Free Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs by Robert Kanigel

ads for the Powell School of Business. Housed in modest quarters on the third floor of a building a few steps down Washington Avenue from school,Powell doesn’t figure much in the annals of higher education, or business education, or any education, really. It started up in the 1920s through the ministrations of its founder, Charles R. Powell, its principal; son Ellwood was vice principal. By the 1950s, it would be gone. But during this intervening epoch, and especiallyduring the Depression, when young Scranton women, and some young men, chased scarce jobs, a lot of them signed on for classes at Powell.
    An Impressions ad in November 1931, in Jane’s junior year, promised the chance for “Building Success On Your High School Foundation.” High school, it allowed, supplied a “splendid background.” But in a long, explicatory block of text like you don’t see much in ads today, it argued for how jobs now demanded specialized training. If graduates wanted a business career, they needed to take “intensive courses in business subjects” that would offer them “A Short Cut to Success.” Through Powell’s sharply focused programs, all “non-essential subjects” pruned away, you could “prepare yourself for the position of stenographer, private secretary, bookkeeper, accountant, or junior executive.”
    The stenographer is a fixture of old films and Edward Hopper paintings from the period, the pretty young thing called into the boss’s office to take dictation (or, more darkly, not to), images filling our mental back pages today along with manual typewriters, carbon paper, and dial telephones. But for many the job was seen as a good one, a step up. Compared to those in factory, mill, or warehouse, it whispered etiquette and decorum. The workplace was clean. The skills it required were substantial. Purveyors of the most popular shorthand systems, Pitman and Gregg, boasted of the dictation speeds their users could attain. An able Gregg stenographer could take down 150 words per minute—fast enough, say, to transcribe a public lecture; the record for some types of material was upward of 250 words per minute. Gregg’s was a complex vocabulary of flowing curves and dots. The most minute squiggles, or variations in line length, or location of lines and dots, conveyed meaning. To the unpracticed eye, the words “play,” “plate,” “plea,” and “plead” all looked about the same. “Business” resembled a bird in flight. “Ransack” looked Chinese. Long lists of common forms and expressions had to be memorized and mastered. But with effort, you could get really good at it, and make yourself marketable.
OTHERS ARE SUCCEEDING
A great many high school graduates have attended our school during the past thirteen years. Many of them today hold splendid positions at good salaries. They capitalized on their High School foundation through business training.
    Powell did pretty much as promised. In retirement notices and obituaries all through the 1980s and 1990s, aging Scrantonians of Jane’s generation would tell remarkably similar stories: They’d graduated from this or that Scranton high school, gone on to Powell, come out knowing how to take dictation, type, compose business letters, and conduct themselves in accord with the starched expectations of the contemporary office. They got jobs with the telephone company, or the railroad, held on through the Depression, the war years, and afterward climbed the job ladder, sometimes to executive positions, and in the end could look back on their working lives with satisfaction.
    In January 1933, around the time she received herhigh school diploma, Jane enrolled in one of Powell’s programs, a specially accelerated secretarial course. She had a lot to learn. Writing a business letter meant taking notes on what the boss wanted, then expressing it in your own words later. To get your typing speed up, you had to learn not to understand what you were typing; to distract