Working

by Studs Terkel

  The head of the settlement house wants me to take the social worker’s job when I get back to work. I visit homes, I talk to mothers. I try to make them aware that they got something to give. I don’t try to work out the problems. This is no good. I try to help them come to some kind of a decision. If there’s no decision, to live with it, because some problem doesn’t have any answer.

  There was one mother that needed shoes, I found shoes for her. There was another mother that needed money because her check was late. I found someplace for her to borrow a couple of dollars. It’s like a fund. I could borrow a couple of dollars until my check comes, then when my check comes I give it back. How much time have mothers left to go out and do this? How many of us have given time so other mothers could learn to speak English, so they’ll be able to go to work. We do it gladly because the Lord gave us English.

  I went to one woman’s house and she’s Spanish speaking. I was talking to her in English and she wouldn’t unbend. I could see the fear in her eyes. So I started talking Spanish. Right away, she invited me for coffee and she was telling me the latest news . . .

  I would like to help mothers be aware of how they can give to the community. Not the whole day—maybe three, four hours. And get paid for it. There’s nothing more proud for you to receive a check where you worked at. It’s yours, you done it.

  At one time, during her second marriage, she had worked as an assembler at a television factory. “I didn’t care for it. It was too automatic. It was just work, work, work, and I wasn’t giving of myself. Just hurry it up and get it done. Even if you get a job that pays you, if you don’t enjoy it, what are you getting? You’re not growing up. (Taps temple.) Up here.”

  The people from the settlement house began visiting me, visiting welfare mothers, trying to get them interested in cooking projects and sewing. They began knocking on my door. At the beginning I was angry. It was just like I drew a curtain all around me. I didn’t think I was really good for anything. So I kind of drew back. Just kept my troubles to myself, like vegetating. When these people began calling on me, I began to see that I could talk and that I did have a brain. I became a volunteer.

  I want to be a social worker. Somebody that is not indifferent, that bends an ear to everybody. You cannot be slobberish. You cannot cry with the people. Even if you cry inside, you must keep a level head. You have to try to help that person get over this bump. I would go into a house and try to make friends. Not as a spy. The ladies have it that welfare comes as spies to see what you have. Or you gotta hide everything’cause welfare is coming. There is this fear the social worker is gonna holler, because they got something, maybe a man or a boyfriend. I wouldn’t take any notes or pens or paper or pencils or anything. I would just go into the house and talk. Of course, I would look around to see what kind of an environment it is. This you have to absorb. You wouldn’t say it, but you would take it in.

  I promised myself if I ever get to work all day, I’m going to buy me a little insurance. So the next time I go to the hospital I’ll go to the room I want to go. I’m gonna stay there until it’s time for me to leave, because I’m gonna pay my own bill. I don’t like to feel rotten. I want my children, when they grow up, they don’t have to live on it. I want to learn more. I’m hungry for knowledge. I want to do something. I’m searching for something. I don’t know what it is.

  BOOK SIX

  THE QUIET LIFE

  DONNA MURRAY

  She has been binding books for twenty-five years. Among her clients have been the University of Chicago, the Arboretum, the Art Institute, and private collectors. Her reflections are somewhat free associative in nature.

  “I didn’t even really become a bookbinder. It happened because we had so many books. I inherited this great big library from my father, and John46 had many, many art books that were falling apart. We had acres of books, and I thought this was the thing to do: I’ll put these books together and make them fit. So I began a sort of experiment and I enjoyed it very much. I became a bookbinder because I had nothing else to do.”

  At first no one taught me. I wasn’t doing much of anything. Then a marvelous woman, who’s a brilliant artist, gave me a marvelous frame that her father made for her, for sewing books and that sort of thing. So I learned to sew books. They’re really good books, it’s just the covers that are rotten. You take them apart and you make them sound and you smash them in and sew them up. That’s all there is to it.

  I have a bindery at home, it’s kind of a cave, really. It’s where you have your gear—a table where you work, a cutter, a press, and those kinds of things. You have a good screw press, a heavy one that presses the books down. A binder’s gear is principally his thumbnail. You push, you use your thumbnail more than anything else.

  I mustn’t pose as a fine binder because I’m not. That’s exhibition binding, gold tooling. You roll out this design and you fill it with egg white. Then you cover it with pure gold leaf. I enjoy restoration very much—when you restore an old book that’s all ragged at the back. You must make a rubbing of the spine. The spine’s all rotten, so you put that aside and you turn back the pages very carefully. That’s what I enjoy most of all.

  Obviously I don’t make much money binding books, but it’s very cozy work. Carolyn47 and I did simple, necessary things for the university. We bound precious pamphlets in a way that preserved them. Incunabula—books printed before 1500. Architectural works and something of the Latin poets.

  Those made of vellum are usually just rotten in the back. Vellum’s a wild thing, the hide of a calf or a lamb. It’s treated with acid. The pages are falling apart. You take them out if you can and you wash them, de-acidify them in a certain solution. Then you fold them together and press them in your press.

  Some of my private customers have very splendid collections, beautiful bindings you’ll never see again. I have very specific, lovely clients. One, who’s no longer living, had a magnificent collection of Stevenson and Dickens, first editions.

  I go to the house and take my equipment, oils and paints and a certain binder’s paste. And a painter’s drop cloth. There’s a beautiful Oriental rug, and indeed you may not drop anything on it. You set up a card table and book ends and that’s about it, really.

  We calculate the books. We make a point of being sure that the books go back exactly where they were before. We look at each book and pull it out and test it for tears. Almost everybody pulls books out by their tops, and they’re always broken. Torn from beautiful leather bindings. In dusting books, you never touch them inside. The dust only goes to the top. People who pull them out with the idea of dusting them—it’s just ridiculous. It only destroys the book.

  My assistant takes the cloth for me, and then we line up the books. She dusts the tops. You always dust from the spine out, cleaning the book. Then you use the marvelous British Museum formula, potassium lactate. It’s swabbed on the books to put back in the leather the acids that were taken out, that were in the hide in the beginning. They’ve been dried out completely and all the salts have been destroyed. So we swab all the leather goods with this potassium lactate. A very little swab, and let it sink in. Then these books are polished and put back on the shelves. It preserves books that could never exist in this climate after five years.

  It’s an arduous thing, but I suppose it’s important because if that kind of thing didn’t happen, the books would just disintegrate. Father’s library did. Especially in the city with its very high potency of sulfur dioxide, which eats up the books. The hideous air, the poisonous air of the city. People love to have whole sets of Dickens or Mark Twain or Dumas—the kinds of popular acquisitions in our mothers’ age, when they filled up their shelves. The books in Chicago are disintegrating to a most appalling degree in comparison to the books of the same issue in Lake Forest.48 It’s been going on for years. It destroys them. It eats them up. Terrible.

  I usually arrive at about ten thirty. I work as long as it pleases me. If I fill up the table and the book
s are oiled, I often leave at four or six. I might work for one client two or three weeks. In the case of Mrs. Armour’s books, it was a matter of six months. She had a superb collection stored in the old house. It took two days to unpack the crates. Her mother was a collector of exceedingly marvelous taste. It was undeniably one of the most beautiful collections of books I’ve ever seen. Not only in the binding, but in the selection. It was kind of wonderful to be there at that moment.

  I wouldn’t want to bind anything that was flimsy. You have to think of what’s inside. If you’re binding a book about a big idea—Karl Marx! (laughs)—you obviously would accommodate a binding, wouldn’t you? The idea of the binding should reflect what’s inside. The books at the Arboretum are among the most interesting. Some of them are sixteenth-and seventeenth-century books, marvelous herbals. Beautiful, beautiful books. Flower papers. There is no special way you relate your own taste, your reflections.

  If they’re the marvelous trees of Japan—oh dear, oh dear. I was reared in California where I saw the redwoods that are now being systematically destroyed. And there’s some redwood trees in Japan that relate to what you’re thinking, oh dear (softly). You must be very clever with a binding and give it the dignity it deserves. Because the pages are so full of stunning, fantastic things that say, This is life. So what do you do with a binding like that? I don’t know. You just give it a strength. If it’s leather or it’s cloth or it’s paper, you give it strength, an indication of what is inside.

  I only enjoy working on books that say something. I know this is an anathema to people who insist on preserving books that are only going to be on the shelves forever—or on coffee tables. Books are for people to read, and that’s that. I think books are for the birds unless people read them.

  That’s what I discovered when I worked in Florence after the big flood. I came in the summer. John and I lived there and he worked there during his first sabbatical. I loved that city so much. And when someone from the Biblioteca Nazionale asked me to come . . .

  It would be darling to look into books when you’re working on them, lured by them—but obviously you can’t. You’d never finish your work. I can read books on my own time. I feel very strongly about every book I pick up. It’s like something alive or—or decadent, death. I wouldn’t for one moment bind Mein Kampf, because I think it’s disgusting to waste time on such an obscenity. Are you offering me a million dollars to bind that? Of course not.

  I adore the work. It’s very comforting. The only thing that makes me angry is that I’m almost all the time on the outside rather than on the inside. I’d like to be reading them. But I do think working in my house and being comfortable and doing something you feel is beneficial—it is important, isn’t it?

  I’m just a swabber. (Laughs.) I’m not an artist. I just use aniline dyes, so they won’t be hurting the leather. Aniline’s a natural dye, and that’s about it. It isn’t very skilled work. It’s just knowing what books need, if you want to preserve them. It’s just something you do. A mechanic takes care of a tire, and he knows . . .

  Oh, I think it’s important. Books are things that keep us going. Books —I haven’t got much feeling about many other things. I adore the work. Except sometimes it becomes very lonesome. It’s nice to sit beside somebody, whether it’s somebody who works with you or whether it’s your husband or your friend. It’s just lovely, just like a whisper, always . . . If you were really brainy, you wouldn’t waste your time pasting and binding. But if you bind good books, you make something good, really and truly good. Yes, I would like to make a good book hold good and I would like to be involved in a pact that will not be broken, that holds good, which would really be as solid as the book.

  Keeping a four-hundred-year-old book together keeps that spirit alive. It’s an alluring kind of thing, lovely, because you know that belongs to us. Because a book is a life, like one man is a life. Yes, yes, this work is good for me, therapeutic for old age . . . just keep going with the hands . . .

  NINO GUIDICI

  We’re behind the counter of a corner drugstore. It is a changing neighborhood. To the east are upper-middle-class high rises; to the west are the low-income people. Along the big street that divides, the transient young are among the most visible. “It’s hard to believe I spent forty years on this street.” He has been a pharmacist since 1926. He is seventy years old.

  In the bins to the rear of the counter are shelved thousands of bottles allocated according to the name of each large drug firm. “It’s been estimated there are 5,ooo to 7,500 varieties of pills. When I’m stuck—in the old days I wasn’t—we go to the Red Book. It lists the names and tells you who makes it and how much it is.”

  The corner drunow. The small store is on its way out. Can’t do the volume. In the old days they took druggists as doctors. How many come in today and say, “I have an earache, what would you recommend?” Or, “My child has a cold.” Gone with the wind. Still, the customer’s the same as when I got started. Like that man that came in. He wants a paper tonight. He said, “Be sure and save me a paper.” He’s a regular. If I forget it, I might as well forget to fill a prescription. It’s a big mistake. Still very personal with me.

  All we do is count pills. Count out twelve on the counter, put ’em in here, count out twelve more . . . Today was a little out of the ordinary. I made an ointment. Most of the ointments come already made up. This doctor was an old-timer. He wanted something with sulfur and two other elements mixed together. So I have to weigh it out on the scale. Ordinarily I would just have one tube of cream for that.

  Doctors used to write out their own formulas and we made most of these things. Most of the work is now done in the laboratory. The real druggist is found in the manufacturing firms. They’re the factory workers and they’re the pharmacists. We just get the name of the drugs and the number and the directions. It’s a lot easier. In the old days you filled maybe twenty, twenty-five prescriptions a day by hand. Nowadays you can fill about 150. This time of the year they’re most antibiotics, because people are having colds.

  In the old days we just used simple drugs, simple ointment base like vaseline, lanolin and mixed them together. They didn’t have the properties that you find today. You’re really an order filler now. (Laughs.) I’m not knockin’ the pharmacist, but it’s got so highly developed . . . We just dispense, that’s all.

  I like it better this way. If you had to make up everything and the physician had to write down a prescription with all the ingredients, you could hardly exist in this economy. Everything is faster, it’s better. People wouldn’t get relief out of medicine in them days like they get today.

  “In the days I went to pharmacy school, you only went two years. Now it’s six. In my day, they’d give you basic metals and salts. You knew certain salts were good for a cough and you mixed it with distilled water and that’s how you’d make your medicine. The young ones know a lot more chemistry. They’re much better educated than we were. They’re prepared to go to the manufacturing end of it. Young kids in high school, they learn how to make things which I don’t know anything about. (Laughs.) LSD and all that. These kids know more about how to make dangerous drugs than I do. (Laughs.)”

  When I first started out, you dispensed very little medicine for children after they were seven or eight. We didn’t have ointments to fix up pimply faced kids with acne and things like that. Now, some children have a little pimple and they’re sent to a skin man. We fill a lot of ointments for ’em. We sell a lot more cosmetics than we did. That used to be a small part of the business. Now it’s at least fifty percent. I’d say about twenty percent come in for prescriptions. The other people just come in for their everyday needs.

  People come in the store and, unless I know who the person is, I’m pretty near afraid to wash out their hand. The laws tell you to tell them to go to a doctor. Gee whiz, here’s a guy ain’t got thirty-five cents. I had a butcher over here, he’s cut his artery with a knife. Boy, he was bleeding like the devil. Tel
l him to go to a doctor? He’d bleed to death. I stuffed it with rags. Jeez, the guy pretty near died on top of it. It was all right. I might have saved him, but you don’t get credit for anything like that. Suppose he died in the back room. Boy. I try to give first aid. Then you try to tell ’em to get a tetanus shot. Jeez, nine times out of ten you’re talking to somebody who can’t afford it. I’ve taken things out of people’s eyes. I’ve always been pretty good at that. Others tell me, “Boy, you’re crazy.”

  His colleague, Grace Johnson, enters and puts on her white gown. She has been a pharmacist for thirty years. “There was only three of us girls in my class of 36o men. The men customers always hesitated coming to me. I would always know what a man wanted because he would avoid me. (Laughs.) When I started in my father’s store, I’d be compounding something in the back and he’d call me out. The men would turn around and walk out. They thought I had two heads. Women have always accepted me.

  “When I say I’m a pharmacist—ooohhh!!! Oh, that’s marvelous! You must really be a brain or something. The idea of a woman pharmacist. It’s like being a woman doctor. But I don’t think a pharmacist really gets credit enough for what we do, as a liaison person between the patient and the doctor. If the doctor makes a mistake and we don’t catch it, they can sue us. They don’t sue the doctor because they stick together.

  “The big change in thirty years is in the merchandise. We have such a variance today. Whoever heard of selling a radio in a drugstore? (Laughs.) And whoever heard of these thousands of drugs? A pharmacist once said to me that if the atom bomb were dropped on this neighborhood in the middle of the night, no one would know it (laughs), because ninety-nine percent of the people take Seconal, Nembutal, right? They just automatically pop them in their mouths, if they need them or not. Almost everybody is on some drug. Everybody has a nerve problem today, which is the tensions we live in.”