Working Read online

  Table of Contents

  Other Books by Studs Terkel

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Preface

  PREFACE II

  PREFACE III

  BOOK ONE

  WORKING THE LAND

  PIERCE WALKER

  ROBERTO ACUNA

  AUNT KATHERINE HAYNES

  JOE AND SUSIE HAYNES

  BOB SANDERS

  HUB DILLARD

  BOOK TWO

  COMMUNICATIONS

  SHARON ATKINS

  FRANCES SWENSON

  HEATHER LAMB

  JACK HUNTER

  A PECKING ORDER

  TERRY MASON

  BERYL SIMPSON

  JILL TORRANCE

  ANNE BOGAN

  ROBERTA VICTOR

  DID YOU EVER HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE FARMER’S DAUGHTER ?

  BARBARA HERRICK

  THE COMMERCIAL

  JOHN FORTUNE

  ARNY FREEMAN

  RIP TORN

  EDDIE JAFFE

  RICHARD MANN

  ENID DU BOIS

  BOOK THREE

  CLEANING UP

  NICK SALERNO

  ROY SCHMIDT

  LOUIS HAYWARD

  LINCOLN JAMES

  MAGGIE HOLMES

  ERIC HOELLEN

  WATCHING

  FRITZ RITTER

  VINCENT MAHER

  RENAULT ROBINSON

  ANTHONY RUGGIERO

  JILL FREEDMAN

  PAULINE KAEL

  BOOK FOUR

  THE DEMON LOVER

  The Making

  The Driving

  The Parking

  The Selling

  BOOK FIVE

  APPEARANCE

  SAM MATURE

  EDWARD AND HAZEL ZIMMER

  JEAN STANLEY

  DR. STEPHEN BARTLETT

  DOC PRITCHARD

  HOTS MICHAELS

  TEDDY GRODOWSKI

  TIM DEVLIN

  COUNTING

  NANCY ROGERS

  FRED ROMAN

  FOOTWORK

  JACK SPIEGEL

  ALICE WASHINGTON

  JOHN FULLER

  CONRAD SWIBEL

  BRETT HAUSER

  BABE SECOLI

  THOMAS RUSH

  GRACE CLEMENTS

  DOLORES DANTE

  JUST A HOUSEWIFE

  THERESE CARTER

  JESUSITA NOVARRO

  BOOK SIX

  THE QUIET LIFE

  DONNA MURRAY

  NINO GUIDICI

  EUGENE RUSSELL

  BROKERS

  MARGARET RICHARDS

  JAMES CARSON

  DAVID REED GLOVER

  RAY WAX

  BUREAUCRACY

  STEVE CARMICHAEL

  LILITH REYNOLDS

  DIANE WILSON

  ORGANIZER

  BILL TALCOTT

  BOOK SEVEN

  THE SPORTING LIFE

  EDDIE ARROYO

  STEVE HAMILTON

  BLACKIE MASON

  JEANNE DOUGLAS

  ERIC NESTERENKO

  GEORGE ALLEN

  IN CHARGE

  WARD QUAAL

  DAVE BENDER

  ERNEST BRADSHAW

  PETER KEELEY

  LOIS KEELEY NOVAK

  LARRY ROSS

  MA AND PA COURAGE

  GEORGE AND IRENE BREWER

  REFLECTIONS ON IDLENESS AND RETIREMENT

  BARBARA TERWILLIGER

  BILL NORWORTH

  JOE ZMUDA

  BOOK EIGHT

  THE AGE OF CHARLIE BLOSSOM

  CHARLIE BLOSSOM

  STEVEN SIMONYI-GINDELE

  TOM McCOY

  RALPH WERNER

  BUD FREEMAN

  KEN BROWN

  KAY STEPKIN

  CATHLEEN MORAN

  CRADLE TO THE GRAVE

  RUTH LINDSTROM

  ROSE HOFFMAN

  PAT ZIMMERMAN

  KITTY SCANLAN

  BETSY DE LACY

  CARMELITA LESTER

  HERBERT BACH

  ELMER RUIZ

  BOOK NINE

  THE QUIZ KID AND THE CARPENTER

  BRUCE FLETCHER

  NICK LINDSAY

  IN SEARCH OF A CALLING

  NORA WATSON

  WALTER LUNDQUIST

  REBECCA SWEENEY

  SECOND CHANCE

  FRED RINGLEY

  PHILIP DA VINCI

  SARAH HOUGHTON

  MARIO ANICHINI

  FATHERS AND SONS

  GLENN STRIBLING

  DAVE STRIBLING

  STEVE DUBI

  FATHER LEONARD DUBI

  JACK CURRIER

  HAROLD PATRICK

  BOB PATRICK

  TOM PATRICK

  Copyright Page

  Other Books by Studs Terkel

  American Dreams

  Lost and Found

  Division Street

  America

  Giants of Jazz

  “The Good War”

  An Oral History of World War II

  Hard Times

  An Oral History of the Great Depression

  Hope Dies Last

  Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times

  My American Century

  The Spectator

  Talk About Movies and Plays with the People Who Make Them

  Talking to Myself

  A Memoir of My Times

  Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

  Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith

  For Jude Fawley; for Ida, who shares his vision; for Annie, who didn’t.

  Acknowledgments

  As in two previous works, Division Street: America and Hard Times, my benefactors were friends, acquaintances, and wayfaring strangers. A suggestion, a casual comment, a tip, a hunch: a collective thoughtfulness led to the making of this book.

  Among these singularly unselfish scouts were: Marge Abraham, Joe Agrella, Marvin David, Lucy Fairbank, Lou Gilbert, De Witt Gilpin, Bill Gleason, Jake Green, Lois Greenberg, Pete Hamill, Denis Hamill, Noel Meriam, Sam Moore, Bill Moyers, John Mulhall, Bryce Nelson, Patricia O’Brien, Jessie Prosten, Al Raby, Kelly Sanders, Florence Scala, Ida Terkel, Anne Thurson, Warren Weaver, Steven Yahn, Beverly Younger, Connie Zonka, and Henry de Zutter.

  For the third time, Cathy Zmuda transcribed hundreds of thousands of spoken words—perhaps millions in this instance—onto pages that sprang to life. Her constant good humor and perceptiveness were as rewarding to me as her astonishing technique. Nellie Gifford’s acute observations as a volunteer editor, at a time the manuscript was really gargantuan, helped immeasurably in cutting the lean from the fat. A perspective was offered by both that might otherwise have been missing.

  My gratitude, too, to Nan Hardin, for her generosity of time and spirit, as a knowing guide during a memorable trip through Indiana and eastern Kentucky. My colleagues at radio station WFMT, notably Ray Nordstrand, Norman Pellegrini, and Lois Baum, were once again remarkably understanding and ingenious during my prolonged leaves of absence. I know I gave them a hard time, but theirs was truly grace under pressure.

  Especially am I grateful to my editor, André Schiffrin, whose idea this was, as twice before. His insistence and quiet encouragement, especially during recurring moments of self-doubt, are evident in all these pages. And to his nimble associates, Myriam Portnoy and Dian Smith, for their bright-eyed look at what was becoming burdensome matter—a salute.

  Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.

  —
I Corinthians 3:13

  You can’t eat for eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours a day—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

  —William Faulkner

  The “work ethic” holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working. America’s competitive spirit, the “work ethic” of this people, is alive and well on Labor Day, 1971.

  —Richard M. Nixon

  I like my job and am good at it, but it sure grinds me down sometimes, and the last thing I need to take home is a headache.

  —TV commercial for Anacin

  FOREWORD

  Babe Secoli, a supermarket checker for nearly thirty years, is proud of her dexterity in moving items along the conveyor belt. If asked, she will do a little dance, showing how she hits the keys on the cash register with one hand, pushes the food along with the other and intermittently whacks the conveyor-belt button with her hip. She knows what everything costs—the price list on the register is, she says, only “for the part-time girl.” Almost everything amuses her, especially the rich ladies who drop in to shoplift meat. “I’m a couple of days away,” she says, “I’m very lonesome for this place.”

  Ms. Secoli’s is one of the dozens of throaty, acerbic voices in Working, Studs Terkel’s oral history of working life, which was published thirty years ago this spring. When it appeared, Working was a revelation, a window on the thoughts of Americans who were rarely heard from: hospital aides, skycaps, gravediggers. Many of the interviews follow a similar, surprising trajectory, beginning with mundane workplace details but quickly moving on to existential thoughts. Even for the lowliest laborers, Mr. Terkel found, work was a search, sometimes successful, sometimes not, “for daily meaning as well as daily bread.”

  The oral histories in Working are wistful dispatches from a distant era. The early. 1970s were the waning days of the old economy, when modern management practices and computers were just beginning to transform the American workplace. In the last thirty years, productivity has soared, but job satisfaction has plummeted. It is hard to read Working without thinking about what has gone wrong in the workplace.

  Mr. Terkel’s ragtag collection of little-guy monologues was a runaway bestseller. Part of its appeal was the unusual, occasionally illicit glimpses it offered into the ways of the world. “If you work nights and it’s real quiet, I don’t think there’s an operator who hasn’t listened in on calls,” a switchboard operator says. “The night goes faster.” A gas-meter reader tells of the codes meter men put on customer cards when there was an attractive woman in the house.

  Mr. Terkel’s interlocutors also offer deeper insights. A parking lot attendant holds forth on why working people are better tippers than Cadillac drivers. A prostitute reflects that she was “the kind of hustler who received money for favors granted,” not the kind who “signs a lifetime contract for her trick,” or who “carefully reads women’s magazines and learns what it is proper to give for each date, depending on how much. . . [he] spends on her.”

  It is striking how many of Mr. Terkel’s subjects have found the meaning he says they are looking for. “Obviously I don’t make much money,” a bookbinder says, but she still loves repairing old books because “a book is a life.” A gravedigger recalls how impressed a visiting sewer digger was with his neat lines and square edges. “A human body is goin’ into this grave,” he says proudly. “That’s why you need skill when you’re gonna dig a grave.”

  There are disgruntled workers in Working who feel caged in by their jobs, but many others exult in their ability to demonstrate their competence, to show off their personality and to perform. “When I put the plate down, you don’t hear a sound,” a waitress says. “If I drop a fork, there is a certain way I pick it up. I know they can see how delicately I do it. I’m on stage.”

  The 1970s were a slower age, and much of the workers’ pleasure in their jobs is related to the less-demanding time clock. A hospital billing agent can take time off from dunning patients to look in on a man whose leg was amputated, who has no one to care for him. “If he’s going to live in a third-floor flat and he doesn’t have anybody home, this bothers me,” she says. A stewardess says she is supposed to spend a half-hour on a Boston to Los Angeles flight socializing with passengers.

  Three decades later, we are caught up in what a recent book dubbed “The New Ruthless Economy.” High tech and new management styles put workers on what the author Simon Head calls “digital assembly lines” with little room for creativity or independent thought. As much as 4 percent of the work force is now employed in call centers, reading canned scripts and being supervised with methods known as “management by stress.” Doctors defer to managed-care administrators and practice speed medicine: in 1997, they spent an average of eight minutes talking to a patient, less than half the time they spent a decade earlier.

  It is much the same in other fields. There have been substantial productivity gains. But those gains have not found their way to paychecks. In a recent two-and-a-half-year period, corporate profits surged 87 percent, while wages rose just 4.5 percent. Not surprisingly, a study last fall by the Conference Board found that less than 49 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs, down from 59 percent in 1995.

  When Working was written, these trends were just visible on the horizon. A neighborhood druggist laments “the corner drugstore, that’s kinda fadin’ now,” because little shops like his can’t compete. “Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit,” an editor says. “Jobs are not big enough for people.”

  When America begins to pay attention to its unhappy work force—and eventually, it must—Working will still provide important insights, with its path-breaking exploration of what Mr. Terkel described as “the extraordinary dreams of ordinary people.”

  —Adam Cohen

  INTRODUCTION

  This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

  The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the suppér table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. More or less. (“More or less,” that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, an ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.)

  It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.

  There are, of course, the happy few who find a savor in their daily job: the Indiana stonemason, who looks upon his work and sees that it is good; the Chicago piano tuner, who seeks and finds the sound that delights; the bookbinder, who saves a piece of history; the Brooklyn fireman, who saves a piece of life . . . But don’t these satisfactions, like Jude’s hunger for knowledge, tell us more about the person than about his task? Perhaps. Nonetheless, there is a common attribute here: a meaning to their work well over and beyond the reward of the paycheck.

  For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. “I’m a machine,” says the spot-welder. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. “I’m a mule,” says the steelworker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the receptionist. “
I’m less than a farm implement,” says the migrant worker. “I’m an object,” says the high-fashion model. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.” “There is nothing to talk about,” the young accountant despairingly enunciates. It was some time ago that John Henry sang, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man.” The hard, unromantic fact is: he died with his hammer in his hand, while the machine pumped on. Nonetheless, he found immortality. He is remembered.

  As the automated pace of our daily jobs wipes out name and face—and, in many instances, feeling—there is a sacrilegeous question being asked these days. To earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has always been the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden’s slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else.

  Lately there has been a questioning of this “work ethic,” especially by the young. Strangely enough, it has touched off profound grievances in others, hithero devout, silent, and anonymous. Unexpected precincts are being heard from in a show of discontent. Communiques from the assembly line are frequent and alarming: absenteeism. On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job.

  There are other means of showing it, too. Inchoately, sullenly, it appears in slovenly work, in the put-down of craftsmanship. A farm equipment worker in Moline complains that the careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good. The first is an ally of the Gross National Product. The other is a threat to it, a kook—and the sooner he is penalized the better. Why, in these circumstances, should a man work with care? Pride does indeed precede the fall.