by Ron Singer.
Perhaps the easiest way to begin the contrast between these, my first two jobs after college, is to contrast my supervisors. Polly (last name forgotten, if ever known) was a lively, ambitious white woman of perhaps forty. In those days, also relevant was the fact that she was “single.” I cannot describe her sexual orientation/preference because it never occurred to me to speculate about it.
Willhemina de Ford was probably in her late fifties. I think Mrs. de Ford (not yet “Ms.”) was of West-Indian origin; she may have spoken with a lilt. In 1963, would her proper ethnic designation have been “Caribbean-American”? Since she wore a wedding band, I assumed Mrs. de Ford was married. Come to think of it, there may have been family photographs on her desk, although the children in them could have been nieces and nephews.
If there are many vague details in this account, don’t forget that fifty-eight years have since passed. Of course, I could have chosen to make these details definite, and invoked poetic license to justify their specificity.
When I picture Mrs. de Ford at her desk, the neat stack of papers in her Outbox was always three or four times as high as the Inbox stack. And everything else –pens and pencils, rubber-stamps, photographs and other personal affects– was also arranged with geometric precision. Not to be smart, but you could say Willhemina de Ford was the Mondrian of the Columbus branch of the New York City Department of Public Welfare (which did not become the “Human Resources Administration” until three years later). Mrs. De Ford was a bureaucrat.
I’m sorry I missed the name change. Like my friend and erstwhile college classmate, John Parisi, who worked at another branch of the DPW, I delighted in lampoon. What could we not have done with the three innocent new initials? Hirsute Rodents Affiliates, Highway Robbers Anonymous –you get the idea. For some reason, we never messed with “DPW.”
I cannot compare my supervisors’ desks because Polly Jacobs (let’s give her a fictitious surname –why not?) was never at hers. If I may imagine it, though, it must have been a mess. This is to extrapolate from her person, which was substantial, and although she wore garish, expensive clothing and heavy make-up, and dyed her hair that Mercurochrome color, she always looked as if she had just tumbled out of bed.
There were other contrasts. Whereas, when she wanted to talk to you, Mrs. de Ford would call your name and beckon with a finger, Polly would either shout from afar or race across the office and get in your face. She would arrive so suddenly and hover so close that you were afraid of getting poked in the eye.
“Mr. Shepard,” Mrs. de Ford would call out, just loud enough to penetrate the constant buzz of the big room, where forty or fifty of us sat about ten feet apart, in five or six rows facing her desk. (The “open-plan” arrangement was one of the few exceptions to the fact that municipal offices were always behind the curve.)
Mrs. de Ford was a formal person. In the six months I worked under her, we never moved to a first-name basis. Now that I think of it, the grizzled vet who occupied the desk to my left, whose name, improbably, was Robert Burns, had never graduated to “Bob.”
“Mr. Shepard,” she once said, when I stood before her, “I have a question about your report of the home visit to…” She paused momentarily to check the names on the front of the compendious manila folder. “…Mr. and Mrs. Decatur. Did you raise the issue of reclassifying them or of closing the case?”
And she went on to explain what I already knew. “Home Relief” was supposed to be a temporary designation, to be replaced within (six months? a year?) by the designation “Aid to the Disabled,” if appropriate, or “Case Closed.” In fact, Home Relief was a battleground between bleeding-heart caseworkers (like me), and numbers crunchers (like Mrs. de Ford). The caseworker’s formal title was “Social Investigator,” which neatly balanced the two parts of our job: to advocate for the genuinely needy, and root out the frauds.
Mrs. de Ford had been a Social Investigator for years (how many?) before passing the civil-service exam that elevated her to “Unit Supervisor.” In several ways, she showed a degree of fidelity to her roots. She understood the difficulty of determining whether particular clients were deserving, having grappled many times on the border between Home Relief and Disabled. She also remembered the difficulty of making fine distinctions with a caseload of between eighty and a hundred, some of which were large families, and others, shall we say, fluid groupings that were extremely difficult to pin down.
Fueled by chain drinking of black coffee, Bob Burns was famous/notorious for maintaining both a particularly heavy caseload (120?) and a thriving (according to him) real-estate business. He would combine field visits to clients with showing apartments to prospective renters. (Co-ops would not catch on for at least another decade.) People say Bob wrote his reports while enthroned in the Men’s Room.
Mrs. de Ford never beat around the bush. “Why did you permit the Decaturs to re-open their case, Mr. Shepard?” she asked, with a tired smile.
“Well,” I said, trying not to sigh, “as I mentioned in the report, they didn’t really ask me to reopen the case. When they got back to the city, they went straight to the Herald Square office and asked them to open the case, as if it were a new one. H.S. forwarded the new file to us because the Decaturs’ address was the same as before they left, and thus in our district. I got the case because…”
Mrs. de Ford blew out some air before finishing my sentence. “…because you had been their investigator previously, and, when they disappeared, you had not gotten around to closing the case.”
“All that is in the file, Mrs. de Ford. They were only gone for two weeks.”
Back and forth we went. The facts were these: Melvin and Sally Decatur were a (white) married couple, aging professional thespians whose multiple health issues, or health pretenses, had prevented them from treading the boards for the past three or four decades. Mr. D. suffered from something that may have been a heart murmur or, alternatively, something digestive. Mrs. D. was a self-described “lung-er.” (Not to be confused with “one who lunges.”) My visit to their SRO had taken place three weeks ago, one week after H.S. had forwarded the file. The Decaturs –he, mostly—had told me a totally frank, totally believable story about their two-week furlough from the Welfare rolls.
Years before, Sally had slipped on the ice in front of a celebrated hotel. (Was it the Plaza? the Pierre? Does it matter?) Since Mel’s friend, Benedetto Crostini, erstwhile U.S. Three-Cushion Billiards champion, had fortunately been present that day, when the negligence case came before a judge, they were awarded a settlement. Of course, the hotel’s insurance company stonewalled as long as possible, but six weeks ago, the Decaturs received a check for $2,703.19.
When I pointed out during the reinstatement interview that they were legally obliged to sign the check over to the Welfare Department, Mel Decatur laughed. “Sue me!” he said.
Further exchanges elicited the following. Not having enjoyed a vacation for many years, they took the Greyhound down to Miami, and proceeded to spend the rest of the money (our “stipend,” Mel called it, in mock Welfare-ese) on food (“yummy food,” Sally commented); five nights in a hotel (“of the second rank,” Mel said. “A fleabag,” Sally corrected); but mostly at the Hialeah Dog Track. (Sally cracked a joke about Greyhound buses and racing dogs.)
When I asked them why and how they had returned to N.Y., Mel replied, “We missed you, Mr. Shepard. I mean you’re our kind, our very own social investigator! Oh, the bus fare? Well, of course we had bought one-way tickets. But, luckily, there are still a few kind souls left in the world.” (Hand to brow.) “An old acquaintance…”
You get the idea. Returning to my conversation with Mrs. de Ford, I explained that (Herald Square) H.S. had put the Decaturs back on H.R. (Home Relief), and that I still needed to check “some details” before I decided whether to close the case. After all, what was really different now from all these years we had carried them on the rolls? And, if it came down to it, everyone (including Mrs. De Ford and me) knew that, if “society” somehow succeeded in prosecuting them for fraud, sent them to prison, and then paid for their room-and-board, it would cost the taxpayer far more than the status quo: the inflated rent of their SRO, and meager allowances for food, transportation, etc..
What I did not mention to Mrs. de Ford was that one of my motives for being secretly glad to have the Decaturs back on my case load was their amusement value. Most of my clients were dreary, pathetic, disgusting, or combinations thereof. The Decaturs were a breath of –I won’t say “fresh”—air.
The upshot was that Mrs. de Ford signed off on my report, with an addendum: to be reviewed within three months by herself and her own boss, Mr. Black, whose title, if I remember correctly, was “Case Supervisor.” By the time the three months had passed, I was no longer working for the Welfare Department. I never did find out whether the case was closed, and I had not thought about the Decaturs until the other day, when I began writing this account. If I had to speculate, I would guess that they bamboozled my replacement, as they had bamboozled me. At some point, they must have died, but it is anyone’s guess whether that means their case was closed.
That story from fifty-eight years ago has a lot of loose ends. What ultimately happened to my good friend, John Parisi? Simple, after a stint at the DPW (Flatbush branch), he, too, moved on. In his case, it was to a Masters program in Social Work, after which he had a long, distinguished career working with juvenile offenders in Connecticut.
I last saw John about five years ago. By then, he had suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. One day, while our wives went off to another part of the Yale Museum, I wheeled him around a roomful of 20th-century paintings, reading titles and artists’ names to John, who made his usual witty, on-point comments about many of the paintings. A few months later, when I learned of his death, I was very glad we had spent that time together in the presence of great art.
Another large loose end is the private sector part of that year, 1963. In the months before we took the test and were placed at our Welfare jobs, we both worked as entry-level employees for a market research company. Our title was “coding clerk,” and we were paid $65 per week (versus the $5,150 per annum we got from the DSW) for tabulating data from house-to-house surveys.
At least one such survey was a big joke to us. The firm, Walter Berks, LLC, had been awarded a contract by a second-tier detergent company to determine why the leader in the field was selling so much more detergent than our client. They paid Berks thousands of dollars, presumably, to be told that, in essence, the competitor’s product was better. Oh, of course, “better” was quantified with great specificity, and broken down into several sub-categories: gentler on the clothes, got them cleaner, did not irritate the user’s hands, etc.
A running joke between John and me about this particular survey was to guess how many thousands of dollars the poor runner-up soap company had paid Berks to reach each obvious sub-conclusion. We also enjoyed speculating how the runner-up might use their expensive new knowledge. This was a better question than the one about the cost-breakdown. Assuming they could not make a product that was both superior to the front runner’s and competitively priced, it seemed to us that their only recourse would be to come up with an advertising slogan clever enough to level the playing field.
For weeks, John and I enjoyed ourselves dreaming up and singing detergent slogans, each a knock-off of a successful slogan for a completely different product. “Betcha’ can’t wash just one (pair)!” “Things go cleaner with —-.” “We scrub harder.” Or our favorite: “Put a leopard in your leotard!” It seems a shame that thirty more years would have to pass before we could have sung, “You’ve got the right suds, baby!”
As those lame jokes suggest, we spent a lot of time waiting around for survey results to come in. We were like that workers’ joke in Bolshevik Russia: “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
The people who made serious money at Berks LLC probably did much less scoffing. One morning, John and I were riding the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, to the “open-plan office space” (another commonalty between my two 1963 jobs) of the fifty-odd (very) coding clerks. That day, the elevator made an unusual stop on Eight where, for whatever reason, the Executive Offices were located. Someone too short for us to see from the back of the crowded elevator got on, and all laughter and conversation abruptly ceased. When the person got off at Nine, the conversation and laughter resumed.
Later, we asked an old-timer among the coding clerks who the short, mysterious passenger could have been.
“Oh,” he replied, a note of awe in his voice, “That must have been Mr. Berks. He’s an imposing man. I heard that, before he retired from boxing and started the firm, he briefly held the World Featherweight title. He runs the company the same way he behaved in the ring: total domination. And did you see his face? Scaaaryyyy!”
Of course, we were further from the eighth floor than six stops on the elevator. John and I did not know exactly how much further, but we did know two facts. The reason there were more coding clerks than the company ever needed was that our entry-level job was a proving ground. If your work somehow stood out, you could be promoted to Step Two, Survey Design, where you drew the routes on printed maps for the survey-takers to follow. The trick, as we understood it, was to design routes where they could visit the most people in the least amount of time. Survey Design started at $125 per week. In the Berks market research jungle, coding clerks would kill for this job.
This brings me back to my other 1963 supervisor, Polly (surname unknown, or forgotten). At Berks LLC, promotion to Survey Design was by audition. When they got too busy “upstairs,” one or more coding clerks would be temporarily sent up, to help out. Exactly what that meant, neither John nor I ever learned. The reason was that, since we planned to leave as soon as the DSW beckoned, we didn’t care. Since we did need the $65 per, however, we tried to do a decent job: arrive on time, not make too many (detectable) tabulating errors, etc. But, when a co-coding clerk returned starry-eyed from upstairs, we never joined the backslapping cohort who gathered round to pick his/her brain.
We were both pretty well liked in the coding department. This was probably because we stood aloof from the shark-like competitive ethos that prevailed from top to bottom at Berks LLC. One Friday afternoon, our position became crystal clear.
“Ben! John!” cried Polly, from across the room. ”Would you two like to work late this evening? They need people upstairs.”
All eyes were on us. We looked at each other, and one of us called out something to the effect that we could not stay late. What, exactly, did John or I say? I honestly cannot remember. Perhaps, it was something like what Melville’s Bartleby (a favorite, during our college days) said when asked to do anything beyond his specific job, copying documents. Did John or I say, “No, thanks, Polly, but we’d prefer not to”? Or, perhaps, we echoed her words: “Thanks, Polly, but we wouldn’t like to work late tonight.” Or, more likely, we made some excuse: “Sorry, Polly, but we’re busy tonight.” (Did we add, “We have to listen to a radio program”?)
What I do remember was how shocked everyone, including Polly, looked, before she recovered her equanimity and offered the spurned opportunity to two saner clerks. That our colleagues looked shocked did not mean our reply had been rude or, in any other way, extreme. What shocked everyone was that we turned down the offer. Because Polly would not ask us again.
Was there any specific aftermath to this moment at Berks LLC? Again, none that I remember. The “aftermath” was that John and I left both of our jobs, and that, starting in 1964, we embarked on the paths that would lead us to become what we would remain for the rest of our working lives: a social worker, and a teacher and writer. After two jobs, in the private and public sectors, that lasted a total of perhaps ten months, we began the studies, apprenticeships, and then careers that would carry John all the way to his stroke, forty-some years later, and that still carry me, as I close in on eighty.