Forty Years and This Still Bothers Me

I have written far, far too many columns on very serious topics lately, and it is absolutely time for a piece on something that is completely irrelevant to today's world of torment and universal brouhaha.  So here's one.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I was a poor young man with an MIT degree and no real job prospects.  I had gone to medical school at the University of North Carolina, quit after one year and moved up to Boston to start a comic opera company, which eventually became the Boston Light Opera that ran for a number of years.

That, however, was not a "living", so I was perpetually applying to jobs and, with the wretched economy of the time, not getting any offers.  Through the good graces of a friend, I was able to wait on tables and be a host at a restaurant to pay food and rent, but that was not a career choice.  So I applied to be many things, even including a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch (remember that; it's plot material) which, like the rest, did not respond to my application.

And then one day I saw an ad somewhere looking for a manager for a theater company.  There, I thought, whether it was a career or not, at least it was something I could modestly say I had skills at, having participated in the founding and management of an opera company.  I put together a resume and sent it along to the company, which was some kind of experimental theater group in Cambridge.

Remarkably, some time later, I got a phone call from a lady with the company, for an interview and what we would call today a "pre-screen."  She sounded to be in her 20s; we talked for a while about the company and what they were trying to accomplish, and what they needed for a manager.  Everything was going along reasonably well.

That ended abruptly when she asked a yes-no question, which may have been to ask if I were available to meet for an in-person interview on some specified date; it doesn't matter other than that it was a binary question.  My answer was affirmative, and I replied as any gentleman in 1970-something would have, who was raised as I was:

"Yes, Ma'am", I said.

You could have heard the icicles form on the other end of the line.  The tone of her voice changed, and after a moment she explained that I probably wouldn't fit very well with the group there.  She added, and I'm really sorry I can't recall her precise words, that I should "think about the way I answered her".  Moreover, I had just moved up from living in North Carolina a year or so back, and clearly did not sound like a native Bostonian (I'm not); so I also recall thinking that she was making judgments about me based on the way I spoke, and then lecturing me on top of it.

I do regret not answering her that she might want to "think about" who the real prejudiced individual was on that conversation and who was being elitist, but I did not say that.  I merely said that I thought I was certainly as qualified to be interviewed as anyone else she was likely to talk to, and if my politeness, speech pattern and the fact that I called her "Ma'am" was a problem, well, they were far less important than my capabilities as a manager.

I never followed up to see what happened to that theater company and I won't guess.  But I do suspect that the young lady on the other end of the phone is just as much the elitist today that she was in 1975 or whatever year that was.  It takes far too much effort to grow up and learn maturity, than I suspect she was ever able to put in.

- - -

Shortly thereafter, I got a letter from a law firm in Baltimore.  Apparently, Merrill Lynch had settled a lawsuit claiming that black applicants were not getting a fair shake.  As part of the settlement, every applicant over the specified period of time received a letter from the law firm with an affidavit to sign and return, if it was applicable.

Now, the text of the letter kept using the term "Negro" to refer to the aggrieved parties.  However, the affidavit itself did not -- it used the term "black", and led off with something like "I am black and I applied to Merrill Lynch between [the inclusive dates] and was not hired for a position as an associate ..."

So, unemployed chipmunk that I was, I went straight to my dictionary and looked up "black" to see if I qualified.  Sure enough, one of the later definitions in the list was "sad or disconsolate" (as in a "black mood").  Well, I was unemployed and had gotten dissed by a pompous little leftist at a pompous little theater company.  That sounded "disconsolate" enough to me.  I signed the affidavit and shipped it off to the law firm, and promptly forgot I had done it.

Sure enough, many, many months later, I received my share of the settlement.  It was a check for right about $83, more than enough to compensate me for the stamp and for the callous treatment at the hands of evil Merrill Lynch (to whom I had sent an application but who never contacted me and surely had no idea of my skin color).  In fact, if I got $83 for every unsuccessful application I sent that year, I'd have a pretty fair amount of cash then, maybe a total 1/10,000th as much as the lawyers got for that one case.

According to something in the way the letter with the check was worded, too, the State of Maryland somehow recognized me as being "black."  I didn't keep the letter, but 40 years later, I still joke about "being legally 'black' in the State of Maryland." I've never had the guts to use it in the EEO section of a job application, though.

There -- was that an unserious enough column for today?

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton