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

herself, Jane sometimes sang to herself as she typed. Then, of course, there was shorthand, with its endless drills. She took it all seriously, wanted to be the best typist and stenographer she could. And, reports her oldest son, Jim—her confidant across most of her later years and receptive listener to stories of her early life—she didn’t begrudge her months at Powell, but found the work “interesting, challenging, necessary, and important.”
    Powell was enough of a fixture in Scranton that the local paper covered its graduations right alongside those of Central High. On June 23, 1933, The Scranton Times carried reports of the Babe’s sixteenth home run of the season; of a rumrunner wanted for murder; and of 114 new Powell graduates, assembled in the Central High auditorium, treated to an orchestral procession, saxophone and trombone solos, singing “America,” hearing Principal Powell’s address, and accepting diplomas handed out by his son. It was rather a grand document, this diploma, one Jane kept all her life—on fancy paper, overlarge, with an engraved image of the school, 1920s-vintage cars and buses bustling by, all testifying to the graduate’s “scholarly attainments.”
    We cannot dismiss Powell as some unlikely or irrelevant asterisk to Jane’s life story, this towering figure somehow reduced to cramming humdrum office skills. Rather, it testifies to a groundedness that all her life tempered and redeemed her intellectualism. We don’t know how much the decision to attend Powell followed from her own healthy,pragmatic nature, how much from her parents’ urgings. What we do know is that for those times, and in that family, she acted reasonably, even wisely. Certainly it paid off. “If I do say so myself,” she’d write, “[I] became a good stenographer. I am very glad I did [it], for I earned my living with it—and thus in a sense my independence—for many years.”
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    But earning a living came later. For the next year or so, Jane worked at a newspaper, unpaid. Like many internships today, it proved invaluable, building up her skills, giving her a job credential, and leaving her with a taste for the world of writing and publishing, if only in the distant reaches of it. All through high school, it was writing that had sustained her—poetry, little essays, a stab at fiction, words on paper. Writers were her model, her dream. She knew she wanted to be one; nothing she said across her long life ever suggested otherwise. “Her ambition is to be a writer; first to be a newspaper reporter, and later to do writing of other kinds.” This autobiographical snippet appeared in a book that published one of her poems, in 1932.
    Jane’s job, beginning in late summer 1933, was with The Scranton Republican , soon to begobbled up by another local paper, The Scranton Times. One day in mid-October, maybe a month after she started there, the Republican ran a seven-column front-page headline, “Hitler Speech Wakes War Fear.” Then came stories reporting that President Roosevelt was working to “thaw” funds trapped in the nation’s closed and imperiled banks; that a tornado had struck Oklahoma, killing three; that the FBI had formed a special squad to track down the kidnapped son of a department store owner. By page 3, readers were deep into the local news, including a parachute jump gone wrong at a local airfield, along with ads for funeral parlors, wool coats, and $10.75 innerspring mattresses. Finally, on page 4, the paper opened up again to a kind of second page 1—a banner across the page, ornamented by silhouetted figures of women in social settings, heralding the Women’s Society and Club News.
    Here seventeen-year-old Jane Butzner earned her first journalistic spurs, “doing routine items about weddings, parties, and the meetings of the Women of the Moose and the Ladies’ Nest of Owls No. 3.” These, be it said, are Jane’s words, written in 1961, and you might think she’d made them up.