Like a New Broom: an essay about an early job I had

 I remember Bill Rollings (pronounced Rollins), the store manager at the Muth Company and my boss. (The “Mu” in Muth was pronounced the same as it is in “music.”) Tall, respected, fair-minded, a keen observer and a master of details, it was his task to get the store through each day, keeping the employees busy and the customers happy, keeping the shelves stocked and senior management off his back. I did whatever he asked me to do. Probably in my early weeks, he would have assumed that I was a spy (uppity white college kid) sent by management (entrenched old-money white folks) to keep an eye on him and the rest of the store staff. But I wasn’t, and management never asked me to spy on anyone, and I did my best to pull my weight around the store. After I'd been there a few months, he allowed me to change some of the shelving and displays in the store to better showcase underappreciated items of our stock. After closing, the two of us would pass the time for a few minutes at the front door before he swung it open for me and locked it behind me. Bill the Gatekeeper, always the last to leave. I remember these unstructured conversations fondly, not for their content (it was just us B.S.’ing about how the day had gone) but for their ease, the way the dialogue would flow between us without  tension or one-upsmanship. In his spare time, Bill made wall hangings with a distinctly African flavor out of colorful fabrics, yarns, and rope, and he brought in photos of these to show me. He also showed me photos of him and his family on vacation. He tried to reach out to me. He tried, I think, to figure me out (not the last of my bosses to do that).

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Early in 1974, having left my announcing job at Washington’s WGMS because of on-air anxiety, I was casting around for something to do. I was 23. By itself, my college diploma qualified me for nothing. My radio experience at college and at WGBH had gotten me the WGMS job and now that was over. My girlfriend, Maureen, had a job at NPR. The previous July, she and I had rented a small pink stucco house on North 22nd Street in Arlington. The realtor hadn’t wanted to rent to an unmarried couple, hadn’t even wanted to speak to us, but after someone at NPR made a call to her we found ourselves sitting down to sign a lease.

There was something about living in a quiet, leafy neighborhood in a pleasant Virginia suburb, where we could walk to stores and the bus, that fit for the moment what we seemed to be looking for. Like my dad, I mowed the lawn and took the trash out and took a daily paper and unclogged the gutters. We tried to raise vegetables in the hard, red-clay soil. Maureen bought cosmetics from the local Mary Kay rep. We tried to fit in. We kept a low profile and we kept the yard tidy. But we were aware that we made some of our neighbors uneasy. An unmarried couple from a northern state playing house . . . that was “different.” This was the South, fairly conservative. People probably wondered what was happening to their neighborhood.

Through NPR we were able to get passes to concerts at Wolf Trap, out in the Virginia countryside. A nice evening out, now and then. But Maureen’s pay wouldn’t cover our rent and expenses for very long — I had to find a new job.

So it was me with the Post’s classified section, along with everybody else. My degree did open some doors. Most quickly slammed shut. Later on, I realized that people in charge of hiring found it odd that an Ivy League graduate was seeking minimum-wage work in sales or in the shipping room, jobs of that kind. Wasn’t I supposed to be in law school, or med school?

At this point I remembered the posters I had made for the pop concerts my college station had sponsored. That experience had given me some knowledge of graphic-arts processes and commercial printing. And an awareness of the importance of promotion, especially self-promotion. Armed with this thin mantle of preparedness, I approached two local art-supplies outlets, one of which was in Falls Church, just to the west of where I was living. I’ve forgotten its name, but it was in a large, modern, brightly-lit building, and there was Helvetica Medium typography all over the walls and the shelves and the delivery vehicles parked outside, just like at Charrette back in Cambridge. I really wanted to work for them and in my mind we were an ideal match. In their minds we weren’t, and I wasn’t offered a job.

My second choice was the George Muth Company, which occupied an antique five-story building on New York Avenue at 14th Street, N.W., with a retail shop on the ground floor and offices and storerooms up above. Below was a basement, with rats. The company had been founded in 1865. Many generations of Muths had sold framing, drafting, and artists’ supplies out of several successively more ample quarters as the company grew until it finally settled into New York Avenue in the 1920’s. Muth’s original motto still graced its letterhead: “We supply everything but the talent.” Three blocks away was The White House, where I got off the bus from North Arlington, for my interview.

Muth was a tired old company, a dying company though I didn’t know it yet, in what turned out to be a tired old neighborhood. There was trouble, various in its severity: purse-snatching, prostitution, shoplifting, people having fistfights, people using storefronts as latrines, people passed out on the sidewalk. Next door was a “burlesque theater,” which may have once been a venue for plays, variety shows, and movies, but was now just a strip joint. The facade of the building was decorated with gaudy banners advertising the renowned strippers who would supposedly be performing that day. From late morning until past Muth’s closing time, a barker in a cap and long overcoat strode up and down the sidewalk in front of the theater, tirelessly drumming up business: “Come on in, gents! The girls are right on the stage!”

There was grime in the air, grime on the walls of the buildings and on the sidewalks, grime on your tongue. Inside the Muth building there was more grime, and shadows, and exhausted coats of paint on the walls, and lighting fixtures that were not up to the task of illuminating the interior.

My interview was with the general manager of sales, a stout, over-middle-age white gentleman in a suit and tie, paunchy and perspiring, whose name I’ve forgotten, which is too bad because he did hire me. Let’s call him Mr. Smith. All of the top management at Muth were white folks. Most of the staff and lower-level managers, at the store and at the warehouse in South Arlington, were black. Mr. Smith slouched in his heavy oak chair, as if it was too much of an effort to sit up straight, today, tomorrow, or ever. Holding in one hand the resume I had sent him a week earlier, waving it lightly back and forth, he addressed the wall over my head: “We’ve been looking for a young man of your caliber.” Mr. Smith was from somewhere in the Old Confederacy, and this came out “yaw calibuh.”

I needed to be putting money back into my depleted checking account, so I took the job without asking what they expected me to do. I had an idea that I’d be starting as a sales clerk in the retail store, but I wasn’t sure. I think now that they thought of me as a potential knight-in-shining-armor, who had come from out of nowhere to aid in their rescue, but this was never explained to me, and anyway, I was not going to be that guy.

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Bill Rollings’ second-in-command was Charles Hunter, very focussed, very energetic (but it was a contained energy), also detail-oriented, also fair, but a demanding boss, and not one to pass the time with me or anyone else. He would take no excuses from employees who called in sick, especially on Saturday, our busiest day, or who called in because their cat was sick. When customers came in for a certain paintbrush or tube of acrylic, having been assured by a phone salesman upstairs that we had plenty in stock, when we actually didn’t (a screw-up which happened with depressing frequency), Charles could soothe them, advising them that by next week, “hopefully we should have some in by then,” which was of course meaningless, but Charles could make it sound so reassuring.

I remember Kirk Glover, Muth's outside salesman. Kirk was Muth's Willy Loman, glassy-eyed, footsore, bent, and weary, with a sagging samples case, an air of detachment, and a tendency to philosophize. He stopped me once in the hall outside the lunchroom: “Have you ever wondered about my name? Glover. That's right, my forefathers made gloves. You see? And Kirk. That's short for Kirkland. That means the land surrounding the kirk, the church. Someone who’s living there. Or someone who’s buried there. It's Scottish. You're interested, aren't you. I can tell you are. You’re not like the rest of these yahoos here. They only know how to say ‘yep’ and ‘you-all.’ ”

A few weeks into my job at Muth, I was able to look up and notice things like the boldly-colored, form-fitting tunic that Charles typically wore around the store all day. (Like the rest of the sales staff, I wore a baggy, light-blue jacket that the company provided. It was cut somewhat like a blazer and had big white buttons on it and was, in a word, lame.) I noticed the tunic and asked Charles about it. It turned out that it had been custom-made for him by Jimmy, one of the upstairs phone salesmen, who also appeared from time to time down in the store. Jimmy liked to wear his own designs, and was one of the more sweet-natured people I ever worked with. The word for Jimmy was “flamboyant.” Later I knew that he was gay, of course, but that didn’t get talked about around the store, and I had the feeling that among the black employees it really didn't get talked about. The tunic Charles wore was such a nice tunic, a unique tunic, that I was considering asking Jimmy if he would make one for me, too. (Who knew? When you’re 23, you try things out. Anything at all might be part of your path forward.) One morning, Jimmy failed to show up for work. It shocked me to learn, some days later, that his body had been found overnight in the trunk of a car in a parking lot, somewhere in the District. He had been shot several times. Kirk, ashen-faced (but Kirk was always ashen-faced): “How little we know. How little we know.”

Most of my time at Muth, it was my job to wait on customers who walked into the store. For years, probably since its founding, there had been no such thing as self-service at the Muth store. It was considered disrespectful to the customer, to make them rummage through the displays for what they wanted. Also, self-service tended to invite shoplifting, and it turned out that Muth had plenty of that already. Even in 1974, though, this model of time-consuming, personal, one-on-one service was becoming a thing of the past. Tradition was strong at Muth, however, and management stuck with the practice. If you wanted a roll of drafting paper or a watercolor brush or a pink pencil eraser or a mat board in a certain shade, a sales clerk would wait on you, advise you (drawing upon the breadth of their knowledge) regarding the best product for your needs and price range, and get it for you. (Even though most of those items were on display in the store and within easy reach of the customers.) Then, on a large central table near the one and only cash register, the sales clerk would wrap your items in brown paper and write up your purchase, by hand, on a large, multicolored, carbonless order ticket. (This was partly for inventory control, and partly, I think, to keep the customs and methods of mid-century American retailing alive for just a little bit longer.) Then you would take your items and your ticket over to the cashier (an affable Jamaican woman named Ruby Wilson) who would ring you up. I remember the time a customer came in for three tubes of gouache, which she picked off the shelf unaided. It was a busy morning and all the clerks were occupied. When she realized that she wasn’t allowed to approach Ruby until someone had written up her order, she flung the gouache onto the order table and stormed out.

I worked at Muth five days a week, including Saturday, for over a year, though it seemed much longer. The store was closed on Sunday. Each clerk got a different weekday off to compensate for working on Saturday. Those of us with a Significant Other who had a normal five-day workweek (such as at NPR) found that we had to do all of our weekending as a couple on Sunday. It turned out that shopping meccas, museums, restaurants, and other attractions had limited hours on Sunday. Gamely we scheduled day trips to the Chesapeake Bay, Catoctin Park, the Appalachians, Harper’s Ferry, and other places but found that most of our time was spent driving out and back. We had to come into the District for our jobs, and somehow weren’t eager to spend more time there on our one day off together.

Who else comes to mind now? A genteel woman in her mid-fifties with a blond beehive hairdo, Flora Lee Muth (called “Miss Muth”) was the figurehead of the organization, the latest (and last) in the Muth family to assume leadership of the Company. Her home was an old, perhaps antebellum mansion in the Virginia countryside, the old Muth home, the kind of property with a title, like “Stonegate”; it was a name very much like that. Her home had its own letterhead, copies of which could be seen around the adminstrative offices. Miss Muth had the front office on the top floor, overlooking New York Ave., but no real power and not much to do with day-to-day operations. I was introduced to her on my first day (the lunchroom, restrooms, time clock ((for punching in and out)) and administrative offices were all located in the fifth floor). She acknowledged my presence with a thin smile and a nod of the head. I noticed that she had a habit of fussing lightly with her hair with both sets of fingers while speaking with someone. She asked me where I’d be working. When I told her I wasn’t sure yet, she cheerfully remarked, “Well! Nothing cleans like a new broom!” and walked away, still primping.

Miss Muth had a private secretary named Betty, short, stocky, alert, well-organized. She was about Miss Muth’s age; I gathered that they had been together for many years. Perhaps Betty had also been secretary to the Muth Who Had Come Before, Flora Lee’s father. One of Betty's legs was lame, which gave her a swaying gait. It was clear that she was fond of Miss Muth and would do anything for her. I was surprised, though, to see that all day long she wore the same light-blue jacket as us lowly sales clerks. Her old desk had a glass top; underneath the glass, where she could look at them while she worked, were various postcards, pictures, and photos. One was of Miss Muth. Another one was of Jesus.

I think now that the company probably tried me out in different positions for my first four or five days, trying to see where I might fit in best. My guide for this journey was the actual executive secretary, Eileen McDaniel, also in her fifties, whose “southern” accent was so different to my ears that I had trouble understanding her. “Come over this way,” she said, “I want to introduce you to Mister Flat-Head.” Mister who? I looked up and there indeed was a man in jacket and tie and glasses and an extremely level flat-top haircut. What had I gotten myself into? After a moment, I realized that Eileen had said “Whitehead” (Waat-Head), not “Flat-Head.” It was not my last such misunderstanding.

She put me to work that day helping Ed Whitehead and another salesman who processed government bids all day. This was a big part of Muth’s business, potentially. Government agencies, and there were many, sent out requests for bids incessantly. The requests came in reams of continuous paper with pale green stripes and  tractor holes along the sides, bearing exhaustive specs printed using the dot-matrix process. “Tape, pressure-sensitive, adhesive, 3/4". . .” was how a very long request began for what amounted to a truckload of Scotch tape. All Muth had to do was be the low bidder, and they could take their cut of a sale and delivery that would never have to pass through the store or even the warehouse.

I never found out where Eileen was from, but I assumed it was somewhere in the mountainous South. It seemed impertinent to ask. I came to realize that Washington was a draw for many southerners. It was common for people from southern states, even more than for people from northern and western states, to come to Washington in search of better pay and working conditions, a career, a more interesting life, a new start. Me, I had just followed my girlfriend down there.

Alice the switchboard operator. All calls to Muth came through Alice's vintage telephone switchboard, as if this were still the “Number, please” era before direct-dialing. Bill Rollings said that any time something went wrong with it, the phone company would have to comb through their ranks of repairmen to find someone old enough to know how to fix it, “one of them old dudes.” Alice was no longer middle-aged and her joints hurt. Someone remarked to me, “Alice is sorry she's gotten too old and too heavy now and can’t have any fun anymore.” She loved a good joke and had an infectious cackle and a wavy black wig. She was one of the first to go when the new owners arrived.  

Hawkins the ex-trumpet player, now Muth's janitor. Once in a while he arrived for work drunk. In such a case, Alice would cover for him, phoning upstairs to Eileen that “Hawkins called in sick today,” and recruiting someone to get Hawkins off the premises in a hurry and pointed in the direction of home, where he could sleep it off and keep his job.

Dores Hedgepeth. She pronounced her name “Doris.” She was especially knowledgeable about the many kinds of paints and papers we stocked. Her hair was orange, and she kept it short. Dores was the first single mom I ever knew, and I often wondered about that, especially how hard it must have been for her to be apart from her daughter all day.

I certainly remember Gregory Taylor, a young man possibly hired when Hawkins could no longer make it to work. Gregory did a little bit of everything menial around Muth. I was always happy to see him; he brightened my day. Gregarious, funny, with a lightning-quick, adaptable mind and a trove of street-wise stories, jokes, and sayings, Gregory had once been a scholarship student at a prestigious prep school in Washington. Something happened to him back then, and suddenly he was homeless and shocked to find himself living on the street, dressed in old clothing nobody wanted. He told me about a mother and her little boy, the mother holding tight to her little boy’s hand, walking past him on a city sidewalk and giving him a wide berth. Gregory at the time would have been slumped against the outer wall of a building, a pile of dirty rags with hands and a face. The little boy turned and asked him, “Mister, are you a hobo?” “No, son. I’m not a hobo,” Gregory replied, chuckling ruefully, even then, about having that term applied to him.

Gregory had gotten some help, and now had a place to live, and a girlfriend, Carol, and this job at Muth. He and Carol were devoted to each other, but still, Gregory had misgivings. He wasn’t sure what she wanted of him, not sure whether he could deliver on it, not sure where they were headed, or where he was headed. Oh, sure, he allowed, the sex was OK, “but sometimes, you know, I get a little lonely up there.” Gregory had beliefs about what women, those “little black girls from the ghet-to,” wanted from a man. “They want a man, and they want a man who’ll treat them all right and not smack them around, and they don’t want a man to have a baby with them and then disappear.” Before I left the company, in 1975, Gregory had enlisted in the army, and I don’t think he took Carol with him.

The D.C. Metro system was being built while I was working at Muth. Many sections of the city had been torn up for the construction of the tunnels. One hot Saturday afternoon, we noticed that in the airspace above New York Ave., a cloud of yellow insects had suddenly appeared. We could see them through the store’s front door and windows. They were zamming around in an angry, disturbed way. Of course! One of the diesel shovels must have hit a big underground nest of bees. No, not bees — yellowjackets!

Holy shit! And now people were running into the store to get away from them, swatting and swearing, and a few angry yellowjackets came in with them, so we began swatting and swearing too, and ducking and scurrying around. And it was awful but somehow hysterically funny, like a scene from a movie. In strode a man in a golfer's cap; addressing no one in particular, he demanded, “Hey, man! When y’all gonna do somethin’ ’bout the Bee Situation?” I doubled over in laughter. Sure, it was a piece of shtick reminiscent of “Amos and Andy”: the comic-righteous outrage, the highfalutin language in the face of absurdity. I couldn’t help that. I hadn't heard anything that funny in a very long time, and I think I was starved for it.

We would get interesting customers coming into the store. (According to Bill Rollings, Flora Lee's father, in his day, had dubbed them “cartoons,” as in, “Say, boys, where all the cartoons at today?”) Senator Howard Baker stopped by often, to pick up supplies for Mrs. Baker, who painted. Hearing-impaired art students from Gallaudet College would come by with lists of supplies; sometimes they'd be accompanied by a classmate who could hear; sometimes they came alone, and would trying signing with us, unsuccessfully, and then would lead one of us around the store, picking things out, pantomiming when they couldn't find what they wanted. An assertive man in a suit made frequent visits to buy drafting film with a government purchase order, always announcing himself as “Foster from Agriculture.” I waited on Sam Gilliam once; he was in his forties and already famous, but still I treated him the same as everyone else, asking to see his driver’s license before I would take his check. I feel bad about it to this day, because my sticking to the rules required him to be more patient and forbearing with me, with my system, than he should have had to be.

Once a deranged man in a baseball cap wandered into the store and began having one, two, then three of the clerks fetch him things. Both Bill and Charles happened to be out that day. We didn't know the man was deranged at first, but we found out pretty soon. A colorful heap of art supplies began to grow on the wrapping table. Who was this guy? Was he really going to pay for all this stuff? As someone began dutifully to write up his order, he became agitated, wanting some of the supplies to be put back and substitutions brought out, claiming we were trying to trick him into buying something he didn't really want. This kind of thing went on for quite a while, sucking most of the air and energy out of the room, the clerks running out of patience, the man becoming increasingly upset and finally hostile. He grabbed a ballpoint pen from beside the cash register and raised it over his head, reaching way back, glaring at Ruby and shouting, “Gonna stab you right through the heart!” Then he flung the pen away and dashed out the front door, another Muth character making his exit.

I, too, made my exit that summer. Maureen and I had broken up, though we decided to stay with our rental house until the lease ran out. I wanted to go home, and I wanted a new start. Muth’s new owners, a chain of office-supplies stores called Ginn’s, swooped in and made some big changes right away and had many more in mind. They had spotted me in the lineup, and wanted my future and theirs to be intertwined. But I was through with D.C., and made my excuses. Maureen was moving into an apartment building where pets weren't allowed, and soon I was headed up I-95 in a Ryder truck with my furniture, and both of our cats.