Their submission went to a slush pile to be read by an intern and had about as much chance of getting published as any of us have today. The merest note from an editor was a major achievement.
It's true that you didn't usually get a personalized note off the bat. There was a phone number. You had to call it, and the editor would go through his or her notes with you. There was a good chance that you'd get his assistant, who would say, "Hey, the only thing he's got this month is 4:30pm on the 23rd." If you had something else at that time, you'd have to wait till next month, because you couldn't expect a busy editor to chat on your schedule. Yeah, you also had to pay long distance (39 cents per minute!) but that was the price of access.
Anyway, it's probably pointless to rant about the Lost Dignity of Work. It's fun to point out how easy previous generations had it-- in the corporate world, the Boomer complaint was, "Oh my God, I'm 26 and still a good three years from being able to expense business-class travel! I'm a total failure!"-- in basically everything. If Boomers acknowledged what they did to us, that would go a long way.
Instead, Boomers say that it's our fault. They call us "entitled" when we ask for 1/4 of what they had handed to them at a younger age. In the corporate world, a Boomer would simply refuse to work (and he wouldn't get fired, because his bosses would be too busy with their 3-martini lunches to notice) if he didn't get a 200 SF private office as a 30th birthday present. If you had a college degree, you got a private office before you hit the Big 3-0. At 40, you'd have a view. Now, I'm 33, I majored in math and got a 3.9, and I'd be happy with semi-private and a wall at my back. I don't care about the palatial 400 SF top-floor corner office. I just want to be able to work and not get open-planic attacks.
And boomers had nothing to do with it, except that they invented the internet
When people like me rant on Boomers, we're talking about the Boomer 1%. We're not talking about black Boomers who marched in Selma. We're not talking about Latino Boomers who came over here in the 1990s. We're not talking about principled anti-war protesters. We're not talking about the engineers who created the Internet. We're not talking about the scientists who sent things into space using slide rules. We're definitely not talking about people who died serving the country in Vietnam (even though that war was a mistake). We're probably not talking about you. There are plenty of awesome Boomers! There are a lot of great people born in every generation. When we attack "Boomers", we're talking about the Boomer One Percent-- the shitfucks who were given stewardship of one of the greatest countries in history and drove it into mediocrity.
It would be obnoxious bigotry to dislike a whole generation based on the failings of its elite, but the bare fact is that the Boomer Cliques that run the world need to be dismantled-- before they promote the worst garbage of my generation (they're already starting) and make the damage permanent-- and we can't afford to wait.