In the early 1980’s, when coal was king in the Ohio valley, steel mills had little competition from foreign imports, and union jobs were still plentiful listening to country music giant WWVA radio provided a common link and a source of pride for all those living in the northern panhandle of West Virginia and the rest of the Ohio Valley.
WWVA-Radio's 50,000 watt clear channel signal was the official voice of the mines, announcing closing and accidents. Its overnight broadcast was listened to by half the truckers on the eastern seaboard. WWVA-Radio also sponsored a live broadcast of country music, with big name talent, every Saturday night from the theatre next door to the radio station. In my twenties I had the privilege of living in the Ohio Valley and witnessing the end of an era, but while doing so, I was faced with the monumental task of finding work without a skill, college degree, or union card. I applied to WWVA- Radio for a sales job.
I remember Harry, my new sales manager’s first words exactly.
“I’ll be honest with you. We don’t want to hire you. But we have to hire you. The FCC is making us hire a woman-- an 'equal opportunity thing'. We don’t want a woman in our department, there’s never been a woman salesperson at WWVA-Radio in its seventy five year history, but if we have to hire one, you’re the most qualified of the ones who’ve walked in here. So you’re hired.”
“Thank you, Harry, I’ll do my best.”
After a bit it of paperwork, Harry walked me down the hall to the sales bullpen to meet the salesmen, who would normally be sitting at their desks calling on advertisers, but were instead frantically trying to extinguish the fire in one of their colleague's hair with wet paper towels. They all retreated to their desks when Harry walked in. Harry went around the bull pen and pointed to each of the salesman and stated their name. The man with the smoldering hair was Joe, a part-time talent agent who also sold time for the radio station when he wasn’t booking talent into one of the dozens of small bars in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. He regularly set his long dark wavy hair on fire with his cigarette while in the middle of an important sales pitch.
Benny or “Boom”, sat in the middle of the bull pen. He used to be a newsman at a competing radio station, but wanted to try his hand at sales. Boom punctuated all his sentences with a loud and forthright “Boom!”, a verbal tic that proved not so helpful as a news man, and also proved not so helpful in radio sales. Boom also smoked grass and took the occasional experimental recreational drug. When he called in sick he invariably blamed it on a bad cup of coffee.
In the corner of the room by the window, sat the senior sales veteran, Charlie, an ex-Grand Old Opry banjo player. Charlie lived just outside of Wheeling and had enough property along the highway to sell advertising on temporary billboards when he needed extra money. This presented a small conflict of interest with the station, but everyone looked the other way because it was Charlie and he used to play at the Grand Old Opry, knew Minnie Pearl, and wrote songs in his spare time. On quiet afternoons, he’d preview new songs for the sales staff, always to great applause. He kept the banjo in the corner behind his desk out of the traffic flow.
And finally, next to the filing cabinets sat Doug, a big handsome kid, about twenty-five, Ohio Valley born and bred, the most recent hire next to me, and married to his first and only girlfriend. He had a beagle named Sam and kept his picture on his desk. He idolized the station and the rest of the sales staff and was as happy and proud as can be to be a part of it. His only vice was that he was in love with the country singer Crystal Gale. Her picture hung in a place of honor over his desk next to his Steelers poster.
Before I started working on my phone pitch I wanted to get a little background on the accounts, so every morning for the first couple of weeks, I took the elevator in the lobby of the station to the third floor where all the advertising copy was stored. The elevator operator was an older man who always dressed in dark brown, so he almost blended in with the interior of the elevator. For the first day or two he didn’t speak. Then he started to mutter and growl at me out of the corner of his mouth. His first mutter was “bitch” and his comments got more colorful and explicit every day. It got so I was afraid to get in the elevator. It wasn’t that I thought he would do something to me physically; it was more that his outbursts shook me up and made me think about what I might be doing to provoke them. This was a major distraction from the task at hand, which was survival.
One morning around that same time, I read an update in the Intelligencer on the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, an issue I was somewhat interested in and was following, but only on the down low. If the amendment wasn’t ratified by enough states by June of that year it would be a dead issue forever. I always believed in equal pay for equal work. But I’d focused on the equal work side of the equation. If I wanted to make a decent living I had to get a man’s job. Because if a job were what we now call gender neutral, I knew the man would be paid more and it was obvious to me that traditionally female jobs didn’t pay well.
Since I had been in what was traditionally a man’s job, business to business sales since 1976, I didn’t concern myself too much with the passage of this amendment.
I know this was a selfish attitude, but I believe a lot of women felt the same way. They couldn’t see how the passage of the ERA would affect them personally for one reason or another, so they really couldn’t get behind it. In addition, to say you were a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment was the same as saying you were a feminist, still a very brave stance to take anywhere in the country, much less in coal country.
There was a related article in the paper that morning about a new sexual harassment law recently put in place. I barely glanced at the article, because once again, I didn’t think it really applied to me. I was never one to be chased around a desk. But that morning, something in the article caught my attention. It was the first time I read the words “hostile work environment” in relation to women. It was as if I were struck in the forehead with a twenty pound mallet. I ripped the article out of the paper very carefully, folded it very carefully, and put it in the back of my notebook. I took the article out and read it multiple times all that day. I was afraid the words would disappear if I didn’t keep reading them and I had to keep those words, and this concept alive.
To be Continued in Chapter 3
No comments:
Post a Comment