Behind the Scenes

You know that phrase, "you can't judge a book by its cover"? That teacherly motto that reminds us not to jump to conclusions, that there is more to reality than our first impressions? I never trusted that motto. (I'm not a fan of "you have nothing to fear but fear itself" either, but that's a story for later.) I believe you can judge a book by its cover and that you can also get a true take on a person even on your first meeting.

Case in point:

I worked nearby two very strange people at West Publishing who later were found to be criminally insane--or insanely criminal. It was clear to me the moment I met them.

A privately owned, multimillion dollar company is an odd duck these days, both by its often idiosyncratic business practices and also because it is surrounded by the more slick, publicly held corporations more common in American business. I remember West Publishing never gave out revenue statistics to the local business media but it did give out to staff free boxed turkeys on Thanksgiving, free pastries early mornings, and free fruit and milk on all lunch shifts. It gave free memberships for the St. Paul Athletic Club and free car washes after every noontime excursion for all its executives. As the era of computerization and digital content drove West to become ever more protective of its legal competitiveness, it became more and more secretive and we often wondered what went on behind the scenes.

One day we were shocked to see our company cashier, Elroy Stock, escorted out of the building by the FBI. Elroy was one of those joyless bureaucrats, a little like Dwight Schroot from the sitcom The Office. He wore ironed, but worn, white shirts, drab polyester suitcoat and slacks, and had slicked-back hair like Dennis the Menace's dad. He always hung his coat on a hangar so he could work the cashier counter in rolled-up shirtsleeves.

When Elroy was escorted out of the building the day he was arrested rumor had it that they had closed off access to all the elevators surrounding his floor. Then the stories spread quickly. Elroy had been arrested. They thought Elroy might fight back. Someone heard Elroy shouting from the hallways.

All I really knew about Elroy was this: he had a disdain for most people who interrupted his time at the cashier window, and was especially rude to the female clerks who came up to cash their personal checks. Someone in my department wondered if any of us could make Elroy smile and said he'd put up money for anyone who was willing to try. A few of us took up the bet and we'd work Elroy through the opening of that plastic cashier window. I think I got a smirk out of Elroy but I wasn't sure, it was a little like that ambiguous Mona Lisa smile.

Anyway, we were sure Elroy had been taken away for embezzling. His cheap polyester suits were the dead giveaway for a company crook who wanted more of the good life.

But the next day we heard about all the hateful things Elroy had been doing behind that cashier's facade and from his lowly Woodbury apartment: he'd been sending mounds of racist hate letters to people all over the Midwest, mostly targeting interracial couples and their children. From City Pages, "Stock dedicated his free time to his belief story, often rising in the early morning to send out a stack of mail. . . . 'The colored men thought they had the right to date white girls. I saw that as wrong. And when I saw those girls getting pregnant, that's when my new mission started. I had plenty of work to do,' he says. 'I would fill grocery sacks with mail. I just kept working and working.' He is not sure how many letters he has sent, or to how many people--hundreds of thousands at least, he guesses, maybe a half-million. He did little else. 'I've lived a frugal life,' he boasts. 'Never taken a trip since World War II. I never married, so I never had anybody pushing me around.'

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Another unforgettable employee at West was Susan Berkovitz, the woman recently sentenced to life for murdering Shelley Joseph-Kordell, estate counsel for Berkovitz's parents, at the Hennepin County Government building in 2003.

Some of you may have seen Susan over the years. She was a familiar sight in the Hamline-St. Clair neighborhood and you couldn't miss her disheveled appearance: dressed in black and pink, tangled hair, heavy eye make-up, red lips, always talking to herself, her appearance and disturbing character deteriorating year by year. At West, she seemed to try hard to be an "office girl." She teased her jet-black hair high over her part, wore heels, and applied lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror after breaks. But her make-up was so heavy and so off-kilter that some women used to say that Susan drew all her make-up onto a big mirror and then stamped that painted face onto hers, except that some days she missed so it looked like those out-0f-register cartoons when all the color is off-center. She knew we talked about her and I could feel the heat in her rising and rising. I could feel her anger and I didn't even know her. A particularly polished and snooty College Division editor was in the bathroom with Susan and called out the catty nickname she and her friends had given Susan: Morticia. When that woman left the bathroom Morticia--Susan--ran out after her yelling, "That bitch didn't wash her hands. Look at her, she didn't even wash her hands."

A few years ago I ran into Susan at the Dorothy Day Center where I was helping to serve the free nightly dinner. She was alone, wearing black pants and black Keds and a bright pink windbreaker, talking to herself, alone at a table surrounded by rough and hungry homeless men, eating scalloped potatoes and canned ham. I felt bad for her. She recognized me and I hoped she didn't think I was one of the mean office girls from those West days. How naive of me to think she still had an opinion of me, considering her situation and all that anger that filled her mind at the time. It was only a month later that she walked into the Hennepin County building and shot Joseph-Kordell (who happened also to be her cousin) in the face three times with a handgun she had purchased at a gun show that summer.