Household Employment Agency
After the war my mother divorced her first husband
and decided to stay in Houston with Betty and Howard. The Pennsylvania
Shipyards were downsizing, so she went to work for the Household Employment Agency, a company that
provided domestic help to affluent families and cooks and wait staff to restaurants.
Mirt was in her early thirties and divorced with children.
Advances from the owner came with the job. She had no interest in him, so when
he asked her to scout a new location for a
branch office in Dallas, she decided to move there and open the business
for herself. She kept the name and the business model.
After several money-losing businesses, the short time Mirt
worked for someone else provided her with a winning concept. The business was
all hers. If was the 1950s, and she wanted no man to direct her future.
Over drinks at the Carousel Club with her new husband, Rick,
she told the owner, Jack Ruby, that she was looking for office space. He
suggested a spot across the street on the corner of Elm and Lamar. It was over
a diner.
Mirt launched the agency a few days later. Post-war Dallas
was growing and people couldn’t hire fast enough, so Mirt did it for them.
After just a couple of years, a fire broke out overnight at
the café, and the agency was a total loss. Mirt immediately found a new
location at 1010-A South Lamar. There she created a family business that
provided a healthy income for decades. Over the years she would employ her
daughter Betty and dozens of others.
The agency was on a drab stretch of Lamar between downtown
and the regional Sears Roebuck warehouse and store. Her giant plate glass
windows were the only break in the long wall of gray metal that covered
the block-long one-story art deco building. Next door was a print shop owned
by an older man, Mr. Bull, who would later sell out to his young
Mexican-American assistant, Joe.
The Household Employment Agency had a high ceiling, tile
floor, and five large wooded desks for employees. The job seekers sat in cold
metal folding chairs until called to a desk or sent on their way to an
assignment – and their future. The room was usually filled with cigarette smoke,
which resulted in Saturday cleaning and scrubbing.
Mirt rarely smoked, but she inhaled second-hand smoke for
forty years.
An elegant wall of paneling with pressed privacy glass on
top divided the space to create a small back-room area for storage. It held a
cot, a small refrigerator, a sink, and a tiny room with a light bulb and a
toilet.
Many of the people seeking domestic or restaurant work were
black or Hispanic. Mirt was responsible for getting them temporary or permanent
positions. When things didn’t work out, Mirt would find them new jobs. The
agency aligned with her own trajectory from poverty to self-reliance and her
Republican ideals. A sign over her desk read, Fight poverty – WORK!
Mirt’s clients included middle-income families, but her
bread-and- butter were the rich: Charley Pride, Stanley Marcus, the Murchisons,
Greer Garson, Dorothy Malone, Sam Wyly, the Hunts, Margot and Ross Perot, Roger
Staubach, Tom Landry, Joey Heatherton, and many, many more.
