Not That You Asked (9780307822215) Read online

  The apprentice carpenters are making more than the young people starting out as bank clerks. Master craftsmen in any line are making $60,000 a year and many are making double that. In most large cities, automobile mechanics charge $45 an hour. A mechanic in Los Angeles or New York, working in the service department of an authorized car dealer, can make $60,000 a year. A sanitation worker in Chicago can make $35,000 a year. All this has happened, in part at least, because the fathers who were plumbers made enough money to send their children to college so they wouldn’t have to be plumbers.

  In England, a child’s future is determined at an early age when he or she is assigned either to a school that features a classical education or one that emphasizes learning a trade. Even though we never have had the same kind of class system in America that they have in England, our lines are drawn, too. The people who work with their hands as well as their brains still aren’t apt to belong to the local country club. The mechanic at the car dealer’s may make more than the car salesman, but the salesman belongs to the club and the mechanic doesn’t.

  It’s hard to account for why we’re so short of people who do things well with their hands. You can only conclude that it’s because of some mixed-up sense of values we have that makes us think it is more prestigious to sell houses as a real estate person than it is to build them as a carpenter.

  To further confuse the matter, when anyone who works mostly with his brain, as I do, does something with his hands, as when I make a piece of furniture, friends are envious and effusive with praise. So, how come the people who do it professionally, and infinitely better than I, aren’t in the country club?

  If I’ve lost you in going the long way around to make my point, my point is that considering how satisfying it is to work with your hands and considering how remunerative those jobs have become, it is curious that more young people coming out of school aren’t learning a trade instead of becoming salesmen.

  Writing the Written Word

  If you have good handwriting, you’re lucky and unusual. Mine is so bad that I’m all but lost trying to write something down on paper without a typewriter. I come on notes I’ve written to myself with little ideas and frequently they are so illegible that I have to throw them away, undeciphered.

  Miss Rose, who in my memory looks like Diane Sawyer, taught me to write in the third grade but I can’t blame my handwriting on her. I blame it on something called “The Palmer Method,” a system used by many public schools when I was growing up.

  I don’t know anything about The Palmer Method … even today I hate to write the name … except it was a style totally unsuited to my character and ability.

  The rules and manner of writing were drummed into my head so often that I recall every detail of how it was supposed to be done. I’m not certain whether my failure was because of a physical inability or a temperamental unwillingness to conform to rules that seemed silly to me.

  Miss Rose was quite clear how she wanted us to do it. We were to take the pencil and hold it between the thumb and index finger. The thumb had to be completely extended, not bent at all. The pencil stuck almost straight up because it was held against the finger above the knuckle, not down in the crotch of the hand. The little finger was curled underneath and rode on the paper.

  Each day Miss Rose went up and down the aisles inspecting our hands as we did push-pulls and continuous circles between two lines on a pad of paper.

  Even at that age I recall being impressed by Miss Rose’s beauty and being excited when she bent over next to my small desk and gently took my hand in hers to reform it in the manner prescribed by Palmer. She would lean over to see if there was light coming under my wrist, too. You were supposed to have light coming under your wrist. The wrist was not to touch the desk. The whole motion came from the shoulder, and your arm was an arch between your hand and the underpart of the muscle of your forearm. The fingers of the hand were not supposed to move by themselves. It was very unnatural.

  I could no more do what Miss Rose and Palmer were asking me to do in those penmanship classes than I could eat an ice cream cone slowly. It was not my nature.

  At home my grandfather, John Reynolds, worked with me. He had learned to write in a little school in Redruth, Cornwall, England, and he had a fine, firm, legible hand. When he put a word on paper, it looked as perfect as the model alphabet written over the blackboard in Miss Rose’s homeroom. I remember the sample words my grandfather had me write. He thought they displayed the grace of the written word and they were words he himself wrote often. They were THE BALLSTON SPA NATIONAL BANK.

  I greatly admired my grandfather but I was totally unable to duplicate his handwriting, and it strikes me now that I must have been coming of age because I recall not being very worried about penmanship. I wished I could write as he wrote but I simply felt he could and I couldn’t.

  My grandfather, I noted later, after I grew up, didn’t do any better with his own son William. My uncle became a very successful commercial artist drawing charcoal sketches for Vogue magazine. As an artist he must have had a great ability to control the direction of the movement of his pen on paper, but his handwriting was as hard to read and childish-looking as mine.

  It’s a mystery to me why some people have good handwriting and why others have writing that’s so hard to read. It’s probably for the same reason that some people are six feet tall and others are not.

  Maybe I’ll ask Diane Sawyer to come over and hold my hand. I’ll see if she can teach me how to be six feet tall.

  Speaking of English …

  Following are some miscellaneous observations on the use of the English language:

  —Every few weeks I use a colon but I almost never use semicolons because I’m not sure what they indicate. I like dashes and three dots for punctuation. Three dots aren’t officially recognized, though.

  —Several times a year I look up the difference between further and farther. My reference books always say the same thing. Farther refers to distance. Everything else is further. You wouldn’t say “farthermore.”

  —There are some phrases that should be given a long rest. Some examples:

  The name of the game

  World-class

  What can I tell you?

  No problem.

  Have a nice day.

  Will that be all?

  More heat than light

  I’d give up the phrase “having a dialogue” when I mean two people are talking, too.

  —I don’t use “whom” much, even though I know when I should. I use it sometimes when it’s the obvious object in a sentence but I never use it at the start of a sentence even when it’s the object. I say, “Who were you talking to?”

  A lot of people get hold of a few grammatical points and are proud of themselves for knowing them. They don’t miss a chance to point out the error in someone else’s speech or writing.

  “ ‘To whom are you speaking,’ said he, for he had been to night school.”

  —In parts of Africa the natives have learned some English from the British and they’ve adapted it for their own pidgin English. Pidgin English is wonderfully colorful and inventive. For instance, they call one of their own native Africans who is uppity because he’s been to London a “beento.”

  —Newspapers always put a period after Harry Truman’s middle initial S even though it doesn’t stand for anything more than that.

  —An educated person is supposed to be able to use a hundred thousand words. A great language expert named Otto Jesperson once counted the different words in Shakespeare and found Shakespeare only used twenty thousand. He says there are only six thousand words in the Bible.

  —One of my good books on English grammar says that when you use a quotation inside a sentence of your own, you don’t start the quotation with a capital even though it’s a sentence itself. For example: The President said last week that “we’re not going to be fooled by the Russians.” It seems wrong to me. I’d have capitalized “we’re.”
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  —I’m suspicious of a writer who uses “launder” when he means “wash,” “inexpensive” for “cheap,” “perspiration” for “sweat” or “wealthy” when he means “rich.”

  —I had an interesting ride into the city from the airport with Gloria Steinem. I liked her a lot better than I thought I would. She was talking about someone she knows who teaches writing courses. Gloria says the teacher just makes the students write and write. The teacher doesn’t care what it is. Her theory is that if a person writes a lot, the person’s natural personality will begin to appear after a while. Not only that, the person will begin to recognize himself or herself.

  —People often replace the simple word now with something that sounds fancier to them. I don’t know why they aren’t satisfied with just plain “now.” They say “currently,” “presently” or “at this point in time.”

  —It makes fussy grammarians angry but I’ve forgotten any difference I once knew between will and shall. The distinction is so fine and so difficult to discern that I don’t try. To me “I shall remember this” is the same as “I will remember this.” The same goes for should and would.

  —One of the few British words that American soldiers brought home to use was “queue” for “line.”

  Reporters

  The other night I was watching Sam Donaldson, one of the best reporters in the news business, sitting in for Peter Jennings as anchorman on ABC’s World News Tonight Sam looked kind of pleased all over with himself, as if he’d been promoted. Shame on you, Sam!

  Everyone wants a promotion because the money’s better, but there needs to be some restructuring done in most companies regarding which jobs are considered most important and which get the highest pay. The whole idea of being boss or manager or anchorman needs to be rethought.

  Being boss, for example, is just another job, and while it may be important, it’s not necessarily more important than the jobs of other employees who work for the same company. Give the boss three phone extensions, his name on the office door so he can show his kids when he brings them in, and let him have a reserved spot in the parking lot but don’t pay him nine times what anyone else gets. I don’t notice many companies closing down when the boss doesn’t show up for work or when he takes his month’s vacation in summer and his ten days in winter.

  In television, good reporters like Sam Donaldson are often promoted and made something else. Everyone forgets that Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw made their reputations as reporters. They were among the very best and, while I don’t want to make any of them mad, because they’re my friends, I liked all of them better as reporters than as anchormen. Those of us who are not anchormen have a secret disdain for anchormen even though we smile effusively when we pass them in the halls.

  Making a good reporter an editor or an anchorman is like making a great chef the maître d’ because he can make more money out front. Can’t the networks find people who aren’t good reporters to read the news? Getting facts and arranging them in an orderly way that will attract and then inform listeners has nothing to do with being able to read aloud. It takes ability to be an anchorman but it’s a talent totally unrelated to a reporter’s and a lesser one.

  Even a lot of the television correspondents you’re semifamiliar with are being turned into minianchormen and -women. Because their faces and styles of speaking are recognizable since they’ve been on the air a lot, they’re considered more valuable as on-camera personalities than as reporters.

  Good reporting takes a lot of time, and if correspondents do it all themselves, they have less time to be on the air. More than ever, TV reporters work with so-called producers, who are the actual reporters. The producers go to the location of the story, check it out, get the facts, arrange interview schedules, get the camera crews and then call the correspondent to come in and do twelve seconds on camera and the narration for a two-minute report prepared from information supplied not by the original source, but by the producer. The chef is out of the kitchen again.

  On a newspaper, it’s considered a promotion when a reporter is made an editor. Who wrote that? The editor should work for the reporter, helping, guiding and keeping the reporter from making a fool of himself or herself in print. (Reporters may stand and cheer.)

  Every writer and every news organization has an obligation to get people to read or watch what they’re about to tell them. That’s what headlines are for. To this extent, news is show business. There’s no sense putting the information out if no one’s reading or watching. The danger comes for news organizations when they put too much emphasis on attracting a crowd and too little emphasis on telling the crowd anything once it’s assembled. Get back in the kitchen where you belong, Sam!

  A Few Cutting Remarks

  I’ve just come from the barber and:

  —My hair looks good now but it won’t after I’ve slept on it tonight.

  —If your hair looks as good after you’ve been to the barber as it did before you went, you’ve had a good haircut. This goes for women who go to the hairdresser, too.

  —It shouldn’t cost three times as much for a woman to have her hair cut as it costs a man. Confidentially, I think women are being taken.

  —Men have their hair “cut” and women have theirs “done.” The difference in price may be right there. Having it done sounds harder and more expensive than having it merely cut.

  —I like my barber, Manny. He always asks me how my kids are and I tell him. He has kids too, and I never ask him how his are.

  —I give 50 cents to the man who sweeps up and keeps my coat now. That’s 15 cents more than a haircut cost me when I first started getting one from Mr. Kelly on Ontario Street.

  —If Manny isn’t ready when I get there, I look at Playboy. I wouldn’t call it pornographic but it’s pretty dirty and the naked girls look cheaper, less attractive than they did when they wore more clothes. I can’t imagine buying a copy for $3.50.

  —A barber always wants to wash your hair, and if you let him, he washes it before he cuts it. The worst thing about having a haircut is all the loose hairs that go down your collar the rest of the day. The time I want my hair washed at the barber’s is after I’ve had a haircut.

  —There are fewer and fewer barber poles outside barbershops and almost none of those move anymore. Why was a candy-striped pole a sign for a barbershop anyway?

  —Manny’s very quick with a pair of scissors. He never once has stabbed me with the scissors even though I always fall asleep and jerk my head up when I catch myself.

  —When there are more than two barbers in a shop, they don’t seem to get along very well among themselves.

  —What would it cost, do you think, to have a barber’s chair installed in your living room in front of the television set? Before I had it done, I’d want to test a dentist’s chair to see which is best.

  —A haircut looks worst the second day after you get it.

  —An experienced barber can talk to you in the mirror as if he were looking you right in the eye.

  —From what I learn from looking in barbershop windows in New York, prices run from a low of $6 to a high of $20. For $20, a man gets his hair “styled.” “Styled,” for a man, is more like a woman having hers “done.”

  —You’re always seeing women who have just been to the beauty parlor. Half the time I feel like telling them they ought to demand their money back.

  —You don’t really appreciate how hard it is to give someone a good haircut until you’ve had kids and tried to save money by cutting their hair yourself.

  —Getting a haircut is an event of some importance for men and having their hair done is an event of paramount importance for some women. If the possibility of something else comes up, “I have a hair appointment” takes precedence over almost everything else.

  —They always have a lot of bottles of stuff. I’ve never tried any of it. I have a feeling it smells quite a bit.

  —The worst mistake a
barber can make is to try to give you your money’s worth by taking off too much.

  —When I left, two men were waiting for other barbers. One of them was reading Playboy and I thought to myself, “He looks like the type who would.”

  Short Skirts, Half Off

  Short skirts come and go every few years as the fashion for women. When the dress designers are pushing short skirts, it’s usually apparent on the streets that the designers and the people who write about women’s clothes like short skirts better than the women expected to wear them. Except for a handful of women under thirty with great-looking legs, women hate short skirts.

  A woman never seems comfortable in a short skirt. Watch a woman wearing one and you can see how careful she’s being. She can’t sit down, bend over, get out of a car or climb a flight of stairs without wondering about the angles of someone else’s vision and about how much of herself is visible.

  French women who go topless at the beaches along the Mediterranean seem casual and easy with their bareness but American women in short skirts are ill at ease. Their knees are always on their minds.

  I hate clothes that constantly remind me of what I’m wearing and if I were a woman I certainly wouldn’t wear short, tight skirts. The clothes I like best are the clothes I put on in the morning and forget until I take them off at night. Obviously most women feel the same. When a woman gets herself together for a special event, it’s right that she should put on her drop-dead outfit even if she’s a little uncomfortable in it. Wearing a skirt up to here on the street, in the middle of the day, is ridiculous and rude because it intrudes on the thoughts of everyone she passes.

  People have never agreed on what to wear and I suppose it’s more interesting that way. If you sit in a car and watch people coming and going on a busy street, you’d never guess they all come from the same planet. The variety is incredible.