Art Institute of Chicago

At what point in your life was your mother [Blanche Daniel] working for the Regal [Theater, Chicago, Illinois]?$$When we were in grammar school [Burke Elementary School, Chicago, Illinois].$$Okay and who were some of the personalities that you met, met there (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) I met James Brown, Al Green, Leslie Uggams, anyone who appeared there actually. There were some, you know, kind of weird folks my mother didn't want us around--$$Okay.$$--you know, for obvious reasons, and so we had to stay back in the office. But one of the, one of the--my mother was a real good friend of Nat [King] Cole's, you know, so that was great. But we used to wait--in high school we used to wait outside the Chicago Theater when they had live, live shows, and that was a highlight, and get autographs. That's what we did. I must have gone through four or five autograph books and of course, some of the stars that we thought were absolutely incredible turned out to be the nastiest and the ones that we didn't really care that much about turned out to be really nice, nice people. One of the highlights from waiting around for autographs was when Zachary Scott and Joan, Joan Bennett's sister, I can't--Constance Bennett, they were in town with a play called 'Bell, Book and Candle' and all five of us-there were five girls who hung together and we went over to the theater to wait for autographs and this very tall, black guy came out with these dogs, walking these dogs and he saw us and he said, "Well hi, who are you girls," and we said, "We're waiting to see Mr. Scott or Ms. Bennett to get autographs," and he said, "Well I'm Mr. Scott's personal assistant." And he said, "Have you seen the play," and we said no. In fact, we had never seen a play. We had seen stage productions but we had never seen a play per se. And so he said, "Well how would you like to come and see the play?" And we said, "What," and we were only fifteen years old at the time and he said, "Why don't you come and see it." He said, "I'll make sure you can see it." And I said, "Well we have to discuss this with our parents first, okay," and he said, "Fine," so he gave us cards and we all went home, talked to our parents. They said, "Well, okay as long as everyone's going," and they were going to pick us up. And we were--oh, did we ever have a big conference about what we were going to wear, oh it was incredible. We decided at the time pique, cotton pique jackets, flyaway jackets those were the big things so we each went out and our parents bought each one of us a different color jacket and we all wore these pique jackets over our dresses and skirts, and when we got to the theater, they took us--we went inside and most of the people were seated already and these five little black girls, teenagers came walking down the aisle. We had our heads up, we were so proud and everyone was whispering, "Who are they? What's this?" And they sat us right down in front, and then William Windom the actor was right--he was there too and he took us to see Johnny Hartman.$By '68 [1968] were there many black employees in the--at the corporate level (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) But again--but everyone was at an assistant level. There were very few blacks at full title, very few blacks at full title. And those of us who were, were constantly being questioned about our abilities and double checked, checked and double checked and just all kinds of stuff. I worked for a buyer who was extremely difficult and really anal. He was somewhat embarrassed because I was his assistant, and one of the secretaries who had a high school education went over to personnel and she said, "I want to be a copywriter," and they said, "Well you can't write or anything, you haven't been to college," and she said, "Well if she can do it, I know I can." And this woman could barely type a letter properly, you know? Lots of, lots of jealousy and you build up defenses and so--a thick skin, that's probably better, a thick skin for all of that. So it was, it was quite rough. It was quite rough.$$Did you get a chance to write about fashion at some point?$$Oh yeah, because I was in a fashion department with footwear, okay (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) (Unclear).$$So what happened was the buyers, when I was a copywriter, they were coming to me because of the way I dressed and I don't know where--I just started picking up this fashion know how by reading. I started subscribing to all the magazines and reading and everything. So they would come to me about colors, silhouettes, everything, who is this going to appeal to, what do you think, and their sales were going up just by listening to me. So the national merchandise manager, a very powerful position, he said, "I want you to come to my department as an associate buyer and forget this copywriting thing." And I said okay, and he said, "Because you're a rebel and that's what I want" because I used to wait for buses for ever just to get over to the West Side [Chicago, Illinois] and then the "L" [elevated train] and then walk. When we had moved downtown and it was still cold, it was even worse because you had the wind from the lake blowing. So I decided I am not going to continue wearing skirts and freezing my tail off in the winter. So I wore pants to work one day and it went all over, all over the place and they called over to the We- the office manager called over to the West Side and said, "This woman is wearing trousers to work, she's wearing pants and that's not the law. I'm going to make her go home," but I didn't work for her so she couldn't do it. I worked for the advertising department so the merchandise manager came into my office and I was sitting there and one of the other girls who was a copywriter, very political, she was white and wasn't going to make any waves because she wanted to be promoted to something else. Well she wore pants too, we were going to do this and she chickened out and put a skirt on over them so that she could remove them in case there was too much heat. So Bill Grant walked into the office and he said, "Stand up," and I stood up. He says, "Turn around." Well see now today, he'd be in all kinds of trouble. But he said, "Stand up, turn around. Okay you look great. Sit down. You don't have to go home." And after that women started wearing pants to work in droves and so they changed the dress code because I had guts enough to do that.$$Now was Sears [Sears, Roebuck and Co.] ahead of or behind the rest of the corporate world in terms of women wearing pants to work? 'Cause it wasn't that long ago, I guess, well long ago now but there was a time when women couldn't wear pants publicly (unclear) (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) I think Sears was ahead of the time, because in most of the big corporations even when that happened women were not wearing pants to work and that was in--it had to be around '68 [1968], '69 [1969], something like that. So I was getting phone calls from everybody, "Aw, thank you so much. God it's great that we can wear pants to work," you know, and then guys would call me up and say, "Hey, do you know what you've started? What would happen if we started wearing skirts to work?" You know silly stuff like that. So that was--that was, that was good. That was good.$$This is about nineteen sixty (unclear) (simultaneous).$$(Simultaneous) Yeah about '68 [1968]--$$Sixty-eight [1968], okay.$$--sixty-nine [1969], yeah somewhere around there.$$All right.$$And you know I mean really it was Sears was not a law office. I could understand the legal department if that was what they wanted to do but with all the running around and everything we had to do, it was stupid for us to not be able to wear them. My mother [Blanche Daniel] was very proud of me; she thought that was just great that I had done that because that's the same kind of thing she would have done.