Publicity Clerkin' At New American Library Revisited (6)

 The publicity director's secretary, whose desk was only a few yards to the right of my desk, did occasionally converse with me during the workday, when I was putting in my 9-to-5 wage enslavement time as the New American Library's publicity clerk. But, aside from having the one common interest in being paid on time for spending five days a week a New American Library's office, I can't recall any other common interest that the New American Library's publicity director's secretary and I shared in the mid-1970s.

The New American Library publicity director's secretary (whose name I no longer recall after so many decades) was a white, affluent working-class or lower middle-class woman who seemed to be in either her late 20's or 30's in the mid-1970s. She also seemed culturally straight and socially conventional, as well unaware that a mass-based anti-war movement and anti-war counter-culture and a women's liberation movement had developed within the USA during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Unlike the younger assistant to the publicity director, the secretary of the publicity director still always wore a dress or skirt and blouse to work each day; and seemed  to have not graduated from a 4-year college. Wearing a bit of visible lipstick and make-up each day, the publicity director's secretary also seemed more interested in buying clothes, shopping and acquiring material goods in the mid-1970s than interested in books--despite the fact that she was working for a paperback book publishing firm.

The secretary to the publicity director didn't appear to be married yet, perhaps because even most conventional and culturally straight men about her age likely woud not have considered her particularly attractive on a physical, emotional or personality basis? But my impression was that she was still hoping to find some man to marry who had a job that paid a high enough salary so that she could quit her own job eventually and just become, in Westchester County, a stay-at-home mother, who just raised her children while her husband supported her and her kids.

My vague recollection is that on the rare occasions when some politically-related issue was mentioned while conversing with me, the publicity director's secretary's political perspective tended to reflect the political perspective of whatever the various Establishment politicians and Establishment corporate media news programs were then promoting.

So, not surprisingly, within a few weeks of me working as the New American Library's publicity clerk in the department in which she worked, the publicity director's secretary realized that I wasn't the type of man she found particularly attractive or interesting to work with.

And the longer I worked next to her, the more both she and I found it to be a drag working next to each other or conversing with each other during the time when she wasn't answering the telephone calls for the publicity director, that were shifted to her desk phone in order for her to copy down the messages the telephone callers wished to leave for the New American Library publicity director; or when she wasn't using the telephone on her desk to help the publicity director arrange primt media articles or interviews related to the paperback books that New American Library was then attempting to publicize and market.