by
Studs Terkel
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We had a client who was providing additives to meats and food preparations. My job was to make it into a trade publication ad. I’m sitting at these meetings with the president of the company and the sales manager. We’re out to provide a service to the meat packers so they can cheat government analysts who are going to inspect the sausages. They don’t see it as cheating. I say, “Why are we doing this ad for mustard?” They say, “Mustard acts as a binder.” It holds together the globules of fat the client is putting in. So we make a living selling mustard because the guy wants to put fat instead of meat protein in there. So the public’s been cheated and these sons of bitches are out there playing golf . . .
I got along fine with ’em. We had good friendships. One woman, May, was a lathe operator. Only the men had the bigger lathes and they got more dough. She knew the company wouldn’t give it to her, so she never applied. I got mad at her. I really gave it to her. I went and applied for the job myself. I got another young girl to do it too. Just to make an issue. Then May went in and applied. The personnel guy called the three of us in. He started telling us how hard it was. So I reached in my back pocket and pulled out a brochure from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, with Title Seven of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I laid that on the table. He didn’t stop to catch his breath. He said, “Of course, May, if you want this job you’re welcome to it. You’re the most qualified.” She got the job.
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We were caught up in the American Dream. You’ve gotta have a house. You’ve gotta have a country club. You’ve gotta have two cars. Here you are at ten grand and getting nowhere. So I doubled my salary. I also doubled my grief. I now made twenty thousand dollars, had an expense account, a Country Squire—air-conditioned station wagon given by the company—a wonderful boss. We began to accumulate. We got a house in the suburbs and we got a country club membership and we got two cars and we got higher taxes. We got nervous and we started drinking more and smoking more. Finally, one day we sat down. We have everything and we are poor.
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.
You pack your lunch, or you buy it at the vending machine. We used to have a canteen in there, but they cut that out. The vending machine is lousy. It hurts a man when he’ll put his quarter or thirty-five cents in there for a can of vegetable soup and it takes the coin but don’t kick anything out. There’s no one there to open the machine and give him his quarter back or a can of food. (Laughs.) A lotta machines are broken that way. Every day it occurs.
To be free is to have some kind of say-so about your life. I have no vote on the board of directors of Commonwealth Edison. I count for absolutely nothing. But that company is polluting my environment, is shaping my life, is limiting it and the chances of the kids at St. Daniel’s parish. It’s killing me as a person, as life in the steel mill is killing my father. I have to fight back. That brash act—that rude act—of interrupting the chairman of the board did it. I felt free. I don’t have to be afraid of him. He goes to the toilet the same way I do. What makes him better than me? His hundred thousand dollars a year? Hell no. Well, that act made me free. You can’t emerge as a person if you’re a yes-man. No more yes, Mr. Mayor. No more yes, Mr. Governor. No more yes, Mr. Chairman.
I think about guys that were in college with me in the early fifties. They sell real estate, insurance, they’re engineers, they’re bankers, they’re in business. They probably make a lot more money than I do. It’s like they’re twenty years older than me. They seem a lot closer to my father than they do to me. They’re in a groove, they’re beyond change. They’re caught into something which is so overpowering—it’s as though their life was over. It’s all settled. I think my job is keeping me young, keeping me alive.
The thing is you gotta like people. If you like people, you have a good time with ‘em. But if you have the attitude that people are the cause of what’s wrong with this country, they’re gonna fuckin’ get you upset and you’re gonna start to hate ’em, and when you hate, you get a shitty feeling in your stomach that can destroy you, right?
I was in a four-man detail in Harlem for about six months, just before my transfer to Canarsie. It’s four thirty-story buildings, and the people’d be movin’ in there. Every day I have a list of names of people that are movin’ in. One black family came with eight kids. They had seven rooms on the twentieth floor. The mother, this big, fat woman, asked could I show her the apartment. The kids just wanted to see it. Beautiful painting, real clean. The kids started crying, little kids. I could cry when I think of it. They ran into the bedrooms and they laid on the floor. They said, “This is mine! This is mine!” The kids said, “Look at the bedroom, it’s clean.” These little black kids with sneakers and holes in their pants, crying. It was empty, but they wouldn’t leave that room. The woman asked me could they stay over night. Their furniture was gettin’ delivered the next day. You get people a job or decent housing, you won’t have no trouble.
I like everybody workin’ together. You chip in for a meal together. One guy goes to the store, one guy cooks, one guy washes the dishes. A common goal. We got a lieutenant there, he says the fire department is the closest thing to socialism there is.