by Studs Terkel
I have a very small office. As soon as I come in, the phone starts ringing. All free jobs. Usually my paying jobs get done later. (Laughs.) They’re the ones I take home with me. My family watches TV and I sit down beside them and work through the evening to turn out the paying job, so I can get my bread and spend the rest of the day doing what I think is important. I put in a sixteen-hour day. It’s a crazy cycle. It’s been a trying experience for my wife. She thinks I’m psychologically sick. She goes one way and I go the other. My kids pay a terrible penalty for me . . .
I’m struggling to survive. I’m running out of funds. I may have to pimp again for survival’s sake. But I’ll not give up the sane work. I’m scurrying about. If it doesn’t work, I may do somewhat what young people do and drop out. I’ll stop existing in this society. I’ll work on a road crew. I’ll cut lumber or whatever the hell it’ll be. But I’ll never again play the full-time lying dishonest role I’ve done most of my life.
Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again. I guess I’m pretty schizophrenic. Obviously all the schizophrenics are not locked up in asylums. (Laughs.)
REBECCA SWEENEY
“I never felt that I’d been searching for a calling. Circumstances made me look around and keep right on looking. Over the last years I’ve been fired sixteen times. (Laughs.) I’d have to dig up all my records to tell you all the jobs I was fired from.” She is thirty-five.
I grew up in a devout Irish Catholic family. By the time I was eighteen I decided to be a nun. I wanted to be a doctor too. So I found a religious order, the Medical Mission Sisters. I was never assigned to a hospital. I did farm work and office work and I cooked. I took care of the property too. I enjoyed it. But after six years I was asked to leave. I didn’t know why. I think it was a personality difference between myself and the Superior. I was hurt because I had been rejected. All I did was cry about it. As soon as I walked out my spirits picked up. I was looking for something new and adventurous.
I was twenty-four and too old to study medicine. So I just went ahead for my degree in sociology. I attended the university at night and got a job as a bank teller. I realized there were no black people employed at the bank. So I went in and talked to the personnel man and the president. Before I knew it, people were no longer talking to me. I used to come in all smiles and people’d say, “Hi.” Now I was getting the cold shoulder.
One young woman—I had talked religion with her, she was a Lutheran —said she agreed with me but didn’t want to lose her job. She warned me to be careful. I said no, the president had a nice Irish Catholic name and everything. (Laughs.) I called the Labor Board. They said they could only protect me if I was organizing a union. So I immediately began talking union. The president called me in. “First you talk about this integration stuff and now you’re talking union. If you’re not careful, we’ll let you go.”
One day a Negro girl applied for a job. As soon as I saw her leave the bank I followed her. I told them I was going on my pass. Caught her on the street. She thought I was nuts. I told her if she wasn’t hired, to go to the FEPC and keep in touch with me. A few days later she called me. And a few days after that I was fired.
I got a job in a girls’ detention home. The girls were coming to me with their problems instead of going to the nuns, ’cause I was younger and wasn’t in a habit and joked around with them a little. I was asked to leave.
Then I got a job in a hospital as an aide and surgical technician, scrubbing operations. There was a group organizing the hospital help. I wasn’t able to do much because I was going to school and active in the peace movement and knocking myself out. But I was talking it up. I put the laundry people in touch with the union. The personnel director called me in. My work reports were excellent but he did fire me.
I was pumping gas in a Standard station because I was tired of working indoors. I knew something about cars. I was fired from that job because I wouldn’t sleep with the boss. That job lasted only a couple of months.
When I finished my education I knew I wanted to get into union work. So I started doing work in different factories, making contacts—nonunion shops. I worked in one plant as a machine operator, makin’ nuts and bolts and drill press work. I’ve always liked mechanical work, work with my hands. Work you can put your energy into.
I just went around and got different jobs in other plants and got regularly fired. In the meantime, to pick up money, I was driving a cab. I’ve always liked to drive a car. I didn’t really like that so much. It was hard on my eyes and my neck. I had fun. Since I was white, they’d say, “I suppose there’s some places in this city you don’t like to drive.” I’d say, “Yeah, there’s one place.” They’d say, “What?” They’d be expecting me to say the South Side. I’d say, “The Loop. I tell you driving there is terrible.” (Laughs.) They’d stop all conversation. That job I quit, believe it or not.
I took some census work in ’70. It’s such a bureaucracy. They keep bringing up different supervisors and firing people and transferring them and everything. Rather than come out and say it’s a temporary job—two, three months—they pick on you and lay you off. When you’re fired it goes on your record. People were mad about it. I got fired for using vulgar language. (Laughs.) I called a supervisor a goddamn motherfucker. That was it.
I was doing automatic lathes in another plant. The Steel Workers Union was there. I went to meetings right away and would give my opinion. The plant had about five thousand people. Maybe thirty would come to meetings. I was raising issues all the time, mostly health and safety in the plants. The local president was a company man but about half a dozen people told him, “We’d like you to assign Becky to the Health and Safety Committee. She’s really good.” I’d go to the local fire department and find out about regulations. Some doors were blocked off because they stacked materials there. I’d raise the issue.
I really liked doing that work. I studied chess while I was working. People would laugh at me ’cause I would buy a paperback chess book, tear a page out, and stick it up on the machine. When I’d have a three-minute pause, while the pieces were running through, I’d be reading that thing over. They’d say, “You read all your books that way? A page at a time?” They got a kick out of it.
I got along fine with ’em. We had good friendships. One woman, May, was a lathe operator. Only the men had the bigger lathes and they got more dough. She knew the company wouldn’t give it to her, so she never applied. I got mad at her. I really gave it to her. I went and applied for the job myself. I got another young girl to do it too. Just to make an issue. Then May went in and applied. The personnel guy called the three of us in. He started telling us how hard it was. So I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a brochure from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, with Title Seven of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I laid that on the table. He didn’t stop to catch his breath. He said, “Of course, May, if you want this job you’re welcome to it. You’re the most qualified.” She got the job.
Eventually they did fire me. For falsifying my application. I had left off that I worked in the bank. I knew they wouldn’t give me good references and I’d never get the job. And I didn’t put down that I had a college degree. That was suspicious—somebody that is too smart to be doing this dumb work.
I filed a grievance and the union had to take it to arbitration. Oh, I’m telling you. Something else they brought up—I was involved with CORE and the civil rights thing around the bank. They had really dug. Anything written about me, they dug up. HUAC82 had investigated me ’cause I was involved in the Students’ Mobilization Committee.
So the arbitrator ruled in favor of the company. The workers felt bad about it. They said they’d like to help me, but they were afraid to make statements on my behalf. They were really scared.
“My health was running down quite a bit. I had arthritis. I was thrown from a horse. I had broken bones. I was wearing a neck brace. I had pimples all over my face. The specialist said, ”Do
n’t strain yourself.“ But I started taking karate. I had been raped and I was interested in self-defense. I went to a naprapath. He agreed with my doing karate. He changed my eating habits and my health improved completely.”
I got on the staff of UE.83 My union work transferred me to Ohio. I joined a karate club down in the hills. I dropped out because I was hit a couple of times and it hurt. So I decided to do some yoga. I found that more to my liking. While I was doing organizing I would do yoga every day. I made it a way of life. I teach it.
I was very busy in union work in Ohio. I was organizing a plant of thirteen hundred, mostly women. It was an electrical plant and they had lightweight stuff. I would get so wound up in the work and be running around so much that the only way I could unwind was yoga.
I was fired from UE. It was not political. It had more to do with the fact that I’m an outspoken woman, that I have been involved with Women’s Liberation, and that I’m unmarried. There has also been a development in the openness of lesbians. Some men lumped all these together. So . . .
My way of dealing with this question is the same way I deal with communism. Any time anyone was challenging me, “Are you a communist?” I’d say, “What is the issue?” It’s the same way in dealing with Women’s Liberation. Only instead of calling it communism, they call it lesbianism. I think that’s why I was fired. The innuendoes.
Many people have suffered because of this. Not because of the loss of me. Lord knows I can be replaced very easily. But this plant in Ohio is going to cost the union. It was a very difficult campaign. People tried five times before to organize it. The company would hire high-school girls and they could care less about the union. They always voted it down. I was in touch weekly with about sixty desperate people who wanted the union. They were behind me. But one of the factory workers in the plant was dead set against me. He didn’t want any “broad” telling him what to do. The other people didn’t care about him, but he reached the union’s higher-ups.
Some of the best people at the plant were furious when I was fired. “If they do this to Becky, what are they gonna do to us?” Even one of the better union officials refused to stand up for me. He said, “It’s one thing to fight for the working class, but it’s another thing to take a fight on for lesbianism.”
I’m collecting unemployment while I’m teaching yoga once a week at a Catholic girls’ high school. So now I’ve enrolled in a college to study naprapthy, which is a form of drugless healing. I’d like to show people how to cure themselves while letting nature cure. I’m also studying colon therapy. Our system isn’t clean.
The first few times I was fired, I cried because my feelings were hurt. When I was fired from UE, the first thing I did was to call the doctor and ask him if I could get into college right away. He said yes. So everything’s fine. When I was in high school I thought a vocation was a particular calling. Here’s a voice: “Come, follow me.” My idea of a calling now is not: “Come.” It’s what I’m doing right now, not what I’m going to be. Life is a calling.
I pretty well flow with the tide. You know what I’d like to do someday? I would like to be a heavy equipment operator. These big earth movers . . . If I don’t get it done in this life, maybe I’ll get it done in my next life.
SECOND CHANCE
FRED RINGLEY
We have a small farm in Arkansas. It’s a mile and a half off the highway on a dirt road on top of a hill. It’s thirteen and a half acres. We call it Lucky Thirteen. We are in the process of building a cattle herd, because you can’t make a living as a farmer unless you have thousands of acres.
We have five children, six to eleven. Three girls and two boys. The eleven-year-old boy takes care of the cattle. The ten-year-old girl takes care of the chickens. The nine-year-old boy takes care of the two hogs. And the youngest girls take care of the dog.
We purchased a dairy bar—a combination ice cream parlor and hamburger joint. My wife and I alternate from ten in the morning until ten at night. This is a carry-out joint. It’s a mama-and-papa operation. A Benedictine abbey sits on top of the hill. It’s a boarding school for boys. They don’t like the food in their dining room and they furnish our daytime business.
He is forty years old. Until a year ago he had lived all his life in the environs of Chicago. He was born in one of its North Shore suburbs; he was raised, reached adulthood, and became a paterfamilias as a “typical suburbanite.” His was a bedroom community, middle-class, “of struggle for the goods of the world.” He had worked in advertising as a copywriter and salesman.
We were caught up in the American Dream. You’ve gotta have a house. You’ve gotta have a country club. You’ve gotta have two cars. Here you are at ten grand and getting nowhere. So I doubled my salary. I also doubled my grief. I now made twenty thousand dollars, had an expense account, a Country Squire—air-conditioned station wagon given by the company—a wonderful boss. We began to accumulate. We got a house in the suburbs and we got a country club membership and we got two cars and we got higher taxes. We got nervous and we started drinking more and smoking more. Finally, one day we sat down. We have everything and we are poor.
The superhighways were coming through. Ramada Inn moved in and Holiday Inn moved in. We used to sit around until three in the morning, my wife and I, and say, “There’s gotta be a better way.” We own a travel trailer. We said, “Suppose we hook the trailer up to the car and just went around these United States and tried to figure out where would be a good place to live—where we could make a living and still have the natural background we want. How could we do it? We’re only average people. We don’t put any money away. Our equity is in our home.”
We sold the house, paid off everybody we owe, put our furniture in storage, and started driving. We had everything in the big city and quit while we were still ahead. We had seen what we wanted to see in the East. It’s time to go West.
We had two criteria: water and climate. We ruled out the North and the deep South. That left us a straight line from Indianapolis to New Mexico. We decided central Arkansas was the best for environment. They’ve backed up the river and made these fantastic lakes. We bought this farm.
Our neighbors came over. They’re sixty-eight. They’re broiler farmers.84 She plays piano in the church, by songbooks written in do-re-mi notes. I brought a record out—hits of the last sixty years. It was from Caruso to Mario Lanza or something. She didn’t recognize one piece of music on that record except Eddy Arnold. They didn’t get a radio down there until about 1950, because they weren’t wired for electricity.85 So we’ve got one foot in the thirties and one in the seventies.
We have a milk cow, a Jersey. I had never put my hand on a cow. The people we bought the home from taught us how to milk her. We discovered a cow can be contrary and hold her milk up if she wants to tighten certain muscles and doesn’t like your cold grip. People would come over and watch us and laugh.
All through this eight-thousand-mile trip, Daddy is thinking, Maybe I haven’t done the right thing. Everywhere I went, they said, “You’ll never make money.” Friends said, “Oh, Fred’s lost his beans.” We were digging into our backlog money for food. Time was passing. It was winter.
I realize there are only two ways to do things: work for somebody else or be an owner. There are two classes of people, the haves and the have-nots. The haves own. I went to the local bank and discovered that this dairy bar was for sale. I said, “I can cook a hamburger.” But I’d never worked in a restaurant, even as a bus boy or a soda jerk. We borrowed a hundred percent of the money from the bank, fourteen thousand dollars. We revamped the entire place because it hadn’t been kept up.
We don’t have car hops. You come to the window. We serve you a to-go meal through the window. Inside we have five tables, and in the alcove a little game room with three pinball machines. We serve hamburger, fried chicken, pizzaburger—we introduced it in the area—chili dogs, Tastee Freeze, candy. Bubble gum’s a good seller. We sell a plastic bag of shaved ice for a quart
er to tourists, fishermen. Coke, Dr. Pepper, Sprite. Fish sandwiches.
We’ve had the bar only six months. We’re trying to get it to a point where we spend less and less time there. The owner has to be there, ’cause they come in to see you as much as they come in to eat. They come in and say, “How’s the cow?” They’ve never forgotten. They say, “How’s the farm and how are the ticks?” And so on. And, “The place looks nice.” They get all dressed up for this. The wife puts on her best dress and comes to the dairy bar for dinner. It’s a big deal.
If all goes well and we’ve doubled the business, we’ll close when school closes. Maybe we’ll close for Easter week. And then close another week when the boys in the abbey have off. So we’ll end with a month’s vacation. We’re only a day’s drive from New Orleans. We’ll go there this winter.
My wife opens the place at ten. Help comes from eleven to one—high-school girls. At three she comes home and gets me. We traded our Country Squire for a used pickup truck. At about three thirty the boys come from the abbey and play pinball machines and have hamburgers. I stay until ten at night.
I’m a short order cook and bottle washer and everything else—until ten. Shut the lights off, clean the grill. Sometimes I’ll stop off at the tavern across the street and shoot the breeze until he closes at eleven. I’ll come home and my wife is watching the news or Johnny Carson. That’s when we talk. She tells me how the animals are doing and the kids are doing. We go to bed about midnight and it starts all over the next day. Except Monday.
Monday we’re closed. Now we begin to reap the benefits of what we went there for. On Monday we put the kids on the bus to school. We get in the truck, we throw the boat in the back. Six minutes from our front door, we put it in one of the world’s largest man-made lakes and go fishing and picnicking and mess around until four ’ when the kids come home. We sit out there, where I don’t suppose three boats go by us all day long. Sit and watch the copperheads on the shore and the birds overhead. Discussing Nixon and Daley and fishing and the dairy bar and whatever. What’s astonishing is we can climb a mountain right across from our home. There’s a waterfall at the top. And no jets going over. No people. Just a pickup truck down the road now and then.
