For no good reason, except that I want to write this story, here’s a little ginnygram about my very first job right out of college.
I moved from my dorm room at Centre College into a U-Haul that Bill pulled behind his Cutlass Supreme all the way to Chicago. I cried until I slept, then I woke up to cry some more. (I am about to cry right now, just remembering how hard it was to leave my Mama for the Big City.) (Sorry for making you cry, too, Mama.) But I sure did love my Bill, and I sure did want to be Mary Tyler Moore.
Bill’s parents moved me into Pammy’s room. They stored my stuff in their garage. And they set about to help me find a job and an apartment. The girlfriends of some of Bill’s buddies offered to share their Lincoln Park apartment with me, but Bill’s father said it was too dangerous. Bill’s mother took me shopping for a professional wardrobe at Lytton’s and Wieboldt’s. Bill’s father got me some interviews at NBC and at Leo Burnett. Bill’s mother offered to pay for my law school degree, if I would get Bill to go with me. She also paid off my student loan of $500. She was a class act, even if she did serve her beans bright green.
After about three weeks, I found an ad for a receptionist at Mitsubishi International Corporation, in the Help Wanted section of the Tribune. It would pay $9,000 a year, plus benefits. It wasn’t my dream job, but it would allow me to move out of my boyfriend’s sister’s room. So I put on my figure-flattering blue and white shirtwaist dress, tied a crisp grosgrain bow in my curled-up-and-under ponytail, buffed my white Papagallos, and chose a cute parrot-green and blue cover for my Bermuda bag. And I presented myself to Miss Elizabeth Conlon, the Office Manager, and the moral opposite of Joan Holloway.
Miss Conlon was a petite and elegant spinster who wore white gloves on her tiny hands and gorgeous brooches on her shoulder every day. Her white-blonde hair was less coifed than tamed. And bless her heart, she must have thought that I was about the sweetest, prettiest, freshest face she’d seen that day. Because she organized her Japanese Managers around their big round table to meet me.
“Ah-so, Missa Glaham, ah-can you unnahstan us?” asked Mr. Tanaka.
With a darling little Southern Sparkle in my eye, I smiled, “I sure can! Can y’all understand me?”
“Oh! She funny! She hired!”
And I was.
Hired.
And also possibly funny.
Footnote: For the first day of my first job, I chose to wear my lavender linen skirt suit with my first-ever black patent-leather heels. I was walking — striding, even! — down Michigan Avenue, feeling all “you can have a town, why don’t you take it,” and grinning up at the Hancock Building, where I would be working on the the 21st floor…when I walked RIGHT OUT OF MY SHOES RIGHT IN FRONT OF WATER TOWER PLACE.
Even Mr. Grant would have smiled.
ginnygram 