Sometimes the most significant things in life turn out to be surprises that come out of the blue. Stuart Chapin, the revered, senior faculty member of the UNC School of City and Regional Planning, had just received a federal grant to study the behavior, lifestyles, and values of the white working class. The study was mainly qualitative, using survey research. But to keep the research honest, the budget included funding for the position of a “participant observer.” The job description called for someone to live in the research area for one full year, get to know people who lived there, and to dictate daily observations, which would be transcribed and then read by the principal researchers in Chapel Hill. It would involve a second year in Chapel Hill reviewing the transcripts and contributing to the final report regarding the research. Professor Chapin called me into his office on a hot day in May, and asked me if I would consider being the participant observer.

He went on to say that the area being studied was the lowest income, almost exclusively white neighborhood in the Mid Atlantic region, located just outside of Washington, DC and included four white working class, small towns in Prince Georges County, Maryland, adjacent to the District of Columbia. Of course, I had no experience in doing anything like this, had never taken a sociology course, and was somewhat concerned that it would throw my job search off track. I was hoping to find a job working in one of the new HUD initiatives associated with the Model Cities Program or in the New Town Movement. In fact, I had applied for some of those jobs but had not been successful in landing anything yet. So maybe this might be an interim option or a placeholder that would not upset my career path.

I talked it over with Embry, who encouraged me to take the job. This would also affect her career path as well, but she said being a stay-at-home mom appealed to her if it meant only one year. Besides, her focus now was on our next child, who would be born in midsummer.

I took the job.

Andrew Martin Howell was born by natural childbirth on July 6, 1969, in Watts Hospital in Durham. Three weeks later we rented a small U-Hall truck, packed it with our meager belongings and headed to the Washington area and the study area neighborhood. I drove the truck. Embry drove our VW Beetle with Andrew strapped into the backseat. Professor Chapin had managed to find a modest apartment for us to rent in Mt. Rainer, Maryland, the ground level of a modest two-story house with another apartment on the second floor. Our adventure was underway!

So, the question for me was how on Earth to go about this job. Over the summer in preparation for the assignment, I had taken an urban anthropology course in the UNC summer school and had done a good bit of reading, but to describe this as a seat of the pants operation is an understatement. I was clueless.

Basically, what I did was to hang out in the neighborhood for one full year. This meant sitting on front porches and talking to folks, attending neighborhood gatherings, joining a bowling league with Embry and our next door neighbors, joining a fishing club and a community swimming pool, hanging out at the local bar, and attending town meetings and various church services on Sundays.

There is no way I could have done this job had I not been married. Having an infant child was an additional benefit. A lot of my conversations were with women when their husbands were away at work. A single person would have been suspect spending so much time with their wives and would be risking his life. I got to know two families very well, whom I called “the Mosebys,” our next door neighbors, and “the Shacklefords,” a family up the street. All names are fictional. These two families ended up being the main families in the “report” that I would write when I returned to Chapel Hill the following year.

Our neighbors invariably would get up their courage and ask me exactly what I was doing in the neighborhood and what kind of job I had. My answer was that the federal government wanted to know more about how ordinary people lived to make better policy decisions. My job was to live in the community for a year and then report back about how “real people” lived. This would always get a skeptical look with a response like, “You mean to tell me that the federal government is hiring you just to live here and report back how we ordinary people live?” They would repeat the question two or three times, then smile, chuckle and reply, “Goddamn, ain’t that just like the federal government!”

What I did not tell them was that every day I would retreat to our apartment and dictate my observations, then send off the tape at the end of the week to Chapel Hill to be transcribed. I had a hint that I might be on to something when in November following a two-week bout with the flu, I got a nervous phone call from the person doing the transcribing asking me what was going on and why she hadn’t gotten the usual tape in the mail. She confessed that every Sunday a group of about a dozen of her friends gathered in her apartment over beer and pizza to listen to the tapes.

At the end of the assignment, the transcriptions totaled more than 2,500 pages. Professor Chapin encouraged me to see if I might be able to get a book out of the research I had done and encouraged me to write it all up and then mimeograph my draft and send it off to five publishers—Random House, Harper and Rowe, Wiley Interscience, Little Brown, and Doubleday. It took me the better part of the year to do this. I had titled the manuscript “Hard Living on Clay Street: Studies of Blue Collar Families.” It was not long before I got the first rejection, then a second and a third. Two publishers remained, Little Brown and Doubleday. I figured that Little Brown was by far the best bet since they had recently published Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Street Corner Men by Eliot Liebow, which had been a huge success. When I got a call from the executive editor of Little Brown, my hopes sunk. His first comment was, “Mr. Howell, we are not going to publish your manuscript. It does not meet our high standards, but the reason I am calling is to ask if you could tell me more about the characters in the book. First, what about Barry and Bobbi Jean?” It was one of the most bizarre conversations I had ever had. The guy was obsessed with these characters and wanted to know about all of them and then had the nerve to ask if I would mind giving him a call in a few months if their lives had changed. I thanked him for the call and hung up in disbelief. Of all the nerve!

Well, that was it. I knew I had no chance with Doubleday, the biggest of them all; and when the Doubleday rejection letter came, I tossed the thin envelope in the waste basket without opening it. When Embry asked why I would not even open the letter, I told her I had suffered enough disappointment and was moving on. By that time, I had landed my first job in my new field of housing and real estate development and wanted to put the entire “Clay Street” experience behind me. I sighed and gave in, opening the letter. The exact wording of the letter was this: “Mr. Howell, we have read your ‘Clay Street’ manuscript and will publish it. We will be in touch with you shortly.” It was signed by Loretta Barrett, editor-in-chief, Doubleday Books.

I didn’t faint on the spot but came close.

It took the usual nine months for the book to come out, renamed by Doubleday. Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families. I had no idea what to expect. Then the reviews started to come in –around 25 in all– and all without exception were positive. It was the first Doubleday Achor paperback original to be reviewed in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, which triggered dozens of interviews, mainly on the radio via phone interviews, but I also had a long interview on the CBS television morning news.

The ethical crisis I faced was this: how to assure that the two main families could benefit financially from the book sales. The idea of “privileged guy writes book about poor people. Privileged guy benefits, poor people get nothing,” was too much, so I asked Doubleday to give each family a 10 percent cut of the royalties. They said they had never heard of such a thing and could not accommodate but for the next ten years I did it on my own anyway, which assuaged my guilt and put some money to good use. It also made the two main families my biggest book promoters.

There were some other issues. I once got an angry call from a woman who said she lived in the neighborhood and that she was “going to sue my ass” for using her name, “Bobbi Jean Shackleford” as a main character in the book. All the names I had used of course were fictional. Doubleday assured me not to worry since it is basically impossible to come up with a fictional name that someone did not already have. The aggrieved lady never got back to me.

Before I sent the manuscript off to publishers, I had sent a copy to my favorite English professor at Davidson College to ask him what he thought. It took a few weeks for him to get back to me, but when he called his first comment was, “Joe, how does it feel to have written a book people will be reading 50 years from now?” Hard Living on Clay Street was published in 1973. It is still in print today. That makes 53 years and counting (though for the last few decades the publisher has been Waveland Press.)

The book, of course, is something I am deeply proud of; but when it was published in 1973, I had already moved in a completely different direction, a career in the real estate development field. Getting a foothold in that new direction was not easy. How that happened—and the challenges associated with it—is the subject of the next post.

Stay tuned.

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