Having quit the Manhattan Criminal Court dictaphone-typist job after finally receiving the needed first paycheck after 6 weeks, I was now ineligible to receive unemployment compensation checks. So some of the time during the December that I last lived in the Jamaica basement apartment with Barry in the 1970's was spent looking at Sunday New York Times classified want ads.
Noticing a want ad for a "publicity clerk" job with a book publishing firm in Midtown Manhattan, I telephoned its personnel office to arrange for a job interview. After being interviewed, my impression was that the person who was the publicity department manager was going to hire me, especially because I was the first applicant to be interviewed, in a decade when the first white applicant for a skyscraper office clerical job usually still was the person who would get hired, unless he or she lacked the job qualifications. But because it was the month in which the publicity department manager was apparently busy hanging out at various seasonal office parties and/or schmoozing/meeting with her print media contacts, press agent contacts, bookstore managers and newspaper or magazine book review editors, she took her sweet time about calling me back to let me know that she had hired me and when I might start working as her publicity clerk at the book publishing firm.
But after two or three telephone calls to her by me, which apparently also convinced her that it made sense to hire me as her publicity clerk because I was eager enough about obtaining the job to call her about her decision more than once, I was told to report to for my first day of work in early January of the new year.
