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Working

by Studs Terkel

JACK CURRIER

It was a chance encounter on the Illinois Central. He is a teacher of English at a branch of the City College. At night he conducts adult education classes at an urban university; among his students are ADC mothers. He is thirty-seven.

My father is the comptroller, treasurer, and a member of the board of directors of a large corporation. His title, salary, his house in the suburbs, everything about his life─the successful American life─is right out of the picture book. But I wouldn't trade places with him for a million dollars.

My father spent his life adding up numbers for somebody else. Any connection between his real life and his work seems to be missing. I feel, with all my doubts about the institution I work for, with the sense of hypocrisy, there's a connection.

In order to do a better job, I have to become a better man. In the business world, in order to do a better job, you have to become ruthless. In order to make more money, you have to care for people less. In order to succeed, you have to be willing to stab your competitor in the back.

A couple of years ago I was in my father's office. I think we were getting ready to go out for lunch. He got a phone call. His boss was chewing him out for something─in a tone and language that was humiliating. Here's my father who had worked for this company for thirty years.

My father is a dignified man and he works hard. God knows he's given that company all the years of his life. He doesn't have anything else. There are no hobbies. He wasn't close to any of his children. Nothing outside of work. That was it. He would get up in the morning and leave the house and come home twelve, fourteen hours later, six days a week. That was it. Yet here he is at sixty and here's a guy chewing him out like he's a little kid. I felt embarrassed being there. I felt sorry that he knew I was watching that happen. I could see he was angry and embarrassed. I could see him concealing those feelings. Sort of shuffling and scratchin' his head, in the face of higher authority. We went to lunch. We didn't talk about it at all.

I would hate to spend my life doing work like that. If work means something to you, it doesn't matter what the boss... I can imagine being fired from my job. I can imagine an administrator at the college disapproving my teaching methods. But there's no way he could deprive me of the satisfaction that comes from doing my job well.

If my father were ever let go, I don't know what he would do. I suppose he could find somebody else to add up numbers for, although at his age that would be hard. There ought to be a reason behind what men do. We're not just machines, but some of us live like machines. We get plugged into a job and come down at nine o'clock in the morning and someone turns us on. At five o'clock someone turns us off and we go home. What happens during that time doesn't have any connection with our real lives.

I have a lot of respect for my father. He worked hard. During the Depression he went to night school in Washington, D. C., and got a law degree. He was a soda jerk in the drugstore of the Mayflower Hotel and he worked his way up to be the chief accountant. He gave his whole life to that corporation. I don't know any man more honest, more conscientious than my father. But what is it worth? What has it gotten him?

His family and his children got away from him. When I got old enough to go to college, I went off and that was it for me. My sisters graduated from high school and, soon as possible, moved out. It was a place where we all slept, but it wasn't home.

I felt, as long as I stick to talking about his job, we could have a pleasant, superficial conversation. As I became interested in music and politics, I found no comfortable way to pursue those things with him. His job was the only topic... He makes some contribution to the Republican party, he always votes, and he reads the newspaper every day on the train, but the job is really it. After all those years, that's his life. To ask whether he loves the company or not─it's irrelevant.

I had a series of jobs in the early fifties, after flunking out of college. I worked for a bank, sold insurance... I ended up with a job as a traveling salesman for a business machine company. I was twenty-three years old and making ten thousand dollars a year. I probably could have made it seventeen thousand the next year. I could see it was going right up.

I began to run into conflicts with my own feelings. I couldn't accept the way my boss did business or the way in which everybody in the field did business. If I had remained, I'd be sitting on top of a business of over a million dollars. One of the outfits that had become disenchanted with my boss offered to take me on as their manager and buy them out. It looked like a beautiful proposition. But I just...it wasn't my life. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wasn't doing it.

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. He went back to school. The experimental St. John's College in Maryland. He taught elementary school for a year in a depressed rural area. "I just felt I had to get into teaching and really try my hand at it. "

Laing says in a sick society almost anything that is done is harmful. I have that feeling about my classes. You walk into a classroom and you've got an enormous amount of power. I'm six seven and here were these fourth graders. You can imagine how much power I had there. They all listened when I spoke. I was the big father figure. They all loved me and I took care of them and it was a great thing for my ego. But I felt it wasn't really using enough of me dealing with fourth graders. There was something missing for me.

I ended up teaching adults. Again, that's very satisfying for the ego. You get into a classroom and you have all the power of the institution. You tell people what to do and they read it. You tell people what to think, how to interpret things... You can make them feel guilty because they haven't read certain things, because they're not familiar with them. Teachers are playing that kind of game all the time. And I was right in there, with both feet.

I was scared of my students when I began. I did every-thing I could to keep from being caught in an error, in a lapse of knowledge. I used all the authority I had to keep them at a distance, to keep them in their place. If any of the students didn't hate my guts, it wasn't because I gave them no reason. There was no communication going on in that classroom at all.

The traditional education sees the school as a place where the student gets poured into him the accumulated knowledge of the past. I've gone very much from one end of the pole to the other in the last seven years. I'm very interested in listening to my students. But I still feel hypo-critical about my work. I suspect people in the business world have to stay away from thoughts like that. Yet there are things I feel pretty good about. I know there are students I've helped. I'm not sure I ever helped anyone when I was selling business machines or insurance.
I've become suspicious of the teacher who automatically thinks he's superior to somebody who's out there working as a salesman. I don't think there is anything automatic about it. I am working for an institution that turns out students so they will be salesmen.

When I began teaching at college, I pretended to be this authoritarian figure who knew everything. Gradually, over the years, it's become possible for me to walk in the class and to admit to my own confusion. As I present the person I really am to my students, they present the people they really are to me.

When I was a salesman, there was never a day in which I felt I could be absolutely honest. It was essential that the role be played. I was on somebody else's trip. I would fit into that slot and behave in a certain way. In order to do that, it meant wearing a mask every minute on the job.

One summer I took a job out in Missouri, selling insurance. After I learned the pitch and got out in the territory I realized it was a crooked operation, a con game. Oh God, they were a terrible outfit. (Laughs.) I needed the money and I was a salesman. I found out I couldn't do it. I'd be driving down the country road and I'd come to the farm where I was supposed to make my pitch. It was difficult just to turn the car into the driveway. I'd drive around the place three or four times before I could pump myself up enough to go in and talk to the guy. I sold one policy in seven weeks and then quit.

I feel that my unwillingness to settle into a groove─my fear of being caught in a rut─is related to my father and his job and, his success. While my contemporaries have been out pursuing exactly what it is my father has. I got a good look at it early enough. So I knew it wasn't the way I'd spend my life.

The corporation really wants that person's whole life. They like to have a guy who will join a country club for the corporation, marry an appropriate wife for the corporation, do community work for the corporation. These are the people that really make it. That's my father's life.

It's hard to think of a friend that my father has. I don't know of one. There are people he works with. These are people in the family. That's it. Because of his particular job he's less in contact with people than a lot of business-men. He's an accountant, a bookkeeper.

I can't talk to him about my social life. I'm sure he'd disapprove of a lot of people I'm close to, a lot of things I do. I really feel my life is wide open. I've got problems, there are things that get me down, but on the whole, I feel younger than I did ten years ago. I have a lot of friends, students, who have affected my life.

When I think of my father, the strongest memories are the very, very early ones. He hadn't been completely sucked into that business. He still had a life separate from the job. I must have been less than four. There was a parking lot across the street. I can remember sitting with my father at the window and he would name all the different kinds of cars for me. I remember his taking me out on a Sunday morning in the park. I'd be riding the tricycle and he'd be walking... I can't remember a time we spent together that.

By the time I was ten I was aware of the distance between us. I was aware he didn't understand me. I was aware he didn't know what I was thinking. What I was feeling. That gap continues... (Pause.) When I got old enough to go out on my own there was nothing to hold me back. His job is the key to his life and, I think, the key to mine.

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