Laughs.) My dad was an old man fifteen, twenty years ago. Today he’s a young man.