Later in Life
Marjorie Brockman
— By the time I got to graduate school I had joined the Communist Party. But I started out in the American Labor... Is all this going on the archives? The Communist Party in North Carolina, we were really involved in racial struggles and that was very much up my alley. And I was also part of the women's League for Peace and Freedom down there. I guess I was growing up a little bit. I stayed there for five years because, I got married instead of getting a Ph.D.
I'm sure if I wanted to go under the Freedom of Information Act I would find lots of interesting things in my dossier, so to speak.
Why this hesitation to tell? I guess because we're still laboring under the aegis of the McCarthy and the other Committee hearing eras when people were called, friends of ours, and their lives were very much changed— though not ruined. What did happen was that when I married, I married a guy who was not particularly left wing, he was a southern Baptist. And he was taking a Ph.D. in romance languages and he got a Fullbright and we had our housing all arranged in Paris. I had relatives there. And about two weeks before we were to go the FBI came and took our passports away. That's what's turned me into such a passionate traveler, because I went through ten or fifteen years without a passport. And then, when I got it back again,— I forget when,— in the early '60s, I guess, or the late '50s, I started going, going, gone. Yeah.
Frances Koral
— I got my Master's in education at Bank Street and then I taught, 'cause then my hours were the same as my children. And then I went on to Hunter. I took a sabbatical and got a professional degree in reading. I was an elementary school teacher in East Flatbush. I don't know if you know that. It was wonderful. I loved it. I really loved teaching but it reached a point where I realized I really wasn't as good the next year as I had been so it was time to stop.
Elliot Levine
— I came into the business -- metal stamping and machinery for assembling zippers. My first job was helping him design a zipper-assembling machine, which turned out to be very successful. We also made eyelets. Very few people know what eyelets are even though we use them every day. The little rings that your shoelaces go through are eyelets. There are eyelets that are attached to envelopes. There are eyelets that are in electrical appliances and various and sundry other products. And we made a whole array of different sizes and styles and envelope clasps. You know those little gimmicks that go through a hole in the flat of a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. And that business was sold in 1965 when I became a free agent to pursue acting on a more or less full time basis.
Phyllis LeShaw
— The men were coming home. But I launched into a singing career in Canada, Puerto Rico, Europe, and marriage was the last thing on my mind. So although I had boyfriends, I didn't have a marriage orientation. Everybody got married. Everybody. As soon as they got out of college they got married, all my closest friends including Ruth, my roommate. I introduced her to my cousin. Bingo!
I got married much later, much, much later with Rose's cousin-in-law. He wanted to marry me when I was nineteen, while I was still in college. I lied to him. I said I was engaged to somebody else 'cause I wanted him to stop nudging me. So he married somebody else and divorced her, had a couple of children and then looked me up. And then we became friends, just friends. And then eventually, out of sheer fatigue, I gave in and I married him. Marriage was not in my mind for whatever reasons. I was alone. You know? Today marriage is not in the minds of a lot of girls. But I was like a pioneer in life, in independence. My mother didn't marriage orient me. She didn't mind at all. My father wanted me to have a normal life, so to speak, but he didn't have much to say. She loved the idea of me being a singer. She was an actress, or wanted to be. Her father wouldn't let her. In those days that was tantamount to becoming you-know-what.
I have no regrets. I have no security but I have no regrets either. My security are my students who are here for years and who I have very wonderful relationships with, and I enjoy watching them develop and helping them grow. And that's it.
Marjorie Brockman
— I was even almost arrested once for sitting in the wrong waiting room of the bus station in Durham. I was coming back from New York with a guy -- I'm the only one who remembers his name but how could you forget it -- his name was Manny Cudlocus. He was a Greek guy who was a lefty. And he and I were escorting the mother of one of the black kids who was up on murder charges and she had been taken by us to the conference in New York. Manny and I were not going to leave this woman alone and she couldn't sit in the white side so we sat in the black side very quietly. We weren't making any particular statement. It was a long wait between buses in those days. And there were a lot of people who had come in from Rocky Mount and other places who were stretched out on benches sleeping. We sat down and within five minutes a group of policemen came and they started to beat the black people over the soles of the feet to wake them up. And then they collected us and they took us in for questioning. And we said we were students in North Carolina, and we didn't want to leave this friend of ours alone. So they said, "Well, we're going to have to book you for trespassing." so I said, "Oh, go ahead, book." I was scared shitless but I said, "Go ahead and book us." and I said, "Manny, maybe you can go out and call Frank Graham or somebody." He was the President of the University, and he won't like this, his students getting arrested. So they thought about it a minute and they let us go. But I was really scared.
We had connections -- social connections -- with some of the young men who worked for various eastern European embassies. And we met a couple of guys from the Soviet Embassy and they were running something called the Soviet Information Bulletin and they hired us to move to Washington and become staff members of the Soviet Information Bulletin where there were lots of interesting people working. We were immediately declared spies by the United States. We worked there for a couple of years and then the Russian staff was declared non grata so the bulletin folded. My husband went to work for the American Council Learned Societies, and I went to work for I.F. Stone when he was founding the Little Weekly.
And then, when he could no longer support me, he suggested, since I had very good writing skills that I should go to work in advertising. I said, "Advertising! That's so bourgeois." And he said, "well, it may be, but my brother does that. He has an advertising and public relations firm in New York." So I went to work in advertising and was in that for a long time. I became advertising manager of a small furniture store called Peerless Furniture.
Then I decided I didn't want to live in Washington any more and I came to New York and after about nine months of looking for a job, I became Assistant Director of a program in drug addiction at Downstate Medical center where I worked for twenty-three years. And now I'm retired and it's lovely. And I travel a lot. I went into business with Morocco for a while. I imported rugs and painted wooden furniture and jewelry and belts. I made eighteen trips to Morocco. And I moved into this apartment six years ago and I go to Hunter College. I love it.
I have three daughters. Sometimes it was hard. I had a very good support system. When my kids had a fight with me, the two younger ones who were only a year apart, they used to escape from my house on Seventh Avenue and run off into the night. And two or three hours later I would get a call from Marion Greenstone. She was their rock of Gibraltar.
Marion Greenstone
— I taught at New Rochelle for a couple of years. And then I decided I didn't want to be an English teacher any more and went to art school. I had been working as an amateur artist on my own for several years and decided that's what I wanted to do. So I went to Cooper Union, graduated and had a Fulbright, went to Italy for a couple of years.
I was afraid I wouldn't get my Fulbright when they learned that I was a member of the AYD, The American Youth for Democracy, which they said was a communist front. I had to apply for a passport in order to go to Italy. You applied and within a week you got your passport. And a week went by and mine didn't come. Two weeks went by and it still didn't come. And I had to go down to Washington to find out what was wrong because here I had the Fulbright and I couldn't get there. And so I had to sign that I was never a member of the Communist Party. And I'm not very happy about that. But I never would have gotten to Rome otherwise. And it was a very, very important experience in my life as an artist and as a person. But that's the way it was in those days.
Then I became a teacher at Pratt. A neighbor who lives across the street one day late in August said we need a teacher at Pratt. "Would you be interested?" I never thought I would be interested but I thought I'd give it a try. And so I was there for over twenty-five years teaching light, color and design, which is basic foundation course, and retired around six or seven years ago. But I taught one day a week, which gave me enough time to do my own work.