Gee, I don’t remember things back in my Way Back resembling the exciting stuff that took place in offices populated by “Mad Men” types, you know, those immaculately conceived males who are carbon copies of each other. As a young lady in the late 50s, yeah, I wore shirtwaist dresses with nipped in waists and full skirts underpinned with crinoline. My feet were shod in high-heels as I sweated my way up a hill in Kansas City, bound at age 18, for a job in a bakery. No, I wasn’t a baker. It was my responsibility to open mail and pass on complaints that someone who ate the bakery bread had found a rat turd and/or a fingernail, in their morning toast. They also promoted me to running the switchboard when they ran out of victims. Then I was passed on to operating an “addressograph” machine, quite possibly one of the most dangerous devices in the office.
It was there that I lost a small portion of the tip of the thumb on my left hand. This was one week before my marriage. I lost more than a portion of thumb in that disaster. Oddly, the one guy I remember from the bakery experience, was a guy named Al Piotrowski (head of accounting) who hired me. He told me he was from Milwaukee.
Before long my husband and I were off to Detroit for his internship. We lived in a dump but were glad to have that dump and the sandwiches he brought home so we would have something to eat. I still wore shirtwaist dresses (I had two: one pink, one blue), but during this era I rode the bus to work in Hamtramck, a thoroughly polish area with blocks of car dealerships. Not much glamour sitting behind a board strung with cords, but that’s where I sat as a switchboard operator. It never occurred to me that I had a life beyond, somewhere beyond that dreary city that daily spewed soot.
All of the jobs I had back then were devoted to serving men. Not one of them involved a female boss. Frankly, despite the Mad Men series, I don’t think things have changed much. Women haven’t been liberated. It seems to me, we’ve merely been reconfigured to suit today’s expectations. Am I wrong?
During a recent trip to Las Vegas, my son sent the above image of a shop specializing in Bettie Page memorabilia. “You’d love this place,” he wrote.
Not really.
