In Their Shoes: In Their Shoes

5: Accepted at Face Value

5: 7IccepleJal :lace 7tiue ((All professionalized enterprises, whether in business, labor, law, medicine or academic O1;ganizations, reveal the same scarcity ofwomen at the top. >J - Barbara Miller Solomon, American historian "C"/I Jlny honorable work," so ran one of my father's litanies, "is good." In West Texas, unlike England, France or even the state of Virginia, we did not have families who belonged to a social register. We all needed one another, and thus we were all important. Having lived through the Depression, being poor was not all that unusual. In a sense we were all beginners, all amateurs. My first job was as a salesman when I was about five. My father filled small pails of tomatoes from his garden, and I was sent to sell them. Knocking on a neighbor's door, I asked, "Do you want to buy some tomatoes?" "What do you want for them?" "Five cents," I said. I also earned money selling "samples" of Jergen's lotion and Colgate toothpaste and Grapenuts cereal that manufacturers sent free if you but asked. I mailed one-cent postal card requests, then sold the samples to neighbors for ten cents each. And I went door-to-door with magazines : "Do you want the Saturday Evening Post?" "How much is it?" "Five cents," I said. 41 42 In Their Shoes In junior high, I began work for a give-away newspaper that had no subscribers and consisted almost entirely of ads. I wrote about church services and piano recitals. With ruler, I meticulously measured my copy and turned in my vouchers. I got paid one cent for every published line. By the time I entered high school, classes were put in shifts, with some students, myself included, being dismissed in the early afternoon. Like many ofmy classmates, I went from school to a job. I worked in a small downtown dress shop wrapping packages and as a general cleanup person. I earned twenty cents an hour. Shortly before I graduated from high school, I walked into the offices of our daily newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal) to get a job. I had a teenager's pride, believing what I had done in school would be impressive to an adult: I had edited the Cowboy World in junior high and for two years the high school's Westerner World. I had won most of the state's top awards for high school newspaper work: I had written the best column, the best editorial , and the paper was judged the most outstanding of all high-school newspapers in the state of Texas. Thus I felt confident mounting stairs to the second-floor newsroom. I had no appointment and I knew no one there, but soon I was seated before the managing editor, Charlie Guy, short, rotund, with bald head, pox-marked face and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He looked bemused, asking, "What can I do for you?" "I want a job." "How old are you?" I had turned seventeen. "Do you type?" "I'm learning." In retrospect, I know there must have been hundreds of older journalists who were looking for a job, this being shortly after the Depression. Still, he dealt with me seriously . Accepted at Face Value 43 "Are you going to college?" Yes, I said, I planned to do so. I had been granted a scholarship for Northwestern College of Journalism in Illinois, but we had no money for me to travel there, nor to pay for my living away from home. I chose not to mention that but rather to stick to one point: I wanted and needed a job. "All right, I'll hire you." But, he added, "you must promise never to study journalism in college. That ruins any potential writer. One should learn by experience." He demanded that I agree. After I nodded affirmatively, he added, "I'll teach you what you need to know." I moved into a largely male enclave: not only then but in all future jobs, I would be hired by a man. I got assignments from men, they supervised my work, and they approved any promotion or salary increase. I was never in my life hired by a woman, although in several instances I worked alongside them. When I was starting out, if a woman got a job on a newspaper the editor generally assigned her to write society news, and I was no...