After graduating from OPRF in January 1973, I enrolled part-time at Triton College and struck out on my own, trying to make a living as a waitress and, for awhile, as the behind-the-counter person at Maling Shoes on Lake Street. Dismal failures all, so I hit the classified ads and found a job as an alleged “order editor” at Laidlaw Brothers Publishers in River Forest. I think they were at Madison and Thatcher.
I remember the company was part of Doubleday and produced very good textbooks. I was one of about eight women assigned to make sure those books were addressed to the schools that ordered them. We sat in two rows of desks, each of us next to huge tables filled with computer punch cards designating customer schools in a particular part of the country. My region was Wisconsin, Minnesota, and some other Midwestern states. Every morning, the mailroom girl would plop a stack of orders on our desks. We’d grab an order and a piece of paper where we would translate said order into computer-ready code. After filling out the paper, we’d look for the customer’s punch card, match ’em up and set them aside. We’d do the same for the next order, and the next ?
Good grief, it was boring. I would write down a list of things to think about every day so I wouldn’t go prison crazy. I’d think about what to wear tomorrow, how to get out of the ill-fated marriage I had managed to dive into at 18, what to cook for dinner, all the usual topics. It got me through the day.
And I would watch as the “editorial” people filed past on their way to their editor jobs. I envied them. They got to work with real words, not zip codes. They all had degrees. I was about as far as I could be from a degree, going to Triton one class at a time with no real goal in sight.
It wasn’t only watching the college grads that spurred me to change my life. Two of the summer workers were the daughter of Mr. Laidlaw and a dark-haired girl named Ellen who went to really good colleges ?#34; real Ivy League institutions. They seemed to come from a foreign world of privilege and status. They traveled. They were worldly. I was living in somebody’s attic apartment in Elmwood Park with a guy who had dropped out of high school.
That’s when I decided I needed to make a change. Thanks to my experience at Laidlaw Brothers, I knew I couldn’t fill out computer forms for the rest of my life. (Nothing wrong with the job, really, except that it WAS screamingly boring.) So I applied for a scholarship and actually got it. Remember, that was the ’70s.
The next year, a newly divorced me took off for one of the greatest places in the world ?#34; Northern Illinois University.