On Assistant Editing, Union Organizing, and the Zen of Obituraies
by adrien rain burke
This is the True History of my Career in Journalism.
I've wanted to write this up for years, but some things are harder to write about than others. This one was very personal . . . . and very hard.
Let me begin by saying that I have an Occupational Certificate in Journalism. Yeah, I know - Big Effing Deal. But I didn't have the time or the luxury of getting a real degree - I had a failing marriage, two kids to support, and I - very brashly - thought I was good enough to overcome any handicap. Hadn't I consistently taken every prize in the Journalism Department - and a few in Poetry, as well?
I was active in community politics, and had for years contributed a controversial weekly column to the local paper, so I applied for a job there. The little paper had no AP wire, no stringers abroad, no syndicated news service, so it thrived on local and political controversy. And in that then-conservative town, my chief value to the paper lay in the fact that I was hated - as a leftist and a feminist.
Soon I was earning my living (well, kinda) on that small town paper - proofreading, editing, a little news writing, and the unavoidable wedding stories. Also answering phone calls from people who had seen UFOs, or God, lived in haunted houses, owned extraordinary pets, or who had just installed an aquarium where their toilet tank should be, and wanted it tastefully photographed for the front page.
Among my varied duties, I fended off a compulsively lecherous managing editor, provided occasional cartoons, wrote a political column, and another on local history gleaned from the paper's morgue (these last unpaid and on my own time).
The wages were miserable, but in truth, it was the only job I was ever good at.
After a number of years of struggle with absurdly low wages and increasing rents, my man and I figured, too prominently, in a failed union drive, in which the union and the boss took their royal turns screwing* us. After that debacle, I mostly wrote obituaries. I got 'promoted' to editor, but they took out my phone, cut my hours drastically, and often scheduled me to come to work at odd times - general bossly harassment - till I had to get another job - or starve. (Ask me about surviving with two sarcastic, unsympathetic teenagers on homemade yogurt, rice sprouts, potatoes, and sourdough!)
* The complex and devious details of that doomed organizing campaign deserve a story of their own; I will not yield to the digression now.
The only thing the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) forbids the employer to do in retaliation for trying to organize is fire you or administer corporal punishment. During my last, doomed months on the job I took to wearing extravagantly gaudy tie-dyed hippy clothes, long trailing scarves, huge dangly earrings - too bad I stopped short of dressing for success as a belly dancer or something - I had the figure for it (although, due to my savagely cut hours and wages, I was losing weight alarmingly), and my gauzy fuchsia, coral, and purple ensembles already made them quite nervous (and me in the front office!) - a jewel in the navel would have been even more fun for me, since my pathetic career was ruined (by my own hand, admittedly), and needling my Republican boss and his mean wife seemed the only thing left. This anger is a character fault I have not overcome. I was trying to get fired, trying to get them to break the rules. And they were trying to force me to quit.
Since all that confronted me each morning was a short stack of obits, I took to meditating ostentatiously, eyes closed, with a hand on each obit for a significant time before writing my maudlin masterpiece. It was a little awkward holding a full lotus in a wobbly office chair on casters, but it was worth it. I really did reach new poetic highs writing them, attempting to glean from the pedestrian, almost anonymous, death form some fresh take on our Common Destiny. (It began as a joke, but I never wrote better. I tried to do something similar with the jobs I held after that, but, sadly, never found the 'Zen' of temping, although the company - hopeful, broke young dancers, actors, and musicians mostly - was always good.) The boss's wife glared at me, but never took the bait. I finally got my revenge with a letter to the boss which resulted in his never coming to the office again - at least never when I was there. But the sad fact is that the printing industry has (or had - I haven't kept track of late) a union-busting organization called the Printing Industry Association, which keeps a List. A Blacklist. Neither my man nor I could ever work in commercial publishing again.
Oh well.
Later, I related my dismal work history to one of my former Journalism professors. He envied me my long-lost adventure! He said working on the paper as I described it came the closest to living the 'Romance' of Journalism of any graduate's experience he'd heard. The spaced-out schizophrenics, homicidal threats, the sinister pyromaniacs, gang girls protesting the way they were depicted in our pages by the lecherous managing editor (and lifting someone's wallet on the way out), self-aggrandizing candidates for Honorary Mayor (with their woebegone bald spots sprayed a drab brown) - all the zany denizens of that little world - seemed like the makings of a 'dream job' to him.
Well, maybe they were. I was often overworked, but never bored. Of course, it is less glamorous when you can't afford to keep a car running decently, or all of your utilities turned on at the same time, and arrive home too exhausted to comment to your budding delinquent on the odor of Bongwater, Vintage 1977, that permeates your shabby rented hovel. I asked the boss for something like a livable wage, but he said editors were 'a dime a dozen,' and pointed out that I was undoubtedly eligible for food stamps, and probably some supplemental welfare as well. But I was also proud. And I was working full time before the union fiasco - well 39.5 hours a week, anyway (for obscure tax or legal purposes, I think).
I didn't think I should have to beg, too.
Here was my parting shot to the boss. It was Christmas, and he - who lived luxuriously in La Canada-Flintridge - with his usual touching generosity, had planned a POTLUCK office party for his employees. We were asked to bring a 'dish' and a wrapped 'gag gift.' I was desperately broke, and already gagging at the thought of spending anything at all on such trivia, but I used my coffee break to purchase a small bag of chips and something from the toy store next door, fittingly called a Can of Worms. He supplied only the bottles of Cold Duck. I was supposed to get off at noon that day, but we were all told that we wouldn't get our checks until the party.
And here was his Merry Plan: he was going to dress up as SANTA! Each of us (at least the ladies) would get to sit on his lap by turns and very sweetly receive our check, a gift certificate good for one frozen turkey, and a 'gag gift' pulled from Santa's bag. I had nothing to do that day - no one had died all week. Worse, I couldn't afford lunch. I was hungry and bored. The Cold Duck that everyone had been dipping into since break had gone to my head. My chevron-striped, trailing wool skirt was itchy, and my heavy earrings were irritating my pierced ears. On the occasion of my 'promotion,' after the union debacle, my desk had been pushed to face into a corner, and an amateurish painting of dead animals (a post-hunt atrocity scene) had been hung over it.
All I had at hand was the latest edition of the newspaper - featuring the boss's mawkish Xmas editorial - and my broken-down mechanical typewriter, with the jumpy 'e' and a tricky carriage return. And paper. Idly I read the editorial. It seems the boss had been out for an evening with the Rotary Club, delivering Xmas trees and turkeys and toys in his long, top-of-the-line Lincoln, to those 'Less Fortunate' in the community (Tujunga that is, not La Canada-Flintridge, to be sure). I could imagine all too well the shame of the women too broke or too polite to refuse them at the door. I wondered how many of them had their heat turned off and wouldn't be able to cook the turkey....... or their electricity off, so the tree would not be lighted. I wondered how many of them would face eviction after the New Year, as the landlord's conscience permitted.
It was the late 70s. Housing prices, which in Greater Los Angeles had historically been very low, had started to rise precipitously. Homelessness had appeared. Unemployment was rising, and the nation was 'stagflating' through Carter's infamous malaise. A new conservatism was rising too. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was an object of scorn, and poverty had become a character fault and not a simple case of too little money.
I became angry reading that editorial. One of the typesetters was in so much pain from a bad tooth that in the evenings at home she was trying to pull it herself. I told her the Free Clinic did emergency tooth pulling on Tuesdays. Taking a working day off was another hardship - no sick days since none of us were actually 'full-time" - but of course, she had to go.
Another woman in the composing room had sent her two sons to stay with her mom for the holidays - she would be spending them in her car. Not too long before, a forklift operator in the pressroom - working a 20+ hour shift for the overtime - had fallen asleep at the wheel and slowly crashed through a wall - the wall against which my desk was placed. My screams of terror woke him up, apparently, before I was pinned to the sturdier brick wall in back of me. I had recently slipped and fallen on the greasy ink while walking through that pressroom and hurt my shoulders stopping my fall with my hands on the cement floor, so I didn't end up disgracefully smeared with ink. It hurt constantly.
None of us could afford the company's health insurance.
Another worker had slipped on the greasy ink at the top of a staircase leading down to the basement restroom, and bumped down the stairs on her butt, bruised but not broken. The hours for the pressroom workers created hazards, and the decibels were probably damaging their hearing, though they were too macho to admit it. And the ubiquitous greasy ink was a danger to all. But when OSHA came around to take a look at the place, they were met with cool sarcasm from the secretarial staff.
It was shaping up to be a singularly depressing Holiday Season. The car-lady - who usually volunteered for a suicide hotline - couldn't do it that year: living in her car had left her at a loss for compelling reasons to press on.
Considering these troubles - all of them heaped mercilessly on the boss's own workers, while he was humiliating welfare moms with his largesse, my anger grew - too rapidly - into rage. I put some paper in the typewriter and began a Letter to the Boss.
It's funny. I was certain I was only playing at it - letting off steam - and that I wouldn't, in fact, deliver it. It was only a few pages long, but using the skills I had honed on extolling the dead, I did my best. Or worst. I wrote about the tooth-pulling employee, and the one who was staying in her car, and my own family, living on sprouts and yogurt - leaving out the names, of course. I knew one should never write letters in that frame of mind. I am getting mad just writing this now. I thought of not signing it, but it was a small newspaper, with only a few writers. He'd know who wrote it. Why add cowardice to my vitriol? Under my signature I wrote, 'one of those less fortunate.'
At the top of our editorial page was this quote: "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire. At the top of my letter I typed, " Hypocrisy is the Tribute that Vice pays to Virtue." - Voltaire.
Of course I could never deliver such a letter.
But his office was empty and the door was open. I was shaking with adrenalin.
I put it on his desk, weighted with a contemptuous dime.
Then it was lunchtime and I went for a half-hour walk alone, embarrassed that I couldn't afford to bring a sack lunch or eat at the local Mexican restaurant where I had sometimes gone with my coworkers for a chile relleno (a la carte) and a margarita when I was working full time. At least there would be food at the party and I could stuff myself on potato chips and dip before having to walk home.
While I was out feeling sorry for myself, the boss went to his office to put on his Santa suit and white beard, but stopped to read something that had been left on his desk. He left immediately, saying he had a headache, and gave the rented suit to the sportswriter who subbed as Santa Claus for those who wished to stay for the party. We were told we didn't have to stay through the party. His wife, silently furious, handed out the checks and turkey vouchers, and I went home to prepare a nice family meal of sprouts and yogurt with potatoes - or some variation thereof.
In spite of the walk, I was very relieved at not having to sit on the SOB's lap.
My partner had already quit the paper and was employed as a mason's tender - under the table, and underpaid by an abusive boss, but we were still somewhat better off than we had been when they promoted HIM to an unnecessary position and cut his hours in half. Two of us working such short hours promised only homelessness. I quit shortly after Christmas and registered with a temporary agency as soon as I could get the car running again, with a no-interest loan from a charity I had learned of while proofreading one of the many specialty publications that was printed at that printing company.
The next year, I sent my old boss a Christmas card with a dime taped inside, and the year after that, too. But the next time Christmas inspired me to send my usual ten cent salutation, my man remarked that it seemed to have become a regular holiday observance, and I realized that, as a Christmas tradition, it sucked.
I never sent another dime to the man.
I saw him once in a while. We showed up once at a town Chili Cook-off, where he (unbeknownst to me) was supposed to judge. He saw me and begged off with another headache. On the rare occasion that I attended some community event where he was supposed to speak or something, he always left hurriedly, presumably holding his head. The paper soon went into a slump and failed, having lost at least one (ahem!) of its best contributors, and all of its penchant for controversial opinion. I guess they'd seen the dark side of cheeky troublemakers.
Less than ten years after the Christmas Potluck, the boss died of a brain tumor. I thought of dropping a dime on his grave, but it was too much trouble.
I never did find out what was in the Can of Worms.
