A chance remark on a news program this morning got my inner editor all worked up. A panelist, explaining herself for some reason, said she “used to be a ballerina.” Well, no. If she had been, I would have heard of her for the simple reason that “ballerina” is a title. Margot Fonteyn was a ballerina. If she wasn’t a soloist in a major company, with critical acclaim, she was not a ballerina I don’t think she meant to elevate her past, but just didn’t know enough to realize she had misused the word.

And that got me thinking about office terms so now you will be privy to my working history because I feel like telling it.

When I first worked in an office, I was a low level employee, typing schedules for photographers in a baby photography studio. Because of my typing skills (a guy at the Times once referred to me as the bionic woman because of my speed) and good language skills, I jumped over the normal progression and went to work at the Chicago Convention Bureau. I became secretary to three men, doing their work through Dictaphone tapes. I wasn’t really a secretary in the grand sense because I didn’t make their appointments and lots of other stuff secretaries do. But I wasn’t complaining.

Below secretary was typist, clerk, file clerk. To be a secretary in a big company was an accomplishment. You had special training, could take dictation in Gregg or Pittman, could analyze things for your boss. Could be him if you were really good. You worked for it, you achieved it, it was special. As the years wore on, the word lost all its meaning as semi-literates got this title just for showing up. The reason, of course, was the growing awareness of women that they could get the title and the money since the best of them were really doing a great deal of the work and decision making already. The women who had been secretaries had been college graduates with degrees, for pity’s sake. When they caught on, they insisted on different titles, the same ones the guys had.

Who was left to be a secretary? Highschool dropouts, or graduates if they weren’t ambitious. So I had to get used to the idea that the words I had grown up with had lost meaning.

I eventually graduated to jobs where I had different titles, the most glorified being “assistant”. Then after years of stagnating because I wanted to dance and “don’t bother me,” I left to push for something better even though, by then, I was older and it would be harder.

So I went to work for a literary agent and was an “agent in training”. The fellow had split off from a large agency to form his own company. His fortunes did not rise and he decided to work out of his home in New Jersey. He introduced me to the editor I would work for at Harper & Row and that is when my life changed.

At H&R, I was “an editorial assistant”. There was, of course, secretarial work involved but, also, I got to write stuff – flap copy, brief descriptions for books when they were presented at the sales meetings, review of over-the-transom manuscripts. When idle, go to the manuscript recorder, ask her for an unsolicited manuscript, read it and write a report. Then the manuscript goes into a pile where some other lowly types a form rejection letter … unless of course you are so strong on it, you show it to your editor, who, if he/she agrees with you, takes it a step further to possible publication.

I liked this job. Then my editor, of whom I have written in relation to her son with whom I reconnected all these years later, died of cancer. She had beforehand introduced me to Tom, president of Quadrangle, soon to be Times Books, as The NYT had recently acquired the company. I worked for Tom for four years and waited for the promotions he had devoutly promised me. Nada, zilch. What was worse was that Tom was monstrous.

When an executive from the New York Times Syndicate offered me a job (with a $3,000 annual bump in salary), I took it without even asking what it would be. And I stayed with the Syndicate for 18 years, doing interesting, sometimes glamorous work, until new execs coming in decided I was “overqualified” and I took early retirement. Jay had died. The insurance that had paid for his care was no longer the hook that kept me enduring belittlement and humiliation. So I left. They had to hire me back as a consultant because, as it happens, my programs in the computer weren’t all that easy to duplicate. My then big boss was convinced I was making my job seem complicated to enhance my importance. It was embarrassing for her to keep using me, so she stopped, but I had made my point.

I kept going back to the Syndicate to say hi to friends and the fellow who was then doing promotion almost broke into tears when he met me, because the people doing the computer work related to promotion were not getting the job done. He had gone into the file, reviewed the promotions I and my boss/bud, Susan, had done, all meticulously documented – a folder with the spiel, the glossy enclosures, a page documenting how the market was chosen, what newspaper groups were in the market, what newspaper features departments were targeted, neatly there. He wanted to use me and I had to tell him that doing so would be job suicide since my former boss hated me for showing her up. He waved a sad goodbye.

My “career” was over. Ed and I weren’t yet married but I was mostly living with him. They gave me a big party with execs coming over from the newspaper. I was in Heaven. Ed bought me flowers and showed up at the restaurant (yes, they closed a restaurant) looking fabulous. My supervisor/nemesis gave me Tiffany earrings and made a little speech and I was graceful. I’m sure she hated doing it.

And, of course, the morning after, I got up and said “Oh boy, MORNING CLASS!! and trained into Manhattan to the Ballet Arts Studio in Carnegie Hall, singing all the way.

xx, Teal