,oturdoy, May 15, 1976 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five An operator s 'unde world' By JEFFREY SELBSTX There is an image of a spare, prissy tele- phone operator, that needs desperately to be debunked. For one thing, more and more op- erators are male. For another, life as an op- eraor is not at all routine. Let me tell you about it. I never expected to be a telephone an- swering service operator. It all started some- what innocuously two years ago when I was in need of a job - any job - and though I knew nothing of the work, the ad in the Free Press contained the magic words, "will train." So I trooped in one beautiful summer s day. They fitted me with a headset (an ab- surd piece of equipment which fits over the head or clips on the glasses) and a message pad. I was trained and on my way. RECENTLY LOOKING for a job in Ann Arbor, I chanced upon a local answering ser- vice where, proferring my application (nowK with experience), I gained employment. But as I sit once again with a headset clipped over my ears, musing over the flicker of lights on the switchboard, I can only look back withm a sigh upon that first wacky place; and realize how dull it is to answer for "respectable" clients. The first job was in a place in Southfield, where from four large switchboards we an- The urda Magazine swered for crooks, deviants and quacks from all over the Detroit area. Furthermore, the operators seemed chosen to match the cus- tomers. There was Emily, who was dating the clients in numerical order; Lydia, who wrote out message tickets for calls that never ex- isted; there was Mary, who suddenly picked up and moved to Maine; and finally Janice, whose desperate love was quenched by a glance. As much as mine, this is their story. LYDIA OWNED THE SERVICE (all names are changed). She also owned a beauty shop in the same building as the telephone answering service, and was almost never around. But it was rumored that Lydia had only one esnndard that would-be clients had to adhere to - they had to prove that they were, at least in some small way, crook- ed. We answered for Mafia fronts, gambling joints, and, paradoxically, a private eye. This all came home to me with a bang one day as I was sitting at one switchboard, when' an official of a Wayne County court came in to serve one of the clients --- an asphalt contractor -- with a court summons, in order that a wronged customer of his might recover her monetary losses. The answering service was served with the writ because the contractor had listed us as his legal address. Which is perfectly legal of course, because we take his messages. Except that this time the contractor never showed up to collect them. He had vanished - without even paying us his bill - and at last account was some- where in New Mexico. Another of our accounts we knew simply by the name of "4-B." The gentleman's oc- cupation was cloaked in similar mystery. It appeared that he was running an ad in the Detroit News which advertised for a cocktail waitress. We took messages from all the hope- ful applicants, and thought nothing more of See OPERATOR, Page 2 The 'Wallace Myth': Fading fast? WALLACE by Marshall Frady (enlarged and up- dated). New York: New American Library, 277 pp. $3.95. THE GEORGE WALLACE MYTH by Michael Dor- man. New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 193 pp. $1.75. THE WALLACE FACTOR by Philip Crass. New York: Manor Books, Inc., 296 pp. $1.95. By LOIS JOSIMOVICH Since the day George Corley Wallace emerged from the sleepy farmsteads and political oblivion of south- eastern Alabama and triumphantly crossed the thresh- .hold of the governor's mansion in 1963, he has be- come one of the most controversial figures the modern South has yet produced. Labelled a 'populist dema- gogue' and a 'hate-monger' by some, a 'God and coun- try man' by others, Wallace has been diversely com- pared to F.D.R., Hitler, and Huey Long (the fire- breathing governor and senator who held Louisiana in his grasp during the early thirties). "Weighed dowa ia a wheelchair by his below-the-waist paralysis and plagued by hearing loss and coastant pain, Frady argues, the man is an empty and vague effigy of himself before that final blast of violence.'" It comes as no surprise that, at the outset of the S6-year-old Alabamian's fourth bid in the presidential sweepstakes, a number of writers have recently cough- l up tleir variably valuable analyses of "the George Wallace story." Anyone who desires a searching, thoroughly in- formed account of Wallace as a political and a per- sonal phenomenon would be best advised to sift through the rest and read the updated version of Marshall Frady's book-entitled, simply, Wallace. When this Work first appeared in 1968, it was hailed as the most comprehensive and authoritative Wallace book. FRADY, A free-lance journalist who has written for many of the nation's most acclaimed publications, followed Wallace through his gubernatorial and his presidential campaigns. He is a Southerner; and the flavor of the South, the emotions that fade north of the Mason-Dixon line, weld together his darkling but conscientiously straightforward perspective on a man possessed at every waking moment by the fever of politics. "In fact," Frady writes, "what makes Wallace the ultimate demagogue is that, behind his indefatigable scrambling, his ferocious concentration, his inexhaust- ible ambition, there seems to lurk a secret, desperate suspicion that facing him, aside from and beyond his political existence, is nothingness-an empty, terrible white blank." In the new chapter, which deals with Wallace's ac- tivities since 1968, the author adds a post-assassina- tion attempt twist to that statement. "If it was already true before Maryland (where the 1972 attempt took place) that Wallace had no existence and no reality outside of his political lusts and glees-the ultimate political creature-then he has at last, in a way, completely atrophied into that absorption," Frady suggests. IT IS FRADY'S contention that Wallace, in his crip- pled condition, has "simply dimmed"-that he has lost the pugnacious fire which led him from boxing bouts in his youth to his vehement segregationist stands in the sixties and his populist appeal against 'big government' in the early seventies. Weighed down in a wheelchair by his below-the-waist paralysis and plagued by hearing loss and constant pain, Frady argues, the man is "an empty and vague effigy of himself before that final blast of violence . . . dressed and tended and trundled about like a doll, produced only for those carefully selected and programmed oc- casions where he conjures forth imitations of his old cocky, waggish, eye-glinting fury, but giving one the impression now that when the crowd scatters and the last lingering echoes ring away in a hush, he will be wheeled off, slumped and blank, and stored to wait for the next appearance." The newest of Frady's fascinating details is his no- tion that Wallace is, at times, feeling guilt pangs about his past, which he sees as an accompaniment to Wallace's last stand. The one problem with the addendum to Wallace is its tendency to look like exactly what it is-a hasty summary (thirty pages) of one of the most intense and tragic periods of George Wallace's life, published and rushed into paperback just in time for the pri- mary book-buying craze. Frady tends to generalize a bit more in this section, and seems to have strayed somewhat from the intimate knowledge of Wallace's character he implies in the earlier text. IF FRADY SHOWS a careful study and understanding of the complex origins of Wallace's personality and political behavior, another of the slew of Wallace books is an obvious and self-admitted attempt to hit the candidate in every possible way, to heave him out of the American system once and for all. That book is The George Wallace Myth, by reporter Michael Dor- man. The format of Dorman's book is an 'expose' of many commonplace sayings about Wallace-that his sfate has been run honestly, that he is for law and order, that he is no longer 'racist', etc.-followed by explana- tions of the real facts, according to the author. Some chapter titles serve as examples of his sensationalist attempt: "The Political Cash Flows Like Wine"; George Fiddles While Crosses Burn"; "'A Gross Vein of Meanness"' See WALLACE, Page 2 Lois Josimovich is Co-editor of the Saturday Maga- zine.