As a 14-year-old high school student, I worked as a page in the open stacks of the University of Pittsburgh library. My job was one of the benefits of my mother’s labors in the household of a regent of the university. She cleaned house and her son shelved books. Everyone with whom I worked was a student at Pitt, or an adult hired by the university. We punched in and out on a mechanical device that recorded the time we arrived and left. One day, I saw a student select his own timecard and punch out, then another timecard; the student punched that card, also. The scheme was that some employees would leave early, and others would punch their timecards. My questions to the college students about this practice resulted in my being recruited into the illegal enterprise. We were all busted, and the college students were fired. My mother’s employer insulated me from damage. I spent four more crime-free years in the Cathedral of Learning.
After graduating from high school, I was recruited by man I knew to come to work at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic. He explained the job as “watching the patients.” Very little time passed before an agitated patient attacked me; another attendant came upon me about to strike the patient and bellowed, “You’re not allowed to hit them!” This prohibition had not been made clear to me at my hiring, but after seeing some great tussling balls of conflict between patients and attendants, I advocated for the establishment of standards. Training was the standard by the time I left, four years later.
In the early 1970s, I was newly employed as a trainee for a loan officer position for a major small loan lender. At the time of my employment, the company had retired some practices that the federal government had objected to, but I found old records in an office that proved the assertion of discrimination. On applications for loans, there were spaces marked “N” or “S.” This was to indicate whether the applicant was “Negro” or “Spanish.” Fewer qualification points were assigned to applicants in those categories. The company signed a consent decree, agreeing that it would no longer use discriminatory practices in its lending policies.
As the assistant creative director in the advertising department of the Famous-Barr Department Store in St. Louis Missouri, I overheard an art director grumbling about the Senior Vice-President’s seemingly arbitrary removals of some of the models from the catalog she was working on. She had booked models in compliance with company guidelines for diversity in advertising, but the SVP had demanded that she eliminate certain African-American models. I queried some of the other art directors and they confirmed that they had also been told to remove Black models from their catalogs. I told my boss, the creative director, that I was going to have a conversation with the SVP; she sighed, and I left her office for his. We had a conversation, and he stopped the practice.
My son and his friend made a light-hearted film about two boys dancing in odd places and situations. The two enlisted the aid of the Morgan County sheriff’s department and some deputies to encourage them to “dance, boys.” They posted the video on YouTube, the video got spectacular viewing numbers and a Morgan County Sheriff came to my son’s high school. The principal, without contacting his mother, illegally acceded to the deputy’s illegal demand and the two boys were taken to the Morgan County jail, where they were illegally made to remove the video from YouTube.
Things change.
cjon3acd@att.net