Exchange Place: How A Small Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation
Season 1, Episode 11: Ms. Pamela Cole: Working Life

AUGUST 14, 2023 | THE 431 EXCHANGE; MYA CARTER, JEFF GEOFFRAY (HOSTS); PAMELA COLE (GUEST); KEVIN GULLAGE (MUSIC)

TRANSCRIPT:

[Dear Audience, this transcript corresponds exactly to the Youtube Podcast version that has a slightly different structure for the opening three minutes. Therefore, while the words correspond perfectly the timecode is off by 30 seconds or so. Thank you for your understanding. Thank you.]

[00:00:00]

[00:00:00] Pamela Cole: When we got there, the Fountain Valley murder trial was in the headlines. Delta was telling people they were not responsible for them once they got off the plane. They would tell us not to shop alone. The U.S. sent marshals to the island to maintain peace. You would see these marshals in trees and things. They had rifles and all this stuff. And all of that was unnerving to me. The airport shutdown at five o'clock. My biggest fear was what if something breaks out [laughs] [00:00:30] and we can't get off this island?

[00:00:32] Mya Carter: The 431 Exchange presents Exchange Place: How A Small, Struggling School Transformed Civil Rights in New Orleans and the Nation. Exchange Place is the story of a school whose mission was to train mostly African American women the skills they needed to integrate the secretarial offices of the Deep South, between 1965 and '72. Those [00:01:00] offices were not just segregated, for the most part they were completely off limits to women of color and many were fighting to ensure the workplace would stay that way for years or decades to come.

The first season of the podcast tells the inspirational biographies of the school's graduates who changed the moral skyline of their city, how they did it, and how the school's teachers and supporters struggled to overcome the massive forces arrayed against them.

Episode [00:01:30] 11: Pamela Cole - A Working Life.

An exchange between Pamela Cole, Adult Education Center class of 1972, and Jeff Geoffray, the youngest son of the Center's director.

Part 1: A Working Life

[00:01:48] Jeff Geoffray: A work opportunity for your boyfriend in the Virgin Islands with a petroleum company, Amerada Hess, led to a marriage proposal.

[00:01:56] Pamela Cole: He had started interviewing with a headhunter, as you [00:02:00] would call them, and the lady got him the interview at Amerada Hess in the Virgin Islands. So he went down to the islands and called me. And he was like, "Oh, I love it here. I think I'm gonna accept this job, but I don't wanna be here alone. I want you to come with me. I said, "Oh yeah, sure. I, I would love living in the Virgin Islands." But my mother said, "Oh no, you're not going to the Virgin Islands without the benefit of a wedding ring." [laughs] I told him, "No, I can't go unless you and I get married." And he said, "Oh no, I was gonna ask [00:02:30] you to marry me."

So we got engaged on his birthday which was March 4th. We got married on March 24th, that same month. And we moved to St. Croix the following month.

[00:02:42] Jeff Geoffray: So, in just a few months you'd graduated from the Adult Education Center, landed your first executive job at Shell, you were promoted to a team that was responsible for moving Shell's corporate offices from New Orleans to Houston, you moved to Houston, became engaged, got married, and [00:03:00] then went to live abroad in the Virgin Islands.

[00:03:02] Pamela Cole: Yes, I had to quit my job, give up my apartment, move back to New Orleans, plan a wedding and then go to the islands. That was a lot for me because I was only twenty-one, twenty-two years old at the time. But persevered.

[00:03:18] Jeff Geoffray: That wouldn't be the last time your life and your career was secondary to your husband's career. When you arrived in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, it was a politically charged environment.

In 1972 a group of [00:03:30] armed gunmen murdered eight employees and tourists at the Fountain Valley Golf Course. Seven of the eight killed were White. Another eight were either shot or wounded. The perpetrators were Afro-Caribbean. And the defense argued in part that the murders were politically motivated, but others said it was a robbery gone wrong. One of the defendants was quoted as saying that he was "Angry about foreigners coming in to take our money and leaving us with nothing."

The Fountain [00:04:00] Valley murder trial in the following months put the Virgin Islands on edge. As an African American from the mainland, United States, you were caught off guard by the resentment of all foreigners, Black or White, by Afro-Caribbean people living in the Virgin Islands.

[00:04:16] Pamela Cole: When we got there, the Fountain Valley murder trial was in the headlines. Delta was telling people they were not responsible for them once they got off the plane. They would tell us not to shop alone. The U.S. sent marshals to the [00:04:30] island to maintain peace. You would see these marshals in trees and things. They had rifles and all this stuff. And all of that was unnerving to me. the airport shutdown at five o'clock. My biggest fear was what if something breaks out [laughs] and we can't get off this island?

[00:04:48] Jeff Geoffray: The tensions were on another level from what you'd experienced in New Orleans. For instance, you were evacuated from a restaurant after a riot broke out on the streets, and gunmen and gunfire [00:05:00] spilled into where you were eating.

[00:05:01] Pamela Cole: Black power stuff was always far removed, but here I was in the heart of the matter, us assuming because we were all Black people there would be a correlation between your troubles and my troubles or whatev-... But, no, they didn't see it like that. They considered us outsiders. They said we were taking jobs that belonged to the people in St. Croix.

[00:05:25] Jeff Geoffray: You learned the hard way there were prejudices between the people of one Caribbean island [00:05:30] and another. Barbados, Saint Kitts, Aruba, Trinidad, etc.

[00:05:34] Pamela Cole: I thought everybody there was Crucian. One guy, his name was Maurice, I say, "Oh, are you Crucian?" He went off on me. And he told me, "No, I'm not a Crucian!" And they considered Crucians to be lazy people. And they had their own stereotypes of the Crucians.

[00:05:51] Jeff Geoffray: You made friends with another Black couple from New Jersey who'd also come to St. Croix at the same time. They felt much the same as you.

[00:05:58] Pamela Cole: One of the, the [00:06:00] other couples who had come down the same month we arrived from New Jersey, her husband had accepted a job to come to St. Croix and work for Amerada Hess. She was a social worker in New York, and they would not hire her in the islands. Telling her that she did not understand what their problems were.

[00:06:21] Jeff Geoffray: You got an office job at a local law firm and experienced tensions with two Afro-Caribbean women who worked in the same office.

[00:06:28] Pamela Cole: The only person [00:06:30] who would befriend me in the office was a lady from Trinidad, and her name was Linda. Myrtle and Irene, they were from St. Croix. We were all working in a purchasing department and my desk was between the two of them. A lot of times, you know, the men would come in from the field and they would pass by my desk and say, "Bonjour, Madame." So being from New Orleans, you know, you're friendly. I would smile. They started bringing me gifts of, uh, mangoes, coconuts and Coca Cola [00:07:00] would be on my desk. Myrtle and Irene would get mad and, and they would talk about me as if I had gone into the ladies' room but I would be sitting there [laughs]. Talking about like, "Yeah, man, that one there, her husband, he up there on the big hill." [laughs]

[00:07:13] Jeff Geoffray: Your husband was quote, "Up there on the big hill," and like he was working with the corporate office and was sort of above all of you.

[00:07:20] Pamela Cole: I would say, "My gosh, what did I do to these ladies?" And so Linda would hear them and she would come over. And she was from Trinidad and she would say, "Pam, pay these two no attention. They [00:07:30] jealous of you, girl. They jealous of you because you're so beautiful." [laughs]

[00:07:34] Jeff Geoffray: You, your mom and Aunt Marjorie were all letter writers. Did you write letters home?

[00:07:38] Pamela Cole: All your food came from Miami, so a lot of the natives had chickens and goats, that's why curried goat was so popular on the islands. But I, I would send letters home to my mom and I would say, "I'd make me a piña coloda using this Crucian rum. I'd get good and drunk, and that way when I go to the supermarket I don't have to pay attention to the prices." [00:08:00] [laughs]

[00:08:00] Jeff Geoffray: The food prices were high because it was imported from Miami, but the rum was cheap. You felt homesick but Ernestina, who'd come to the Virgin Islands with her husband, got physically ill from the tension of living there.

[00:08:13] Pamela Cole: I felt so helpless. What is gonna happen to us if anything happens? Are we gonna be protected? Ernestina, her husband decided to leave the island because she broke out into hives. Her nerves was just that bad at what was going on that the doctor [00:08:30] recommended that she return to The States.

So then when we left, I had no one. They were older than us, and we had gotten to be real close to them. So when they left the island I felt abandoned. I was like, "Oh no, I don't have anybody here now."

[00:08:44] Jeff Geoffray: Your worst fears were almost realized. A catastrophic explosion occurred at the refinery where you were working.

[00:08:51] Pamela Cole: The week we were scheduled to leave there was a big explosion on the island, in one of the areas of the refinery. And I remembered them [00:09:00] having to shut down this gas real fast. I was in the purchasing department in the actual vicinity but towards the front end. We heard the explosion. The island was, I think, twenty-six miles long. You could cover Christiansted to Frederiksted in about fifteen minutes. But I was so fearful that the whole island was gonna blow up.

[00:09:21] Jeff Geoffray: I understand from news reports of the time that the explosion could be heard all over the island. It triggered your worst fear, the fear of being stuck on the [00:09:30] island with no possibility of rescue. Fortunately, your very worst fears weren't realized and you were able to leave for the mainland on schedule.

Out of the frying pan back into the fire. When you moved back to The States for your husband to work at the corporate offices of Amerada Hess in Woodbridge, New Jersey, that town was so segregated that the only place you could stay was a hotel. And not just any hotel, the Holiday Inn was the only nearby hotel that would accept Black guests. The company left you to [00:10:00] fend for ourselves, that is, to find a place to live.

Many people associate segregation with the southern United States. But as we know, segregation was a nationwide phenomenon from cities to small towns. In James Loewen's landmark work, Sundown Towns, he documented thousands of sundown towns where African Americans and other minorities could not stay past sundown, and certainly could not live, or in other cases, work. Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law [00:10:30] showed how the American apartheid system was not de facto but de jure up until recent times. That is, not the result of circumstances but the result of laws and policies supported and enforced by the federal government, as well as state, city and local government and law enforcement.

When I interviewed you about your career path, I was struck by how you and your husband, and other African Americans, knew to work within and around this system as a matter of fact. What [00:11:00] shocks me is to be reminded that this was still a reality even in the 1970s, that you were working around these restrictions.

[00:11:08] Pamela Cole: Amerada Hess transferred us Stateside. My husband went to work for their offices in Woodbridge, New Jersey, which was a very segregated township. We were at a Holiday Inn in Woodbridge. You could see the Amerada Hess offices very close to where we were staying in a hotel. When we were [00:11:30] living in the Holiday Inn in Woodbridge, there were no Blacks in that area. Even in the hotel, there were no Black waiters, there were no Black cooks. I saw nobody Black, until one day a guy who was a salesman for Gulf Oil Company. He lived in Philadelphia but he would often stop in New Jersey. And he happened to be in the same hotel that we were sta-, living at. And he came up to us and [00:12:00] he was just hugging us, And we didn't understand. He was like, "I haven't seen a Black face in this place." [laughs]

So naturally we all got to be close friends. So he started showing us the Black areas of New Jersey where he would go and, and find food. So this is how we ended up in Rahway because there was a restaurant and they had just built these, uh, twin tower apartments. And they were integrated.

[00:12:26] Jeff Geoffray: The apartments were technically integrated. Was the neighborhood integrated [00:12:30] too?

[00:12:30] Pamela Cole: It was mostly a Black community where we lived. I could walk to the train station and catch the train that took me to Newark every morning. New Jersey is a lot of factories. There was a Norelco factory in the heart of that Black community where I think a lot of the Blacks worked.

[00:12:48] Jeff Geoffray: Many Black communities were located near factories, prisons and industrial areas. Also within close proximity to commuting centers. Places that were less desirable from a real estate [00:13:00] standpoint. Or conversely, where voters with relatively less political power would have correspondingly less to say in zoning of factories, chemical plants, interstates and prisons.

[00:13:11] Pamela Cole: I managed to get a job after we did find an apartment in Rahway. I got an interview with Prudential Life Insurance Company which was located in Newark, New Jersey. I was in Newark, I think for roughly three years before they sent me to the Woodbridge offices.

[00:13:29] Jeff Geoffray: [00:13:30] You advanced at Prudential taking on more responsibility but often without additional salary or title. For instance, when you started managing the steno pool in the actuarial department you designed a tracking system showing how much work was being done for whom, and that exposed certain problems within the department that had gone unnoticed. Your initiative got you into trouble because it exposed some issues with one of the actuaries. On the other hand, your initiative helped you get your first secretarial job, as [00:14:00] opposed to working in a secretarial pool. And with a boss who gave you some good advice.

[00:14:04] Pamela Cole: I got my first secretarial working for the guy who was over Human Resources, his name was Alex Plinio, P-L-I-N-I-O. And he looked just like Al Pacino. The Godfather [laughs] was the big hit movie, and I loved that movie. He got me to slow down. He would say, "Pam, I know you like to type fast but I can tell how many times you take [00:14:30] that paper out and start over." So he says, "I want you to slow down your typing and go for accuracy over speed."

In, in a typing pool you had to type fast so that was my thing, but I did learn how to slow down and that really worked. Then a position became available in the training department at Prudential.

[00:14:52] Jeff Geoffray: This is now the mid-1970s. How many other Black secretaries did you encounter at the workplace?

[00:14:57] Pamela Cole: Usually at that time I was [00:15:00] always the only Black. Even when I worked for Alex in the Human Resources Department, I was the only Black. Then when I moved to the training department I was the only Black.

[00:15:10] Jeff Geoffray: So, after the Virgin Islands you were integrating one office after another, even in the north where segregation wasn't supposed to be part of the culture or the laws. In the training department an inexperienced White teenager just out of high school pulled strings to earn parity in salary with you, even though [00:15:30] you had worked at Prudential for several years at the time, had an unblemished work record and more skills. In the interaction you describe, it seems like everyone except you took it for granted that you would understand why your making ten dollars more an hour than any White person in a comparable job was a problem.

This might be considered an isolated incident, but for the fact that it's hauntingly consistent with comprehensive outside studies in thousands of [00:16:00] workplaces and our own small sampling of how Black women were discriminated against in terms of pay and promotions, even as they were making progress and at least getting a foothold in the White-collar workforce.

[00:16:12] Pamela Cole: I worked for the associate director of training, and he was the guy who did all of the tests for the people who were training to become an actuary. He and I had a good relationship up until Donna, who worked for the director of the department, realized I [00:16:30] was making ten dollars more than her. Donna felt she should be making more than me because she worked for the director. But she had come right out of high school, no previous training. Whereas, I had training and secretarial skills.

And so, it made me feel I'm not valued because you must see the output. I was doing all of the typing, all of the work for the actuaries.

[00:16:54] Jeff Geoffray: Donna ultimately did get the raise. Your assessment of your abilities was confirmed when you were [00:17:00] recommended for a position in the legal department by someone within the legal department, but your boss in the training department who had told you about Donna's raise, blocked what would have been a substantial promotion for you.

[00:17:12] Pamela Cole: The lady in Human Resources called me, and she said, "The legal department would like you to join them. They're gonna send you to paralegal school in New York." She said, "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" And I was like, "Oh, yeah!" She said, "But Pam, let Mr. Becker tell you." Mr. Becker was my boss at [00:17:30] the time. She said, "I just wanted you to know I think it's a wonderful opportunity for you." I said, "Okay."

And so I waited and at the end of the week Mr. Becker still had not said anything to me, so I went into his office and I said, "I understand the legal department is interested in me coming to work with them." I said, "I would love that opportunity." And he said, "I turned it down." He said, "I think that you are the best secretary I have ever had. And I just [00:18:00] don't think I will ever find a secretary like you."

And that was the nail in the coffin because [laughs] I was really furious by then. Now you're stopping me from a better opportunity because you feel you are not gonna find a better secretary.

[00:18:17] Jeff Geoffray: You may not agree but it sounds like a plantation mentality. Like he's the master of you and your destiny. Fortunately at that time you had the freedom to quit and find a better opportunity. You handed [00:18:30] in your resignation at Prudential and almost immediately got a job working for the pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson, that had become a progressive company in terms of diversity.

[00:18:40] Pamela Cole: This was my first opportunity to work with a Black male. He was military, Mr. Frank Steele. He was a graduate of West Point. Johnson & Johnson hired him as their EEO director.

[00:18:54] Jeff Geoffray: The EEO stands for equal employment opportunity. In 1972, Johnson & [00:19:00] Johnson was one of a group of public companies that made a point of hiring more diverse management after the intense pressure put on GM and other companies to do so in 1970.

An SEC ruling in favor of shareholder resolutions addressing social issues and scrutiny from the Michigan Civil Rights Commission for violating the state's anti-discrimination clause were factors that finally caused GM to appoint an African American to its board. Like the corporations of the Deep South, there were no Black [00:19:30] secretaries at GM when the Adult Education Center was conceived. Much less Blacks in management.

The point I'd emphasize is that desegregation in the workplace did not happen magnanimously, nor because of changes in the law. The changes finally happened when pressure was applied by groups and individuals applying pressure within the limits of the law.

[00:19:51] Pamela Cole: There was also a Black vice president at Johnson & Johnson, Mr. Harold Sims. He was vice president over the [00:20:00] community affairs department, and had previously been heading up the National Urban League before Vernon Jordan. This was the first corporation that I worked for that had Black supervisors, a Black vice president, Black directors and Black lawyers.

[00:20:19] Jeff Geoffray: You were amazed by the feeling of working in a vertically desegregated company and your responsibilities expanded beyond the secretarial offices. You became a trusted colleague of men in upper [00:20:30] management, especially Harold Sims whose mandate was to represent Johnson & Johnson to the minority communities and recruit African Americans and women managers into the company "to reduce chances for inflammatory situations as experienced at AT&T, Polaroid, Sears and McMillan & Company," to name but a few.

[00:20:50] Pamela Cole: I used to coordinate their participation every year with the National Urban League, like setting up the hotels, getting their hotel reservations made, [00:21:00] making sure, uh, the Blacks going to attend, which was usually Harold Sims, my boss and some of the Black lawyers. So, I was meeting so many Blacks with high level positions. I had never had that opportunity before.

I think I really blossomed at Johnson & Johnson. I started taking classes at Rutgers Community College at night.

[00:21:23] Jeff Geoffray: Johnson & Johnson paid for your night classes, meanwhile you'd moved to New Brunswick and you were starting to [00:21:30] enjoy all that part of the country could offer.

[00:21:33] Pamela Cole: I loved New Brunswick. I loved being near Trenton University. My friend, Marjorie, one of my neighbors, worked for Princeton University. Marjorie and I started taking classes at New York School of Visual Arts on Saturdays. And my husband started taking camera, he wanted to take photography.

So on Saturday's we would all take these classes and it would last like, from maybe nine to twelve in the [00:22:00] afternoon. And then we would spend the day in New York. I did not min New York, just being there, because I knew we would leave at the end of the day. But then we ended up moving to New York and I just thought it was gonna be the worst 'cause at the time, they were predicting the stock exchange was gonna fall and jobs was gonna leave New York. And so, a lot of people had started bailing out of New York which is how we were able to get an apartment so fast.

[00:22:26] Jeff Geoffray: Just as you were becoming acclimated to the East Coast and [00:22:30] even though you were thriving at your job, your husband wanted to quit his White-collar job in accounting to pursue a career in photography, and you supported him.

[00:22:38] Pamela Cole: I didn't wanna leave. I wanted to remain at Johnson & Johnson. He wanted us to move to New York because he wanted to "do his trip" as he said. He wanted to become a professional photographer.

[00:22:50] Jeff Geoffray: Unfortunately, that meant quitting your job and moving to New York City. You got a job working for a management and financial consulting firm in Manhattan called Towers, Perrin, [00:23:00] Forster & Crosby. Simultaneously, you enrolled at Rutgers University to get a communications degree.

[00:23:06] Pamela Cole: I worked for Towers, Perrin and Forster & Crosby, and they were a management consulting firm. I was in the communications division. When I was at Rutgers, I started with being a communications major. Then when I moved to New York, I enrolled at Fordham because it was my desire to get a degree in communications.

Towers, Perrin, their secretarial pool was slightly different. When [00:23:30] you worked for clients you were required to take a cab, go up to Wall Street, and deliver benefits packages for various companies to show the employees how much money their employer was spending on their benefits.

I had never had that experience. All of a sudden I'm able to go here, take a cab. And it wasn't, "Be back in ten, fifteen minutes." It was like, when you come back you would start another job because you had to keep a time sheet for every client you [00:24:00] performed typing for. And I loved that.

[00:24:02] Jeff Geoffray: At the same time you applied to Towers, Perrin, you applied to work at Columbia University. You didn't get the job but it sparked your freelance career.

[00:24:10] Pamela Cole: I had applied at Columbia University. And the guy, he said, "If you say you take dictation at thirty-five words a minute, forty words a minute." I said, "Yeah." He said, "This is forty words a minute." And he just, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when he asked me to read it back and I read it back to him, he say, "I still don't think that was forty words a [00:24:30] minute." And he did not give me the job.

[00:24:32] Jeff Geoffray: You took dictation at a high rate, maybe forty words a minute, but even after you read it back accurately he still didn't give you the job. It kinda reminds me of those Jim Crow voter registration tests where there registrar would have the discretion to fail a Black voter or a poor, White voter who didn't own property, because the registrant couldn't recite The Constitution perfectly or interpret some obscure statute that a White landowner would never even be asked about.[00:25:00]

After the interview and the dictation test, you noticed on a bulletin board there were a lot of law students looking for a secretary to type their papers or resumes.

[00:25:08] Pamela Cole: On my way out I did see some students had, in the little room, they needed typing. So I took down a few numbers. And so, that was primarily how I was getting my own work.

[00:25:20] Jeff Geoffray: That sparked a whole side career as a freelance secretary.

[00:25:23] Pamela Cole: A friend of mine introduced me to a young lady who was dying of ovarian cancer. And she had a [00:25:30] freelance secretarial service. She asked me, "Can you help her, Pam?" And I was like, "Okay, sure. I'll help her." That's how I got into it, was because this lady was at the point where her death was imminent. And she was telling me, "I will turn over all of my clients to you." The same young lady who introduced me to her also put me in contact with a gentleman who had his own business. And he needed secretarial help. I felt, "Okay, I can do this."

I went [00:26:00] ahead and set up a contract with IBM to get an IBM Selectric. For fifty dollars a month they gave you the Selectric typewriter, all your supplies, your paper and everything. And to maintain the contract you just paid them fifty dollars a month. So it was a good setup for me.

[00:26:16] Jeff Geoffray: You maintained a thriving side hustle to go along with your day job at Towers, Perrin. You became well-respected in both places for your attention to detail along with speed.

[00:26:26] Pamela Cole: It was, [laughs] it was a side hustle. And that attention to [00:26:30] detail really helped me because I was doing work for people who relied on me to get it right. I was typing theses and dissertations. I was typing manuscripts for authors who were trying to get books published. What I did was create a template that would help me stay within my margins for whatever position or whatever job that I was doing. But again, it required attention to detail because people did not want a lot of white-out, so you had to make sure [00:27:00] that your typing was correct. Sometimes it meant starting a whole page all over again simply because you had an error in it. I wanted it to be perfect.

Some people say, "Nah, don't worry. You don't have to get it perfect, Pam." But that's something that's been ingrained in me.

[00:27:16] Jeff Geoffray: Despite all the challenges of balancing a nine to five job with a private secretarial service and going to school, you were enthusiastic about what you were doing especially because of the education you were getting from school [00:27:30] and on the job.

[00:27:30] Pamela Cole: I was enjoying the type of work I was doing theses, dissertations. I felt like I was learning from the people I was typing for.

[00:27:38] Jeff Geoffray: While your business was flourishing, Lionel's photography career wasn't doing as well. Taking on the extra work was a way of supporting him so that he could afford to keep going.

[00:27:48] Pamela Cole: I started doing this just as a way for me to have extra money because my husband wasn't that overnight success he thought he was gonna be. Okay, I'll take [00:28:00] on the rent. And then it got to be one thing after the other, so I felt, hey, you're not really meeting your end of this. When we moved here, it was so that you would become a photographer but at the same time, if you see where it's not working for you, you would get a full-time job again. And that was not happening.

[00:28:18] Jeff Geoffray: But in the end what doomed our marriage with Lionel wasn't so much the money, as how he took out his frustrations on you. He blamed you for not quitting your nine to five to help him promote his portfolio.

[00:28:29] Pamela Cole: [00:28:30] He was becoming abusive. Things were not working as he had planned. People would say, "Oh, girl. It's just y'all first year of marriage. Second year, it gets better." We were going into our seventh year of marriage when I decided this is it.

[00:28:44] Jeff Geoffray: After separating from your husband you decided to return to the South. You knew the job opportunities in New Orleans would be limited so you decided to try your luck in Houston.

[00:28:54] Pamela Cole: I got a job on the first day out. In '79, Houston was stealing all of the big [00:29:00] jobs from New Orleans. I went to Houston and I interviewed at Gulf, Shell and Tenneco told me, "Go have lunch and come back." They made me a job offer to work in the Human Resources Department.

[00:29:12] Jeff Geoffray: You found a mentor in your job at Tenneco, but even in 1979, prejudice, entrenched inequality in pay, position and opportunity, was a natural part of the workplace. Sometimes the prejudice was out in the open.

For instance, when you were not [00:29:30] allowed to sit in the executive office suite even though you were part of the executive staff because there was already one Black secretary. And they didn't want two out in the open.

Prejudice was also subtle. For instance, at Tenneco your first boss didn't wanna let you take on responsibilities you were well-qualified to take on. And as was eh case with Prudential, blocked you when you sought out better opportunities within the company. You were also a firsthand witness to violations of the [00:30:00] Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines, and high level bosses who expressed their prejudice against people of color.

[00:30:07] Pamela Cole: When I was at Tenneco, my boss was Kurt Lloyd, the Director of Human Resources. And sometimes he didn't want me to type certain letters, but he would give it to me to file. Every time I tried to bid on another job he would say, "No, I don't think you're qualified for that job." And he would not sign off. So he went on vacation and I got the assistant director of Human [00:30:30] Resources to sign off for me to interview for a job in the legal department for the subsidiary company called Channel Gas Industries. The general counsel there, French Kaytonhead, interviewed me for the job. And he said, "I know you don't have a bit of, of legal experience but I'm gonna hire you because I see something in you."

So he hired me and when Kurt Lloyd came back from vacation he was furious. And he actually tried to get French to [00:31:00] rescind that job offer to me, but French wouldn't. He said, "No, I think she can handle this job."

[00:31:05] Jeff Geoffray: You learned a lot while working with French.

[00:31:08] Pamela Cole: French, he said, "I want you to join Professional Secretaries International, PSI." Which I did. Then he had me join the Houston Legal Secretaries Association. He would give me things to look up in the law library. And he would tell me, "This is the section where I want you to go. And this is the case that I want you to research for me."

So he was always training me. He would tell me [00:31:30] things like, "Pam," and I would just get up and go in his office. He would say, "Where's your pad and your pencil?" He'd say, "Whenever I call you, never come in my office without a pad or pencil because you don't know what I have to say and I don't have time for you to go back to your desk." So it was these little things that I learned from him. If he said, "I wanna dictate a letter to you. It's gonna be on such-and-such," I knew at times to go and get the file, come in his office with the file. And so, proceed from there.

[00:31:58] Jeff Geoffray: As with your other jobs it [00:32:00] was rare to see another Black secretary, so when you did meet one it was usually memorable.

[00:32:05] Pamela Cole: When we became so large Channel started acquiring a lot of smaller gas companies, one was Louisiana Interstate Gas that was out of Alexandria, Louisiana. They acquired that company and they brought in some of the people from Louisiana. One of them was a Black secretary named Alzeda. Alzeda and I used to speak on the phone but I couldn't tell... She was [00:32:30] Black, I assumed because of her name, Alzeda, but I didn't wanna say [laughs] and be wrong. When she finally came to Houston she was the other Black secretary in the department.

[00:32:40] Jeff Geoffray: Two Black secretaries in the same office were two too many as far as the top managers of Tenneco were concerned. When your team was consolidated with a new subsidiary you had to sit in a side office because there was already one Black secretary in the executive suite.

[00:32:57] Pamela Cole: The president of Channel had a Black [00:33:00] secretary, and then the general counsel had me. I don't think Tenneco wanted any Blacks in that executive office because when they returned us to that main office building after Channel Industries became so large the top floor was where the executives at Tenneco were, we were down on the third or the fourth floor of the building.

[00:33:22] Jeff Geoffray: The president of Channel Industries had a Black secretary, Marjorie, while you worked for the general counsel of Channel. The [00:33:30] entire executive office of Channel was located on a lower floor away from the executive office of the parent company, Tenneco.

The top floor was not integrated at all. You and Alzeda were kept in a side office near the legal secretarial pool, instead of being right outside of French's office which would've been more natural if race wasn't a factor. You ferried between the legal department and French's office.

[00:33:54] Pamela Cole: Marjorie integrated the Channel Industries' executive suite. [00:34:00] There was a door where French came that led from his office into the legal department office. When he needed me he would call me, and I would go in his office and take whatever dictation he needed me to take, but I would go back on my side in the legal department, type it up, and that's how we worked.

[00:34:19] Jeff Geoffray: Your working life changed when French retired.

[00:34:22] Pamela Cole: He told me that they were gonna probably retire him, "and try to get you out the legal department." He said, "I want you to [00:34:30] enroll in paralegal school because this department will need a paralegal. And I want you to be able to get the job." So with that, I went to paralegal school. And when I returned, French was gone. They told me that the guy who was gonna replace French was bringing his own secretary.

Now, Mary Brumbee was female and she was Caucasian. She was allowed to sit in that same executive office where I was not [00:35:00] allowed to sit.

[00:35:00] Jeff Geoffray: Knowing that you weren't allowed to sit in the executive office, segregated within a larger office, how did that make you feel?

[00:35:08] Pamela Cole: I tried not to be so pessimistic about my position because I was just happy to be able to be employed and able to afford my own way. I knew we were grossly underpaid, I saw that when I worked in Human Resources and I had access to salaries, and I would see where Caucasian girls with just a high school [00:35:30] education was making over and above what a Black female with a four-year college degree made.

[00:35:36] Jeff Geoffray: There was a myth that Black women were more valuable than say, a White woman or Black man, because it checked off an additional box in terms of diversity. The Black box and the female box. But if there was any truth to that myth, it didn't translate into cash in your pocket.

[00:35:53] Pamela Cole: When I started working f-, for Tenneco in the Human Resources Department, a lot of White females [00:36:00] would come to me and say, "I know you mean more to the company than I do because you're counted twice." The Equal Employment Opportunity records that the company maintained counted me as a minority and as a female. It did not put any more money in my paycheck. There was the assumption I made a higher salary than they did because I was a Black female. I would be like, "Oh my gosh, if y'all only knew." [laughs]

[00:36:28] Jeff Geoffray: Black men in the same [00:36:30] company, for instance a lawyer in Human Resources, suffered from prejudice that reflected how everyone understood and played into patterns of discrimination, for instance, White secretaries who didn't want their careers tied to Black managers.

[00:36:45] Pamela Cole: When I worked for the EEO lawyer who was a Black guy, Frank, and I was working for the Human Resources director. Now, I worked for the lawyer and for the director with no extra money because the White [00:37:00] female girl said she did not wanna work for Frank because he had already reached his plateau. He was as high as he was gonna go in the corporation. She did not want her advancements tied to his career.

[00:37:13] Jeff Geoffray: A White female secretary didn't wanna be tied to the career trajectory of a Black man in corporate America.

[00:37:20] Pamela Cole: A Black man, yes. She felt, I'm not gonna get any promotions because they're not gonna promote him any further. He's already as high [00:37:30] as he's gonna be. She made it known to them and they allowed her to work for another White guy in the office.

[00:37:38] Jeff Geoffray: When she was given another job with a White attorney, you then had to serve as a secretary or the Black lawyer, Frank, and the director. That was also detrimental to Frank because he didn't have the same resources as he would've had otherwise, his own dedicated secretary. Frank gave you some good advice about dealing with unequal treatment based on his own experience.[00:38:00]

[00:38:00] Pamela Cole: He and I would often sit down and have discussions. And he would tell me, "Hey, Pam don't get all discombobulated about this." He was the one who would help me keep it under control, not let the emotions get all caught up in it.

[00:38:13] Jeff Geoffray: You learn that the EEO rules and regulations weren't always enforced. They were a guide at best as equal opportunities were gradually expanding. As a Black man and a lawyer working for Human Resources, Frank had to navigate this new terrain.

[00:38:28] Pamela Cole: I sat in on a [00:38:30] meeting to take notes where a White female had come to complain about her boss. When they interviewed her boss he told them, "I'm gonna fire her when I go back." And they were like, "No, that's considered retaliation." And he said, "I'm gonna fire her because no secretary of mine is gonna come to you," meaning Frank as a Black man, "and complain about me." And so, he went back and he fired her. He was willing to put his job on the line, even [00:39:00] though he, he knows it's retaliation he's still gonna because he knew his job wasn't gonna be affected by it.

[00:39:06] Jeff Geoffray: Getting back to your transition after French retired, the new general counsel brought his own secretary and made it known that he didn't wanna work with any Black people in any position. You weren't fired but moved into the legal secretarial pool.

[00:39:22] Pamela Cole: As French predicted, once he left they brought in another guy to be the general counsel. [00:39:30] One Hispanic girl came to me and she said, "Pam, they asked me to talk to you." And she just said, "They asked me to talk to you." And I could only assume that it might have been her White boss who told her, "You might wanna let Pam know this." They told me the general counsel had a dislike for Blacks because his niece had been raped by a Black man or something.

[00:39:50] Jeff Geoffray: How do you think they found out the new general counsel's opinion?

[00:39:53] Pamela Cole: They had a golf tournament to get to know the new general counsel. And he must've let it [00:40:00] be known to people I guess at some point, "How many Blacks are there in the office and do I have to encounter them?" I don't know what the conversation was, but I told the young lady, I just said, "I'll just stay out of his way."

[00:40:12] Jeff Geoffray: And that's what you did. You stayed out of his way even though he made it difficult to work, over assigning you tasks, ignoring you, ignoring you and another Black secretary when he came in the office and in other ways. But you managed to survive because everyone respected your work and dedication. That is [00:40:30] until for the first time in your career someone accused you of doing poor work and you felt you had to fight back against the accusation.

[00:40:38] Pamela Cole: They gave me a guy to work with. He write a memo to me stating he could never recommend me for a promotion within the company simply because I had typed up this letter. And this letter was horrible and oh, he just tore me to pieces. So, when I looked at the letter [00:41:00] the first thing I noticed was that was a day that I was out of the office, so I circled that date. At the bottom of the page was the initials of the secretary who did the job. Mary Brumbee was the secretary to the general counsel. She had typed this letter.

My rebuttal to him, I told him I was sorry he felt he could never refer me for a promotion but I pointed out to him that on the day the letter as typed I was absent. So I attached a copy of my [00:41:30] paperwork where you were gonna take a day off so I had Exhibit A. Then I told him that when I was in secretarial school, the mark of a secretary to show pride in the work that she took. If you took dictation from your boss, his initials was first with a slash, and then the secretary who typed it up. I said, "And this is done so that the correct responsibility could be placed."

[00:41:53] Jeff Geoffray: You also had a different workflow that most of the time prevented mistakes like the ones Mary Brumbee had made. [00:42:00] Mary was the secretary who had usurped your position when French retired, the same one who was allowed to sit in front of the general counsel's office in the executive suite where you weren't allowed to sit.

[00:42:11] Pamela Cole: I told him how most jobs I had, secretaries were required to proofread a letter with another secretary. And then both of you would initial that letter saying, "She typed it, I proofread it with her." That way if bad stuff went out both of you got [00:42:30] reprimanded. This is how I worked when I was with Towers, Perrin, Forster & Crosby in New York, because they wanted the work to be top-notch when it left their office. And we never had problems with proofing. And so I had gotten into the habit of working like this.

[00:42:47] Jeff Geoffray: You knew you were in a no-win situation. Your reputation had been impinged in a written accusation that would be added to your employment file. You had irrefutable evidence that the accusation was wrong. [00:43:00] You wanted to correct the file but you knew that your position as a Black woman correcting a White superior was problematic. You'd been in similar circumstances before and it generally didn't go well for you even when you were clearly in the right.

[00:43:14] Pamela Cole: When I put all of this together, I went to HR first before I spoke to my boss about it, and I gave them a copy of what he had given me. But I knew it was gonna be some mess behind it. So when I got back, I went to my attorney and I brought him the letter, and I [00:43:30] gave it to him. Like I expected, it, it did not go over well.

[00:43:34] Jeff Geoffray: French Kaytonhead, the general counsel who saw something in you and encouraged you to become a paralegal, had good instincts. You won the argument but not without repercussions.

[00:43:45] Pamela Cole: Shortly thereafter, they deemed I was no longer needed in the legal department, and they sent me to work in the contracts division. Before they did that, they made me work for the only non-attorney in [00:44:00] the office. Houston had ceased being progressive to me. By then I was a mother and I had my son, he was two years old. I had come to Atlanta for a visit with my sister.

[00:44:11] Jeff Geoffray: Houston want the progressive city you'd hoped it would be. After over eleven years at Tenneco, you were tempted to move closer to one of your sisters, Eunice, in Atlanta.

[00:44:21] Pamela Cole: I bought the Atlanta Journal Constitution and took it back to Houston with me. And I started applying for jobs, and all of them were interested but they [00:44:30] said, "We would be interested in interviewing you once you moved to Atlanta." This was right around '89 when a lot of companies were downsizing and doing different thing creatively with employees. I was going on my eleventh year with Tenneco.

So I went in and talked to my director who I had a very good relationship with. He didn't want me to go. He kept saying, "Pam, I could use you in this office." And I was like, "Well, Dave, I got to go. I, I'm looking out for my son at this point." So that's how I [00:45:00] ended up in Atlanta.

[00:45:06] Mya Carter: Part 2: Today and the Future

[00:45:12] Jeff Geoffray: Your mom, Dorothy, always wanted to have a big celebration to renew her vows to your dad and make up for the small celebration they had when they were originally married around 1940. Shortly after the celebration, June passed away.

[00:45:26] Pamela Cole: He died in 1991. Four [00:45:30] months after they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They got married in October but we did it at Christmas so family who would travel at Christmas would come home for that. It made my mom so happy. She was specific on all the details. She wanted all the kids in white and gold. And all of the grandkids participated in the ceremony. She was so proud of that moment.

[00:45:54] Jeff Geoffray: To the end, he tried to live life to the fullest. Enjoying his family and his [00:46:00] neighborhood.

[00:46:00] Pamela Cole: When he was diagnosed they told us my dad had six weeks left. He had bone marrow cancer, lung cancer, so he decided to come home and live his last days at home. So we brought him home. And his last days were spent sitting on the front porch waving and saying hello to everybody. He died in his sleep.

[00:46:23] Jeff Geoffray: After your father died, your big brother, Pete, the prodigal son, the artist, protector, spent more [00:46:30] time at home with your mom after living many years in the projects as sort of an enigma.

[00:46:34] Pamela Cole: Even when we left the project, Pete wanted to stay there because he had been accepted. He didn't have anything to prove to anybody so he felt, this is my home. But every now and then then he'd show up and he'd spend a night or two, and then he was gone.

[00:46:50] Jeff Geoffray: Didn't have anything to prove especially to your dad. Your mom had a special bond with Pete that made you and your sister think he was spoiled.

[00:46:58] Pamela Cole: Later in life [00:47:00] after my dad passed, he would spend more time at home with my mom. And so, we would tell my mom, "Mama, you give Pete too much attention. All his life you've catered to him and da, da, da, da." And one day my Mom told me, she said, "I raised you girls to be strong but I didn't do it with him. You always know the child that needs you the most." I had never looked at it like that. I just thought my brother was a spoiled rotten boy. But she was trying to make up for what she felt she had let [00:47:30] down in him. She said, "When you get to be a mother, you gonna know, the child who's the weakest needs you the most."

[00:47:37] Jeff Geoffray: Carol and her husband of fifty years or so, Alvarez, decided to move to Atlanta mostly because she fell in love with your church.

[00:47:46] Pamela Cole: When she visited during Katrina, her family stayed with me. I brought them to my church which was interdenominational. I told her, "It's a teaching church. That's what drew me to it." I wanted to know the [00:48:00] bible but I needed to truly understand it. She so enjoyed the delivery. She said, "Ooh, girl, we gonna find us a house here in Georgia." She said, "'Cause I'm a join this church."

[00:48:12] Jeff Geoffray: Carol and Alvarez eventually returned to New Orleans even though most of Carol's family, you and your other sisters, Carol's children, and other nieces and nephews had moved to Georgia and North Carolina. Carol and Alvarez bought a house in Slidell so he could be [00:48:30] close to his family. Carol died in 2012, but she was passionate about bible stories until the end.

[00:48:36] Pamela Cole: Her later thing in life was the bible. Even up until she died, Carol would call you every Sunday to read a bible story to you or have a conversation with you about the bible.

[00:48:49] Jeff Geoffray: You stayed close to your brother-in-law, Alvarez, even after Carol passed.

[00:48:53] Pamela Cole: Ooh, that's my brother [laughs]. He's not my brother-in-law, he's my brother. He's living in a house in Slidell alone [00:49:00] now since the girls and his only grandson is in North Caroline. They'll say, "Dad, we're gonna meet you in Georgia." So he'll drive as far as Atlanta and they'll come and meet him and drive him up to North Carolina.

[00:49:13] Jeff Geoffray: Only your sister, Brenda, has kids still living in New Orleans.

[00:49:16] Pamela Cole: Brenda's two boys, Zane and Stacey, they're the only two left in New Orleans. All my nieces and nephews have left. One just moved up to New York. And Carol's two daughters are both in North Carolina.

[00:49:29] Jeff Geoffray: [00:49:30] You, your Aunt Marjorie, your oldest sister, Joanne, all found financial independence in leaving New Orleans.

[00:49:36] Pamela Cole: My nieces tell me today that because I left New Orleans when I was young to take the job in Houston with Shell, that's what made them wanna leave. "We remember when you would come home and how happy everybody would be." I said, "I can remember when Joanne would come home, how happy everything would be. My mom would cook and have everybody over." "Oh, here's my daughter. She's here from [00:50:00] college." It was a big thing.

[00:50:01] Jeff Geoffray: Your sister, Eunice, the bootleg hairdresser who was hired by Amoco by Wanda Nichols before she even graduated from the Center, and who went on to a successful career, joined you in Atlanta.

[00:50:13] Pamela Cole: I'm glad Eunice got to leave New Orleans and see what life outside of New Orleans was about. As a result, her two children left and they have very good lives here. Eunice always wanted to leave New Orleans so when Katrina came, that was [00:50:30] her opportunity. She said, "I'm not going back to New Orleans."

So for the eleven years that she was here, Eunice made the most of it. I think her biggest contribution was she started helping with a bible study group here and drew people to her. She would have the pastor laughing. She would say, "The Lord's still working with me."

[00:50:52] Jeff Geoffray: You moved away for mostly financial reasons but you still appreciate the special community in New Orleans.

[00:50:58] Pamela Cole: New Orleans has [00:51:00] always had a community. White or Black, you always knew where you stood. People are gonna help you, even if sometimes they don't agree with you, you can always find somebody who gonna help you get your life along because they recognize potential.

[00:51:14] Jeff Geoffray: The graduates of the Adult Education Center often talk about how schools of its kind would be important today. Why is that so, in your opinion?

[00:51:22] Pamela Cole: We received a big benefit from Carol having attended that school. I cannot say that enough. [00:51:30] I sit sometimes and wonder where would be be? I often talk to people when I meet them about the Adult Education Center and how important it is to give people a skill. Now they are realizing a four-year college degree is not gonna be for everyone. When you come out of high school these days everybody expect you to know exactly what you wanna do and exactly what you want your career to be. Most high school students today, they're far more removed from [00:52:00] knowing whatever gift God has given us. Whether He's given us the gift of gab, the gift of song, the gift to think differently, to see outside of the box.

I think it's important that schools get back to teaching industrial arts to young men. That young women learn other skills that can be applied to self-employment and learning enough to start a business on their own.

[00:52:25] Jeff Geoffray: You're blessed to have a son, Jonathan, and now you're a grandmother. What's your favorite [00:52:30] thing to do with your grandson?

[00:52:31] Pamela Cole: Always trying to feed his imagination. I, I truly see him as being a kid who's gonna go far, so right now while I got this time with him, I'm always challenging him and seeing what it is he likes, and then just feeding it. My son said, "Mama, you're doing too much with him. He got all these toys." I said, "One day he's gonna stop playing with toys, but that idea is still gonna be in his head." I said, "That is the seed you wanna plant and watch it [00:53:00] develop, and nourish it, and watch it blossom."

[00:53:02] Jeff Geoffray: There was a teacher at the Adult Education Center who turned you onto a poem by Countee Cullen that stuck with you all your life. The poem's called "Song In Spite of Myself."

[00:53:13] Pamela Cole: Yes, it was a nun. I think she was our speech teacher. One day after class she called me, and it was a typed out version of that poem. When I got home that night I just had to have Carol read this poem. [00:53:30] Carol loved the poem, especially when you got to the last stanza that said, "Mind that frets may find control, and a shattered heart find mending. Give but a grain of the heart's rich seed, confine some undercover, and when love goes, bid him God-speed, and find another lover."

And I don't know why that particular stanza just really stuck with me, but it [00:54:00] became my poem to most women on Valentine's Day. I would literally send everybody I knew a handwritten version of that poem. For me, that poem says be careful who you give your whole heart to.

[00:54:17] Jeff Geoffray: " Never love with all your heart." That poem reminds me of one of the themes of Toni Morrison's Beloved. Especially in the character of Paul D who says, "Love can split you wide open." Paul D is a former [00:54:30] enslaved person, suffered the worst trauma imaginable. The trauma of being forcibly separated from his family. A common occurrence prior to the Civil War. He keeps his feelings locked up in what he describes as "the rusted tobacco tin that is his heart." But in the last part of the novel, he encourages the main character to forget the trauma of her past and build a future with him. He offers to give all of his heart to her. He says to Sethe, [00:55:00] "You are your own best thing."

It sounds like with your son, your grandson, Carol and all your family, that you do love with all your heart. Are you still looking for romantic love?

[00:55:10] Pamela Cole: I'm single and I have been single. And I tell people, it is by choice now. I never gave up on love, it's just that I gave up on finding what I thought was true love.

[00:55:22] Jeff Geoffray: You're still enjoying work in your seventies. You say you're thinking of re-firing not retiring. You're thinking of pouring our [00:55:30] whole heart into another endeavor after being a secretary, paralegal and administrator. You say you have a lot more you want to accomplish.

[00:55:38] Pamela Cole: I've emptied myself of one job, but I'm ready to move to another. Whether it'll be part-time working with kids in a school to learn how to read or working with somebody after school. I always put things to God saying, "Hey, is it time for me to just walk away from working?" I don't just give a hundred percent, I tell [00:56:00] people, "Every day I go to work, I go to give a hundred and ten percent or more, because I don't just do the job I have to do." If I see a void somewhere that needs to be filled, I try to fill that void. Maybe I'm trying to do too much, I don't know because I've always worked this way.

[00:56:17] Jeff Geoffray: You're inspired to pour your energy into the lives of younger children.

[00:56:22] Pamela Cole: Because I have grandbabies now, I, I want to concentrate on children who need a grandmotherly figure, who need [00:56:30] somebody to read to them, somebody who's gonna help them get over anxieties. I do it with my grandbabies.

My son said, "Mama, you come here and they're just quiet." I tell him, I say, "They listen to your heartbeat." For nine months a baby sits in the mom and she's listening to that heartbeat. When she's snatched out at birth that security is gone. She doesn't hear that mother's heartbeat. She's hearing noise. It's frightening! I said, "So to give your child confidence, let them hear your heart." But if your heartbeat is gonna be [00:57:00] erratic and you screaming, uh, I said, "You upset them. They don't have that confidence because they know something is not right now with you."

"Mama, you spoiling them." I said, "There's no such things as a spoiled baby." The ones who are spoiled, them the ones who don't get love. These are the spoiled kids because they don't get to know a tender, loving heart. So this is what my next step is. It's not so much doing the secretarial, day-to-day things but it's now the portion [00:57:30] where your mother was, the love. The over pouring of love and just wanting to help somebody get along in life.

[00:57:40] Mya Carter: That concludes Episode 11 of Exchange Place: Pamela Cole, A Working Life

Please join us for the final episode of Season 1 entitled, A Cowardly Lion.

[00:57:53] Jeff Geoffray: This has been a presentation of the 431 Exchange. We're a nonprofit organization dedicated to adults [00:58:00] seeking to transform their lives through continuing education. We invite you to learn more about us by going to our website at www.431exchange.org. To hear more inspiring stories, please sign up for our newsletter. Thanks. Copyright 431 Exchange LLC 2022.

​ [00:58:30] [00:59:00] [00:59:30]

“Simpler Times” by Kevin Gullage, Performed by Shelby Griffith

Simpler thoughts

And simple feelings

Simple smiles

Full of joy

And full of love

Simple ways

Simple truths

And simply longing

Simply for

Something real

And something more [00:34:00]