Was this how America, in lieu of any meaningful government support, used to fund the arts? Love the characters and your detailed description of Trans Am Man’s wardrobe! I was at the Clay movie theater during this time, making popcorn and hand-copying piano scores on the candy counter.
You forgot law! I’d bet that there were more people working in law firms than in advertising and maybe even real estate. I’d occasionally open the SF White Pages and try to find a page that didn’t have at least one ‘atty’ next to a name (the firms listed each attorneys phone # as an individual listing because reasons).
You probably recall Josh Kornbluth’s first show, Haiku Tunnel, structured around his experiences as a legal temp at what was then Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. There were armies of legal secretaries, paralegals, clerks, messengers, law librarians, word processors, and (at the prestige firms) even proofreaders!
A majority of the big SF firms of the Eighties disappeared in the upheavals that hit the profession starting in the latter years: the Brobeck, Thelen, Landels, Pettit, Lillick, Bronson, and Graham firms had been institutions in SF for decades, and they were all gone by the turn of the millennium.
Thanks Paul -- yes of course, the legal profession. I knew many people who moonlighted as "summarizers" for piles of court transcripts. I did not see Josh's "Haiku Tunnel" show until the film came out. But I did get to see an early stage version of his show "Red Diaper Baby" which was around the same time, if not before. The law firms also supported the then-enormous bike messenger economy!
SO MANY bike messengers. I worked at Pillsbury while Josh was there (same floor, actually), right across Sansome from the Sharper Image store where lots of the messengers hung out. Another sector that was substantially supported by the law firms was cabs. All the big firms would pay cab fare for people working late, which would’ve been dozens of fares each night from the 4-5 biggest firms.
Oh man... totally takes me back to my days as a "law clerk" (I.e., glorified go-fer for the Legal Dept) at the Beatrice Foods HQ in downtown Chicago from 1984-86. We had a far less interesting cast of characters, though, and I was the only slacker. No office affairs for me, either, though I *was* tackled by a drunken secretary at the company Christmas party...
You probably remember them from numerous TV ad campaigns of the mid-80s — Beatrice Foods was buying up everything from Tropicana Orange Juice to Proctor & Gamble, and then shoe-horning their "We're Beatrice!" slogan into the products' ads.
Sadly, there isn't much more to that secretary story — I was only 18 at the time and fairly uptight; I was pretty mortified by the spectacle she caused, not to mention kinda pissed that she tore one of my favorite mod suit jackets in the process. It would be a few more years before I loosened up and learned to roll with the punches (and the secretaries) a little better...
Was this how America, in lieu of any meaningful government support, used to fund the arts? Love the characters and your detailed description of Trans Am Man’s wardrobe! I was at the Clay movie theater during this time, making popcorn and hand-copying piano scores on the candy counter.
it's so true - so many categories of the arts were funded this way. and you didn't have to know anything about computers yet!
God. Working as a temp at Secor, environmental engineering downtown and then dashing out for auditions and my boss asking me. “How did it go?”
Amazing. This sounds otherworldly, like something from Ray Bradbury or something
You forgot law! I’d bet that there were more people working in law firms than in advertising and maybe even real estate. I’d occasionally open the SF White Pages and try to find a page that didn’t have at least one ‘atty’ next to a name (the firms listed each attorneys phone # as an individual listing because reasons).
You probably recall Josh Kornbluth’s first show, Haiku Tunnel, structured around his experiences as a legal temp at what was then Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro. There were armies of legal secretaries, paralegals, clerks, messengers, law librarians, word processors, and (at the prestige firms) even proofreaders!
A majority of the big SF firms of the Eighties disappeared in the upheavals that hit the profession starting in the latter years: the Brobeck, Thelen, Landels, Pettit, Lillick, Bronson, and Graham firms had been institutions in SF for decades, and they were all gone by the turn of the millennium.
Thanks Paul -- yes of course, the legal profession. I knew many people who moonlighted as "summarizers" for piles of court transcripts. I did not see Josh's "Haiku Tunnel" show until the film came out. But I did get to see an early stage version of his show "Red Diaper Baby" which was around the same time, if not before. The law firms also supported the then-enormous bike messenger economy!
SO MANY bike messengers. I worked at Pillsbury while Josh was there (same floor, actually), right across Sansome from the Sharper Image store where lots of the messengers hung out. Another sector that was substantially supported by the law firms was cabs. All the big firms would pay cab fare for people working late, which would’ve been dozens of fares each night from the 4-5 biggest firms.
yeah, baby .. i was one of those messengers .. i remember alll those names, and most of their addresses
Love this story. The hilarity of being in your 20s in the 80s…got a few stories like this up my sleeve, too.
Oh man... totally takes me back to my days as a "law clerk" (I.e., glorified go-fer for the Legal Dept) at the Beatrice Foods HQ in downtown Chicago from 1984-86. We had a far less interesting cast of characters, though, and I was the only slacker. No office affairs for me, either, though I *was* tackled by a drunken secretary at the company Christmas party...
Ha! Yeah, Beatrice Foods, I remember that name, somehow. Tackled by a drunken secretary, the world needs to hear more of this story...
You probably remember them from numerous TV ad campaigns of the mid-80s — Beatrice Foods was buying up everything from Tropicana Orange Juice to Proctor & Gamble, and then shoe-horning their "We're Beatrice!" slogan into the products' ads.
Sadly, there isn't much more to that secretary story — I was only 18 at the time and fairly uptight; I was pretty mortified by the spectacle she caused, not to mention kinda pissed that she tore one of my favorite mod suit jackets in the process. It would be a few more years before I loosened up and learned to roll with the punches (and the secretaries) a little better...