Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (14 page)

But this late success, she’d say with humor and bitterness in approximately equal measure, “
was almost my undoing.” It seems that as a woman accumulating so many credits in the general studies arm of the university she had swung under the administrative scrutiny of Barnard College. Barnard was the women’s college across Broadway from the main Columbia campus, variously linked with the university, but in other ways distinct from it. Until now, Jane had enjoyed rapturous intellectual freedom. No more. She was called in to meet with a Barnard administrator she would term “
the Dragon Lady.”
Now, Miss Butzner, you wish to take which courses? Oh, and with which prerequisites missing? And with no college-level foreign language to your credit?
It only got worse. Turning to Jane’s high school grades the Dragon Lady threw up her hands: How could Jane be admitted to Barnard at all with grades like those?

Jane managed to take a few more courses before she was through at Columbia. By fall 1940, with the publication of
Constitutional Chaff
imminent, she signed up for a single two-credit course in embryology, then went out looking for a job again.

She found one at a trade magazine called
Iron Age
, published weekly from offices near Grand Central Station, and serving the metals industry. “They hired me,” Jane liked to say, “because
I could spell molybdenum” (a key alloying metal). At first, despite her two years at Columbia, she was just a secretary again. And at
$25 a week, she made less than she’d made at Frasse when she left. But with the magazine’s top editors her immediate bosses, within a few months she had new responsibilities thrust upon her. Once a week she went down on the
train to Philadelphia, to call at the offices of metals industry firms and scrap metal dealers, gathering news of market conditions. Or she’d get on the telephone to gather data on tonnage coming out of blast furnaces in Bethlehem or Baltimore. In time, she was editing and writing technical articles herself.

That year, 1941, Jane took a little Spanish at Columbia. Betty started taking courses there as well. Brother John graduated from the University of Virginia law school and joined Uncle Billy at his offices in a little brick building on Princess Anne Street across from the courthouse in Fredericksburg. Aunt Martha, ill with breast cancer, came to live with Jane’s mother in Scranton, but a few months later, on November 23, died there, at age sixty-seven. Two weeks later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America was at war.

As a twelve-year-old, in 1928, on a trip with parents of friends, Jane had visited New York for the first time. “It was
lunchtime in Wall Street in 1928…and the city was just jumping,” she’d say in an interview. “It was full of people.” When, six years later, she moved to New York, things were different, the streets fairly exhaling the unemployed. “It was the difference between the high tide of the Twenties prosperity and depression.” And while she herself, a little cosseted, had managed all right, the times had been cruelly, inescapably hard for most—in families doubled up in shabby quarters, homes unbuilt, roofs unpatched, jobs never filled,
opportunities quashed, hopes withered. The city, the country, everywhere and everyone felt poor, insufficient, dilapidated, and worn. The unemployed millions suffered, and their wretchedness seeped into the lives of everyone else, into the psyches of all who lived in uncertainty and constrained ambition.

With Pearl Harbor, the army of the unemployed vanished. In New York, the Brooklyn Army Terminal was soon
processing servicemen bound for Europe. The Norden Company was making bombsights on Varick Street in Lower Manhattan. The city’s garment industry was churning out millions of uniforms. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, just one of forty shipbuilding and repair facilities in the city, was building battleships. And as the men went off to war, women got jobs long closed to them. “
Everyone knew it was ghoulish to delight in jobs and prosperity at the price of war,” wrote Jane, looking back from a distance of six decades; “nevertheless, everyone I knew was grateful that suddenly good jobs and pay raises showered like rain after a drought. It seemed that the world did need us.”

   CHAPTER 6   

WOMEN’S WORK

A
T AGE TWENTY-FIVE
, Jane Butzner had already sampled several sides of the world of writing, editing, and publishing—as high school poet, newspaper intern, research assistant to an established writer, freelancer, and published author (or “compiler,” anyway) of a university press book. Now, for the past year at
Iron Age
, she’d inhabited yet another corner of it.
Iron Age
, poor thing, was never read just for the pleasure of being read, was of no interest to the larger literary world, was found rarely on newsstands, and was about as far from literature, on the one hand, or academic scholarship, on the other, as any publication could be. It was a trade magazine, its news, insights, and reportage valued by its niche readers, and by no one else.

Jane had started there as a secretary, was soon promoted to editorial assistant, would ultimately rise to the rank of associate editor. Just before that final promotion,
in late 1942, she was working on a big article about nonferrous metals. Ferrous metals include iron and, especially, steel; nonferrous metals are all the others, like copper, tin, aluminum, zinc, magnesium, nickel, and lead. They are vital to modern life. And in 1942, that first full year after Pearl Harbor, they were vital to the war effort. To many of a literary bent, the subject itself might have seemed hopelessly utilitarian, barren of interest. To others, its technical ramparts stood forbiddingly high, the shops, factories, foundries, and dreary back-of-the-mill offices in which its industrial dramas took place rough and repellent.

Still, this was Jane’s subject.

“
All the common non-ferrous metals,” she began her article, “have become precious metals, sought after and hunted down, cherished and pampered, aliens to thoughtless use and ordinary ends.” Most of the world’s tin supplies had fallen to the Japanese. Most other metals could be had, but the war-fed demand for them was insatiable, expanding wildly beyond even plentiful existing supplies. A bomber sent over Germany used a ton and a half of copper. Antiaircraft gun sights needed zinc die castings. Alloy steels needed nickel in vast quantities.

“To teeter these enormous, swift demands into balance with supply, everything has been used except transmutation”—Jane’s coy reference to the alchemists of old. “Allocations, reclamations, requisitions, restrictions, prohibitions, substitutions, premiums, Indian giving, capacity building and manpower freezing have all clattered onto the scale.”

Was Jane having
fun
with this?

A Cuban plant for making nickel from local ores, she reported, had been built from “a fabulous quantity of odds and ends, including steel from the World’s Fair trylon,” the iconic triangular pylon that had stood high over the fairgrounds, “an abandoned cement plant, an Indiana hotel, and a New Jersey factory. A complete Oklahoma machine shop was moved, like a Hearst monastery,” down to the island.

In composing her long article, which took up fifteen pages in an early 1943 issue of the magazine, Jane was writing for readers hungry for industrial insider information; the technical details mattered:
To make magnesium, you mix calcined dolomite with pulverized ferrosilicon, and reduce it in a vacuum at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In fact, Jane had recently completed a short
course in physical metallurgy, receiving an “Engineering Science, and Management War Training” certificate attesting to it.

But it wasn’t enough to collect raw information and slather it onto the page. Her task was to make it easy, even pleasurable, to take in. Among the nonferrous metals, she wrote now, “only lead is fat and happy.” Lead was plentiful, restrictions on its use few: “While other metals must give way to substitutes,” she went on, “lead moves into the manicured society where it never moved before. While other metals must skitter from hand to mouth, lead can rest peacefully and long in inventory.” Jane, then, had to care about her readers
as
readers.
Not
caring explained why nine-tenths of the world’s technical reports, legal briefs, and academic papers were scarcely readable at all. With sure command of her subject,
stylish wordplay, and an occasional streak of merriment, even mischief, Jane made it almost fun to read about magnesium, aluminum, and lead.

At
Iron Age
, she seems never to have had people working for her, but she did enjoy
substantial autonomy there, and in the end was making $45 a week, almost twice her starting salary. She often went down to Washington to meet with officials of the War Production Board, the Navy Department, the Department of Labor, and other agencies, her nose deep into the metals trade news, rounding up leads for stories. She visited refiners and metal fabricators around Philadelphia, New York, and up into New England. She attended scientific meetings. She met with metallurgists who had agreed to write articles for the magazine, edited their manuscripts, helped work out graphic and photographic treatments for them.

And, of course, she wrote. Was it the sort of writing she had in mind when she first came to New York in 1934 determined to become a writer? Hardly. But by now she had real skills she could turn to any subject she wished. And in 1943 she turned them to
helping out her hometown.

Bylined simply as “a member of the
Iron Age
staff,” Jane wrote for the March 1943 issue how Scranton, with its thirty thousand unemployed, had the resources of labor, electric power, and transportation for war factories—yet hadn’t gotten any. Scrantonians by the thousands were decamping for jobs in war-boom cities like Baltimore. The year before, the Anthracite Coal Commission had judged Scranton well suited to making explosives, forgings, machine parts, and ammunition, but this determination had gotten Scranton exactly nowhere. Likewise, efforts by the city itself, working through
The Scranton Tribune
, successor to Jane’s old paper, had failed. Their entreaties to the Army, Navy, and War Production Board, Jane wrote, had yielded only “a post-graduate course in the runaround.” Jane’s article got play around the country. She wrote other articles, too, in the
New York Herald Tribune
and elsewhere. She spoke at a rally in Scranton. By the end of the year, a factory for making B-29 bomber wings that would employ seven thousand people and run seven days a week was going up in Scranton. At one point, a letter of appreciation went out to the “gentlemen” at
Iron Age.
But many around town knew whom to really thank: “Ex-Scranton Girl Helps Home City,” ran a local headline.

While Jane’s regular salary came from
Iron Age
, she also got periodic checks from other publications, like the
Herald Tribune.
Her
boss
didn’t much like it, but she’d sometimes take a subject researched for
Iron Age
and work it into a story with a different slant for ordinary readers. Remember her sidelong reference to World’s Fair steel going into a new Cuban nickel plant?
A week before the
Iron Age
article appeared, Jane had much more to say about it in the
Herald Tribune.
There she described the backbone of hills known as the Lengua de Pájaro (bird’s tongue) where the new mills would rise, tin-roofed “pastel-colored cement houses” for thousands of new workers, and the “crumbly red-brown earth,” thick with nickel ore, that made it all possible.

She wrote about
women on the home front, too. The war had changed things for women. With men fighting in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific, almost the entire world of work had opened up to them. It wasn’t just Rosie the Riveter, though there were plenty like her. Jane’s sister, Betty, worked as a draftswoman at an aircraft plant. “Women were everywhere,” writes Lorraine B. Diehl in
Over Here!
, her account of New York City during the war.

They sold you railroad tickets at ticket counters and took those tickets from you on the trains. At La Guardia Field they were part of the police patrol, controlling pedestrian traffic and watching for suspicious packages. They flew planes for the Civil Air Patrol. They drove trucks and taxis, tended bar, and operated elevators, and in the summer months you’d find them perched atop lifeguard chairs at the city’s beaches.

In a 1942 article, Jane wrote about how the government had reviewed its roster of occupational categories and now deemed most of them open to women; previously, only 154 of almost 3,000 had any appreciable numbers of them—no electricians, no welders, no lathe operators. Now, she wrote in an article nationally syndicated among newspapers, “Wanted: Women to Fill 2795 Kinds of Jobs,” women could work at all of them, though they usually earned less than men. At
Iron Age
, Jane belonged to the United Office Professional Workers of America International. She was no organizer, she’d later have cause to explain. But she did talk up the union, especially to lower-level clerical workers, asking,
If women are doing the same work, shouldn’t they get the same pay?

Her union efforts seemed to rub some of her coworkers the wrong way—in particular the managing editor,
T. W. Lippert, a Carnegie Tech graduate in physics and veteran of almost ten years at the magazine when
Jane was hired. The two of them clashed. On her employment records, he’d insist on calling her a typist. He’d make “
loose and untrue allegations about my morals,” Jane would write. One time, he sent her off to a stag dinner “to which he was well aware no women were invited,” determined to embarrass her. All this, at least, according to Jane, who had to defend herself against his accusations later. To her union sympathies, add what Lippert or others at
Iron Age
interpreted as a left-wing bent, a willfully anti-British streak, and her penchant for smoking a pipe, and you had the makings of “
a troublemaker and an agitator,” as an FBI report quoted one informant. After almost three years at the magazine, Jane was eased out.