I work for a pretty large corporation (as a male accountant) and have been wondering, what would it have been like to work in a corporate office fifty years ago? Would I have been smoking at my desk? Did male business majors typically know how to type? Would I have had health insurance? And what about Fedoras!? And so on…I haven’t seen Mad Men either.
Yes for the smoking; probably not as much drinking as they showed in Mad Men. My dad was a press secretary for a big theater in San Francisco during the 60’s, so, briefcase, typing, cigarettes, dial telephones, noisy, dusty. Not so sure about the health insurance, and for the most part Kennedy killed the hat at his inauguration.
I first worked in an “office” in the summer of 1964-1965, but I’m not sure how much it’s relevant to your question: it was in Australia, it was a government office, and it was in an office that specialised in research.
Smoking was more common back then – I remember one high school teacher who smoked in the classroom – so I suspect some people smoked at their desks, but I just can’t remember.
Most workers didn’t type back then, unless they were trained and employed as typists (who were 99.99% women, of course). However my father, a university lecturer, owned a typewriter, so I’d taught myself to type as a teenager (and as a result type very fast fir a one-finger typist).
Employment-based health insurance has never existed in Australia, so I can’t answer that question as it relates to the U.S.
Most men did not wear hats then, though they would have in the 1950s and earlier.
One big change is the absence of computers. Since this was a research office, there was a computer somewhere in the building, though I never saw it, even though part of my work was calculating some numbers that were going to be used as input for some computer data analysis. I had however learned some computer programming in 1964 as a university student and even had been close enough to a computer to feed programs written on punched paper tape into it. But that was very unusual – I did it as part of a maths major, and business majors would never have been anywhere near a computer.
I don’t know if JFK was setting or following a trend. This is a picture that I took in London in 1961, and you’ll see that none of the men – not even the older men – are wearing hats. I don’t think they would have been influenced much by JFK.
I wore a fedora in my 1941 Ford; I could not in my 1950 Chevie. I always thought it was Detroit that killed hats.
The late 60’s were the very beginning of my career, and I often saw my father’s and older siblings’ workplaces.
If you were a manager, you got an office, otherwise you sat at a desk in a big room with a bunch of other desks. Smoking was probably allowed. That wasn’t as bad as you might think, because it was likely that your office wasn’t air conditioned, so there were plenty of windows to open. If you were a man, you wore a suit, but took off your jacket first thing and worked in shortsleeves all day. Women wore skirts and tops, or dresses with sensible shoes. Few of either sex wore hats.
There were professional typists because every document had to be created from scratch – no templates, no search and replace. That said, many people didn’t have jobs that required typing, and some people even typed their own (short) letters.
If you were a salaried employee, or a union member, you had at least rudimentary health insurance. If you were a clerical employee, you were paid hourly and even if you were full time, you probably didn’t have any benefits.
Salesmen and people who dealt directly with customers/clients were expected to take them to lunch or dinner, and drinks were appropriate (i.e., "two martini lunches.) A manager might keep a bottle in his bottom desk drawer and mix a little bourbon and water at the end of the day, but no, there wasn’t a lot of drinking at work. In fact, there was probably more cocaine being done in the restrooms in the 80’s than there was onsite drinking in the 60’s.
Many offices, especially at larger corporations, maintained some degree of formal demeanor (as many still do today). This often meant that female employees were expected to wear white gloves. IBM, for example, required this.
I worked for a research company, where there was IBM equipment. When IBM field reps or service reps were on-site, if they were female, they wore white gloves.
Smoking – all the time. All desks has ashtrays.
Drinking – no. The “three-martini lunch” did exist, but primarily as a way of entertaining clients. Advertising was the place where it was common – in that you’d take a client out to lunch and have a couple of drinks with him. But not every day and usually not every week. In other businesses, especially those that didn’t entertain clients, it was unusual, though I suppose people would have one drink or a beer when eating lunch in a restaurant (and they had the time to).
You would have health insurance – usually Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Blue Cross was for hospital expenses; Blue Shield for doctors, though by the 60s, they two organizations often were merged into one.
Hats were going out of style before JFK’s inauguration, and he wore a hat, anyway (though he took it off to give his speech).
Office attire was a white shirt (no hint of color) and jackets and ties. Usually you removed your jacket when working, but would put it on when meeting with anyone from outside, or to go to a meeting of your fellow workers.
As I recall my Dad going to work in a 1960s office, he always wore a suit and tie. He also wore a fedora; at least up until the late 1960s.
In the 1970s, I was working in an office. No fedora, but definitely jacket and tie, though you typically worked in shirtsleeves. It was open-plan–very few dividers, so you could, in places, see from one side of the building to the other. Every desk had a telephone, with real bells, and they rang loudly. Typewriters clacked constantly.
Every desk had an ashtray, and everybody smoked.
A coffee cart came around at break time. There was coffee, hot water for the teabags you could get, and usually some baked goodies (donuts and similar). Prices were reasonable and you could set your watch by the cart’s arrival, but there were prices and a schedule–no free coffee whenever you feel like it, as there is in many offices today.
You would probably have a beer at lunch, if it was a special occasion: a co-worker’s promotion, somebody’s last day, the day before a long weekend, and so on. But otherwise, most of us brown-bagged it, or hit a sandwich shop or fast-food joint. No three-martini lunches, IME.
Another interesting aspect is how people in those offices arrived at work.
Today, everybody has their own car. Back then, it was common for people to arrange car pools.You would often pick up 2 or 3 other people on the way to work each morning, and rotate who drove. This was true for managers( and even fairly senior managers) as much as for the average worker.
Adding to my post above, because I just remembered it…
Entertainment options at lunch and on breaks were limited–no computers, no computer games, no internet. Many people read the paper or a book they had brought, or they caught up on the latest gossip with co-workers. Some folks played chess, or worked crossword puzzles. I myself played bridge at lunchtime with three other co-workers for the better part of a year.
As others have said, formal business attire and smoking. Hats were on the way out. Drinking at the office was rare in the corporate environment except for an executive’s office. Drinking at lunch happened. More formality, higher ups addressed as Mr. or Dr., Miss or Mrs. less frequently because women didn’t have as many opportunities in the workplace. Health insurance had become common. Typists typed. In accounting and bookkeeping positions you’d have an adding machine. In and out boxes on your desk. There weren’t many copy machines in the office, almost all were made by Xerox, and usually secretaries or clerical personnel operated them. Greenbar printouts from computers were becoming common. Women were sexually harassed without consequences.
No air conditioning, my mother told me the company would hand out salt tablets in the summertime.
I remember standard male attire in the summer: white or pastel short sleeve Oxford shirt with black neckties. An awful look, even without black horn rim glasses.
But even worse was adding Bermuda shorts and knee socks. :eek:
In Dallas in heat intensive work places, salt tablets were available by the handful.
Even at the high tech Silicon Valley firm I worked for, smoking at one’s desk (cubicle, so no contained air) was allowed as late as 1987. I think they started segregating smoking in a section of the cafeteria after that, and then soon it was outside or not at all.
When I was a kid in the mid 70s, my parents took on some office cleaning jobs to help make ends meet. Us two sons helped out some evenings. We did mostly insurance companies. No cubicles, one or two private offices with doors and walls, mostly just desks and phones. About half of them had ashtrays, typewriters, and huge calculators* on the desks.
Same places existed as offices for several years, so it was likely this way in the 60s too.
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I have an adding machine on my desk to this day, we all do in accounting. Of course it’s the digital one.
Hmmm…
I don’t remember my father ever owning a fedora-type hat (or any hat, for that matter,) He was a professor, so he dressed the part; maybe it was an official uniform, the tweed jacket with the dress shirt and tie, dress pants. He was OCD, so he wore those black oxfords with the lacey-looking cutouts on the leather toe ends, if you know what I mean. I think he had 3 or 4 ties and rotated them.
Smoking was not banned in the office where I worked until about the 1990’s. Then they were told to smoke in the lunchroom; then the president finally got the courage to tell the company “no smoking indoors” even on the plant floor.
Drinking was a no-no simply because around heavy industrial equipment, it was a danger and workers compensation baord would come after anybody who knowingly allowed drunks to operate potentially lethal machinery. However, a lot of the office and supervisory staff were known to have a drinking problem. As long as it did not cause a problem, or tick off a big shot, peopel seemed to be too embarrassed to confront it, or call the pot black. Big shots could have drinks on the company dime as longa s their boss signed off on their expense account.
Several companies I knew of, especially factories outside of downtown, had a full cafeteria for staff if big enough. It would server hot meals at lunch, have snacks available, etc. One I know even in downtown Toronto had an èxecutive lunchroom so the brass did not have to mingle with the peons, and even had their own nice marble-counter executive washroom so the prsident did not have to hang his willy out in the urinal beside his lowly minions in a painted concrete block style industrial washroom. Everyone knew their place, or were fired.
Another reason for the cafeteria was the one-car family. If the wife needed a car, or parking was too expensive, etc. - car-pooling. A car for everyone, including the teenagers, is an idea that has slowly crept down from the richer classes until we did not realize it had arrived. Big shots, of course, had a company car and possibly a driver. It was the tax decision in the 1980`s or so, that any perk would be taxed as if it wsa income, that destroyed many perks like cars, drivers, golf-club memberships, and such for executive brass.
Even in the offices, in the more “male” areas, like the PC repair area, scanty-clad women on calendars were common, as were similarly risque bits cut out of magazines, etc. I remember an employee from the government from the big city about 1990 looking at a bare-breast calendar on the wall in a factory-floor office, and saying “holy cow!” (inspired comment) “You guys are allowed to do that??”
Apparently about that time, the control room bunch had a mural collage of pictures from Hustler, including such classics as the “lady” who could tie knots with her labia. One of the early female supervisors suggested this was not appropriate. The management from the 1800’s suggested “live and let live” so she posted some cutouts from Playgirl in the unisex bathroom. (I think sh glued them heavily to the existing mural). After a bit of back and forth - believe it or not, the control room operators complained- management finally clued into the 1990s (sexual harrassment was becoming an issue) and banned any inappropriate postings.
Kunilou makes a good point. Nobody important touched a typewriter. (The last of our keyboard-challenged execs left about 2000). A mark of importance was that you had a secretary, who typed anything that had to be formal. Hence, having a secretary, like having a private office, was a perk. Old timers from the 60s told me about the time when the phone system had a plug switchboard, and the higher-ups did not see why two purchasing agents could not share a phone. Long distance, of course, cost a fortune and so calls were very limited, business was done by snail mail. If you wanted something, expect days to weeks for the paperwork to be processed, order mailed out, and the order to ship. Life was done at a slower pace in those days. This I think is the biggest concept to wrap your head around - many of the things we do electronically were done by personal or departmental secretaries. If you wanted a meeting, the secretary found an available time, arranged it, notified the other participants (or their secretaries) and kept an appointment book. They screened all the calls for the boss, even dialed numbers for him and negotiated the other ends screening secretary and switchboard. Bosses dicatated aloud; shorthand - writing it down as fast as he talked - was a serious in-demand skill. Then it got typed. Smart secretairies did the spell-check and grammar-check because they knew their stuff. They stuffed things in envelopes and addressed them. Physical mail volume was so large that they had several people in the mail room to sort and even deliver internal and external mail - or the departmental secretary came down to fetch it and delivered it herself.
Of course, when things started to get cut to the bone in the 1990s and 2000s, secretaries were the first to go since now you could phone, or type and email your own messages.
Sexual harrassment as a concept did not exist. If the boss harrassed the secretary, she could ask for a transfer or quit - but his word and value to the company was obviously bigger than hers, so tough. Glass ceiling was real. If you started as a secretary, as the saying goes you had to be twice as good as a man to get ahead; even today, aggressive men are ok but similarly aggressive women are often labelled bitch. It was 10 times worse back then.
Basically, in those days there were limited options if the boss or fellow employees had it in for you. If the boss wanted you gone, you were gone. By the 1960`s civil rights laws were coming in, but unless the company brass were really stupid and explicity said they would not hire that sort, odds are there was no win.
(Also mentioned that when the company went to direct deposit pay, a lot of guys who sued to drink or gamble a lot of it before they got home Friday had to explain to their wives why they were making so much more…)
A paper copy was filed for future reference. Xerox was starting to make inroads in the major markets by the 1960s but for many uses, 2 or 3 carbon copies did the trick. Corrections in carbon were fun. White-out was another popular new product. Instead of a copy for everyone, circulation lists were stapled to a memo and everyone initialed when they had read it.
To confirm: Hats were going out of style in the 50’s. But even then, you didn’t wear them indoors. All the men in the office had gone through army training which trained them to remove their lids when entering a building. This also meant a very militaristic hierarchy in business offices. The 60s saw the very gradual shift from military style haircuts for men to longer hair styles (cf. JFK).