ON OUR SECRET HISTORIES

I took the road less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.
*** Robert Frost

HANK: How did you turn out the way you turned out? Was it what you planned? Dreamed of? When I was given the some multiple-choice preference test, back in whenever-it-was, the high school guidance counselor told me I had scored high in "literature" and "persuasion."

"You should work in a book store, I guess," she said.

All righty then.

But I remember, vividly, that my first job aspiration was to be an airline stewardess. Yes, that's what they were called. You got to go cool places, look chic, bring passengers whatever free stuff they wanted, and tell people what to do. (That was a key element of it, as I remember.) Then I decided I'd rather be an English teacher. Then, a geneticist. Then a radio disc jockey. Then, in college, I decided I would be the lawyer for the Mine Workers' union.

The unplanned and surprising road to TV reporter went through a stint as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, a job I got at age 20 by going door to door with my resume. Wound up as the press secretary to a congressman from Texas. Then at Rolling Stone magazine as an editorial assistant. And then--my first job in TV, at age 25. And there I was, doing my life's work. And now writing mysteries about it.

Literature, and persuasion. Pretty funny. What did you want to be when you grew up?

JAN: I decided in first grade that I was going to be writer. When you think about it, that's actually when you learn to write, first grade. So the first thing, I learned. I stuck with.

I remember the first story I wrote: The Cat on the Moon, about a poor kitten tormented by a pack of little boys (much like the author was tormented by her three older brothers). Even at six year's old, I had delusions of being published, and was infuriated when I found a book by the same title on my second grade shelf. Those sneaky plagiarists!

RHYS: I wanted to be a lion tamer when I was a little kid, but nobody would give me a lion to practice on.

HANK: Oh, Rhys, I'd love to see photos.

RHYS: When I was a teenager I wanted to be a movie star. I have always written, edited the school magazine, wrote short stories, was invited to have tea with Iris Murdoch when she came to my school, and then edited the college newspaper. This convinced me that I didn't want to be a journalist. Too much hard work and deadline pressure.

HANK: Smart girl, even then.

RHYS: So my thwarted theatrical ambitions were channeled into the production side of BBC drama instead. It was while I was there that I decided some of the plays weren't that good and I wrote my own. As only a 22 year old can do, I took it personally to head of drama. He liked it and the BBC produced it. More followed. I might still have been there but I got lured to Australia by ABC, met my husband and wound up in San Francisco. Funny how life takes side turns.

ROBERTA: I edited the yearbook instead of the newspaper and performed some very bit parts in the school plays--no danger of reaching Broadway there! I finished college without any firm idea of what was next, having run through majors of biochemistry and art history before settling on French lit. so naturally my first job was--in a book store! Then I spent some time as a vocational rehabilitation counselor before going back to school for clinical psychology. I never anticipated becoming a writer--in fact I could kick myself now for opportunities I didn't seize when I was young. But I wasn't ready--just happy to be here now!

RO: I wanted to be exactly what I turned out to be..someone who has a lot of fun, travels, does cool things and hangs out with cute guys.

HANK: Come on, RO. Fess up. And yup, Roberta, timing is everything. Sometimes I think, gosh, I should have started writing mysteries sooner. But then, I wouldn’t be who I am now, so the books couldn’t be the same. I do think Rhys still has a future as a movie star, though. And Jan, do you still have Cat on the Moon? We’d all love to read it!

And how about you all? What did you want to be when you grew up? Is that who and what you are?

On First Jobs

"Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count, everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

Albert Einstein

HANK: There was no way around it. At this time of year, every summer from the time I turned 16, I had to get a summer job. We all did, as soon as we passed into no-longer-child-labor territory. In fact, there may not have been child labor laws back then (after all there wasn't even color TV, for heaven's sake) but anyway. My step-father insisted. No summer job? Forget about it. That also meant no pool privileges, no car privileges, probably no food privileges.

So my first summer, after complaining about it for awhile, and failing at trying to prove to Mom and Boo (as we called him) that no one would hire a teenager with no experience, I went to the Avon Shopping center, I think it was, in suburban Indianapolis. I inquired at the A and P--do you need anyone? No. At Shaeffer's Drugs. No. At Adore Beauty Salon. Pronounced A-dor-ay, of course. No.

Next on the strip mall was the dry cleaners, can't remember the name. Oh, yes, Tuchman's.
And they needed a clerk. Great! Cush job,I thought. Take people's clothes, give them back. Though it did smell a little funny in there. So done deal, I was hired, and then they handed me an employee information paper to fill out.

I picked up the pen, and began to write.

"Waitaminit," the clerk said. "You're left-handed?"

"Yes," I said.

He took the paper back. "We can't train a left-handed person," he said, shaking his head. "The machines--"

Machines? I remember thinking? Why will I need a machine?

"--the cleaning machines are designed for right-handed people only. No way, sorry, but we need someone right-handed."

And with that, adios job.

I was crushed, defeated, and went to the Dairy Queen to drown my sorrows in a double chocolate softserv in a cup with pineapple topping and coconut flakes. The Dairy Queen. Where, as it turned out, they needed a person to be a counter girl.

And I got the job. I adored it. I learned to make an ice cream cone with a curl on top, and dip it in chocolate keepng the curl in place. (Bet I could still do it.) I learned customer service, how to be nice even if you didn't feel like it, how much fun it was to make someone happy, how fulfilling it was to give people something delicious, how fantastic it was to get a paycheck, what a good feeling it was to go home tired after a real day's work.

And, because you can make ice cream cones left-handed, but not do dry cleaning, I did NOT spend my summer breathing tetrachlorethylene, "perc," the solvent they now know causes cancer and all kinds of other horrible things.

Somehow, to me, that's all just--chillingly revealing about the universe. Or maybe it's just a nice story.

Summer jobs anyone? How did the universe work for you?

JAN: From about seventh grade on, I worked in my father's law office, both afterschool and summers, but I don't think that really counted because my father was the most patient man in America and I didn't really have to learn the real rules of a workplace.

At sixteen, I figured I needed to deal with a real boss, so I got a job at Shoprite, which was the purest form of torture I've ever endured. I was hired as a cashier, with about twenty other young women. The store kept a camera on us and if we made an an error ringing something up, we weren't allowed to make our own correction, we had to call the manager over, so he could humiliate us in front of the customers.

If you made too many mistakes, or if you didn't flirt enough with the manager, you got demoted to bagging. I refused to flirt and did A LOT OF BAGGING. So much that from time to time, I still feel the sharp knife pain in my shoulderblade.

I quit, and went back to the cocoon of my father's law office. I learned no lessons in workplace politics, but I did learn how to type the right way, without looking at the keyboard. And hey, that came in handy!

ROBERTA: oh my gosh, I could write pages about the crazy jobs I had. But probably the first was snack hut girl at the historic village in Allaire State Park in Southern New Jersey. I was still in high school and my parents got the zany idea that four kids, three of them teenagers, would enjoy camping for the entire summer while holding down their first jobs. My older sister and I shared a tent, while the rest of the family, German shepherd included, enjoyed a pop-up trailer.

Women's liberation hadn't yet crested in NJ, so my YOUNGER brother got the plum position assisting the blacksmith--at a higher rate of pay. My older sister and I rotated between flipping burgers and standing watch in the historical buildings. If you cooked the meat, you left the day drenched in grease.

If you stood guard, you suffered death from boredom. And you were required to be in costume--long, ugly dresses that showed neither waist nor cleavage. I sewed my own--something flowered with a scoop neck and a cinched waist. I had to fight for the right to wear it--definitely not appropriate to the period!

The next summer I gladly accepted employment cleaning motel rooms in Hatteras, NC, not living under a canvas roof and far from my family!

RO: I don't think I ever had a summer job per se. Not the Marjorie Morningstar, summer camp-type job. I've worked after school since I was fifteen - toy store, hardware, discount drugstore. Nothing glamorous - no fun memories..ah yes there was that time I was pricing tube socks...

HALLIE: Not counting an unpaid job teaching dance (HA!) at a summer camp, I was 15 the first summer I tried to get a "real" job. Every office where I applied asked if I took shorthand. I did not. So instead of working, I learned shorthand--Gregg shorthand, which is really the coolest thing. It's a bunch of little strokes that represent consonant sounds (the sound "t" is a little upward slanted line; "d' is a longer upward slanted line), Different-sized circles and semi-circles are vowel sounds. More than you ever needed to know, huh?

The next summer I worked for a temp agency. They placed me at an import/export company where I typed invoices and no one spoke English and I had to ride 3 busses to get there in downtown LA. Then I worked at a company that sold pipe fittings, also downtown LA--I broke some kind of record there typing hundreds of connected blank invoices that fed in a continuous roll through my typewriter. I worked from indecipherable handwritten invoices full of abbreviations, and I've often wondered what havoc my invoicing wreaked on that company. The next job was out in the Inglewood oil fields (3 different busses, this time) where I worked in a trailer, filling in for the receptionist. I had a wonderful time. I dated one of the engineers who lived in an apartment over a garage of a house right on Manhattan Beach. Looking back, I realize my parents were truly out to lunch that they did nothing to stop this. (Ed Maciula, are you still out there?) It was, ahem, memorable.

Of course, you guessed it, I never once used shorthand. It's another useless appendage, along with the doctorate I thought I'd need for my academic career

HANK: Oh, ahem! Now THAT'S gotta be a blog for another day. Ed??? You out there?
Summer jobs. You never know what you're going to learn.

**NOTE: A sorrowful goodbye to Tim Russert. He was the genuine article. **