Stories about my Father 4
July 15, 2022
My grandfather and my great-grandfather had a law firm together beginning in the 1920s called, appropriately enough, Hester & Hester, Attorneys at Law.
About 18 months after my father was born, my grandfather couldn’t take working with his father anymore and moved the family away. They went to a small town about twelve miles away from Lynchburg called Rustburg where he could practice on his own. As my father described it, “a prospective client would come in and his father would say, “My boy here can take care of that for you.” Daddy said the “boy” heard this once too often and decided to do something on his own.”
There are four generations of men in that paragraph and while all, except me, were fathers, we all had fathers. I am guessing that we all felt the same thing at some point or another. At the time they broke away, my grandfather was about thirty. He was married and they’d just had their first child. My grandfather had only graduated from law school at Washington & Lee a few years before and there was probably only so much that my great-grandfather would let him do on his own. To him, my grandfather Morris was still just a kid.
The house they moved to in Rustburg was owned by a man who was the county clerk - a Mr. Woodson. It was a new house - they were the first to live in it - but it had no running water, no central heat, no electricity, and no telephone.
It sat just off the main road that went through the town and had a short two-track dirt driveway that led to a small one-car garage. At the back of the garage was a small woodshed and a little room with wooden boards for a seat with a hole cut into the middle of it that was the toilet. A rickety wire fence in the back separated the lot from the Lynchburg and Durham railroad tracks. A big area, almost as large as the lot itself, was given over to a vegetable garden and between the driveway and the vegetable plot was a fenced-off chicken yard with a small chicken house inside it. The house was green.
It might not have been much, but it was theirs.
Rustburg is the seat of Campbell County, so its court served the whole area. There were only three lawyers in town, so my grandfather tried a much higher level of cases than he would have been able to back in Lynchburg under his father. They didn’t pay him much money - some of his clients were so poor that they’d pay him in vegetables - but he got an invaluable level of experience.
We are at an interesting moment in time where the idea of interning for little or no money just to gain experience is being questioned. Among the arguments against it are that the people who can do it often have some other source of income to support them. Perhaps their parents slip them some cash from time to time, as mine did when I was starting out in theatre. A lucky few may have trust funds to bankroll them. In other words, it is a classist system and by extension a racist one. In theatre, at any rate, the intern system when I was starting was populated mostly by white kids from families who were well off enough to offer some support. Some worked without that kind of support, but their whiteness again helped them find more flexible well-paying part-time jobs.
Living in New York is so much more expensive now, relatively, than it was forty years ago, so I can only agree that something must change. This may sound strange, but if it is made too easy to break into the business, then a lot of people who may not be all that committed to the work are going to get in. The experience I got working long hours for little or no pay only strengthened my resolve to succeed.
This life isn’t for everyone. You need that passion and drive to succeed. There are only forty Broadway theatres so, at any given moment, there will never be more than forty Broadway Production Stage Managers. Those jobs represent some of the most coveted jobs in my line of business. You want the best, most committed, and sharp people doing the work. Before now, many people who may have had those qualities were never given the chance to try. There does need to be a way to level the playing field right at the beginning. Everyone deserves to enter the race even though many will not make it to the end.
There are plenty of stage managers who never work in New York and never get to earn the level of money their Broadway colleagues do and have great careers. Touring stage managers at the Production Contract level usually make more money than those in New York. Career stage managers at regional theatres can sometimes make a comparable salary when you factor in cost-of-living expenses in and out of New York City. There is still, however, a finite amount of those kinds of jobs available and competition for them is extremely high.
For maybe the first ten years I was working in New York as a production assistant or as a stage manager, I made little or no money. I couldn’t for my life figure out how anyone got onto a Broadway show to earn Production Contract salaries. I worked Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway constantly and couldn’t break through that ceiling.
I remember one year after I had joined the union, I once worked for 65 weeks. I overlapped contracts multiple times during that single 52-week period. For one solid six-week stretch without a day off, I assisted a friend on a Lincoln Center play that toured into New York City schools in the mornings and then in the evening she assisted me on The Pinter Plays at CSC Repertory Theatre on 11th Street. Even with all those extra weeks crammed into that single year, I still ended up with only about nineteen thousand dollars of income. Jean Stapleton, the television star from All in the Family, was in the Pinter plays and she referred to her salary as her “car fare.” My salary, which, as the stage manager, was more than hers was, had to be stretched to its absurdly furthest limit by me to try and pay for rent and food. She had already made plenty of money by then and didn’t need it to live on.
In Rustburg, my grandfather would go to work in the mornings and then come home for lunch before heading back out for the afternoons. Sometimes, when he came home, he would change out of his work clothes, pick up his shotgun and go out and shoot a rabbit. My grandmother would then dress and cook it for dinner. My grandmother was teaching school in Rustburg, so she was working hard, too. They would both work in the garden and tend to the 50 or so chickens as well. When my father got old enough, one of his chores was to feed them. Some of the hens came to feel more like pets than livestock, but when the time came, she’d grab the ax, catch a chicken, and take it to the stump they used as a block and chop its head off. Then she’d pluck it clean and roast it.
It cannot have been easy, but my grandfather said that he and my grandmother had a wonderful life there. Everybody in town knew everybody else and everyone knew what was going on with everyone else. People helped each other out when they needed it. They never had enough money, but they had a nice little house, a car, and everything they needed.
The years I was “starving for my art,” were much the same. I never had enough cash, but I figured it out. I sank into credit card debt that I didn’t get out of until years later when I got on the national tour of The Phantom of the Opera. “Robbing from Peter to pay Paul” was my mantra - squeezing enough money out of one card to pay the minimum on another. I would not have been able to keep doing what I was doing during those ten years on what I was making as a stage manager if my mother and father hadn’t occasionally bailed me out.
What that time gave me, though, was invaluable. When I finally started working on Broadway, that decade of leading smaller productions off-Broadway really helped me advance much quicker. The people who had started out as production assistants on big shows right away didn’t have the experience that I did. As much as it drove me insane that I couldn’t get a gig on the Great White Way for all those years, I learned so much more taking the path that I did. I think that my grandfather felt the same way about his law career. His father never would have given him the chance to work on important cases in Lynchburg that he got in Rustburg. He had plenty of work so he could hone his skills and maybe even fail a few times. He made money later.
When my dad was six, Mr. Woodson decided to sell their little rented house. My grandfather couldn’t afford to buy it, so they moved back to Lynchburg, and he went back to work with his father. My great-grandfather was about sixty-five at the time and likely starting to slow down. I don’t know if things changed in their working relationship or not. My father and his sister used to talk about them working together all the time and they couldn’t figure out how they did it. My grandfather went on to become a successful lawyer on his own after my great-grandfather retired. He was still doing people’s taxes when he was in his nineties. I think that the people who still hired him must have gone to him from a sense of loyalty. I remember my father and me talking about it and him saying that he hoped Morris’s clients got the figures double-checked before they filed their returns.
One day, while the two of them were still working together, my great-grandfather bought a large oak presentation table from a store that was going out of business. He moved it into the office to spread out the law books on top of that he was using for his active cases. He would get annoyed when my grandmother would stop by the office and clean them all up because he then couldn’t find anything he needed. When he finally retired and my grandfather moved into another office to practice on his own, the table was moved into the kitchen of the house at 418 Elmwood Avenue that my grandparents would eventually buy. It has a wooden brace between the two end braces that jiggles when you put your feet on it. When we were little, my sister and I would sit on opposite sides of the table at breakfast and lunch and make it rock incessantly driving all the adults insane.
When Michael and I were looking for our current apartment, we each had a list of several things that it needed to have before we would agree to move in. For me, one of those things was having enough room for that table. We looked at many places before we found the apartment we are in now. We finally found the one that ticked all the boxes. My great-grandfather’s law book table that became my grandparents’ kitchen table is now Michael’s and my dining room table. We both use it to spread out the things we are working on, too. Heaven forbid either of us disturbs the stacks of papers and books the other has made because all hell breaks loose when the other can’t find something. “I left it right there, where did you put it?” I’m sure it makes them all laugh.
We do eat at it as well, of course, on the end nearest the kitchen that we both keep clear. I will often put my feet on the middle bar and wiggle it. Michael is not nearly as annoying as my sister was back then, so I usually have it to myself.
Breakfast is served.