Frances Salten

 

Few people would forget their first encounter with Frances Salten.

Mine came a year or so after I took on the role of Managing Editor of The Main Street WIRE. Editor Jim Bowser and I were chatting in the Rivercross lobby, noodling some ideas for the next issue, when Frances’s eagle eye spotted us and figured out, instantly, who I must be.

"You wrote that..." she started, eyes narrowed as though focusing on a target, then finished the sentence with a description of an Island Observer piece I had written for the previous issue... "Didn’t you?" I was in for trouble, I could tell. I had used the word henchperson in describing the role of some minor functionary at RIOC, having a little fun over the gymnastics inflicted on the English language by political correctness.

"That ridicules feminism," Frances said. I don’t recall her offering a feminist’s substitute for the term, but she made it abundantly clear that she disapproved most severely of any such poking of fun. On the spot, Jim and I recruited Frances as a WIRE proofreader, charged specifically with keeping the publication’s language gender-neutral.

Frances called it "pouncing," not proofreading. She realized that her greatest source of delight was pouncing on errors of the kind in question. And she pounced often. If an Albany story used the word Assemblyman, Frances would write, in the margin, "What do his testicles have to do with it?" Seeing that Rep. Carolyn Maloney calls herself "Congresswoman" in press releases, Frances had a double objection, feeling that the term was a reflection of an inferiority complex in the U.S. House of Representatives. "She’s a Representative," Frances would command. "And there’s no such thing as a Congresswoman or Congressman." Even saying the words put a bad taste in her mouth. "She is a Member of Congress or a Representative, period."

The pouncing was not limited to her WIRE proofreading. In Rivercross tenant meetings, she sat in the front row – an accommodation to failing hearing. If the President of the Board let "doorman" slip from his lips, even before the last "n" sound was out, he knew the correction was coming: "Doorkeeper!"

And so it went. Frances knew every proper non-sexist substitution for every errant sex-tilted occupational designation. Any she didn’t, she made up on the spot.

As time went on, she was experiencing difficulty getting around. She sublet her apartment and moved to an assisted-living facility, somewhere out of state – Rhode Island, I think. I had come to appreciate her acerbic sense of humor and her crusty manner of straightening out any errant non-feminist within reach of her voice. We started a correspondence – one or two letters a week – and I learned more about her philosophy of life and personal history. Though divorced, she was still in regular friendly touch with her ex-husband, David G. Salten, a teacher and school administrator who devised the desegregation plan for the New Rochelle school system.

After a year or so, one of Frances’s letters to me had this surprise: "I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to come back to Roosevelt Island and be a proofreader for The WIRE." And that she did. A year or two later, when her eyes were no longer doing the job, The WIRE fixed her up with a video magnifying device, but she found her eyes were not good enough to find and operate the controls. More than once, feeling she wasn’t carrying the weight of her name in the staff listing, she asked to be removed from it, even while still proofing. Ultimately, she had to give it up, and she felt it as a loss of her own usefulness.

David Salten died on the first day of this month, remembered in a New York Times obituary.

Frances died eleven days later. Characteristic of her, she left nothing to chance. She had written her own obituary, which appears here with only a few things touched up to protect the innocent and guilty alike from her edgy frankness.

Dick Lutz