Working

by Studs Terkel

  GEORGE: They used to hang around more. But now I don’t allow anybody to drink soda or eat food in the store. I put the opener outside. Keep it movin’. Otherwise, it’d be just a regular hangout. It’d get pretty crowded.

  IRENE: They come in in droves, six, seven teen-agers at a time. One or two might buy and the rest circulate through the store and they’ll rob you blind. You have to sort ’em out right away. “How many want to buy? The rest of you leave, please.” You have to be a little rude.

  GEORGE: When I first came in here, some of the punks, we call ‘em, some of the neighborhood rowdies, I’d pick out a leader of the group. I’d take’im down to the health club where I was workin’ out. I’m in condition, liftin’ weights. You take these young guys who think they’re real tough, you put’em through calisthenics and their bodies would ache for a week. (Laughs.) The next time they’d have a little more respect for you. Now I got into karate and I worked up to a black belt. They found out about that and they got a healthy respect for me. (Laughs.)

  IRENE: A lot of people come in and make comments: “How come you’re drivin’ such an old car? What’s the matter? You got so much money you’re hoarding it. You can’t buy a new car?” Then we would buy a new car: “Oh boy, you’re really makin’ it off us poor people.” There’s no pleasin’ ’em nohow.

  When prices go up, people come in the store and they throw the items on the counter and they blame us. Eggs go up ten cents a dozen and they act like it’s us that raised them. Actually, we make two cents on a gallon of milk. You can’t tell them that. They can’t understand that anyone could make so little. They say, “Now you’re a buck richer.” They’re so used to having items raised that the resentment is much more. They slam the door and they cuss at you. They gotta blame somebody so they blame us.

  GEORGE: When we first opened the store, our insurance was $398 a year. Now it’s jumped to $1,398. They say you’re in too high a risk area. Your lights have went up, your gas, all your utilities. Your mark-up on your profit has decreased. Like Hostess cakes—they raise an item a penny, it costs you a penny more. You’re getting a less percentage on the return. At one time, you were makin’ a twenty-two percent mark-up with a five percent overhead—which would leave you a seventeen percent profit. Now they squeeze you down to a twelve percent mark-up if you’re lucky. With costs up, your overhead is ten percent, now you’re workin’ on two percent profit. Instead of coming out of the hole, you’re going into the hole. It’s impossible to survive unless you’re doing something else on the side.

  “We’ve been turned in for everything. We had a raid here. It was a set-up deal. A couple of crooked cops had some guy bring in cans of lunch meat. The guy said he’s goin’ out of business and he had a couple cases. I got a good price off of him. I set it in the aisle. About a half an hour later in walks these two guys. ‘That’s stolen merchandise. What else you got that’s stolen?’ They went through the house. ‘We’re gonna have to take your television. We’re gonna have to take this. This is stolen. That’s stolen. We know how things are. Give us a thousand dollars and we’ll leave you alone.’

  “We were new at this thing and got scared. So I went out and borrowed the money and gave it to these guys. I took the license number of their car and reported it. They put us through a lie detector test. They didn’t want to believe us. We had to go to the police show-up and things like that. During this time cop after cop was comin’ in raiding us with search warrants, just harassment, one thing after another. All the time, we were waitin’ to identify these guys at the show-up.

  “The phone’d ring all night long, with heavy breathing and all. They worked on the family and stuff like that. We had health inspectors, building inspectors, fire inspectors, all the harassments of the city that you could get. Just because we turned in a couple of cops. They were hushing it up all down the line.”

  Irene interjects: “One day, nine or eleven plainclothesmen come in and started goin’ through the store, tearing stuff out and everything. He has a search warrant that we had a printing press and we’re supposed to be printing false credit cards and false ID cards. They tore the place upside down, up in the attic, in the basement. What really took the cake, they came in looking for these pornography books. They said some woman in the neighborhood reported us that we were selling to children. They put me in a state of shock. What we were selling were those coin saver books. We had ’em behind the counter and let the kids go through ’em. It was a thing seven or eight years ago. It was part of harassment. We had it all.”

  “By the time we went down to IID,61 we just dropped it. We said we couldn’t identify ’em. Then everything quieted down.”

  GEORGE: Of course you’re always lookin’ for a buck on the side. Years ago fireworks were illegal. It was a beautiful setup. The police were shakin’ down the peddler on the street and bringin’ it in here and sellin’ it to me. (Laughs.) I would turn around and sell ‘em on the counter—on the open counter. Sky rockets, Roman candles, the whole works. They would get calls that we were sellin’ illegal fireworks. They’d call us and say, “We gotta make a raid on you. Put everything away.” So they’d come in and say, “I don’t see nothin’, do you, Joe?” “No, I don’t see nothin’.” (Laughs.)

  It’s such a rat race. We were becoming stagnant in the area. We were getting to be puppets. We were ruining our sense of being. We were ruining our vocabulary. What do you hear in here? “You got dat?” “You got dis?” “You got dose?” You find yourself talking like the trade that comes in, especially with the area degenerating as it is. You begin to feel like you’re not progressing in life.

  “We decided we had to do something to enlighten ourselves. To be mentally active besides physically active. So we got into the psychic field. I did palmistry before. We went to hypnosis classes. Irene went into more development in hand reading and I was teaching hynotic principles. She’s a staff member at the psychic center. ”

  Irene interjects: “We’re both ordained as reverends by the IGAS—International General Assembly of Spiritualists. It’s a nondenominational church. George takes people in that have hang-ups and problems. In the meditation room here.”

  GEORGE: The work is confining. In our spare time, between midnight and six in the morning, I built the whole upstairs. Made the attic into the girls’ dorm. We own the building, us and the finance company. (Laughs.)

  IRENE: The tension is so great—you got to watch ‘em all the time. Turn your back, they’re fillin’ their pockets. We’ve had people fake injuries here and try to collect. By the end of the day you’re talkin’ to yourself.

  GEORGE: This is where the psychic center has helped us a lot. We can come in here and just lay down for fifteen minutes and bein’ able to relax. It’s equal to an hour’s sleep of somebody else’s time.

  I hope we won’t be doing this forever. If we can unload it, we have hopes to get into the psychic field, in a resort area, a rest home, retreat type of thing, where people can develop a finer awareness of theirself.

  The only kind of family that can survive in a ma, pa store is where everybody pitches in and helps at all times. And have their little kingdom of their own.

  POSTSCRIPT: There is a sign on the wall of the apartment: “Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”

  REFLECTIONS ON IDLENESS AND RETIREMENT

  BARBARA TERWILLIGER

  She is in her thirties. She has an independent income and is comfortably well-off. During her less affluent days she had worked as an actress, as a saleswoman, engaged in market research, and had assorted other occupations.

  It can be splendid not to work for a while, because it changes the rhythm. You can reflect on what you’ve done. There’s no feeling of being indolent. I like being by myself for long periods of time and do not need an occupation. After two months, though, it doesn’t work for me. I begin to feel the need for a raison d’etre. Unless I’m in love. If I should be in love, after mont
hs I would begin to feel parasitic and indolent.

  What’s love got to do with it?

  Oh well, love is a woman’s occupation. (Laughs.) It’s a full-time occupation if you’re married. Since I’m not married, I’m talking about a love affair. If you have any sort of ego, you can’t make a love affair a justification for life.

  About work and idleness . . .

  You raise the subject of guilt.

  (Slightly bewildered) I did?

  I have come to some conclusions after having been free economically from the necessity of work. To be occupied is essential. One should find joy in one’s occupation. A great poet can make love and idleness fructify into poetry, a beautiful occupation. He wouldn’t think of calling it work. Work has a pejorative sound. It shouldn’t. I can’t tell you how strongly I feel about work. But so much of what we call work is dehumanizing and brutalizing.

  I’ve done typing as a young girl. I’ve worked in places where the office was like a factory. A bell rang and that was time for a ten-minute coffee break. It was horrifying. Still, most people are better off—their sanity is maintained in anything that gives their life some structure. I disliked the working conditions and I disliked the regimentation, but I enjoyed the process of typing. I was a good typist. I typed very fast and very accurately. There was a rhythm and I enjoyed that. Just the process of work. Its movement. There’s something enlivening . . . A blank piece of paper, your hands on the keys. You are making something exist that didn’t exist before.

  I tried to pay very much attention to the words I was typing down. I care about language. Some of the words were repugnant to me. If I were having to type some porno stuff or having to say, “Dry cereal is the best thing to feed one’s kids night and day, they’re going to flourish eating Crunchy Puffs,” I wouldn’t have been able to do it. But the process gave me satisfaction. There weren’t very many erasures. It was neat.

  I really feel work is gorgeous. It’s the only thing you can depend upon in life. You can’t depend on love. Oh, love is quite ephemeral. Work has a dignity you can count upon. Work has to be a game in order for it to be well done. You have to be able to play in it, to compete with yourself. You push yourself to your limits in order to enjoy it. There’s quite a wonderful rhythm you can find yourself involved in in the process of any kind of work. It can be waxing a floor or washing dishes . . .

  I worked for an employment agency, doing placements. They divided the girls into placeables and unplaceables. I was usually drawn to the unplaceables. These were girls who seemed to me to have some sort of—maybe, inchoate—creative gifts. They wanted jobs where they could feel as individuals. The girls whose hair was not in place, who looked untidy, who weren’t going to be that easily accepted. There were some eccentricities involved. I would spend most of my time with them. I would make phone calls to—God forgive—advertising agencies, radio stations.

  If you concentrated on the placeables, you made money. These were the girls who came off the production line of high schools, particularly the Catholic schools. They seemed to be tractable young girls. They went into banks as filing clerks in those days. You called the banks and you had your card file and you sent the girl over to the job. You could be a mass production worker yourself, working these girls into the system. There were no tough corners, nothing abrasive. One of my colleagues made two hundred dollars a week shoveling people into these slots. I wasn’t doing what the other girls at the desks were doing. I found myself haunted at night by the unplaceable girls. The unplaceable girls were me. If I failed them, I was failing myself. I couldn’t make any money. I quit in three weeks. They probably would have fired me anyway.

  They were pretty intense weeks. I suffered a lot. I needed the money. I was living on practically nothing. My girls were losers. I found it unbearable to reject them. You say, “We have nothing for you,” and send them away. Your time is money, you work on commission. There was a code on the application blank, so you could give the girl the brushoff and she’d never know why.

  There were a couple of times I found jobs for the unkempt girls, whose stockings were baggy. And there was even some pleasure in placing those sweet, naive girls, who wanted nothing better than to work in banks, and they were grateful. Even there, the process—being part of something, making something happen—was important. That’s the difference between being alive and being dead. Now I’m not making anything happen.

  Everyone needs to feel they have a place in the world. It would be unbearable not to. I don’t like to feel superfluous. One needs to be needed. I’m saying being idle and leisured, doing nothing, is tragic and disgraceful. Everyone must have an occupation.

  Love doesn’t suffice. It doesn’t fill up enough hours. I don’t mean work must be activity for activity’s sake. I don’t mean obsessive, empty moving around. I mean creating something new. But idleness is an evil. I don’t think man can maintain his balance or sanity in idleness. Human beings must work to create some coherence. You do it only through work and through love. And you can only count on work.

  BILL NORWORTH

  It is a suburb to which many old railroaders have retired. We’re in a modern brick bungalow. Outside is a flower garden, lovingly tended. Inside are flowers in vases, statuettes of religious figures, plastic covers on the furniture; on one wall, a cross, on another, the legend: God Bless Our Home, and on the kitchen wall, a framed verse: My house is small

  No mansion for a millionaire

  But there is room for love

  And room for friends

  That’s all I care.

  “I put in fifty-three years with the railroad and I thought that was plenty. I worked right from the bottom to the top for the Northwestern.” From 1917 to 1922 he worked in a roundhouse at Spring Valley, Illinois, his home town. From 1922 to 1944 he was a railroad fireman. From 1944 until the day of his retirement, August 30, 1970, he was a locomotive engineer. He is president of his local of the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers. For twenty years he was secretary-treasurer.

  At times his wife joins in the reflections.

  A diesel’s a lot easier than steam. It’s a lot better job. Diesels can handle more cars, more tonnage. Diesel’ll pull anything. They move, they can run. They don’t take the know-how that you had to have with a steam engine. Steam engine was more of a challenge. Those men weren’t well educated, but still had the know-how. They could get more out of an engine than a man that had a college degree. It was all pride.

  When they got the diesel and got rid of the firemen, they had to make ‘em engineers overnight almost. They’re savin’ themselves a penny, but it cost ‘em, in my imagination, a dollar afterwards. ’Cause they’ve got men now goin’ over the road that never even worked as a fireman on that territory, that hardly spent any time on the road.

  Most of the diesel work, it’s electrical. If it breaks down, they can’t fix it. You’ve gotta send for somebody. In the old days with a steam engine, why, it was up to you to get that engine in. If something you could see was wrong, why, you could do nearly all the repairs yourself or put grease or oil or what was needed to bring it in. With the diesel, you got your throttle and a brake, same as an automobile. I think it’s easier than driving an automobile. You’re on rails. On an automobile, you gotta watch curves and all that. That’s truthful.

  Diesel’s very clean. In the old days, with the steam engine, you had steam leaks and all that. And in the wintertime there was times you could almost go over the road and barely see any crossings, with the steam leaking around the cylinders. Diesel, you could sit in a business suit. Same as this room. It’s almost soundproof. With a diesel, all you are is like a bump on the log up there up front.

  In the old days, I’d say nine out of ten of the firemen come from small towns. ’Cause they were about the only ones that had a strong back and a weak mind. (Laughs.) When I first started, they used to have the boomer fireman. A boomer’d be a man, he’d have the cantaloupe run down in Texas and the coal rush in Illinois and
the ore season up in Escanaba and the wheat harvest out on the coast. They’d just go, and when business would slow up, why, he’d put his little suitcase and be on to the next place.

  That’s when the company’d really get a break. They were experienced men. In the rush season, if they didn’t have these boomers and had to hire new men, they’d say it used to cost ‘em two thousand dollars to make a fireman. Until you knew what you were doing. When a boomer come up, he had about five, ten years’ experience, and you were getting it for nix. I had a half-brother who was a boomer. He got drowned in Cordova, Alaska —gold mining. Boomers were single. They’d all knew where the season work was, where they were gonna be hirin’, and would write to the master mechanic and be Johnny on the spot. They’re not doing that work any more.

  The engineer, fireman, and brakeman was in the cab. Not much conversation, it was usually mostly business—as to the right of way, see around every turn, every curve. It was your duty if the curve was on your side to look the train over, see if there was any hot boxes or anything dragging. ‘Cause it didn’t take very long for somethin’ to pop, where it could be disastrous, and if you’re not on the job, why . . .