Review of Working

I skimmed through about a dozen of the interviews that make up this book.

1. I spent most of my life learning techniques that are of no value any more. Magazines, newspapers--print. I'm not oriented to television as I was to print. The biggest impact today is TV. This has helped reduce the need for press agentry. A client will come to me and say, "I want to be a star." In the old days, maybe I'd get her in Life. Today on the Carson show you could get more attention that I could have gotten her in a year. As press agentry becomes part of a bigger and bigger world it becomes more routinized. It's a mechanical thing today. It's no longer the opportunity to do stunts. They don't work any more. Much of what I've been doing all these years is not as potent as in the old days. Most guys in my category have eight, ten clients. If you have less, you're in trouble. You can't depend on one or two, no matter how much they pay, 'cause you can lose 'em. One day I lost three clients that were paying me each over twelve thousand dollars a year. I lost Cinerama, Indonesia, and the Singer Company. That is thirty-six thousand dollars a year. I had years I made a hundred thousand. There's a law of making money. You never regard it as something temporary, and you live up to the scale. But in this work, you don't build anything. If I had a little candy store and I built it up to a bigger store, I might have sold it for a quarter of a million dollars. Who do I sell my clippings to? Eddie Jaffe, press agent - pg 88

2. To me, when I was a kid, the policeman was the epitome--not of perfection--was a good and evil in combination, but in control. He came from an element in the neighborhood and he knew what was going on. To me, a policeman is your community officer. He is your Officer Friendly, he is your clergyman, he is your counselor. He is a doctor to some: "Mr. Policeman, my son just fell and bumped his head." Now all we are is a guy that sits in a squad car and waits for a call to come over the radio. We have lost complete contact with the people. They get the assumption that we're gonna be called to the scene for one purpose--to become violent to make an arrest. No way I can see that. I am the community officer. They have taken me away from the people I'm dedicated to serving--and I don't like it. Vincent Maher, policeman - pg 134-135

3. I quit chaufferin'. I make more money in a parking lot with tips and salary. When people ask what I do, I tell 'em I park cars just like any other job. Only thing you got is a white collar, that's okay with me. Working behind a typewriter, that's fine. You're a doctor, that's cool. I got man friends, teachers. We meet sometimes, have a drink, talk. Everything is normal. Everybody got a job to do. My friends never feel superior to me. They'll say, "I'll go downtown and park with Lovin' Al." Alfred "Lovin' Al" Pommier, car hiker [valet] - pg 222

4. We were doing a beautiful job for a big brewer. They'd just bought a new brewery and found out the beer was too nutritious. It had a lot of food value. They did market research and found out that psychologically inadequate young men consumed beer as a way of competing with one another--the kids in college. "Can you drink fourteen bottles of beer while I drink fourteen bottles of beer?" How many can you drink before you puke? The beer that sells best is the weakest and the thinnest and doesn't fight you. The first thing they did was take the richness out of it. They got it down to alcohol and water. My role was to create a fun-filled image, an exciting boy-girl gaiety in the competitive market of light beer. "Light beer"--that's the ad phrase for the watered and thin beer. So the schmucky kid thinks he's a stud fighting for the babe by consuming all that alcohol. You begin to say, "What the fuck am I doing? I'm sitting here destroying my country." The feeling gets stronger and stronger and suddenly your father dies. Walter Lundquist, industrial designer - pg 526

5. We've had the bar only six months. We're trying to get it to a point where we spend less and less time there. [...] We go to bed about midnight and it starts all over the next day. Except Monday. Monday we're closed. Now we begin to reap the benefits of what we went there for. On Monday we put the kids on the bus to school. We get in the truck, we throw the boat in the back. Six minutes from our front door, we put it in one of the world's largest man-made lakes and go fishing and picknicking and mess around until four o'clock when the kids come home. We sit out there, where I don't suppose three boats go by us all day long. Sit and watch the copperheads on the shore and the birds overhead. Discussing Nixon and Daley and fishing and the dairy bar and whatever. What's astonishing is we can climb a mountain right across from our home. There's a waterfall at the top. And no jets going over. No people. Just a pickup truck down the road now and then. A man stood on Eden's Highway [in Chicago] 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. [...] 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. [...] My personal status with somebody else may have gone down. My personal status with myself has gone up a hundred percent. Fred Ringley, ex-salesman turned farmer - pg 534-535