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Wadsworth Memories by Becky Hayden (from 1994 Wadsworth Yearbook)

Clay Street years in San Francisco (1957-1961): twelve people when I began in 1958 . . . housed in a two-room loft, on the second floor of a two-story brick building next to the old produce district, all long gone to make way for the Golden Gate and Embarcadero Center developments . . . Our favorite place for signing or birthday celebrations was Pietro's, with a singing waiter parading Baked Alaska topped with a sparkler...We also frequented Maximo's, across the street, for end-of-day drinks and gab and some of Maximo's tall tales.

From the beginning Wadsworth was a friendly, open, informal, fun-loving place to work, and we had our share of wonderful characters: Lon Driggers, Allen Jossey-Bass, Mad Margaret . . .Too, Clay Street was where the tradition of the annual Christmas pageant, always a company satire, began...the first one--written by three EAs--featured Lance Valor (Bob Sass, then, Education Editor) and Vincent Vitriol (Allen Jossey-Bass, then English Editor).

On to Belmont: Our ground-breaking was big news, with photo ops by the mayor and Miss Belmont..a windy day on the hill, with dust flying in President Dick Ettinger's face as he shoveled . . . In 1961 the office was just a small L (now the East wing), since then added onto three times (in 1966, 1971, and 1979)...For several months we had no landscaping . . . At last, funds for some trees, grass, and plants . . . the first night the plants were in, deer from the ravine ate about $500 worth of bushes and flowers . . . Those were the days of noon Hoots, with Jim Leisy and Jim McDaniel on guitar and Jack Thornton on banjo . . . I confess I got a little tired of Darlin' Clementine.”

Remember that great day in 1962, when we hit our first million in annual sales...Each of us got a marble paperweight with a shiny silver dollar on top . . . Some pried the dollar off for lunch money - hey, their take-home pay was probably no more than $300 a month . . . Up to about 1968, there were no women reps in college textbook publishing and no women acquisitions editors (except one at Harpers and me, with responsibilities in both acquisitions and editorial production) . . . Today, look around you.

Remember Jack Carey's kill 'em presentations . . . Henry Staat's Star Wars...the Communication "umbrella"? . . . The roast for Tom Braden's birthday . . . The sales conference in Fort Lauderdale in the year of the Big Freeze? The People's Picnic in the early 1970s? The great times in Vancouver, Key West, and New Orleans? Being named Number One by NACS in 1987-88, 1990-91, and 1992-93? And 1990, the year we went over $100-million in annual sales?

Remember when Bryce kept records of adoptions by hand on 3x5 cards filed in one box? Since then, several generations of computers and printout programs . . . to today's burst of on-line technology . . . tomorrow is almost today . . .

Remember when we published books almost exclusively, with an occasional IM for support...Now awesome packages, with study guides, computer testing, software, videos, and CD-Roms . . . in the early 1960s reading books were "hot" . . . and then everyone thought programmed learning was the answer . . . or teaching modules, audio-tutorials, custom publishing . . .

And lets give a moment of silence or take a bow to our many authors: from our first best sellers (McDonald's Educational Psychology and Guth's Words-and-Ideas) to Starr's Biology and the psych texts by Kalat and many, many more from Wadsworth Publishing . . . all true to one of our mottoes "Education Changes Things.”

Wadsworth 1956-1994: full of changes in size, in sales, in women in the profession, in the disciplines we serve, in technology . . . And recent gearing up for a world with bigger and faster changes -- in the way we do business, in even newer information technology from fiber optics to interactive virtual reality, in new challenges and opportunities . . . Through it all, expect the Wad always to be a friendly, informal, lively place to be and to work.

Becky Hayden, Consulting Publisher

Becky Hayden, Wadsworth's longest serving editor, began in 1958 as a production editor. Within three months she became managing editor of editorial production and assumed acquisition responsibilities in the communication areas. Although officially retired in 1992, she continues to work, as a consulting publisher, a few days each month. In April of 1993, she was honored with the Distinguished Service Award by the Broadcast Education Association at their annual convention in Las Vegas; she was the first publisher and the first woman to receive this award in its twelve year history. Her B.A. is from the University of California at Berkeley, and she holds an M.A. from Mount Holyoke College. Her interests range from all the arts to travel all over the world and volunteer work with the International Visitors Center, the Foundation for San Francisco's Architectural Heritage, and UC-Berkeley alumni activities.