Worse than dating
I have been here before.
In the fall and winter of 1979-1980 I was unemployed between graduate school and my first newspaper job. My first wife and I left New York state, where I had been a Ph.D. candidate in Syracuse University’s English department, for Ohio, where she had been hired as an administrator at the University of Cincinnati.
It was a fresh start, and there was an initial burst of ebullience. I would finish my dissertation on the poetry of Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Rochester (it never happened, and its loss to academia is not mourned). I would find work. Every morning I walked to a little bakery in the decaying Swifton Shopping Center for a pastry with my coffee as I scanned help-wanted ads in the newspaper. (Yes, children, there was a time when employers seeking employees paid to advertise openings in daily newspapers.)
As fall proceeded, it became increasingly apparent that an English major with scant working experience was not a hot commodity. WGUC-FM was mildly impressed that I had been the host of a spoken-
word program at WONO-FM in Syracuse, but the station had no openings. At least the station manager replied; most inquiries were dispatched into a silence, where they stayed.
Once in high school I asked a classmate out on a date, and she accepted. Arriving at her house on the appointed night, I was told that she had left the day before to visit out-of-town relatives. Ah, I said, trying not to look too crestfallen, I must have mistaken the date. (I hadn’t.) Looking for work is more dispiriting even than dating. You put yourself forward to be judged, and you are not only found wanting but often simply ignored.
Discouragement begets depression, which settles in like dark winter weather. There were lapses, whole days when I stayed at home in bed and read compulsively for distraction. That was how I worked through William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — in retrospect, perhaps not the ideal remedy for depression.
Ultimately, I gathered my energies for an assault on Cincinnati’s two newspapers, The Post and The
John McIntyre, removing his personal effects from his office, bids farewell to his colleagues in The Baltimore Sun's newsroom.
Photo by Jerry Jackson
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