by Studs Terkel
A man stood on Eden’s Highway86 and took a survey of guys driving to work. Their jaw muscles were working. I was one of those guys. I was this guy with his eyes bulging and swearing and saying, “You rotten guy, get out of my way.” For what? So I could get to work to get kicked around by a purchasing agent because his job is five minutes late? That forty-five minutes’ drive to work. I would usually have about five cigarettes. Constant close calls, jam-ups, running late, tapping the foot on the floor, thumping that wheel, and everything that everybody does.
I would get to the office. You might find the paper hadn’t been delivered, the press had broken down, the boss might be in a foul mood. Or you might have a guy on the phone screaming that he had to see you in half an hour or else the whole world would end. They always had to have an estimate first. So you’d do your paper work as fast as you could. Then you’d start your round of daily calls. Then came the hassle for parking space. Are you lucky enough to get one of those hour jobs on the street or do you go in the lot? If you go in the lot, what’re they gonna do to your car before they give it back to you? How many dents? So you go through that hassle.
Then it would be lunch time. You’d take a guy to lunch, have two or three drinks. Rich food . . . You come out of the darkened restaurant back into the summer afternoon. At four you’d take whatever jobs you had assembled or proofs you had to look over. Maybe work until five thirty or six. Then you’re fighting the traffic back to the suburb.
I’d be home at a quarter to seven. We would just sit down and eat. We would finish at eight, with dinner and conversation, looking at the kids’ report cards and whatever. Then we’d watch TV if something decent was on. If it was daylight saving time, we’d play ball with the kids until nine or ten. Then we’d go to bed. Or else we’d start hacking away at our personal problems. Mostly it was fighting the bills. On weekends we’d go to the country club for dinner. I belonged for three years and never played the course. I never had time.
Just the intolerable strain of living here is fantastic, especially when you’ve been away for a year.87 I haven’t been as nervous in one day driving mountains with radiators blowing out as I was the half-hour it took my father to drive me down here this morning—in his Oldsmobile.
If you decide to cut and run, you’ve got to do it in one clean break. You’ll never do it if you piddle away and if you wait until you’re sixty. A fellow I know, he was sixty-three, bought a piece of land in Taos, on a mountain top, forty acres. He and his wife were gonna go in three years and move there. He told me this on a Tuesday. On Saturday his wife was dead in the garden. The day he buried her he said to me, “Boy, you’re so smart to get out while you’re young.” Our decision to make this journey evolved over a period of years. Not so strangely, it came about with our achievement of what is called the American Dream.
People say, “You’re wasting your college education.” My ex-employer said to my father, “You didn’t raise your son to be a hash slinger.” I’ve lost status in the eyes of my big city friends. But where I am now I have more status than I would in the city. I’m a big fish in a little pond. I’m a minor celebrity. I can be a hash slinger there and be just as fine as the vice president of the Continental Bank. If I were a hash slinger in the suburbs, they’d ask me to move out of the neighborhood. I said to myself as a kid, What’s Mr. So-and-so do? Oh, he only runs a cleaners. He’s not a big wheel at all. My personal status with somebody else may have gone down. My personal status with myself has gone up a hundred percent.
I think an education is to make you well-rounded. The first room we built in this house was the library. But I believe we’ve gotten too far away from physical work. I found this out working around my house in the suburb. I could have one terrible day and come home and hang a wall of wallpaper and get so involved, do the edges, make sure there are no air bubbles under it—that I could forget all my frustrations. I don’t think jogging is enough. I believe most suburban guys are happier and easier to get along with when they’re out cutting the grass than when they’re in that Cadillac. I work on the house in Arkansas. It’s just an old oak frame. There’s no finish. I’m remodeling all the way through. You’re rehanging doors and moving thresholds. Just by trial and error. When I walked out of my old life I weighed 185 pounds. As you see me today I weigh 160. I feel healthier than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I don’t say I’m gonna end up the rest of my life as a hash slinger, either. I may buy more land and get more involved in cattle. I would like to go a hundred percent in farming, but it would require ten times the land I’ve got, and it takes time . . . In the cattle business there’s enough demand for meat, so you can make a comfortable living between the cattle and the broilers. I might expand the dairy bar into a regular restaurant, make it a little fancy. I’ve got a lot of different ways to go.
But one thing we’ve still got—the one thing my wife would not let me get rid of—is we still got the trailer. We can go again if we have to. If we found something better, maybe a higher mountain top to live on, we’d go live there.
PHILIP DA VINCI
He is a lawyer, twenty-nine years old. Until three years ago he had been working for the house counsel of a large insurance company. Though “doing very well,” he and a colleague suddenly quit and took off—wandering out West.
I was defending the company against people who had been hit by cars. I honestly took that job because it was the first rung on the ladder. The next thing would have been to jump sides in the game, become a PI—a personal injury lawyer for the plaintiffs. Passing out cards to policemen and start getting referrals and making a lot of money and on and on and on and on. Had I remained with the company for twenty-five years, I would have walked out with $350,000 in profit sharing. (Laughs.)
The first three months were novel. Getting up there and playing the advocate. The novelty wore off when I found out what I was really doing. Spending eight, ten hours a day defending an insurance company was a waste of time. If I had this education, I might as well do something useful.
I drove a cab. Somebody told me about Legal Aid. I went there with the intention of staying only six weeks, make a grubstake, and go to New York. I started working in Uptown.88 When it came time to go to New York I said, “No, I’m gonna stay.” I finally got into something where I actually felt useful. It’s been two years now. I’m still a lawyer, but it’s different.
My clients are Appalachians, blacks, senior citizens, people in landlord-tenant cases. We’re in Juvenile Court. We represent people abused by police. We represent inmates of the state penitentiary. My clients are people who’ve been dumped into Uptown as a result of overcrowding in state hospitals.89 They’re like camps, some of them—six to a room. They’re dying. After you pressure the hell out of them and threaten an expose, the Building Department files a suit and they move the people to a better place. All the day labor agencies are down the street, the slave marts.
For the last nine months I’ve been fighting with the Illinois Department of Financial Institutions. They are twenty-six companies that call themselves debt planners. There’s one that advertises on a Spanish-speaking TV program. It preys on the people. They get ‘em in there and they have ’em sign these contracts in English which they can’t read. Making debts that don’t exist, charging exhorbitant fees. Finally they said they’ll investigate—a slap on the wrist. So we filed our own law suit attacking the companies directly. It’s intentional malfeasance on the part of the bureaucracy not to enforce the laws, not to impinge on the mercantilism of the slumlords, shylocks, et cetera. We’re constantly attacking the bureaucracy.
He works out of a storefront office. “We have a group of law students from the school where I teach—two classes a week. Plus two Mexican women and one black woman, who help us run the office.” It is funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity. “Had I stayed downtown practicing law, I’d be making slightly more money, more than slightly . . .” (Laughs.)
Every day is different. There’s
no boredom ’cause there’s so much going on. A typical day? We walk out of our office and all of a sudden two guys in topcoats walk up behind us and start taking our picture. As we walk in the restaurant, they’re looking at us. As we walk out, our pictures are taken again. Red Squad, Chicago Police Department.90 Because we represented the Young Patriots.91 that was at the time when they established the free medical clinic. The city was trying to close it down. They were keeping a file on the activist lawyers in the city.
I walk back to the office and interview people. Calling finance companies, trying to find defenses on contracts where people have signed, not knowing what the hell they signed because they can’t read English. Their car gets repossessed, their wages are garnisheed . . . You can work four days straight, sixteen hours a day, and never feel tired. Until your eyes start falling out, and then you know you have to go to bed.
There’s a new thing going on—the legal commune. Four or five people out of law school get together. They’ll just work out of their apartment. We’d make exhorbitant fees if we were in private practice. But we charge one-tenth of what a lawyer would normally charge. You know, lawyers who behave are well paid in our society. (Laughs.)
At the insurance company it was all competition. You’ve got to push the other guy down and crawl on top of him and move up that way. If you don’t push him down, you know he’s gonna get over you and pass you up. He’s gonna get that job and you’re not gonna make as much money and you’re not gonna get that title. Oh, the day dragged on! I was always sneaking out, going to a show downtown to pass a few hours. It was so boring. You have a stack of a hundred files on your desk. All you do is make check marks. Go into the court and make the same motion. The same thing, over and over, day after day. And why? To save the company money.
Here you’re aware of the suffering of your client. You know the type of landlord he has. You know what his apartment looks like. You know the pressure he’s under. It makes you all the more committed. We don’t help them only with their legal problems. If they’re suffering from a psychological problem we try to hook them up with a psychiatrist. Or try to get them in school. They’re so pushed down, so depressed.
You get to know them intimately. We’re very close. I’ve been in their houses. They come to my house. I know them all by their first names. We go out drinking. They’re my friends. The people I worked with at the company, I never saw them after five ’. I would never think of sharing my thoughts with those people. The people I work with here are my life.
My work and my life, they’ve become one. No longer am I schizophrenic. At the other place you had to go to work with a suit and tie on. When it hit five you would run out, hop on a bus, and go home. I would immediately strip myself of my suit and put on levis, sandals, and a T-shirt. Of course, I still wear a suit and tie in court. I don’t want to hurt my clients. But the falseness has passed. People have to accept me for what I am.
(Suddenly he is fatigued.) I don’t consider myself a real lawyer. I’m not a lawyer in the sense that the better job I do, the more money I get from my client. I’m just trying to help . . . (Sighs wearily.) You can change a few things. But not much progress is being made. There are about two thousand of us in the country. The legislatures are not controlled by us. For every law we have declared unconstitutional, they rewrite five more. For every step we make, we’re pushed back four. Some days I’m optimistic. Other days . . . (Trails off.)
Because of the commitment in this type of work, the amount of hours per day, per week, per month you put in, there’s a burn-out process. Usually guys last here two years and they just burn out. It’s just physically too much—and emotionally, God! That’s what happened to Bud. (Laughs and indicates his colleague seated nearby. )
Bud, too, had previously worked for an establishment law firm. He became a “poor people’s lawyer,” and now, after two years at it, is taking time out. He chuckles ruefully: “They complained about small things on LaSalle Street. I didn’t get my five hundred bucks from this guy.’ Doesn’t mean anything. Up here it’s a wearing process. I go down to the office and I’ve got 110 cases and their lives are involved. You feel overcommitted and overextended . . .”
In the past ten years I find myself unable to sit through it for another ten hours. You just become emotionally sick because of your powerlessness. You’d like to pick up a gun and get that cop who beat up that thirteen-year-old kid. You prepare that one brief and file that one complaint and go before the jury and get twenty-five bucks for a kid that’s had his skull split open by five police officers. You know it’s bullshit. Maybe the best way is to give the kid a gun and say, “Okay, square it.” But those are the depressing moments.
It’s a matter of maintaining a grasp on hope—that more people will become aware. Maybe things will get better in my lifetime. Maybe twenty, thirty, forty years from now. You’re overwhelmed by so much, you just gotta turn off and say, “Man, I can’t go back for two days.” This happens a lot.
You live for two years in the ghetto and you get so absorbed, you don’t see what’s going on outside. I need more escape from this job than from my old one. At the insurance company you’re not being battered from all sides. You have a few hassles but they’re meaningless. Here, things are so heavy . . .
I have no regrets. On my bad days I feel I have wasted three years working here in the ghetto. But not over-all. It has helped me see a lot of things and make me aware of what’s going on in our society—what the system does to people. I would have died on the other job. I would have become an alcoholic or a drug addict or something. It would have driven me to that, I’m sure.
SARAH HOUGHTON
It’s a farmhouse in New Jersey. A Sunday brunch with her husband, Dave, who works in Manhattan. He spends long weekends here. She is a librarian at a private school.
She attended library school for four years, 1960 to 1964. Most people who went there had other jobs. She was forty-six. “We were referred to as second chancers, because we were all hoping for more rewarding work. All were looking to this as a release, as a ‘now I’ll live’ kind of thing.
“I’d been out of college for twenty-five years. When I got out, it was during the Depression. If you had a liberal arts education, you couldn’t get very much. Everybody went to Macy’s.” She did secretarial work, taught temporarily at a girls’ college. “When I was very little I had a picture in my mind of how life was going to be.” She worked as a newspaper reporter, edited trade union journals, and in 1949 “drifted” into the new field of television.
I was the first television producer the agency had hired. They had done a Wildroot commercial and the client didn’t like the negligee the girl wore. Somebody said, “The only way to do it right is to hire a woman.” So I was hired.
I didn’t think I ever worked on anything I thought was terrible, really. Though I didn’t think there was that much difference between Wildroot and someone else’s shampoo. I know Coty has one kind of smell and another has another kind—a new lipstick, there’s not that much difference.
I took pride in what I did. I made myself do it right. But it became increasingly ridiculous to spend all that time and energy making sure a print got to the station on Thursday the twenty-second at six ’. I dropped the film off myself on the way home because you couldn’t be sure a messenger would get it there on time. What difference did it make if the film was there on Monday or Thursday? I felt, to live miserably under such pressure, to knock yourself out—it should be for something more important. Life was too short for this.
It was obvious, too, that the men were getting much more than I was. They were getting raises more regularly. They were getting twice as much as I was getting for the same work. That kind of stuff—which any woman gets used to, after a while.
Every time they’d lose a big account the pink slips would come out. Is it going to be me? Or somebody else? This is nervous-making. There’d be times when you were terribly busy and times when you’d sit around with nothing to
do. You’d try to look busy. You’d sit there and knit or read or do double-crostics. You had to be by the telephone in case somebody’d call. I never took my work home with me. I took the tension home. You couldn’t help doing that. If you’re going to be tense, it should be for something worthwhile.
I could probably have stayed at the agency for ages. Perhaps being squeezed into one thing or another. The time would come when they’d say, “You will clean the film or get out.” It happened to some people. They certainly weren’t going to keep a sixty-five-year-old film producer. (Laughs.) So I had to think of something else.
I had known so many women—the only thing they could do after they left their jobs was to be a receptionist. I had seen too many ladies that had to earn their living doing these miserable things—receptionist, companion. Or going back to being a secretary. I didn’t want this. Suddenly I had the inspiration. Why didn’t I go to library school?
In the winter of 1960, I started thinking about library work. I don’t know whether it was my sense of insecurity at the office or whether I just felt I had to get out. I heard there was no age limit, that you could be a librarian until you practically keeled over. I accepted the notion that I would probably work until I dropped. Anyway, I think people and books are a nice combination. It was comfortable to feel that you could probably do this for as long as you wanted to. So I went to Columbia Library from seven till eleven at night for four years.