Discrimination comes in many shades of gray

When one of my favorite colleagues was fired, I asked her why, after 25 years with the magazine, she had been "let go." Even as I asked the question, I knew it was a rhetorical one, but I was hoping that, maybe, she had a better, fairer reason. Betty-Jean put both hands in her hair and held out big tufts of her pretty curls. "This is why," she said. "Because my hair is gray. Or, rather, in my case, white. And I refuse to color it. That's why they don't want me around."

The official line in the office - and the one that Betty-Jean had been told - was that there was no longer a need for her position, that it had been eliminated. Maybe semantically her title had been eliminated from the magazine's masthead, but already pretty girls in their early 20s had been coming in, dressed up, high-heeled to interview for a junior level version of the very job Betty-Jean had held for decades.

And just the other day, one of the most senior of the editors of the magazine came out of his office at 6:30 in the evening as several of us were frantically getting pages of the October issue ready to send to the printer. A magazine "closing," as the procedure is called when an issue is being prepared to ship to the printer, is always tense, but the editor's complaint and demand for a copy change surprised us all and made for a lot of new and unwelcome work that would take hours to remedy. He had just read our Letters to the Editor page and slapped down the paper copy of what we were going to ship. "We can't run a letter by a woman who's 84 years old," he said with indignation. "That's not the kind of message we should be conveying to our readers."

The letter in question came from a devoted reader who proudly stated her age in the missive and complimented our publication with some rather old-fashioned, but endearing terms, like "grand" and "charming." As diplomatically as I could, I told this editor that the most prevalent form of discrimination in America was ageism. And here we were committing it against our readers.

"This is this woman's big moment in print," I said, recalling how thrilled the woman had been when our editorial assistant called her to say we would be publishing her letter and how she had said she was going to frame the printed page.

When I realized that the editor was unbending and unpersuaded, I suggested still running the letter but removing the line where the woman reader stated her age.

"Even if we do that, our readers are still going to know this is from someone old," he said. "Who uses the word 'grand' anymore?"

He was right. In fact, the last time I had heard the word used was a year earlier when I had approached the late Kitty Carlisle Hart on Park Avenue because I was determined to meet the famous then-95-year-old actress/singer/patroness of the arts. I told Miss Hart that I had always wanted to meet her and was looking forward to seeing her opening-night performance at Michael Feinstein's club (yes, she had been booked for a three-week singing gig there). She shook my hand and as I looked at her striking face she said, "Why that's grand."

Of course the irony of ageism in the office is that anyone who practices it is also prone to being victimized by it. At one magazine where I worked, the editorial director, a 60-ish woman proudly told me how "brave" she had been to feature the architect Philip Johnson on the cover of the magazine. "He was 90 years old at the time," she told me, "and it was a daring thing for me to approve putting his image on the cover of our magazine. It was a disaster on the newsstand," she added, "and I learned never again to feature someone so old on the cover."

She was soon fired, in her case, it was rumored, for smoking pot in her office, but also, as many colleagues had said, because well, maybe, she, too, hadn't colored her gray hair.

There are some senior level people at the publishing company where I work who have safely eluded the age factor, simply because they are so powerful. But on the editorial side of magazine publishing, it is a known fact that once you start reaching your mid-50s, you are marked as potentially irrelevant.

I have several years to go before I reach that point, but I did recently get an unnerving sense of how I am fast approaching that era of my life. One of our youngest new hires, a 23-year-old, came up to my desk the other week and asked if I could help her with a problem.

"I don't know how to use a fax machine," she admitted. "I've never used one." This was the first time one of the junior level people had asked me to solve what I considered a technical problem. I was the one forever asking her and others in her age group how to open an Excel spread sheet or program the computer to have an automatic "Out of Office" response when going on vacation or how to record a new message greeting on my phone. But this girl was so young that the fax machine was an outmoded technology to her.

Whenever I attended industry trade shows and press events with my former colleague Betty-Jean, it was immediately evident how well she knew the world we covered in our magazine.

She was constantly being greeted by public relations people, fellow editors and writers, and industry professionals, simply because she had been working as an editor for so long and was a recognized authority. She had the confidence and the experience of age.

And that, for some perverse reason, is seen by our politically correct, ever tolerant society today as the problem.

I really do believe that some day we will look back at this time and marvel at the unfairness of the ageism we now so overtly practice. I believe it will come to seem as outrageous as Jim Crow laws or the denial of the vote to women or the medieval practice of drilling into skulls to relieve headaches. I just hope this new enlightenment takes effect in the next several years, in time to save my job and my career.

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