Lois M. Randall to Loren D. Estleman, 16 June 1997.
I’m a
native Californian, born a long time ago. I grew up during the Great Depression
and had no hope of college. However, after high school, thanks to the
availability of an excellent local junior college, I was able to attend and
graduate from it in 1942 and worked at the San Bernardino Army Air Base all
during World War II. I was able to finish college (UC Berkeley, English major)
after what my generation still refers to as The War, and met my husband at
Berkeley. That’s the in-a-nutshell version of my biography.
A few
important family biographical particulars: my father was a Missouri farm boy
whose schooling ended at about the fourth grade, after his father died from a
fall in an icehouse where he had been working in 1904 (obviously, with no
pension or other social benefits), and my grandmother [did] her best to support
him. They moved to Southern California when my father was fifteen, and seven
years later he and my mother (daughter of a small-town grocer) were married
after her high school graduation. I was born four years later.
My father
worked as a cement contractor, and he and my mother bought a very small house
in 1925, four years before the 1929 stock market crash. Obviously, my parents
had no stock or bonds, but the building trades were about the first to be
affected by the Crash. The years up to 1933 were nightmarish for my parents: no
work, no money, nothing to fall back on. My mother was an excellent seamstress
and cold bring in a little money, but not very much. I don’t know how old I was
when my dad had to apply for financial assistance, but I do remember the day he
came home and told my mother he had had to sign something called a “Pauper’s
Oath” to get help. I think he was then about thirty-five, an age when he had
expected to be able to pay off the mortgage and be a responsible citizen.
Signing the oath may not seem like much now, and he did it; but it was
something he never forgot.
Before the
1932 presidential election, California had some sort of inadequate work program
that my father signed up for.
Lois M. Randall to Don Sharp, 5 May 1983
I’m a
native Californian who has been driving since 1940 and copy editing since 1965.
Your mentioning the tree-and-pulley method of engine repair reminded me that my
cousin tore down, as I recall it, a bright red Essex under an ash tree in our
back yard during the mid-thirties and then put it back together in better
condition than it had been when he bought it. I’m afraid I got more than a
little grease on my hands (and clothes) while he was working on it. ….
As the
native California daughter of a native California mother (my mother taught
herself to drive in my parents’ Model T in the early twenties), I can say that
many women have driven cars alone as long as I can remember.
Lois M. Randall, Job Application to Library Journal, 31 March 1960.
I am a
native Californian, born in 1921 …. I Majored in English at the University of
California at Berkeley and was graduated with the class of 1948. My husband in
is college English teaching, which is something of a gypsy profession; and we
were married while he was in graduate school. Consequently, as we moved from
graduate school to various teaching positions, I gathered experience in a
variety of occupations which might fit me for the position that you have open.
While we
were at the University of Minnesota I worked as an editorial assistant in the
College of Education, editing and summarizing reports on school administration
and construction written by the director of the Bureau of Field Studies and
Surveys and his staff. Moving on to Northwestern University, I was an assistant
to the documents librarian in the university library. Since we have been at
Wellesley I copy edited four children’s books on a freelance basis under the
guidance of Mrs. Mary Rackliffe, head copy editor at Little, Brown and Company;
since last June I have been employed by the Wellesley Free Library.
Lois M. Randall to Arnold Tovell, 14 May 1965
When my husband
took his first full-time position (at Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois), I worked in the university library, and my editorial
work—officially—came to a halt. However, it was then that my husband was
finishing up his dissertation, and I gained a lot more unofficial editorial
experience, since I typed all but the final copy of the dissertation. Later,
when it became a book (The Landscape and
the Looking Glass, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960), I was again
unofficially employed as a proofreader.
By that
time, we have moved to Massachusetts, where he has taught American literature
(at Boston College) since 1960. For two years, 1960-62, I worked as editorial
assistant and secretary to Ruth Hill Viguers, editor of The Horn Book Magaine, leaving only because we were going to live
for a year in Belgium, where John was Fulbright lecturer in American literature
for 1962-63. My work on The Horn Book
included both copy editing and proofreading, as well as indexing the magazine.
Since our
return from Europe in the fall of 1963, I have been employed as a more-or-less
full-time housewife, a part-time secretary, and a free-lance manuscript reader
of children’s books. I have discovered that I would prefer to be a full-time
copy editor and hire a cleaning woman. It would be nice to be paid $95 a week.
Sarah Flynn, 18 July 1986
As some of
you may know, today is Lois Randall’s last day with Houghton Mifflin. She has
chosen to retire on her sixty-fifth birthday. Lois has been with us for eight
years. Among the authors she worked with are Paul Brooks, Pat Conroy, Loren
Estleman, A. G. Guthrie, Jr., Morgan Llywelyn, Edwin Newman, and Robert Taylor;
she expects to take on certain projects on a free-lance basis in the future.
Before joining HMCo, Lois was production editor at Beacon Press, and she
started in publishing at The Horn Book.
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