Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life by Joseph Epstein

Author:Joseph Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2024-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten Poverty Warrior

In Little Rock, my wife had found a charming white house, up on a slight hill, with an ample front porch that had a wide swing. The house was originally built by the parents of the current occupant of the larger house next door, an older southern woman who in the early 1960s still referred to Blacks as “darkies.” The rent was a reasonable $100 a month. The house was walking distance from downtown Little Rock.

The problem was I hadn’t any clue about where to find a job. The Arkansas Gazette, onto hard times, was not hiring. I applied for work as a salesman at Pfeifer’s and Cohn’s, Little Rock’s two large department stores, but heard nothing back. Four or five worrisome weeks passed. Then Dorothy Williams, my wife’s sister, reported that a member of her Baptist church, a man named Olen Thomas, was the director of the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency and had a job opening. I arranged for an interview. Thomas was looking for, in effect, a public relations man, someone who could write public releases for his agency and oversee correspondence going out of the office. At the interview, he seemed, and later proved in fact to be, a good man, and at the interview’s end he hired me for the job.

I was the only non-southerner in the office. For a time, I could fall back on that male lingua franca, sports, as a subject of conversation. My colleagues and I came from radically different worlds. One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a “throwout bearing” in my used Corvair—the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed—Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. “All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath.” Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day’s headline in the Arkansas Gazette: “Jewish Man Found Dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock.”

For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! these various mechanics must have thought.

My job at the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency was less than all-consuming, so in my ample spare time I decided to write an article for Harper’s with the title “The Row Over Urban Renewal.

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