How The Only Black Teacher I Had Suffered Racial Abuse — And Made My Career in TV Possible

I was going to write a cute story about how shop class in Jr. High School made my lifelong career in TV possible.

Let’s start with that, but it becomes, trust me, much more interesting and MUCH more upsetting. Shocking, actually. But maybe I was just naive.

I went to Jr. High School in the late 1960’s, when shop class was still mandatory. As a result, I took woodworking, metal shop, print shop, mechanical drawing and touch typing.

As I was not going to become a carpenter or metal worker, I thought these pretty much a waste or time. That turned out to be wrong. But my biggest mistake was my take on being required to learn touch typing.

The course was taught by a woman named Fannie Chaffee. She was incredibly tough. She would smack your hands with a ruler if you typed the wrong letters. To this day, my Lawrence HS classmates still talk about her on Facebook.

Tough and demanding though she was, she taught me to type 60 WPM without a mistake. Raw red knuckles, but no mistakes.

She was also the only Black teacher I had in all my years of elementary school — which in itself says a lot.

Many years later, when I was in my 20s, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Law school, probably. In the meantime, I had enrolled in a PhD program (which I never finished) in Islamic History. In 1979 this was about as useful as Sanskrit, another option.

In order to pay the bills, I signed up with a temp agency called Career Blazers. They placed people like me in part time / fill in jobs such as receptionist. In my case, I took their typing test — 60 WPM with no mistakes — so I was farmed out as a typist. I was sent to a bank, to an insurance company, to a law firm as a temporary typist.

One day, they sent me to a TV studio.

I had never been in a TV studio, knew nothing about it, but as I was hired to type transcripts of interviews, it was the same a legal depositions. 60 WPM. No mistakes.

About a week into the job, the Executive Producer of the show, a man named George Merliss came running into the newsroom. The Iranians, it seemed, had just seized our embassy in Teheran and it was all hands on deck for BREAKING NEWS.

Everyone in the room got a job. “You call the White House,” Merliss yelled, pointing at someone. “You call the Pentagon.” Everyone in the room got a job. Including me. “You call the Islamic Center in Washington!” I took off the headphones, picked up the telephone and dialed up The Islamic Center.

“Salaam Aleikum,” I said, “Ana min al- Good Morning America..”

Suddenly Merliss had me by the shirt collar.

“You speak Arabic!” he said.

“I told him I did.”

“Where did you learn?” he asked.

I thought for a moment.

“When I lived in Iran,” I said.

His eyes grew wide as a saucer.

“You lived in Iran?”

I had been to Iran, but what I said made no sense. Iranians don’t speak Arabic, they speak Farsi. But this was TV news. No one knew a thing. So I was hired, on the spot, as the Middle East Expert for ABC News. And that is how I got into TV.

So I was going to end this here by saying Thank You Miss Chaffee.

That was until I googled Fannie Chaffee, looking for her picture.

Instead, I found a far more disturbing story about her. About how she had been fired as a teacher in Westchester because of her ‘Southern Accent.”

Yeah.

Right.

I had no idea she had suffered such demeaning racial insults and worse in her career. I had no idea, until now. How utterly revolting.

So thank you Miss Chaffee, both for making my career and even moreso for enduring the unendurable. So sorry and so grateful to you.