June always takes me back to my graduation from Princeton in 1980. Do my fledgling steps in the job market hold any lessons for the class of 2024? Read on.
I was an economics major planning a journalism career. To that end, I mailed out resumes hoping that summer newspaper jobs and my economics degree might stir some interest. I had also passed the Foreign Service exam, so global public service beckoned as a career option. As my classmates talked about travel plans, I thought a summer of backpacking in Europe could be educational. The Peace Corps intrigued me, but my practical-minded mother back in Mission, Texas, warned me, "Van, if you go into the Peace Corps, I'll make you pay me back every dime I ever sent to Princeton." And she was serious about that, too. So that option was off the table.
None of these pleasant fantasies happened. The job search plan worked – catastrophically well. Instead of landing in Baton Rouge or Corpus Christi, I parlayed the Princeton connection, writing samples and a gift for good job interviews into a reporter-researcher job at Forbes Magazine, "the Capitalist Tool." The catch: I had to start a week after I graduated. Visions of travel vanished as, buckling under maternal pressure to get a job, I accepted the offer of a $12,000 yearly salary and scrambled to find a place to live. I plunged into the world of work and New York living with absolutely no break. By mid-June I was in a sports coat and tie, humping along in the sweltering A train from the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn to West 4th Street in Manhattan wondering what I had gotten myself into.
On the surface, an entry-level job like this made sense, a way to build on my skills. And it would have – but not at Forbes. Back then it was a twice-monthly magazine with a fearsome reputation for hard-hitting stories and a delight at squeezing the gonads of executives. Insecure, inexperienced, anxious and wildly nonconfrontational, I struggled like a guppy among piranhas in the Forbes fishbowl.
Problems began immediately. My journals from 1980 are full of anxiety and pep talks to myself as I tried to get the rhythm of checking financial stories that blended arcane (to me) business concepts with punchy opinions and quotes that sources often did not want to appear in print. As I recall, fact-checking required guile and mental gymnastics, since we could not read quotes directly back to sources, only paraphrase them. That meant sources didn’t know exactly what we wanted them to confirm, and they couldn't retract or alter a quote.
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| Trying to look like I know what I'm doing, 1980. |
Forbes veterans felt exasperation with my bumbling. For example, senior editor Bob Flaherty dubbed one hot-shot Wall Street investor a “cult figure.” So I dutifully underlined the phrase in red ink on the draft as a fact to check. When I called the guru, I asked him, “So are you really a cult figure?” That didn’t help my reputation at all.
Indeed, I knew from the beginning I was out of my league. From my journal, June 26, 1980:
Work is hell. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I am checking my 1st story and it is a nightmare. . . I’m afraid I’ll get run over when it hits the press. My manager is very helpful, but my lack of attention and knowledge is hopelessly frustrating.
And on July 5:
Work has been an experience. Fact-checking is much more difficult than I expected. My 1st story was one by Howard on REITS [real estate investment trusts]. I am sweating blood about some things I underlined but did not check. I think the spellings are all OK, but I’m just not 100% sure. I’ve heard that capital punishment is preferable to the penalties affixed to misspellings that checkers let past. I just have to wait.
I don’t know how exactly to evaluate the experience so far. The people are OK and the education is good, but I can’t help feel a Sword of Damocles is over my head. The thought of getting fired has of course entered my head, and it is possible after the 3-month probation I might be let go. If that happens I could either try the Journal of Commerce or Jewish publications. If they want me, fine. If not, it won’t be the end of the world. I could have used a vacation. Now I know why I didn’t write to the biz mags—I must have thought something like this would come up. I wonder what I was thinking about when I started this search. I suppose I did the right thing, given what I wanted to do and the market. Ideally I could work through next May, try to get a position someplace else, then take the summer off. I think my considerable strains of late will be alleviated when the July 21 issue comes out w/o pain, and when I finally develop a social life. Last Friday I attended services at The Village Temple and they made me feel quite comfy. As I was leaving the rabbi said, “We could use a few more single men here, for these young women.”
By August, the alarm bells rang loud enough for the head of the research department to warn me about my lagging performance. While other new reporter-researchers were getting articles published, I hesitated to write anything, until I finally broke into print with short newsmaker items.
August 14:
My manager called me into her cubicle and told me, essentially, I had the next three weeks to get my act together, by the end of the three month probation period. It’s gotten so nobody has a great urge to work with me, which probably accounts for the revolving door series of people I’ve worked with. I’m too slow and unsure and just don’t seem to be jelling with the system.
By December I had a talking-to that left me in tears, and I should have cut my losses. Forbes management could have done that also, but I remained. These days, I’d tell my younger self to bail out, get a Eurail Pass and don’t look back. Use your post-college youth on more rewarding activities if you clearly see a mismatch and no future at a job. However, that path would have required accepting that I had failed in the sort of high-status job worthy of a Princeton grad. Given my utter inability to make that mental leap, I couldn’t slink back to Mission, Texas with my tail between my legs, or stay in New York without a job. Instead, I soldiered on the best I could.
Hovering over the entire operation at 60 Fifth Avenue was the merry and mischievous warlord, Malcolm Forbes. He was an outsized, unique character who garnered massive press coverage. Reporter-researchers dreaded the ritual of the “townhouse luncheon,” when Malcolm and his sales executives would wine and dine a corporate chieftain who probably had been the subject of a major article. Malcolm and the CEO would then sweep into the research department with a copy of the fact-checked manuscript. The CEO would review the manuscript with the trapped reporter-researcher for errors and demand explanations for anything that looked wrong, while Malcolm relished the fun.
My turn as the townhouse luncheon dessert finally came. A compassionate and alert senior reporter-researcher, Gerry, warned me that Anthony O’Reilly, CEO of H. J. Heinz Co. (the ketchup company), would be the honored guest and peruse a story I checked. O’Reilly’s host that day was actually Malcolm's son Steve Forbes, fellow Princetonian, flat-tax advocate and presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. O’Reilly looked at the manuscript, didn’t see anything amiss, and moved on. I collapsed in relief at my desk, head resting on my IBM Selectric typewriter, and took the rest of the afternoon off.
I began to think I was getting a handle on the job. How wrong I was. By the spring, soon after signing the lease for my first apartment at 131 Amity Street in Brooklyn, my manager took me out for a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwich Village and told me to find another job. She didn't set a specific timeframe for leaving. I thought I was getting a promotion, that's how deluded I was. Then I found myself involved in a libel suit for my involvement in a story where a touchy executive was referred to as “unsavory.” And then my mother had a fatal bone cancer diagnosis. And then I had a tempestuous romance with Joanne, an older woman (as in, she was 30 years old) from the Upper West Side who I met at Congregation Emunath Israel on West 23rd Street. Those tumultuous weeks in 1981 swamped my boat in every possible way but I stayed afloat.
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Aghast and ashamed at this reversal of my post-college trajectory, I never could tell recruiters why I wanted to leave the plum job at Forbes. I finally became an editor at a meek trade magazine, Quick Frozen Foods, a monthly published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ). This job was a better fit for my skillset at the time, and it paid 50 percent more than Forbes. I did solid work there, with a fondness for articles on kosher food regulation in New York and the foodservice department at Sing Sing Prison.
Two years later, HBJ moved its New York magazines to Cleveland. I decided to stay in town and try freelancing. My career arc plummeted from Princeton to Forbes to Quick Frozen Foods to an unemployment line in downtown Brooklyn in three years. My mother died before I ever held another full-time job.
On the upside, I living by my wits as a freelancer, which resulted in four years of enjoyable writing at publications like Advertising Age and Whole Life Times, the freedom to finally travel the world, fast times with the invaluable National Writers Union and eventually a job as the East Coast Bureau Chief of Video Store, a magazine then owned by HBJ.
May 29, 1981:
Do I want to remain in this type of media work? Reporters, who demand such lofty ethics from others, often ply their trade under the sleaziest of styles. That’s the contradiction of the job. I keep mine high but I’m not often in the touchy situation. I love writing, I find increasing evidence that I do it well, so I can certainly pursue it through other channels than kick-ass reporting. . . . There’s something with my name on it out there and I just need to find it.
June 26, 1981:
I’m leaving Forbes. Wednesday I got an offer from HBJ’s QFF. I am bored beyond belief, which means of course it’s time to clean my apartment.
I never read Forbes after I left, although I did buy the March 18, 1990 issue of OutWeek magazine, which appeared just after Malcolm's February 24 death, with the headline "The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes." The Forbes Building at 60 Fifth Avenue, with its ground-floor museum of toy soldiers and FabergĂ© eggs, forever loomed over me like Sauron’s Dark Tower in The Lord of the Rings. I imagined Malcolm’s all-seeing eye scouring the sidewalk in search of hapless hobbits like me to torment after townhouse luncheons with muscular orcs. To this day, over 40 years later, I never, ever walk in front of the (former) Forbes building, lest its haunted shadow fall over me. Instead, I cross to the other side of Fifth Avenue to keep the wraiths of memory at bay.
Forbes magazine has struggled in the digital age, relocated to Jersey City in 2014 and has been tossed from one owner to another. I wish it well in these traumatic times for publishing. Looking back, the pressure-cooker environment of the reporter-researcher department incubated tremendously talented people who went on to careers in journalism, publishing, Wall Street and law. Life in the editorial trenches created durable bonds and "Front Page" style humor. One writer groused after a particularly trying week, "I need a brain D&C." I grasped the humor in that after looking up D&C in a dictionary.
Management kept me on staff far longer than they had any reason to do so, a humane gesture that resulted in me staying in New York rather than relocating. I've been treated much more brutally elsewhere. In 2006, the accounting firm KPMG laid off almost its entire proposal team, including me, in a stunning four-minute listen-only conference call.
At Forbes, I learned the value of fact-checking and wrote some of my favorite all-time stories for the “Personal Affairs” section in the back of the book. One was about executive portraits. My very last story, “Private Eyes for Inc.’s,” appearing in the July 6, 1981, issue, covered corporate investigators. Malcolm himself wrote “Fascinating story—MF” on a draft copy, which I still have. That moment gave me great satisfaction, tangible proof that sometimes I knew what I was doing.
I stayed in trade magazines until 1995, when Video Store laid me off after eight years. A year later I landed in firmwide communications at Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm now known as PwC. I continue to work in accounting as a proposal writer, a niche that ideally matches my skills and personality. Why do I like proposal writing? Because it involves hard deadlines, high stakes, a respect for facts and a minimum of fluff, clear and persuasive writing and, as I once explained, “I like to win.”
As unlikely as it would have sounded to me in 1980, I’ve evolved from the anxiety-wracked 20-something fact-checker to the informed, experienced and unflappable (outwardly, anyway) proposal pro who confidently guides teams through the pursuit process and spins out persuasive copy as fast as I can type. AI's got nothing on me.
My advice for new grads: Dare to dream, but if you fail, learn from the experience, don’t be humiliated by it. Savor the wins, build skills and be flexible. Use The Elements of Style by Strunk and White to learn to spell correctly, use proper grammar and write in a jargon-free and logical style—that will give you an unbeatable advantage over AI and the semi-literate competition in the job market. If Plan A doesn’t work, go to Plan B, don’t recycle Plan A. You'll be working a long time, so if you want to see the world, get that Eurail Pass and start packing.
And if the Peace Corps meets your vibe, then join the Peace Corps and find out what life has in store for you. Let that desire be the road you take.
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| Validation from the Boss. |
