Carnegie Tartan

The title of “nicest person on the planet” is now open. The longtime incumbent, Ruth Cavin — also a veteran book editor who was known to many as the doyenne of mysteries — died early Sunday morning at the age of 92. She was still holding down a full time position as an editor with the Thomas Dunne Books imprint at St. Martin’s at her death.

What is unique about Ruth’s career is that she didn’t become an editor until she was past her 60th birthday and didn’t start her more than two decades at St. Martin’s until she was 70. She was sort of the Grandma Moses of mystery editors.

I had the very good fortune to have known Ruth all my life.

Ruth Brodie grew up in Pittsburgh where she first met my mother, Eleanor Oshry, when they went to kindergarten together. They were active together as schoolchildren in the YPSLs (Young People’s Socialist League, the youth arm of the political party that was led by Norman Thomas) and they both attended college locally at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon).

The story in the family is that when my father, Leonard Shatzkin, went out to Tech in 1938 to get his degree in printing, he had the phone number of two girls in his pocket: my Mom and Ruth. He called Mom first. She said she knew he had both numbers, so she kept him too busy from that point on to have time to call Ruth.

But they all became friends and worked together on the Carnegic Tartan, the school paper, on which Ruth was a columnist, Dad eventually the editor, and Mom the managing editor.

I realize as I write this that I never asked Ruth exactly how she ended up in New York after college. What I do know is that between when the war ended, during which my Dad had been exempted from service because he was working on the Manhattan Project, and when my arrival could be anticipated (which would have been late in 1946), they thought he would be drafted. My parents organized a going-away party for him for which the guests were all married couples except for two single friends: Ruth and a young Business Week writer named Bram Cavin.

The families remained close, personally and professionally. When Dad started the Dolphin Books imprint at Doubleday, he was able to hire Bram as an editor. In the early 1960s, the Cavins with their young children, son Tony and twin daughters Emily and Nora, moved to Pleasantville near where we lived in Croton and we saw them increasingly often. They moved to Cleveland in about 1964 when Bram took a job as an editor with World Publishing and Ruth’s home was my stop the first night I was driving across the country to go to UCLA in 1965.

Ruth was not working full time then but was active in anti-war politics. She was also interested in whatever you were interested in. I remember in the late 60s when bands starting putting out “concept” albums sitting with her for an hour with the Moody Blues’ “Days of Future Passed”, talking about what was “different” about all this, or whether anything really was.

In the early 1970s, my father started The Two Continents Publishing Group, setting up a trade book distributor on what is now the PGW-NBN model before there really any prototypes. Dad hired Ruth as his first employee to do the publicity. She also sold the subsidiary rights. I got the entirely-too-inflated title of Director of Marketing which meant that I got credit for a lot of what Ruth did.

Her output was prodigious. She wrote all the catalog copy, edited or wrote press releases, flap copy, and rep information for what grew into many dozens of books a year. She called on all the book clubs and all the senior book reviewers. Meanwhile, she had written a couple of books. One was called “Dinners for Beginners”. Another was on inter-urban rail transportation, mostly in the midwest, called “Trolleys.”

And, I must stress, it would be an understatement to say she had a smile on her face every day. Ruth had a smile on her face every minute. Nothing flustered or annoyed her. When you knew her well, you knew she had smiled her way through some pretty significant annoyances. She had a mastectomy in 1941. (She told me about two years ago that she now thinks she didn’t have cancer; that the diagnosis was a mistake.) She had a pacemaker installed in the late 1960s. I’ll bet that very few people who knew her had any idea about either of these things.

When the Shatzkins sold out of Two Continents in 1979, Ruth was 61 but definitely not done working. She was looking for new worlds to conquer. She managed to get a job at Walker and Company, a family-owned independent publisher that did a lot of mysteries. And thus did Ruth become a mystery editor.

Among the people she worked with at Walker were Philip Turner, who went on to work at Random House, Kodansha, and Sterling, and David Sobel, later at Wiley and Holt. I had an exchange with David yesterday in which he said, tongue only partly in cheek, that Ruth taught him everything he knows.

Ruth would teach you without it feeling like teaching. Every conversation was with an equal; every relationship was collegial. Her respect for other people was universal and deep and entirely genuine.

Tom Dunne was the man who “discovered” Ruth (when she was 70) for his imprint but he had support for the idea from then-CEO Tom McCormack. McCormack (another Doubleday alumnus originally recruited by my father) told me that he had a previous good experience with Joan Kahn, a mystery editor who had been retired by Harper at age 65 and then gave St. Martin’s ten great years.

Ruth started five years older and gave them more than 20!

The enormous productivity that my family and I saw in Ruth at Two Continents continued to be her reputation at St. Martin’s. I heard over the years that she routinely acquired, edited, and put into production more books than anybody. Since I pitched a few and sold her a couple over that time, I can tell you that she did all that without stinting on any part of the job from first contact through contract and editing and launch. Working with her was a positive experience for every author I know who did it.

With greater diligence since my Mom died in 2007, I’d see Ruth every few months outside the holiday season. We’d have lunch. She’d come along to see my nephew A.J. Shively in a play. I took her downtown a couple of times to get new hearing aids. I could see her decline. The scoliosis in her spine had her bent over so her back was nearly parallel to the ground. That meant she couldn’t breathe. We’d have to stop 3 times on the one block walk from her office to the restaurant she frequented.

Her memory, which, for names, had been sliding for years, started showing other lapses. I’d always ask her about her job. She always had a determination to keep it; the time she spent in the office with her colleagues was precious to her. A couple of years ago, she told me a bit abashedly that her company had insisted she stop taking the bus down from Grand Central to the office and provided her with a cab and then a car to take her back at the end of the day. (This was at the time that Bram was in a home near the White Plains train station, and Ruth stopped and saw him every evening on the way home.) A year or so ago, she said there was a plan afoot to have her work at home sometimes because the travel to the office was exhausting her. But she loved being with her colleagues. And she revered her boss, Tom Dunne, who really was the one who gave her this magnificent post-retirement-age career.

I had a conversation with St. Martin’s Publisher Sally Richardson (Dunne’s boss) about Ruth at a party for Al Silverman’s book three years ago. Sally was saying that she was working on making sure Ruth got a decent winter coat; she was so frugal and unconcerned with her own comfort that Sally had to, more or less, do it for her.

I told a few people at Macmillan that I wanted to acknowledge them publicly on Ruth’s behalf for the extraordinary sensitivity and generosity they showed her over the last months, perhaps even years, of her life. Although Tom McCormack made the point that they had learned that a “no age limit” policy made sense through their experience decades ago with Joan Kahn, that policy would not have obliged them to give her the extra support and reduced expectations that she must have required in the recent past.

They did that because they loved her, which was an inevitable consequence of knowing her well, so that isn’t extraordinary. But the fact that the company, particularly a company of the size of Macmillan, treated her better than many families would, is both rare and worthy of commendation. From this lifelong friend of Ruth’s, thanks very much.

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I’ve written several times about my father’s life in the book business, which shaped quite a few careers, including mine. Here’s one. Andanother. This post, for Mother’s Day weekend, is about my father’s other great passion: my mother.

Eleanor Oshry Shatzkin — Elky to everybody who knew her — was the first woman to graduate from the engineering school at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon), earning her degree in physics in 1941. She was, in a way, a management consulting pioneer, running the consulting operation for the accounting firm J.K. Lasser and Company from 1957-1962. For a dozen years after that, until Dad dragooned her into the family book distribution business, Two Continents (the place where I really learned about the trade), Elky ran her own consulting company. She was a “better, faster, cheaper” consultant: a designer of systems and the rigorous author of “procedures” (as workflow documentation was called then.) Her clients included substantial law firms, for which she designed billing systems in the days before computers, and the Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency.

One of Mom’s clients for many years was The Longacre Press, a printer of book jackets based in Mt. Vernon, New York. Among other things, she designed a scheduling system for them. Working for Mom on that project was a critical piece of my early education in the book business.

She was a feminist before Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique”, although she explicitly resisted the label. But she was so totally devoted to my Dad that there were aspects of her capabilities and personality that we didn’t see in full flower until after he died when they were in their 80s.

Elky Shatzkin grew up in Pittsburgh, the younger child and only daughter of a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist family. Her father, Sam Oshry, sold life insurance in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. It was family lore that when Sam encountered a person begging for money for a meal, his frequent response was to bring them home for dinner. Mom’s older brother, Howard, was her intellectual inspiration (before she met my Dad) and since he became a physicist, her inclination was to follow in his footsteps.

Elky and Len got married in Harlem in 1940 (Len’s family lived in New York) and went back to Pittsburgh for their senior year at Carnegie Tech, living together at the Oshry home. Their marriage was not announced on campus to protect Elky’s scholarship, but they were serving together on the school paper, the Carnegie Tartan: Len as editor-in-chief and Elky as managing editor.

In the winter of that year there was a strike at Kaufman’s Department Store in Pittsburgh and scabs were hired to break the strike. Len wrote and published an editorial castigating that practice in the Tartan; the problem was that the Kaufman that owned the store was a regent of the university. About two months later, the administration used the claim that an April Fool’s issue that imitated past practices of lampooning faculty and staff was in bad taste as the excuse to fire Len from his position. My mom, his secret wife, took over as editor for the balance of the school year and, in effect, nothing changed. That incident characterized their 62 years of marriage: they had each other’s backs.

During World War II, Elky worked for Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, doing pioneering work with radioactive isotopes. In early 1943, she was getting bored with the job and she went to Columbia University to apply for another position. It didn’t sound appealing to her, so she decided to decline it by saying she expected Len to be drafted soon and she expected to be going to wherever he was in basic training and interrupting her career. “What does your husband do?”, she was asked. “He’s a printer,” she said. Len was then Production Manager for House Beautiful magazine. “Where is he?” “He’s waiting for me downstairs.”

This led to Len being interviewed and hired to work on the Manhattan Project, which kept him out of the war. But while the war was going on, he didn’t tell Elky what he was doing. The secrecy requirements were stringent and she would have understood that and not pressed him.

About a year later, Elky and Len went to the theater with a woman friend who had a loud voice and a vivid imagination. Len had to visit the draft board every six months to get his deferment renewed, and that was the night, so he didn’t arrive at the theater until the intermission. While they were outside between acts, friend Florence said, “I know what you’re doing, Len. You’re working on that new atomic bomb!”

Elky jumped in immediately. “Oh, no, Florence. Of course, he isn’t. We discussed the possibility of an atom bomb in my senior class in physics at Carnegie Tech. It’s simply not possible to gather enough fissionable uranium to create a chain reaction. You can’t make an atomic bomb.”

Elky could never have told a lie. If she didn’t believe that to be true, she wouldn’t have said it!

After the war and after my sisters and I were born, she got a job, with her physics background, working for the Picker X-Ray Corporation in White Plains. In short order, she was reorganizing their files and systems. That piqued her interest in management consulting and she was lucky enough to get a meeting with Peter Drucker for career advice. He hooked her up with a consultant named Bill Porter, who took her in and trained her. That led to her consulting career.

Aside from being a devoted wife, career woman, fantastic hands-on mother (she created a Benjamin Franklin costume for me on Halloween in 1957 that was definitely the coolest one in the entire village of Croton-on-Hudson that year), and running a complicated house that always had guests coming and going, Elky was a very active “citizen.” For example, she went by herself to the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. (I never really got the story about why she went and Len didn’t and we didn’t and now it is too late to ask.)

Elky’s greatest civic achievement was the Croton Shakespeare Festival, which she organized in 1962 with two other local Moms and which ran every summer, introducing the Bard and theater skills to local students and their parents, for 25 years. The full story of the Festival could take a book, let alone a blogpost, but it was a product of her boundless energy, unbelievable organizational skills, and public-spiritedness.

Over the years, Mom mentored countless young people. I have many childhood memories of the children of her friends coming to our house to be tutored in algebra. My sisters and I have many contemporary friends who learned office and organizational skills working for Elky. She was a tough boss: a perfectionist who never tired of making you go back and do it again to get it right. She could yell and scream at you too, and she terrified some people. But you found out pretty quickly that she had a heart of gold and unlimited generosity and, in fact, her demanding perfection of you was a compliment, because she knew you could do it.

For the last few years before Len died in 2002, Elky’s singleminded focus was helping him maintain a high quality of life as congestive heart failure progessively weakened him. They didn’t cut back much on their lifelong habit of traveling as often and as broadly as possible. In the last two decades of Len’s life, they traveled to every continent and spent months at a time living and doing volunteer work in Brazil, Venezuela, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Russia, India, and other places too numerous for me to recall. They maintained a wide circle of friends the world over.

When Len died, Elky lost the focal point of her life, but it didn’t slow her down for very long. A month or two later she was bouncing back, joining a weekly vigil and protest of America’s impending entry into Iraq. In 2004, she spent the last week before the election walking the precincts of Florida, trying to get John Kerry elected.

In the winter of 2006, Elky discovered a Democratic Congressional candidate in her local (always Republican) district named John Hall. She quickly “sold” him to my activist sister Nance (whose family had lived since 1990 with Elky and Len in the house we grew up in) and they joined the campaign. Elky didn’t let the pancreatic cancer diagnosis she got six weeks before Election Day slow her down; she ran phone banks and volunteer operations for Hall right up until Election Day. And the very last trip she took was to Washington in January, 2007, to be in Hall’s office to congratulate him when he came off the House floor after being sworn in. She died about two weeks later.

My mother was a great person, a great teacher, a fabulous parent. She didn’t teach me as much about the book business as my Dad did, so she doesn’t show up on this blog as often, but she sure taught me as much about life.

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