Working

Gin 

I earned money for the first time when I was in sixth grade.  I was attending Crane School in Pittsfield.  We were in school from 9:00 to noon and then again from 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon.  In the mid-50s, it was assumed mothers would be at home to give their children lunch.  My walk to school involved a steep hill on the street where I lived, then a right turn for a few blocks before I reached the schoolyard.  I did this walk to school, back and forth for lunch and home from school five days week all fall.  Then came January. 

A neighbor wanted a favor. Her son was enrolled in the afternoon kindergarten session for the rest of the year.  She was worried about him getting to school on his own.  “Will you walk him to school each afternoon ?  I’ll give you a dime every Friday.”  I was thinking, “Fine.  I go back there every day after lunch anyway.  Wait, what did she say?  She’s going to give me money!”

Now, you may think, a dime?  What a paltry sum!  However in 1956, a dime bought a full bag of penny candy, two of the big candy bars like a Hershey Bar or a Baby Ruth, a full bottle of soda, or two bags of potato chips.  A dime was worth a lot.   Movie tickets were 25 cents. That’s just two and a half weeks of walking to school.  Which I did anyway!

Each afternoon that spring, we walked together. I held his hand the whole way because I felt I was in charge of him. He was my responsibility.  It wasn't like two friends walking to school next to each other as equals. I was being paid for this.  I don’t recall his name, don’t know how he got home, don’t remember any exciting incidents.  I do recall thinking about what I might buy with all the money I was earning.  As we walked, I’d consider my options.  “What do I want this week?  Candy, soda, chips?  Maybe I’d only spend five cents this week and save the rest."  Then I’d start calculating. “If I save for three weeks, what would I have?  Four weeks?  Five?”  The walk, even up the hill, would go by fast as I daydreamed about my potential riches. 

Over the next few years, I would expand my “walking to school” babysitting business to the more traditional kind.  I charged 50 cents an hour, 75 cents after midnight.  I'd sit in people’s homes, watch TV and they would give me money.   While I might feel tired and want to be home, I'd stay awake imagining how much more I would earn if the parents would just stay out just a little bit longer especially after midnight.  

Babysitting gave me a glimpse into other people’s lives.   I became aware of who had records of Broadway shows I could listen to, which family had a great collection of Kingston Trio albums, which houses had lots of books, and who had magazines we didn’t get at our house.  Reader’s Digest was a favorite of mine, a magazine my father scoffed at, but it had a lot of jokes and funny stories.  That’s why I liked it.

As I got older I would notice how incidents were interpreted differently than in my family.  One evening I was babysitting on my street for a young family.  The father was an engineer just starting his career at General Electric, his wife a stay-at-home mom.  Now that I think about it, all the moms on Montgomery Avenue in the fifties were stay-at-home. There wasn’t any other kind.

There were two kids, a boy around six and a girl eight.   They were pleasant to sit for.   I liked getting there before their bedtime, because they had board games I liked, ones my family didn’t own.  The three of us would start playing the Game of Life but Jack would get bored quickly.  To keep him interested, I would invent physical activities for him to act out.  Instead of just moving his little plastic car around the board, I'd read from the game card,  “Jack, you need to run to the door three times before your next move.  Jack, you have to walk six steps backwards with your eyes closed.”  He loved it. We rarely finished the game the way it was meant to be played but we had fun.    

Then they would get ready for bed.  I’d read them a story before I moved to the living room to watch TV until the parents came home.  It would often be late, as the parents volunteered as ushers at Tanglewood in Lenox, a summer music venue for the Boston Symphony.  This was something a lot of young families with limited funds for entertainment would do. After a certain number of nights ushering, they would earn free tickets to a performance.  

One evening, Jack woke up. “I’m thirsty.”  I told him I'd get him some juice.  When I opened the refrigerator, the juice was tucked behind a quart of milk. With one hand I took out the bottle of milk to place it on top of the fridge so I could reach in to get the juice. The fridge top, however, was rounded, not flat.  The bottle of milk fell shattering all over the kitchen floor. 

Jack, several rooms away in this one level ranch house, started to cry. I went in to tend to him. “Why are you crying?  I am the one who spilt the milk.”   “Its my fault,” he said. “How can it be your fault?  You were nowhere near the kitchen.”  Jack looked up at me and said, “My mother will say I made you nervous.”  This surprised me. I told Jack to drink his juice and not to worry because I would clean up the kitchen.

As I thought about it I realized Jack wouldn't have said he made me nervous unless he had heard this from his mother. My mother's life was far from perfect but blaming us kids for things going wrong would not have been her reaction.

We have all read about women in the 50’s dealing with the stress of trying to be a perfect homemaker, of not being able to express their own worth by following a career path.  There are statistics about the number of wives in the 1950s involved with depression or pills.  Maybe Jack's mother was one of these, maybe not. 

At one job I was literally babysitting.  A family across the street had a two-month old infant.  They wanted to go to a movie together for the first time since this little one had arrived.  It was new for me to babysit an infant even though  I felt up to the task.  I had a little sister and brother and so knew the basics.  She was sound asleep when I arrived, so cute in her basinet.

The somewhat anxious mom showed where the bottle of formula was in the refrigerator.  I told her I knew how to heat the bottle and test the temperature of the formula by squirting a little along the soft inside skin of my arm.  “Have a good time.  We’ll be fine.” I said. “ My mother is right across the street if I need anything.”  They left. I settled down with a book on their couch.  

It wasn't too long before the baby started fussing.  I went in to comfort and change her.  I was proud of handling the diaper pins correctly.  Well, I did the change the diaper part okay, but the comfort not so much. She was crying, well, screaming really.  I knew how to heat up the bottle but what did I do with her in the meantime?  I couldn’t take a screaming, wriggling baby into the kitchen near the flame of the gas stove.  Where would I put her while I heated up the bottle?  I kept walking around the house swaying the baby to get her to be calm and quiet.   However, that was delaying the very thing that would make her calm and quiet.  

I called my mom, holding the phone up to my ear with one hand still trying to sooth the baby.  She told me,  “Put the baby in the bassinet even if she's crying and heat up the formula.”  I said, “But she’ll cry.”  “She’s crying anyway,” my mother pointed out.  “She isn’t going to stop until she has something to eat.” 

My mother had given me the courage to put the crying baby down for a few minutes while I attended to the bottle.  When I came back with the ready bottle, it didn’t take her long to settle into my arms and drink.  After the traditional burping, she quieted down and fell back asleep.  I placed her back in the bassinet and returned to the couch.  Just then the couple came back, their movie night over.  No sign of any noise or stress. The house was quiet. The baby happily asleep just the way she was when they left.  As he paid me that night, I began to rethink my, “They give you money for this?” refrain. This night I felt I earned it. 

Then there were the times I earned it but didn’t get it! It's hard to believe couples would be so low as to stiff a teenaged babysitter her few dollars. But it would happen.  The father, the mother never dealt with payment in my experience, would pull out his wallet and look surprised he only had tens and twenties. “No dollar bills. We’ll get it to you tomorrow,” he'd say. I'm thinking, “It's okay. I’ll take a ten!” I never had the nerve to say that out loud.

Sometimes they would follow through but not always. One family in particular never paid me until the next time I came to sit for them.  It became a regular thing. I never got paid the night I did the work, but the next time they wanted me they would somehow find the right combination of bills for the earlier work.  When they arrived home at night, it would be the same situation again, a mysterious lack of some ones or a five to pay me. My mother wanted me to refuse them, but I never did that.  I wonder about that last time I sat for them. They probably still owe me.

Sometimes parents did do the right thing even if I was unaware of it at the time.  I was sitting for a couple new to our neighborhood. Not just new but exotic to me.  Most of our neighborhood was comprised of working class families, the dads working at the GE.  One side of the street was mostly two family homes with factory or blue-collar workers.  The other side of the street had newer one-family ranch homes with engineers just beginning their careers at the GE. The Jorgensens were from New York City. He was an architect and she was an artist. They had nothing to do with the GE. I don't know why they came to Pittsfield or how they came to rent a home in our neighborhood.

I do know my parents, my mother, in particular, enjoyed their company.  If my parents had connections to any big city, it would be New York.  They read the New Yorker, the Sunday Herald Tribune, and rooted for the Yankees.  None of the other neighbors had that connection to share except the Jorgensens.  They were big city people with habits that were different from the culture I was used to.  I always associated the word sophisticated with them. 

One evening I was sitting for their two small boys, easy to care for, very polite and quiet.   Shortly after I arrived it was their bedtime. Then I settled in to look at the art books and other treasures in their house.  Around 9, I was hungry so I went into the kitchen to see what was there.  In the refrigerator was a single individual bottle of Pepsi. I saw no other soda.  I didn’t want to take their last bottle so I passed it up, drinking water instead.  I poked around a bit to see if there was something for snacking.  I saw a plate covered with plastic wrap. Inside was a variety of fancy crackers, each with a slice of cheese, and some sliced up carrots and celery.  I figured they were going to have a party and had prepared canapés' (I was proud I knew that word.)   I closed the fridge, sadly snackless, to return to my reading.

The next day Ruth asked my mother why I hadn’t had any of the snacks or drunk the soda they had left for me.  She had prepared that fancy plate for me.   It turns out they had oodles of soda they kept in their basement, just putting in the fridge what they needed at the time.  When I heard of this, I thought, “Can I go get it now?”  I said that to my mother as a joke.  When she relayed my comment to Ruth, she came over to my house with a fresh plate of snacks and a bottle of Pepsi.  She was very generous, but their lifestyle habits were so different from ours that I misinterpreted. If we had had a plate of fancy food like that, it would have been meant for company.  We did not store extra soda anywhere. Whatever we had was in the fridge, period.   If it wasn’t there, we wouldn't have any until the next time my mother did the weekly shopping.

Babysitting let me take the measure of how my family compared to others.  As a child I always felt my parents were strict even though I can’t recall being denied anything. I knew they had expectations of how I was to behave. However, the reality was they were rather permissive.  We didn’t have chores assigned to us.  “Your job is school. Do your homework.  Get good grades,” my mother would say.  This didn’t mean we didn’t help out around the house, setting the table, doing dishes, giving the younger kids a bath, or reading them bedtime stories. It felt impromptu, helping when it was needed rather than scheduled or required.  We didn’t have rules about how much TV to watch or how much time to devote to homework. It was understood we needed to get homework done and that was it.  

It surprised me to find out other parents, people my parents knew as neighbors, had different attitudes.  I was babysitting at a house just across the street.  This boy Jeffrey was a friend of my sister’s.  He was seven, very easy to take care of.  It was a summer’s evening with warm breezes coming in the windows.  The two of us were watching a baseball game on TV.  While my family were Yankees fans, Jeffrey followed the Red Sox.  It was a close game, tied in the ninth inning.  Suddenly, he got up and turned off the set.  “What are you doing?” I asked with a lot of surprise in my voice.  “I watched my two hours,” he said.  “What do you mean?”  “I am not allowed to watch more than two hours of TV at once.”  I nodded. “I see, but the score is tied. I am sure your parents wouldn’t mind if you finished the game.”  “No," he said, “I watched my two hours.”  I suggested he subtract the extra time from his next day’s TV allotment, but to no avail. He stuck to this rule.   I began to appreciate my parents more.  They raised me with a sense of doing what was right, not by rigidly following rules, but by using common sense. 

Then there was weekend babysitting. All arrangements were made in advance.   Instead of walking home from school on Friday I’d take the school bus to a house in a different neighborhood.  The parents were already gone when I got there, a weekend trip they took a couple of times a year. Since I arrived before the kids were home from grade school, I had time to read the note left by the parents with details on bedtimes, meals and so on. I was particularly interested in the weekend meal situation. I was a pretty fussy eater at the time so I needed to know what I was in for. 

The two kids I was minding were boy around seven and a girl ten.  They resented having a baby sitter. I think they felt they were old enough to stay home alone.  Obviously their parents didn’t think so.  I found them difficult.  Maybe they resented me feeling I was just a few years older than they were. Whatever the reasons they seemed like brats to me. They talked to me in ways I would never talk to my parents

Rosalie and Roy complained about everything, mostly Roy  “I don’t like tuna noodle casserole. I’m not going to eat it.”  “But this is what your parents left for tonight. It’s right on this note,” I explained, as if that was going to help.  “I don’t care. I never liked it,” he replied.  I ended up making him a peanut butter sandwich. Rosalie ate it all eagerly enough. I moved it around on my plate figuring I’d also have a peanut butter sandwich when they were asleep.   I wondered why parents would leave food they knew one of their kids wouldn't eat.  The rest of the night and next day were easier. We watched TV after which they went to bed without any problem. The next day, after Saturday morning TV, we went outside to play ball in the yard.

Roy was friendlier outside.   He told me that a few months ago he had been in the hospital.  “What for?” I asked.  “Rosalie dared me to chew on poison ivy leaves.”  I stared at him. “And you did it?” “Well, she dared me to.”  Some defense I thought. Then I began to think about the power of a dare.  It was as if you had to do whatever you were dared to do. I began to feel a bit more sympathetic toward Roy.  Rosalie seemed to delight in getting him into trouble.  She herself was seen as quiet and innocent. Roy was the scapegoat of the family. If anything went wrong, it was his fault. 

I don’t recall what dinner was left for us that night, but whatever it was we all survived it. Once they were asleep I gorged myself on Kingston Trio.  I will admit I played Charlie and the MTA over and over again forgoing their more folksy ethnic music.  Enjoyment of the full range of Kingston Trio songs would come to me only after I met Bill who shared his enthusiasm for all their music.

Sunday morning I woke up to commotion from the parents’ bedroom that I understood was off limits to all of us. I walked in to find Roy stacking a footstool on top of a chair that he had moved over next to a large bureau.  Still in his pajamas, he started to climb up this improvised ladder. I yelled,“What are you trying to do?  You’re going to fall.”  “I am going to practice with my father’s guitar. He lets me do it all the time,” he told me. I looked up at how the guitar case was wedged on top of the tall bureau as close to the ceiling as possible.  “Yes," I said, “That’s why he keeps it way up there. So you can play it.  Leave it alone! Put the furniture back. Lets go have breakfast.”  “But I want it!” Roy screamed. I didn’t really want to fight with him, so I said, “When they call today, I’ll ask your Dad if it’s okay.”  Roy suddenly became quiet.  “No. You don’t need to ask him.  I’ll wait until he's home.” 

At least Roy backed down.  I was getting tired of him at this point and it was only 8 o’clock in the morning.   “I want to go outside and play,” Roy demanded.  I remembered that New England was expecting Hurricane Donna over the next few days.  Hmmm, I thought to myself, maybe I should say yes.  Let him go outside and play in a hurricane!  Then I realized I was being no better than Rosalie to him. 

“Sorry,” I said, “It’s almost raining.  It’s going to get really windy pretty soon. We can’t do that.  After we have breakfast, we’ll make a tent in your room with some sheets and blankets. We’ll bring a flashlight inside.” I knew this kind of activity, one his parents would likely say no to, would appeal to Roy.  Of course, Rosalie would have no part of it.  “I’m going to go into my room and play alone,” she declared. I never could get both of them happy at the same time.  The phone rang while we were in the tent.  The parents were coming home early due to the weather.  I liked that.  I would be home in time for Sunday night supper.  Sleep in my own familiar bed.   I had survived another weekend babysitting adventure. And I could keep the full amount they had paid me!

Late night babysitting sometimes offered unexpected pleasures. I often watched  TV to fill the time after the kids were asleep before the parents came home.  Pittsfield, nestled as it was in a valley among the Berkshire Hills, was not a good location to pick up over the air TV signals as the only stations were in Albany, 50 miles away.  The only reason we could get the signals was because of repeater antennas at the top of nearby Mount Greylock.

Network programming ended at 11pm followed by local news until 11:30.  Sometimes the stations would just go off the air until the morning. Weekends were better. The stations would run movies from 11:30 until 1:00. Not a lot of frills.  No one introduced them.  Lots of local commercials. Most weekend nights it was a western or a war movie, sometimes a drama or romantic comedy. I’d watch whatever was on. 

Then there was the night, sitting quietly in the dark, I was captivated. The movie I was watching was fascinating. I knew nothing of the real event that served as the backdrop for the story. I knew nothing of who these actors were.  I just knew I was there with them living through every moment, wondering how it would all turn out and imagining how I would react to these situations.  A movie about two people.  He, gruff, rough and tumble; she, refined and uptight.  They were caught up in a situation, thrown together, needing each other to survive.

The next day I was chatting with my mother as she made me breakfast. I started to tell her about the movie I had seen. How much I liked it. I was so surprised when she started to talk about it too. She not only knew the name of the film but also the names of the actors and who had made it.  As soon as I started to describe the story, she joined in the conversation with her own details. I hadn't been aware I had been watching a classic, The African Queen.

Babysitting wasn’t just about watching TV. Sometimes there was the unexpected to deal with. One night I was sitting for a family that consisted of two boys (three and four at the time) and an eight year old girl. I enjoyed this situation. The house was three doors down from mine. When I got there the kids were already asleep. The parents went to jazz clubs during the summer Berkshire tourist season. The music didn't start until late so they often didn't get back until three or four in the morning.  I really had little to do.  I came over at 10:00,  Just watched TV  and then doze off.  The parents had even told me, “Just sleep on the couch. You don't need to stay awake. We want someone here." Here I am thinking again,  “They give you money for this?”

It wasn't always that simple. One night, I heard one of the boys moving around.  I went upstairs to see if he was okay just as he walked into the bathroom.  Then he started to pee.  Still half asleep, he was squirting all over the place.   I didn’t know what to do. I had no experience with this.  I began to panic.  Should I just pick him up so he was directly above the toilet?  Reach over and hold him to try to direct the stream?  I was frozen in place, watching him pee all over the bathroom. Finally he finished, tucked himself in, walked into his bedroom and went back to sleep.  I don’t think he was ever fully awake. I was left standing in the bathroom feeling embarrassed at my ineptitude.  I cleaned up as best I could and left it at that.  I never mentioned this incident, either to the parents or my mother, but every time I saw this kid on the street I wondered if he had any memory of that night.

As I grew older my working horizons widened from babysitting to other options.  I had attended a summer day camp, Camp Stevenson, run by the girls club when I was ten and eleven.  The summer I turned twelve, I was planning to be a junior counselor.
Though this was an entry position with little responsibility and no pay, it could lead to a paid job as a counselor the next summer.   I liked the idea I could go to camp and get paid for it in the future.  This sort of fit my mantra of they pay you for this?

However, my camp counselor position was never to be.  That June my father brought home a pogo stick.  My brother was seventeen at the time. Pesky little sister that I was, I had a crush on one of his friends, Frank.  Unlike my brother, who always wished I would leave him alone, Frank would talk to me, play with me for a few minutes before going off with David.  If I were bouncing a ball, he would throw it back and forth a few times.  If I were jump roping, he’d try a few hops. I ate this up. So what does the pogo stick and my crush on Frank have to do with my never-to-be had job as junior counselor?

We would have neighborhood competitions counting how many jumps you could make on the pogo stick before falling off.  Even David got involved taking a few jumps.  I, with my twelve year-old logic, figured the way to impress Frank, to get him to take me seriously, to win his heart, would be to beat him at Pogo stick jumping.  I worked hard at it, practicing for hours so I could jump more consecutive times than anyone else.  I reached a thousand jumps one day while practicing   I felt triumphant.  However, when I told people I had jumped a thousand times without stopping, no one believed me.  I began to realize besting a seventeen year-old boy at a physical activity might not endear me to him. I might have mastered the pogo stick but my relationship with Frank remained the same. I was the little sister of his best friend.  Nothing more.

The worst was yet to come.  That relentless practice on the pogo stick had calloused my hands.  My palms were sore and blistered. A few days later one became swollen and inflamed necessitating a doctor’s visit.  I had a staph infection.  Staph is very contagious.  My hand was bandaged. Directions for care were given.  Restraints on my activities were ordered. No swimming. No bike riding. No camp counseling. No summer. That's the way it felt to me.

I never did return to Camp Stevenson. Never did try my hand at camp counseling, but I did have a chance at a different kind of work with children one summer.  I was in college at this point, a math major with an interest in teaching.  The Pittsfield city schools had been through a curriculum change.  They were adopting New Math.  Jeffrey’s mother was nervous about this.  Jeffrey hadn’t had new math in the elementary grades. She wondered if he’d be able to succeed in junior high math.  She expressed her concerns to my mother and the two of them decided on a plan.  During the summer vacation, three mornings a week for two hours a day, I’d teach Jeffrey and my sister, Vicki, New Math. 

Jeffrey’s mother set up a classroom in their cellar den with New Math workbooks for fifth and sixth graders as well as materials and supplies.  To me it was an extension of playing school, only I had live people to play with! I did take it seriously. I assigned them pages in the workbooks, corrected their errors, explained any confusion. I enjoyed the work. 

My students did well.  They were able to find the union and intersection of sets of numbers. They differentiated between the empty set and a set containing the number zero.  They learned how to count in other bases.  They never asked why anyone would want them to know any of this.  Good thing. I would have had no answer for that.   The “They give you money for this.” philosophy was alive and well that summer. It wasn't until high school that I finally understood it went deeper than that.

 It was junior year; time to apply to college.  Taking PSATs. SATs, writing college essays, obtaining letters of recommendation.  It felt like taking an extra course. There was so much to do.  I decided to ask one of the couples for whom I had babysat for a letter of recommendation. 

These were the Cooks. They attended the Unitarian Church, a source for many of my baby-sitting jobs. They were older than the usual parents I sat for.  She was a special education teacher, he a long-time GE engineer. They were active members of the Pittsfield community, serving on boards and committees.  I found it fascinating he was a leader in the town Republican committee while she was active on the Democratic side.  I was in that teenaged black-and-white stage of judging people. I couldn’t see how two people who loved each other could be on such different sides of political issues  It was confusing to me. 

Babysitting was not confusing.  They had a baby girl rather late in life.  She was two and three during the time I took care of her.  The first time I went to sit for them Mr. Cook picked me up at my house around five. They were going out to a dinner party.  As we drove up to their house, I noticed a teen-aged boy playing basketball by himself.  I could hear him talking, describing his game as if he were an announcer on the radio.  He kept up the patter the entire time, not even acknowledging us as we walked into the house. 

Mrs. Cook told me, “You don’t need to do anything for him. He knows what to do. He’ll stay outside for a while. Then he’ll come in to have his supper which I've already prepared.  He’ll listen to sports on the radio and go to bed.”  I came to understand this boy had been staying with the Cooks for a while, perhaps he was a foster child.  I also knew something wasn’t quite right about him.  However I took her at her word that he was fine alone turning my attention instead to her instructions about the little girl. I babysat a lot at this house and Mrs. Cook was right.  My job was to tend to the baby; the boy was capable of taking care of his own needs. 

This family had all the Broadway records you could imagine. Once supper was over, the little girl in bed, I loaded the dishwasher as I had been asked. Turning on the record player, I sang enthusiastically all the great songs from Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, and Paint Your Wagon.  These were records my family didn’t have. My family didn’t have a dishwasher either.  Maybe that was why, every time I went to unload it, some glass would be broken. Really. Every time.

Once when the Cooks arrived home, they brought ice cream sundaes from Friendly’s, the three of us enjoying them before he drove me home.  They asked how school was going, what I wanted to study in college. I in turn talked about the activities I did that evening with their little girl.  I never said anything about the boy because I wasn’t sure how to pose my questions.  I was curious about him.  What was wrong with him? Why he was living there? I didn't know how to ask these questions so I never found out.

The Cooks told me they were happy to write a letter of recommendation.  Not only did they send it to the high school guidance office, they also gave my father a copy.  The first few paragraphs were what I would expect, comments on my school record, my sense of responsibility, my interest in teaching, likely all of this culled from that ice cream conversation.  The last paragraph really surprised me causing me to reflect back on all my baby-sitting experiences.   They concluded their letter with a sentence like this.  “The best evidence of our confidence in Virginia is seen in the fact that we entrust our most precious possession to her care, our little girl.  We know in the case of any emergency Virginia will make the right decisions.”

This stunned me.  I had considered babysitting easy work.  I could while away the time playing games with the kids, listening to records or watching TV while they slept.  Now it dawned on me. I wasn’t being paid for my time.  I was being paid for my ability to offer protection when needed.  Soothing crying babies, entertaining bored kids, finding ways to keep them out of hurricanes, making sure they enjoyed their time with me so they felt safe without their parents.  This is what they gave you money for.