Manhattan Project

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.

Share this post

Leonard Shatzkin was trained in printing. He left City College of NY a semester short of a degree in the social sciences to go to Carnegie Tech for three years to get a BS in Printing, which he received in 1941. His first job was as production manager at House Beautiful magazine when he and his college bride, Eleanor Oshry (who was, I suspect, at least part of the reason he abandoned the CCNY degree for three more years of undergraduate school in the first place!) moved to New York after graduation.

But Len shortly had to leave the House Beautiful job because of World War II. Rather than military service, he found a spot as a research scientist on The Manhattan Project (another story for another blog post). After the war, he landed a spot as production manager at The Viking Press and his career in book publishing had begun.

I don’t know the specific suggestions or ideas that led to this, but after a couple of years at Viking, proprietor Harold Guinzberg told Len to find a job at a bigger publishing house. “You have lots of big ideas,” Guinzberg told him. “I’m not interested in big ideas; I just want to publish the books that interest me. You should find a place that is more compatible with your ambition.” So, in 1951, when a former professor of Len’s from Carnegie Tech named Charles Pitkin offered Len a job at Doubleday, he took it.

Doubleday had its own printing plant in Garden City, Long Island. At first, Len’s main responsibilities had to do with running the plant. It was unusual, perhaps unheard of, for production managers to move into the senior executive ranks at a book publishing house, but Len found the way.

There was a committee at Doubleday that determined the first printing quantities for all new books. Len was on that committee, whose key members were, of course, the representatives of the sales department who, it was assumed, would be the first to know how many books were needed. In his first year on this committee, Len lived with the frustration of the sales department’s refusal to make timely decisions about printings.

The consequences of this were severe. These were the days before computers (of course) which meant that when 12 new books were scheduled to ship on March 20, invoices had to be prepared in advance to meet the shipments as they left the plant. If one of the 12 books didn’t make it, a paperwork nightmare was created. So all 12 books had to make it. If time was tight, and with late decisions on printings, time was just about always tight, each “first printing” effectively had to become two printings. First the plant would produce the number of books needed to fulfill all the prepared invoice shipments and then, after all those were done, they all went back on press to complete all the “first” printings.

Sometime in 1953, Len got permission to hire a mathematician: a young Polish immigrant named George Blagowidow. Len set George to work doing a regression analysis of the orders received from the sales force and, using techniques that are pretty much the same as what the networks use to predict election returns from key precincts, was able to predict the total advance sale from a small sampling of orders. (It is necessary to mention here that, while there were multi-outlet department store “chains” all over the country, there were almost no large national buys equivalent to what Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders would place today.)

When George’s work was well in hand, Len was prepared for the next meeting of the first printing committee. The sales management opined that, on a number of books, they did not have sufficient data to make a printing decision. Then Len handed them a sealed envelope. “In here are the numbers for what will be the total of advance orders for all these books,” he told them. “You can open it now or you can open it later, but don’t tell me there isn’t enough information to know what to print. There is.”

As a result of that stunt, Len was appointed to a newly-created position, Director of Research.

His next big assignment was probably partly a result of his having undermined the credibility of the sales management. Doubleday had two sales forces: 13 reps covered the trade and 10 sold “Garden City Books”, which was a promotional line Doubleday had in those days (like Outlet Book Company was in relation to Crown until that independent publisher was sold to Random House in the 1980s.) The company was going to wind down the Garden City imprint and combine the sales forces. They knew they needed to get rid of some reps, but a) they didn’t know how many and b) they didn’t trust the sales management to cut the force sufficiently. So they handed the question to Shatzkin — and his cohort Blagowidow — to determine the new configuration.

Len and George set out to scientifically determine what a sales rep contributed to sales. They did that by calculating the discretionary income by territory (I did this exercise under my Dad’s supervision about 20 years later, using the county-by-county data provided by Sales Management Magazine). That gave them an index of how much they should be expecting in sales from each territory. Then they calculated how many accounts there should be (theoretically) in each territory, and compared that to what the rep covered. Then they looked at the sales they got from accounts where the reps called and compared them to sales from accounts where the rep did not call.

Their conclusion was that, indeed, Doubleday did not need 23 reps, they needed thirty-five! (At that time, the 13 reps in the Doubleday sales force might already have been the largest sales force fielded by any publisher.) The new large sales force led to other innovations, including the creation of the Dolphin Books imprint, which I covered in a prior post.

Of course, field sales forces peaked in size some years ago and have been shrinking since. (And although it would drive Dad crazy, I’m sure his analytical techniques would support a field force reduction. Most likely, though, using his techiques would also create territories that are configured differently than they are in most houses.) But Random House copied the Doubleday practice and today’s publishing “old timers” remember the days in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s when Random House and Doubleday had the largest and most powerful field sales organizations, which gave them an edge over everybody else.

Today is when the Big Six publishers need a Director of Research. There are more decisions to be made today that require research, quantification, and analysis than what Doubleday faced in the 1950s. What Len Shatzkin did in that position more than 50 years ago anticipated the MBA-rich IT and corporate staffs that exist today.

Share this post