Notes from a former ghost

...of the freelance kind

I started working as a junior copywriter at Time in 1972. I was a token hyphenate, a token hippie and a token “female professional” among hordes of perky typists and preppy males.

The executives wore Cartier cufflinks engraved with initials and numbers, like GSW III or CMJ IV. My bosses were George the Third and Christopher the Fourth, while I was J, the only.

There may have also have been a Henry the Seventh, one short of Henry the Eighth.

The men had gone to Princeton or Dartmouth, as had their dads and granddads, who’d endowed a building or two. I’d gone to Berkeley and majored in tear gas and mace. I came from immigrants, some of whom made it here despite pogroms and worse.

One grandma arrived with one copper pot and one candlestick. Nothing else. The other grandma didn’t arrive.

But back to Time. All the guys in my position had a wife, a nanny and 2.3 kids. The nanny made meals and took care of the wife. (Also the kids.) They lived in Greenwich, CT; I lived over a cab garage in a crumbling neighborhood with no trace of college grads.

Meanwhile, on Sixth Avenue and 51st Street in Manhattan, otherwise known as the Avenue of the Americas, the Princetonites, Dartmouthians — and I — did our jobs, which involved time and life, in a building called Time&Life. Tools included pen, paper and news judgment. Also White-Out, erasers and graph paper. (The delete button had not yet been invented.)

Women were paid fifty-seven cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same jobs. All men were not created equal, and women were even less equal. I became witty, gritty, off the wall, efficient, proficient—and anonymous. I became a freelance ghost. Ghosts were paid more.

My typewriter—the cutting-edge writing technology at the time—sported what looked like a grey metal golf ball with letters, which somehow got punched onto the page. Then we had IBM Selectrics and Kodachrome days.  This was before PCs and search engines. Speaking of search engines, women are now paid 67 cents on the dollar. Fifty-odd (very odd) years to earn an extra dime.