IRL, Miss Jane would have worked the system to skim enough for whatever she wanted. Thus, the reason she was anxious to keep her job was that her departure might create the risk of her scheme being uncovered.
A different take on Drysdale- he was greedy but not criminal. And as the show continued, he developed a real affection for the Clampetts. Jed was most likely Milton’s best friend.
Exactly. *Experienced *Senior Exec Assistants to CEOs (and other very senior executives) at Fortune 500 companies headquartered in large cities (NY, LA, Chicago) today can command $120,000 - $150,000 (all told, including bonus). Granted, there are relatively few positions like these available, they’re very competetive, and 9:00 - 5:00 clock-punchers need not apply.
I agree with you there. I can’t see Drysdale cheating the Clampetts that way, if only because he would have done so immediately if he were inclined to do so at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had power of attorney on their accounts.
Drysdale, it seems to me, wasn’t greedy in the sense of wanting money for its own sake. He liked the process of acquiring money, which is a different thing. Embezzling millions from the Clampetts would have been pointless to him, because it was the process he enjoyed.
You’re exactly right about Drysdale. All of his schemes centered around keeping Jed as a depositor at his bank. I don’t remember Drysdale ever attempting to swindle Jed out of so much as a single penny. Drydale went to great, and no doubt personally expensive, lengths to cater to (mainly) Granny’s and Jethro’s goofy ideas and to find Ellie a beau. His relationship with Jed seemed to be based on real friendship.
That sounds about right for California.
I think a far more important question about Miss Jane is whether or not she ever succeeded in gaining access to Jethro’s (no doubt) enormous schwanzstucker.
“Oh Milburn! Those -dreadful- hillbillies! Must they live next door to us?!”
I pity the first guy who ever invited her to make monkey love. (“Come down from the tree… my God what are you doing with your ass???”)
I think Ellie was an avatar of Artemis/Diana, the virgin huntress goddess. How she wound up incarnate in Appalachia must have been an interesting story, but it would explain her lack of resemblance to Jed.
I always wondered what the attraction was twixt the Drysdales. He clearly didn’t care for her (except in the “I’m Tinker Bell” “… and I’m Peeeeeter Pan” episode when he was under the influence.) She was a good bit older than he was (it was said that Sonny was 38 in the early episodes, meaning she’d have been near or over 60, and he was maybe 50), and she wasn’t from a wealthy family as when her father visited in one episode he was broke and courted Granny for her’s. I can only assume she was a wealthy widow or divorcee.
Are you familiar with Max Baer’s “in development for 30 years and still nowhere near fruition but always talked about” Jethro’s Hillbilly Casino & Hotel?
Aside: anyway who loves Jane Hathaway sexual references owes it to themselves to see Sordid Lives. Leslie Jordan as Brother Boy comparing/contrasting her to Jethrine as possible onanistic fantasy material is one of the many highlights. (NSFW due to language.)
Jed told the Army recruiter that Jethro had completed “twelve years of schooling”,… “clean through the sixth grade”. (And graduated “highest in his class”,… “by a good two feet”).
I was looking for a possible or likely salary either back in the 60s or what a similar position today would be.
In reality Miss Jane was always second in charge of the bank. On several occassions when Drysdale was out of town, she took his office and told Janet Trego (played by Sharon Tate) to take her office. When Mr Drysdale went missing the entire bank staff ran to Miss Jane. Mr Drysdale originally had a board of directors but soon that was changed to “he owned all the stock in the bank.”
Miss Jane ironically, seemed more loyal to Drysdale than the Clampetts. When Jed gave all his money to Jenny Jenning (Played by Sheila “Zelda Gilroy” James), she dismissed the now poor Clampets and says “Stop crying over the loss of the Clampet money and try to get a hold of the Jennings’s money.”
I realize like any TV show the plot changes depending on needs but it seemed even by 1960s standards, Miss Jane was too highly skilled to be portrayed as so poor. After all she was fluent in French and Italian
Similarly I recall an interview with Audrey Meadows and she said the show would get letters from NYC bus drivers and sewer workers saying that Ed and Ralph shouldn’t be as poor as they were portrayed. As they were paid well. Audrey said they missed the point, Ralph was always blowing all his money friviously on get rich quick schemes
I’d look it up myself but I’m stepping out of the house, but if it’s super important to you the Statistical Abstracts of the United States have year by year data about average salaries (though I think they use the term wages) for professions. Click on a year in the early 1960s, look under “wages” in the index, and it should give you a page number. Remember that if it says the average 1960 salary for a secretary is $4000 per year (that’s a figure I pulled out of the air- no idea what it would be) that Miss Jane is going to make a good bit more than that because she’s at the head of her profession and in California, so she’s probably going to make more like $6500.
Once you find a salary, you can run it through the inflation calculator to find out what it would be in today’s money. (Remember that there’s no way to exactly calculate buying power- real estate has skyrocketed in price since the '60s while airline tickets and TVs have gone down in price and some things have stayed the same, etc., but it’ll give an approximation.)
Incidentally, per that inflation calculator, $125,000 in 2008 was roughly equal to $17,960 in 1963 if that helps.
That’s why I also previously posted that I always saw her as at least an executive assistant (at the low end of her pay scale*), whatever it was called back then. She seemed to have a lot of authority above what even and executive secreatry would have and, though they did talk a couple of times about VPs in the bank, they never alluded to Miss Hathaway as such.
I agree.
I thought this had more to do with her telling Drysdale to move on and do what would make his life better at that point; I think, in some small way, since she seemed like such a decent person, she was probably subconsciously proud of Jed for being so generous, freehearted and true-to-his-nature, even up to the point of giving away all of his money. She truly cared about all of them (though she cared about Jethro a little more, but who could blame her).
I thought she was fairly refined too, but wonder if, overall, she was limited by being a woman and having had a liberal education at Vassar.
Her skills DID NOT MATTER. She was a woman, and was confined to the pink ghetto of available female jobs. She could get to the top of a profession, but it was a low paying profession. She would never, ever have been able to be the bank president. If there was a board of directors, then they would not have allowed it. If she was an heiress, or otherwise had enough money to buy the bank, she would not have been taken seriously by other banks, or other businesses. Nobody would have put money in her bank, or asked her bank for a loan. If she had inherited the bank somehow, she would have found it necessary to hire a man, any man, to be at least a figurehead. She was a WOMAN, no matter how she dressed and groomed and acted, and in that time, she was only able to get hired in a few lowpaying jobs. It was OK for her to act as prez when Drysdale was unavailable, because everyone understood that she was just a temporary placeholder.
The reasons women went to college in that time was because of a genuine love of knowledge, to get the skills that the wife of a successful man might need (being fluent in a couple of languages is a great skill for the wife of a diplomat, for instance), or to catch a man who had a bright future. It might be some combination of the three. I don’t think that teachers needed college degrees back then, just a high school diploma, and possibly going on to normal school, unless they were themselves college teachers. Nurses and secretaries tended to go to trade schools to learn their skills. Usually, women’s colleges had a “brother” college for men, or rather, men’s colleges frequently had “sister” colleges, and the women who attended these colleges were regarded as a pool of dates and possibly wives for the guys who attended the brother colleges.
Miss Jane was a highly intelligent woman of her day, but she was severely constrained by the fact that she was a woman…and even worse, she was an unattractive woman. Being unattractive and not making even token gestures to increase one’s attractiveness was an unforgivable sin in a woman in that day.
In much the same way, a black man could not have aspired to a well-paying, highly respected job back then, with a few exceptions. Being an entertainer or a preacher could bring a black man, or a woman of any color, fame and fortune. Otherwise, don’t whine about your lack of opportunities, and keep pushing that mop, that’s all you’re good for.
Lynn Bodoni writes:
> I don’t think that teachers needed college degrees back then, just a high school
> diploma, and possibly going on to normal school, unless they were themselves
> college teachers. Nurses and secretaries tended to go to trade schools to learn
> their skills. Usually, women’s colleges had a “brother” college for men, or rather,
> men’s colleges frequently had “sister” colleges, and the women who attended
> these colleges were regarded as a pool of dates and possibly wives for the
> guys who attended the brother colleges.
You’re off by about twenty years here. For what it’s worth, the situation shown in the show was also off by about twenty years. The characters of the Clampetts, Mr. Drysdale, and Miss Hathaway were cliches from about twenty years before the time that the show ran on TV. Even back when it was running, the show looked old-fashioned, I think. Furthermore, the show was intended as slapstick, not as intelligent commentary on the world. A lot of people hated the show because of its blatant stupidity, as I remember.
The Beverly Hillbillies ran from 1962 to 1971. Teachers most certainly did need college degrees then. I was in elementary school when the show started. I specifically remember a teacher around 1960 - 1962 talking about her career. She was around retirement age at the time. She said that when she began teaching (in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s, I guess) she only needed a year-long course to be a teacher. Then the requirement went up to two years, so she had to go back to get another year. Later the requirement went up to all four years of college and she had to go back again. (Incidentally, don’t tell me that four years was only necessary in big cities at the time, while it wasn’t necessary in rural areas. I lived way, way out in the sticks, and even there a full college degree was necessary.)
Normal schools had pretty much disappeared by the time the show came on the air. Or, to be more exact, while some of them closed, most of the others were renamed as state universities and offered much wider selections of majors. I believe that nurses were mostly graduating from four-year programs at regular universities at the time, although there may have still been nurse-only colleges. Secretaries both now and then only study at trade colleges.
In 1962, it was no longer true that most women in college studied at women-only colleges. The clear majority of them studied at state universities that had never been sex-segregated. There were still a fair amount of sex-segregated private colleges, but this was changing fast. Between 1960 and 1980 most of the remaining sex-segregated colleges gave up and either admitted the other sex, consolidated with a nearby college with the other sex, or just closed down. (A few kept the pretense of being sex-segregated when they consolidated classes with a college with the other sex, but in effect that only meant that dorms were still sex-segregated while classes were co-ed.) You’ve confused 1962 with 1952 or maybe with 1942. It was the year before the publication of The Feminine Mystique and there were already rumbling of the women’s liberation movement.
I’m pretty sure that my elementary school teachers, at least, only had a year or three of schooling after high school. My grandmother went to nursing school, but that was in the 40s or 50s, I think, and she only got a Licenced Vocational Nurse certification (whatever it’s called).
Miss Jane would have gone to college BEFORE 1962. Vassar went co-ed in 1969, so she went to a women’s college. In fact, while many colleges were going co-ed, many women were still going for the reasons I stated. Going to a co-ed college just increased the chances of meeting The Right Boy.
I started school in 1963, in Texas. Throughout elementary and middle school, we had a daily prayer, despite the fact that this was ruled unconstitional. In high school, we had a daily minute of silence. It was well understood by both teachers and students that we were expected to pray, every day, in school, no matter what those godless heathens in judges’ robes said. So, while you say “You’ve confused 1962 with 1952 or maybe with 1942”, I say that this is the way it was, where I grew up. Maybe things were different where you were, but I can tell you that in my experience, women didn’t have a great deal of choice when it came to jobs, no matter how talented and well-educated they were. Texas was pretty much behind the times in these areas.
I can see both Lynn Bodoni and Wendell Wagner viewpoints. I wasn’t really taking into account regional variations. Like in Illinois in the 60s you could teach through high school, but you had to have a degree. They didn’t care what your degree was in as long as you had one.
But by the mid 70s specific teaching degrees and training were implemented.
But as Lynn Bodoni said even women who ran things like Lucille Ball, got here not because of their business skills but rather because they could buy the company outright.
But generally I was thinking in terms of Miss Jane being portrayed as so poor. And as I said othe characters like Ralph Kramden were portrayed as poor, even when they had decent paying jobs. A NYC bus driver was paid enough to live much better than Ralph did, but this was explained away by saying Ralph blew all his pay on get rich quick schemes
One thing I know from the time I worked in banking and from reading about the history of banking (and as a mother) is that Drysdale had to have inherited or married or stolen or otherwise additional wealth to live like he did on a bank president’s salary, especially then. He certainly make a good income, but not “mansion in Beverly Hills” income unless he’s mortgaged to the hilt or the house is bank owned and goes with the job. It was also established that he bowed to the board of directors and the bank’s CEO owned banks in Alaska and other places as well (because Drysdale was threatened with transfer there by its CEO [played by Jim Backus]).
Lynn Bodoni writes:
> Miss Jane would have gone to college BEFORE 1962.
Sure, but you weren’t talking about Miss Jane in your post. You were talking about teachers, nurses, and secretaries in general. In Ohio, where I grew up, the teachers needed college degrees, even out in the sticks where I lived. Apparently it was different in Texas.
Miss Jane was not supposed to be a typical woman of those times. She was apparently supposed to be a woman from a well-off family who graduated from Vassar and then had no choice in careers but to take a secretarial job at a bank. (As people have pointed out, today she would have been considered an executive assistant.)
I still find something oddly old-fashioned about the show, even for 1962. The attitude toward hillbillies (or whatever you want to call them) was patronizing even for those times. Basically, the show was stupid. It’s not a good idea to take it as a reasonable source for historical information about hillbillies, bankers, career women, or anything else.
Oh, definitely. I can’t think of a single comedy of that era that wasn’t stupid. The premise of every comedy that I remember was that somebody did something stupid, and then spent the rest of the show trying to fix it and/or cover it up. People generally acted in a stupid manner. And I believe that both the script writers and the producers were exceptionally stupid people, who ate stupid food not just for breakfast, but for lunch and dinner too.