December 30, 1964
Surprise! Os were home at 1:05. Wonder of Wonders! $2.50 for a 4 hour job. See what I mean? At T’s I got $2.55 for 6 hours. Hey! I’ve been gyped at 50 cents an hour that’s $3.00. But how can you do it? What do you say when a client asks “Is this enough?” You feel like an ogre saying “no”.
I might work in Millbrook with Dad this summer. I hope I can! I’d have to get New York State Papers and pay N.Y. taxes.
December 30, 2022
My sincere apologies for using (and misspelling) a common slang word for “cheated” that we now know as a slur. But I have decided that protecting my present self from embarrassment does not include whitewashing my 1964 vocabulary.
The prospect of working with my dad was as exciting as a summer working at Camp Maria Pratt. Newspapers were the family business; my great-grandfather was a minister and a printer. His son, my grandfather left school at twelve to drive a grocery wagon, took over his father’s print shop at fourteen, and started a weekly paper at sixteen. My father, born and raised to the tune of the clanking presses in the first-floor shop, learned the trade in his teens and never left it. By 1964 he was more journalist than printer, working for a chain of small weekly papers as the editor of the Millbrook (NY) Round Table. It would have been quite a summer. Between 1963 and 1968, Millbrook was home to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) and their League for Spiritual Discovery. According to New York State historian Devin Lander, “The psychedelic counterculture was not created in California. It was created in Millbrook.” As far as I can recall, Dad never reported on the goings-on at the Dietrich estate, but he did talk about its odd assortment of inhabitants over the dinner table. Little did we know.
Eventually, both my brother and I had stints with the papers, Bob as an reporter and assistant editor of the Pawling-Patterson News Chronicle, and me as proofreader, paste up girl and occasional reporter with the New Milford Times. But the family tradition ended by the time we finished college. Probably a good thing; small town newspapers have long since disappeared, replaced by online “communities” like NextDoor. RIP.