A sordid tale of two pay checks: 1982-style

My head spins when I see news reports about women’s earnings today.  Can it be true that women earn 79  cents for every dollar men bring home?  Back in 1982, it was even worse.  About 61.7% of what men took home.  (As you’ll see, for me, the pay difference was even worse.)

I was managing editor of an International Thomson publication called Brandon’s Shipper & Forwarder, 30 years old, working on the 31st floor of the World Trade Center in NYC — the highest placed female journalist in the national transportation arena. And I loved my job!  What wasn’t there to love!  I interviewed CEO’s of the top transportation companies in New York, inhaled press releases, chased down leads, and occasionally ate mussels in a bucket at Windows on the World, the tragically not so enduring restaurant on top of 1 WTC.

The editor-in-chief, (a very smart Harvard grad), and I reported to a crew of executives who sat in windowed offices and pretty much grew up together writing about the Dow Jones average. Even though I had a lovely title, I worked in a noisy cubicle, where I was pursued by transportation flack and courted by advertisers over the phone.

Again, I loved my job, dated a close by investment banker, and wrote my stories on Saturday mornings at the New York Society Library, (anyone could join!) where the phones never rang.

Back in ’82, I was snug in the NY trade magazine game, hammering out stories on yellow legal pads that my secretary typed up on Monday mornings. My salary then was about $25K. I looked it up a minute ago and that translates to about $63,000 today.  Enough to own an unglamorous, itsy bitsy  co-op on East 80th Street, buy books at Rizzoli, vacation at Martha’s Vineyard, at least once, and dress for the part.

Pay checks were distributed biweekly. Dropped off in white envelopes at our desks. I tore open the envelopes, signed the checks, and headed off to the bank, barely looking at the sum.

One day, I looked a little harder and discovered gleefully that my check was about three times as large as usual! I could hardly wait to hug one of the men in the windowed offices for being so generous!  Three times the usual is a big deal, you know.

As I began to ponder three weeks in Martha’s Vineyard  — something happened!  I read the check more carefully.  What — it didn’t say Pamela Gilbert on it. No, it was made out to a man about ten years older who stared out his window and looked depressed most of the time. What he did, I can’t remember exactly. I think he was part of the marketing team which never showed up at our editorial meetings  — he rode the train to the World Trade Center from a nice house in the same town where Moss Hart used to live.

Upset, I raced over to Mary, the publisher’s secretary who ran around the office now and then dropping off our pay checks. “Mary, I can’t believe it!” She apologized for her carelessness, took back my check, and re-routed it to a worker who stared out the window.  She said she’d find mine right away and she did. Same numbers as last time — roughly one third the size of my “bonus check.” This time, my name was spelled correctly.