Shift Work
Nancy Smiler Levinson
Word Count 1577
To get your first job in journalism, assemble your by-line article clippings from the university newspaper and paste them into a scrapbook purchased for a dime at Woolworths. Pack it in your suitcase with your summer clothes, which includes nylon stockings, garter belt, and a pair of white gloves. At the Minneapolis airline terminal building hold back tears as you hug your bewildered parents good-bye, climb the steps, and board the plane for New York City.
Once arrived in the fabled Greenwich Village, thank your older college friend, Peg, for letting you sleep on her foam rubber sofa in her beatnik pad up on the sixth floor. Begin pacing the pavement in search of a newspaper job. First, The New York Times refuses you entrance to the editorial department. Next, a man at the Herald Examiner dismisses you with the cliché, “Go back to your hometown, get some experience, and come back in a few years.” Begin to understand yourself as somewhat naïve.
Do not give up.
While being rejected at the Women’s Wear Daily, consent to a suggestion by a WWD secretary: Take the NY Central train up to Westchester County to The Port Chester Daily Item, hoping it’s not too far from Manhattan where you truly yearn to be.
Luck! But with a glitch. A no-nonsense editor-in-chief, Bill Bassett, hires you as a reporter on the spot, clarifying, of course, that you’re required to live in town to become part of the community, which also requires having a car. Nod. Hold in a gasp.
Bill Bassett points to your desk in a newsroom corner. The society writer, Marguerite, informs you that the TV host, Ed Sullivan,began his career as a sportswriter, sitting at that very desk, paid ten bucks a week. Go ahead and accept your salary of sixty-five With no apartment buildings as such in Port Chester, manage finding an apartment-like space above a real estate office, across the street from the railroad station. Also chance upon a single girl as a roomie, a German girl just released as an indentured servant/maid in a family home. (believe it or not in 1960 America). Furnish the place with a table, two chairs and two mattresses
from Volunteers of America, horrifying your parents beyond their initial puzzlement and upset at your departure.
Next, with the help of a young man reporter, also named Bill, purchase a 1950 (or so you’re told) turtle shell color Studebaker from someone who knows someone who. . . pay 300 dollars! It’s a shift. Sigh relief, though, having learned to drive on a shift, one belonging to a Minneapolis policeman moonlighting as a driving teacher.
In your new used car, sputter around cautiously, getting your bearings. Locate the places assigned as your newspaper beats and become acquainted with people who work at each: the combined Town Selectman and District School board building,
the schools and the Port Chester police station. Drive up and down a street actually named Main. You now live and work in a township!
Or another country.
When you drift into homesick moments or ask the daring young girl in the mirror how she came to this strange new life, think Hah! to everyone back home who said you’d never get to New York and certainly never land a newspaper job.
One day early on Bill, the reporter, stops clacking his typewriter keys, looks up and asks, “How’s the car is working out?”
“Okay so far,” you answer confidently, "I just had the tank filled.”
“How about the oil?” he asked. “Scheduled an oil change?”
“Oil?” What about oil?” At home you drove the family DeSoto. When the arrow pointed to L for low you drove to a filling station and got it filled up. No one said anything about oil. Blush, stand awkwardly, and listen to a short automotive lesson, along with a sum-up from the other editor, Warren, a cigarette dangling from his mid-lips, “Careful you don’t wreck the car, Kid.”
Don’t expect any big newsworthy events. Bite the pencil, sit on Ed Sullivan’s swivel chair and rewrite news releases: A revised dog-leash law, an obituary, an announcement of a public meeting to discuss debris near the Byram River bridge.
So far you haven’t left the office. What about those assigned beats? Were three hundred dollars flushed down the toilet?
Perk up one morning, when at last you are sent out. With pad and pencil and car keys, prepare to interview two volunteers at United Hospital. Drive your car (the oil having been changed and air in the tires checked).
Oh, God. The Studebaker stalls. So too with your heart. Blocks from the hospital. The motor snorts and spits while you manage to inch towards the side of the road. Turn the motor off, sit quietly while faking calm to yourself, count to 300 and try again. Then again. No luck. But lucky to have paper and pencil on hand. Write a note, slip it under a windshield wiper (find out that it’s broken) and hope that since you know Police Chief Donald personally, he won’t ticket you. Swallow several of those homesick moments, then run to the hospital, interview two teenage girls volunteering during their summer break (Homesick moment, find a phone booth and call Bill, the reporter.)
Bill comes to the rescue, demonstrates some kind of trick to get the engine going (oh God will that happen again?) and he follows you back to the office where you sit at your desk, spread out your notes, roll a piece of paper in the typewriter carriage and really begin your career.
Become an engaged part of the community. Cover meetings of the school and Selectmen, regularly check the police blotters, and write a feature piece on a retiring fireman, a piece on the Port Chester Library story hours (how you love hanging out there and befriending the librarian, Evelyn!)
Visit the town of Mamaroneck and interview a Mad Magazine illustrator. This time ride in the photographer’s car, a Buick, to interview an Argentinian woman, Fanny Taylor Newberry, (although American-born) visiting town relatives, on her way to Washington, D.C.
“A spry 92-year-old woman, who primped and packed all morning for an appointment with President Dwight Eisenhower, said, “It’s going to be quite a date.”
Eisenhower’s invitation to Fanny, was sent to her Bariloche, Argentina home, months after his visit there and following a momentary meeting between them. Fanny had sent him a letter in Spanish, noting that she was an “admirer of great men. . . the greatest patriots of the world have sacrificed and worked for their own countries.” She also wrote that he ought to have her letter translated into English. At his follow-up invitation, she took him up on it.
Admire your first by-line. Smile at the three-column photo of yourself with Fanny and her local relatives on their front step, which accompanies the article/
A startling mid-winter surprise ushers in a big break, yielding several stories from one major, terrifying event.
200 PERSONS HOMELESS IN 3 A.M. BLAZE:
5 TENEMENTS GUTTED IN NEAR-ZERO WEATHER
South Main Victims Flee in Nightwear
By Nancy Smiler
On that date, January 21, 1961, write of the wild, crackling flames and the thick smoke. . . the five apartment houses and four business establishments disintegrating . . . the terrified people running. . . the dangers and injuries. . . the winter weather working against the firemen, the hosed water freezing within minutes. . .the several injured firemen . . . a collapsed wall, trapping four of them in a basement before their last-minute rescue . . . Momentarily, feel a dual self, the naïve girl who set out on a journey and your present you, a newspaper reporter madly scribbling notes with freezing bare hands, unable to wield a pencil wearing mittens.
What crazy luck and timing, arriving at the scene only blocks from your living quarters and not having to struggle getting the Studebaker started. Most surely a night to remember. . . the sheer power of fire. . .humanity trembling in terror . . . working together. . . aiding each other above and beyond boundaries
Follow up with stories all week, dig in learning about building structures, pipes and electrical wiring, possible causes; interview the fire chief, business owners, and stunned homeless set up in the high school gym. Help with Port Chester’s collection of food and clothing… Become starkly aware that all of this life is far bigger than yourself, your doings, your own purpose.
In short time go about your beats, select feature stories, enjoy an occasional lunch with Evelyn at the little deli near the library.
In early spring listen to Evie’s food for thought. “If I were you, free and single, no little ones to care for. . . eager to see and do,
I’d travel. Maybe Europe. Yes, go ahead. Think why not? Give idea serious thought. Small jaunts into Manhattan is not living there. . .maybe seizing the opportunity. . . yes, why not?
At the end of summer make plans to sail on a freighter to Rome, where a friend landed a job as a copy boy at the Rome Daily American. Who knows?
Shifting your gears, bid a warm farewell to the staff, friends, all the good town folks, and your roommate who is now working in the real estate office downstairs. Find someone who knows someone who turns out to have a mechanically-minded teenage son happy to have an old, battered car in the family driveway to putter around with. Sell your Studebaker for $100.
Set sail across the Atlantic Ocean. Without the nylons, garter belt, or white gloves.
Nancy is author of Moments of Dawn: A Poetic Memoir of Love & Family, Affliction & Affirmation, and a chapbook, The Diagnosis Changes Everything. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Hamilton Stone Review, Ink in Thirds, Silver Birch Press, Jewish Literary Journal, and Copperfield Review. In past chapters of her life she worked as an educational book editorand Head Start teacher, and she published some thirty books for young readers, focusing on history and biography, Yes, she did work as a newspaper reporter, a short stint indeed. She lives and writes in Los Angeles.