Normally what is written here is about publishing’s present with a look to its future. An obituary notice last week recalled some personal family history about publishing’s past and shed some light on how much has changed in the past six decades. It’s publishing history from a highly personal point of view, but it seems an appropriate story with which to end the year.
Last week there were several reports, including from The New York Times and from Publishers Weekly, of the death of Charles F. Harris at the age of 81. Harris had been the founder of Armistad Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins, and was for a time the director of Howard University Press. He was very unusual, if not unique, being an African-American executive in the world of trade and university press publishing. It was noted that he began his career at Doubleday in 1956.
This brought back to me that my father, Leonard Shatzkin, had hired Harris at Doubleday back then. The obit triggered a partial memory: that Dad had hired two black men at Doubleday in the 1950s and was then told, by somebody in authority: “that’s enough, Len”. Dad died in May of 2002 and Mom, Eleanor Shatzkin, in January of 2007, so I pinged my sisters Karen and Nance to help me piece together more of the story. Turns out there was more in my memory that my sisters helped me to dig out (but memory turned out to be only a secondary authority).
I had met the second of the two hires in the 1970s. I believe that at that time he owned a printer of book jackets. I couldn’t remember his name — which was Ed Simmons — until I dug it up in a way you’ll be told in the postscript. Nance and I had some professional interaction with Harris in his Howard University Press days. Ed Simmons’s name was temporarily lost to memory, including with the one veteran of Doubleday at that time with whom I was able to check, until I found it later.
The family account had always been that, after he got the word from higher-ups to stop his personal integration movement that our Mom had to wrestle with him to cooperate so he wouldn’t lose his job. That shook loose another slightly-off memory, which was that Dad corrected that account sometime before he died. I recalled that he had defied both Mom and his bosses and did offer a third black man a position at Doubleday. “How come you didn’t lose your job, Dad?” The answer? Because the person to whom the job was offered turned it down!
Karen recalled that Dad had gotten help from the Urban League to find worthy candidates who would pass muster in as genteel (and in this case gentile as well, Len very much excepted) an environment as this major New York publisher in the 1950s.
Reflecting on this made me think a bit harder about Dad’s career. He left Doubleday in 1961 for Crowell-Collier Macmillan, a company that would have been presumably more hospitable to him since it was headed by a Jew. (Jews were vanishingly rare at Doubleday in the 1950s.) But Dad found reasons to object ethically to the Macmillan management too, and he resigned from there in 1963. He went on to McGraw-Hill in a much less exalted (and substantially lower-paid) position and was there for about five years before starting his own businesses: first a book production service and then a trade book distributor. During that same period, he quit a lucrative consulting gig in a company originally started by a mentor of his because he objected to the Board decisions of the founder’s children.
In other words, Dad wasn’t real good at working for other people.
He apparently passed that along to us. Sister Karen runs her own law firm and sister Nance runs her own consultancy doing data management in the health care business. But at least they have worked for other people, at least for a while. Since I left my Dad’s employ in 1978, I never have. Fortunately, the independent temperament we inherited from Dad and which was nurtured by both our parents was augmented by training in basic business skills that we got mostly from our mother. (She started as a physicist but then became a management consultant.)
We now live in times where we would not be told by any employer that would conceivably have us that we couldn’t hire a person of any particular color. There are other aspects of corporate and organizational life that would prevent a child of our parents from being a happy component of somebody’s larger scheme, but that particular problem is a relic of history. I’m so glad that our Dad’s courage in the 1950s gave Charlie Harris an opportunity that, with Harris’s own talent and application, turned into a remarkable career.
And, as I was finishing this post, I searched “Urban League” within my blog and found out I had told the story once before, back in April, 2009. Turns out I remembered back then the name of the second hire, Ed Simmons, so I was able to put it in here. And I also got the story straight about how I learned that Dad had hired a third person, which I left mangled in this recollection. AND I got at least part of the straight scoop on exactly how the word came down from Doubleday. This post adds some insight that the first didn’t, but I would also refer you to the original. And let this one and the gaps between them stand as testimony to how much we can forget in nearly seven years.