The New American Library publicity director, Marge Ternes, was an easy-going, white upper-middle-class woman who looked like she was in her early 40s in the mid-1970s. With her friendly and sweet personality, her stylish way of dressing and the physical beauty she still possessed, she was the kind of white woman that most men of her generation, and even men who were younger, likely considered quite attractive personally and physically and fun to have as a workmate.
And because she seemed to both enjoy working and talking with the authors whose New American Library books she arranged publicity for, and actually read what most of the New American Library writers had written before writing press releases for their books, it was likely that most of the New American Library writers were happy to have a person like Marge Ternes holding the position as New American Library's publicity director in the mid-1970s.
Prior to working at New American Library, Marge Ternes had previously held the same kind of publicity director job at another Manhattan book publishing firm. So, by the mid-1970s she had had a lot of experience in genererating publicity for a publishing firm's books and was on friendly personal terms with a lot of business contacts in the corporate print media world of Manhattan and around the USA, who decided which books their publications would review or write articles about.
Having attended college and received her 4-year college degree, probably in the liberal arts, in the decade before the 1960s, when most women who attended college still used a lot of make-up and lipstick and wore dresses, not pant-suits, when they went to work in the skyscraper offices, Marge stilll was always arriving at work each day wearing a dress or a skirt and blouse in the mid-1970s.
Although by the mid-1970s--after the coroporate ban on women coming to most skyscraper offices wearing pants or slacks had been lifted due to the pressure of the late 1960s and early 1970s then-rapidly growing women's liberation movement--more women executives, especially those under 30 years of age, were starting to come to the office skyscraper workplaces in pant-suits and wearing less makeup and less or no lipstick; as were more women office workers who weren't executives.
In the mid-1970s, Marge seemed to be happily married and lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her husband and daughter, who appeared to be between around 9 to 12 years of age around the time I was working as a New American Library publicity clerk.
Unlike some other white women executives with careers at that time, who were beginning to use their maiden names again as their workplace names, Marge seemed to feel no desire or need to not still use the last name of her husband, whom she apparently still loved, at the workplace. And Marge and her young daughter--whom most of her pre-high school or pre-junior high school (possibly private Manhattan day school) classmates likely would have considered to be one of the prettiest students in the class at that time--seemed very fond of each other.
Like most left-liberals in Manhattan by this time in the 1970s, Marge was anti-militarist, anti-Nixon and the kind of person who would want to see U.S. society become the kind of society Martin Luther King and the 1960s civil rights movement was working for.
But because she personally seemed to feel both economically secure and personally contented with the kind of life she and her family were able to live in Manhattan and not particularly exploited or oppressed by the kind of work she had to do during the workweek each day in the paperback book publishing world at New American Library, it never seemed likely to me that she would understand why some people of my generation were still into New Left Movement politics during the 1970s; and had come to regard U..S. society, as a whole, as an insane society or wanted to still see some kind of anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist revolution happen in the USA in the 1970s.
Yet if the nature of the publicity clerk job 9-to-5 wage enslavement situation at New American Library in the mid-1970s had only been about typing up the press release copy and letters that Marge wrote out for me and then mail out to her list of corporate print media contacts--sometimes mailed out with a copy of the New American Library book she was publicizing or with the most recent catalog of the books New American Library was then publishing-- and occasionally having to take messages for Marge when the telephone on my desk occasionally happened to ring, I might have ended up working at New American Library longer than I did.
Because, in retrospect, I can't recall Marge ever speaking to me or anyone else whom she supervised or worked with in any kind of impatient or authoritarian way; and, in that sense, her personality seemed similar to the personality my mother had had. In addition, Marge seemed vaguely similar in physical appearance to the way my generally youngish-looking mother had looked, although Marge was a few inches taller than my by then-deceased mother had been.
So if the System was requiring you to be a wage-slave office workers in the mid-1970s Manhattan skyscraper office world, it was not likely that you would have then found a more pleasant and less psychologically hung-up supervisor from the previous generation to work under than Marge Ternes was during that decade.
Yet, in retrospect, I also can't recall ever having any deep philosophical conversations with Marge or any conversations with her in which she openly expressed any concern about the direction the New American Library paperback book publishing business was moving by the mid-1970s.
