Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (8 page)

This last assertion seems indefensible; Jane was, rather, a living witness to all that can go wrong between school and student. Each semester, Central High listed students on
the honor roll, which required grades averaging 90 percent or better. It was only a modestly select list; about one in seven in Jane’s graduating class of January 1933 made it every single term. In her senior year Lena Charles made honor roll. So did Joe Scaramuzzo. Jane did not. She didn’t make it even once in four years. She never came close. A story heard in Jane’s family today probably dates to 1933. Someone, it seems, asked Mrs. Butzner what her biggest accomplishment of the year was. Oh, that was easy, she replied: “
getting Jane through high school.”

Mrs. Butzner once called her big accomplishment of the year “getting Jane through high school.” Proof of success: Jane’s graduation photograph, January 1933.
Credit 4

Well, her record doesn’t seem
quite
that bad. Jane never actually failed a class, though she several times came close. One semester of sophomore year yielded grades of 74 in French and a barely passing 70 in Latin; she did no better in geometry, where she also got a 70. She did well enough in her eight semesters of English, even cresting over 90 once or twice. And, unaccountably—it flies in the face of her whole school record—she got a 98 in European history in her senior year.

Central High in the 1920s and 1930s was of at least locally high repute; it did not deify sports, did not downplay academics.
Jane’s classmates included Eastern European Jews, Irish, Poles, and Greeks, among others, who would go on to become librarians and FBI agents, chemists and priests. Statistics from a class a little before Jane’s told of 126 graduates admitted to 41 colleges and universities, including Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, with Syracuse, Barnard, and Bucknell notable among the women. At Central, Jane did not inhabit an academic wasteland where the fashion was to reject effort and study. Rather, her problem seems to have come down to all those “stupid” teachers. Here in its entirety is one of her poems, which, once you learn its title, suggests something of her attitude:

The moon, with all her brilliant light

Illumines only space and night.

The stars with but each other’s aid

Stand clearly out, all unafraid.

Without a light to help explore,

Some things seem clearer than before.

The poem’s title? “To a Teacher.” She didn’t need teachers whose “light” illuminated nothing; she—presumably one of those stars standing out, unafraid—was better off on her own, without them. Jane would later insist that her dismal high school performance actually
spared
her the tedious college education she might otherwise have had to endure. Whether this was mere rationalization, snide potshot, or both, Jane’s high school years fed an antipathy to the traditional classroom, and academic credentials generally, that she would express all her life.

Jane came out of Central High with her independence intact. “
I’m not all that different as far as I can see from when I was 13 years old,” she’d write
Whole Earth Catalog
founder Stewart Brand, when she was seventy-seven. “I was self-indulgent then about following my own interests and…still am. This didn’t serve me awfully well in school, but it has ever since.”

It must have been hard being Jane’s parents during that last year of school. On the one hand, she was so obviously curious and clever. Yet as a student she wasn’t any good at all. There was more to being a good student than being smart: you had to get out of bed and get to school on time, sit still, respect your teachers, do what you were supposed to do; at
all these, Jane was a failure. “I was thoroughly sick of attending school,” she’d say. So as graduation neared in early 1933, one thing was plain: she wasn’t going to college. Her parents had put away college money for her, “if I wanted to,” but made it clear she didn’t
have
to want to. And Jane
didn’t
want to.

For many intellectually agile young middle-class men and women, college meant a chance to stretch and explore, leave behind familiar circumstances, and push into new, more challenging ones. Jane’s next two years would serve her in exactly this way—only no halls of ivy, no professors. During this time, she’d be ejected from the celestial gardens of Rupert Brooke and her rarefied life on Monroe Avenue into the modern workplace; from a life where it could seem not to matter much what she did into settings where she had to perform, on deadline; from the cozy and familiar middle-sized city where she’d spent her whole life to, first, the backwoods of Appalachia and then the streets of Depression-era New York City.

   CHAPTER 3   

LADIES’ NEST OF OWLS,

and Other Milestones in the Education of Miss Jane Butzner

J
ANE GRADUATED
from high school on January 26, 1933. Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as president on March 4, stepping into the most severe depression in anyone’s memory. Twelve million were out of work, the unemployment rate at 24 percent. It wasn’t just the chronically poor who suffered. Despair licked at the heels of the middle class, many of whom had prospered during the ebullient 1920s but now were jobless, hurting, and scared. Jane would one day picture the Depression’s victims standing forever in line, for a job, for day-old bread, in “anxious
rows of pinched faces.”

Jane’s parents had instilled in her and her siblings a memorable precept: pursue what you want in life, and also a practical skill or trade; not one or the other, but both. For Jane, it was not the best time to get lost in clouds of poetry or aim for a paying job as journalist that didn’t exist; these days, dreams deferred to practicality and she would have had to be almost willfully oblivious not to see it that way.

All the time Jane attended Central High,
Impressions
, the school magazine she worked on more devotedly than she ever did her studies, carried big, full-page ads for the Powell School of Business. Housed in modest quarters on the third floor of a building a few steps down Washington Avenue from school,
Powell doesn’t figure much in the annals of higher education, or business education, or any education, really. It started up in the 1920s through the ministrations of its founder, Charles R. Powell, its principal; son Ellwood was vice principal. By the 1950s, it would be gone. But during this intervening epoch, and especially
during the Depression, when young Scranton women, and some young men, chased scarce jobs, a lot of them signed on for classes at Powell.

An
Impressions
ad in November 1931, in Jane’s junior year, promised the chance for “Building Success On Your High School Foundation.” High school, it allowed, supplied a “splendid background.” But in a long, explicatory block of text like you don’t see much in ads today, it argued for how jobs now demanded specialized training. If graduates wanted a business career, they needed to take “intensive courses in business subjects” that would offer them “A Short Cut to Success.” Through Powell’s sharply focused programs, all “non-essential subjects” pruned away, you could “prepare yourself for the position of stenographer, private secretary, bookkeeper, accountant, or junior executive.”

The stenographer is a fixture of old films and Edward Hopper paintings from the period, the pretty young thing called into the boss’s office to take dictation (or, more darkly,
not
to), images filling our mental back pages today along with manual typewriters, carbon paper, and dial telephones. But for many the job was seen as a good one, a step up. Compared to those in factory, mill, or warehouse, it whispered etiquette and decorum. The workplace was clean. The skills it required were substantial. Purveyors of the most popular shorthand systems, Pitman and Gregg, boasted of the dictation speeds their users could attain. An able Gregg stenographer could take down 150 words per minute—fast enough, say, to transcribe a public lecture; the record for some types of material was upward of 250 words per minute. Gregg’s was a complex vocabulary of flowing curves and dots. The most minute squiggles, or variations in line length, or location of lines and dots, conveyed meaning. To the unpracticed eye, the words “play,” “plate,” “plea,” and “plead” all looked about the same. “Business” resembled a bird in flight. “Ransack” looked Chinese. Long lists of common forms and expressions had to be memorized and mastered. But with effort, you could get really good at it, and make yourself marketable.

OTHERS ARE SUCCEEDING

A great many high school graduates have attended our school during the past thirteen years. Many of them today hold splendid positions at good salaries. They capitalized on their High School foundation through business training.

Powell did pretty much as promised. In retirement notices and obituaries all through the 1980s and 1990s, aging Scrantonians of Jane’s generation would tell remarkably similar stories: They’d graduated from this or that Scranton high school, gone on to Powell, come out knowing how to take dictation, type, compose business letters, and conduct themselves in accord with the starched expectations of the contemporary office. They got jobs with the telephone company, or the railroad, held on through the Depression, the war years, and afterward climbed the job ladder, sometimes to executive positions, and in the end could look back on their working lives with satisfaction.

In January 1933, around the time she received her
high school diploma, Jane enrolled in one of Powell’s programs, a specially accelerated secretarial course. She had a lot to learn. Writing a business letter meant taking notes on what the boss wanted, then expressing it in your own words later. To get your typing speed up, you had to learn
not
to understand what you were typing; to distract herself, Jane sometimes sang to herself as she typed. Then, of course, there was shorthand, with its endless drills. She took it all seriously, wanted to be the best typist and stenographer she could. And, reports her oldest son, Jim—her confidant across most of her later years and receptive listener to stories of her early life—she didn’t begrudge her months at Powell, but found the work “interesting, challenging, necessary, and important.”

Powell was enough of a fixture in Scranton that the local paper covered its graduations right alongside those of Central High. On June 23, 1933,
The Scranton Times
carried reports of the Babe’s sixteenth home run of the season; of a rumrunner wanted for murder; and of 114 new Powell graduates, assembled in the Central High auditorium, treated to an orchestral procession, saxophone and trombone solos, singing “America,” hearing Principal Powell’s address, and accepting diplomas handed out by his son. It was rather a grand document, this diploma, one Jane kept all her life—on fancy paper, overlarge, with an engraved image of the school, 1920s-vintage cars and buses bustling by, all testifying to the graduate’s “scholarly attainments.”

We cannot dismiss Powell as some unlikely or irrelevant asterisk to Jane’s life story, this towering figure somehow reduced to cramming humdrum office skills. Rather, it testifies to a groundedness that all her life tempered and redeemed her intellectualism. We don’t know how much the decision to attend Powell followed from her own healthy,
pragmatic nature, how much from her parents’ urgings. What we do know is that for those times, and in that family, she acted reasonably, even wisely. Certainly it paid off. “If I do say so myself,” she’d write, “[I] became a good stenographer. I am very glad I did [it], for I earned my living with it—and thus in a sense my independence—for many years.”

—

But earning a living came later. For the next year or so, Jane worked at a newspaper, unpaid. Like many internships today, it proved invaluable, building up her skills, giving her a job credential, and leaving her with a taste for the world of writing and publishing, if only in the distant reaches of it. All through high school, it was writing that had sustained her—poetry, little essays, a stab at fiction,
words on paper.
Writers were her model, her dream. She knew she wanted to be one; nothing she said across her long life ever suggested otherwise. “
Her ambition is to be a writer; first to be a newspaper reporter, and later to do writing of other kinds.” This autobiographical snippet appeared in a book that published one of her poems, in 1932.

Jane’s job, beginning in late summer 1933, was with
The Scranton Republican
, soon to be
gobbled up by another local paper,
The Scranton Times.
One day in mid-October, maybe a month after she started there, the
Republican
ran a seven-column front-page headline, “Hitler Speech Wakes War Fear.” Then came stories reporting that President Roosevelt was working to “thaw” funds trapped in the nation’s closed and imperiled banks; that a tornado had struck Oklahoma, killing three; that the FBI had formed a special squad to track down the kidnapped son of a department store owner. By page 3, readers were deep into the local news, including a parachute jump gone wrong at a local airfield, along with ads for funeral parlors, wool coats, and $10.75 innerspring mattresses. Finally, on page 4, the paper opened up again to a kind of second page 1—a banner across the page, ornamented by silhouetted figures of women in social settings, heralding the Women’s Society and Club News.