Interview With My Mom on Her Life in Libraries

Kate: Okay, we're back. This week is National Library Week. I'm here with my mom today to talk about her long career in libraries and all the things that she has done as a librarian, which is quite a lot. So, thank you for being here, mom. Thanks for coming back.

Mom: Oh Kate, you know I'd do anything for you dear. Especially talk about libraries since that's something.

Kate: I know, there's so much happening in library world right now.

Mom: Well, that's true.

Kate: The stakes are high, I guess.

Mom: The Stakes are very high. have something precious to we have to defend access to libraries funding. Yes.

Kate: Yes. So, the last time I interviewed you, you talked a little bit about how you started working in libraries in high school and in college when you were at OBU. Want to say anything more about that before we go on to other stuff?

Mom: Yes. No, I'll just say that you're right. It was ninth grade when I realized I could get out of study hall by volunteering to be in the school library. In this time when we were together before, I did talk about how that was my first introduction to a banned book, though the phrase banned book wasn't used, but I found out about books that weren't allowed to be put on the shelf because our high school librarian didn't think they were appropriate for kids.

And then my work study jobs, both at OBU and at University of Oklahoma. OBU was in the regular, they just had one library, but at OU, I got to work there in the physics library. These were both work study jobs. So ,they were good exposures to me about libraries and how they work and how different they are, even the idea that there were these specialized libraries within the departments at OU was eye-opening to me when they took me over to the physics building, to the physics library. But, I still didn't think much about library as a career. It never even dawned on me to think about that. That happened much later in life. It actually, in midlife, when you kids were getting pretty much older.

Also, during that time when I was young and married, we would go back and forth to your visit your grandparents in Lubbock because your grandfather was in library work and had been the director of the library in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And then when he transferred and got a job out in Lubbock, and he was the head of the city-county library there. When we would visit them, I would see these journals around the house. Maybe you remember them too. They were always stacked up on the coffee table and on that hearth of their fireplace, which I don't think they ever ,can't remember there being much of a fire.

Kate: Too hot for that there.

Mom: But he always had stacks of American Libraries and Booklist, Library Journal too. But I didn't and I would look through them all the time when I was there, and I loved looking at American Libraries because it had photos of libraries around the U.S., and it had little articles about what they were doing and I loved looking at Booklist and looking at book reviews and then and that was when you were just a toddler and in grade school and then here to think that you grew up later and were a contributor to Booklist for how many years?

Kate: You mean Library Journal?

Mom: That’s right, Library Journal?

Kate: Yeah, I wrote book reviews for them for a long time. At least ten years, maybe more than that.

Mom: Yeah, you did. Yeah, and at the time, mean, just think about that connection of seeing those at grandpa's. And one time he actually mentioned to me, you should think about being a librarian, but it just seems so distant and far away and unconnected because at that time I was just a full-time mom to the three of you. And I didn't have any thoughts of even returning to the workforce.

That did happen later when you were in fourth grade and I, at that time when your dad and I were separating, I had to think about getting a job and at the time I couldn't think of any possible job I could do other than maybe being somebody at the checkout at the Safeway.

But your fourth-grade teacher was married to a children's librarian at Kansas City Public Library. And he told a few of the PTA moms that they were having trouble filling a job down there. I was desperate at that point, and I knew it was part-time. So, I applied for it. I told him I would apply for it. I think he is the one who recommended that I would be okay for the job, which turned out I really wasn't very good at the job. But it was something for me to do and it got me. That was like what kickstarted me getting back into working in libraries and figuring out how I could become a librarian. And that job was working in the children's library.

I was actually collating book reviews on children's books. When I think back about how it was for their selection committee. The selection committee was made up of the children's librarians at each of the branches in the Kansas City Public Library District, and they would meet once a month. They would be, they always got this great selection of free books that were sent from publishers, children's books. So ,I was opening up those boxes of these sample books from publishers and making a little card for each one of them, a 3x5 card and filing it alphabetically. And then they had all of these review journals like Kirkus, and I can't even think of all the titles, but there were probably four or five or six of those. And they would have already read through them and checked off the ones they were interested in. So, I was to look for that book within the pile that we had that came from the publisher and write down whether the reviews were positive or negative. I would put plus or a minus, which issue of which review journal it had come from and stick those inside or have them inside the book covers. And then when they met, they would pass around the books and actually look at them, read them and evaluate how they scored. And that was how they made their selections.

Kate: Wow, okay. That's interesting.

Mom: It's well when you think back to work that was involved.

Kate: Oh, I know. I remember one of my first library jobs, I remember I would help out with a little bit of that, like look through book reviews. The librarians would pass them around and like do check marks on which ones they were interested in, and I would read through them too. It was fun.

Mom: As a staff member, mean, later when I was working in a library, we passed around the journals, I would be looking at the reference books or the audiobooks when I had that collection for reviews. But you know, there was no other way to do it than by print. And you had to move that journal along. People would come to see what was stuck on your desk that you haven't finished and moved along, because we all had to share it.

But when I listen now and hear about the controversies that go along with children's librarians and what's in the library and what parents approve and don't approve and all of that controversy. And then I think back to those women that came together once a month and passed around the actual copies and read them and did personal selections for what would be appropriate for the children in their neighborhoods, at their neighborhood libraries based on their income or based on maybe the ethnic races that attended that. It just, I don't know. I just think that was kind of like the glory days. But then they really took their jobs so seriously. They really were nurturing these little minds and they wanted everything that they had on their shelves to be something that could add to their childhoods in some way.

Kate: That would have been around, was that like ‘88-ish? ’89?

Mom: Yes, that was late, very late ‘80s. The only problem with me was I was so slow and was such a slow typist. You was that, that the librarians.

Kate: They told you you were slow.

Mom: Yes, I was too slow, and I had to speed it up. And I, that's when it kind of fell into place that, I'm a cog in their wheel. Yeah. This is not just for me, know, own enjoyment. So, I had to adjust to that.

But the thing is, from that position, my friend Jan, who you've also interviewed, who was a children's librarian, she was going to take a library course. And it was through Emporia State. And they had just started, that was a library school that was just about to be discredited.

Kate: Oh no.

Mom: It was like one year away from losing its accreditation. So, they had done something kind of risky, and they brought in a new group of faculty. I'm trying to think, from Syracuse, New York. And there were three or four of them, maybe more, at least four, that came from Syracuse with this new idea of how they were going to kind of revamp library school. They were going to come in and teach management skills. They wanted to teach how to do community assessments. They were going to try to elevate the status of a of a librarian to being a real profession. The whole issue we talked a lot about what makes a profession and how is a profession differentiated from just a job, that this is actually a profession.

It was bringing in this whole new idea of how to teach library skills and teach people to go into libraries with a different maybe perspective than they had in the past. And a part of that also was that they did distant learning. Instead of, which really was a boon to that department in that small school. They doubled or maybe even triple the size of their student body without any having to add anything for the infrastructure of the school to support that because they were, this was when distance learning, I think was even first being born as a phrase. And so, they would send their faculty, they figured out which large locations, metropolitan areas did not have a library school close to it.

Denver was one of the places. I know for sure in Kansas City, I mean, though Emporia was about, I don't know, three-hour drive away, but because I did have to take some classes on campus, but they were sending their faculty up to run a weekend course. You'd go on Friday night, get introduced to go back and spend all day Saturday there. And then you'd go back Sunday till noon and then you'd be given assignments.

And we were in little cohorts of groups of people that you would work with. Then they'd come back in like six weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and you'd meet again for another long weekend, and you would do your projects that present your projects that you had been working on. Jan had learned about that and she, I believe, had taken one class and said, you ought to do this, come with me, let's do this, we could do this together, because she was newly divorced too.

And I had been looking around the library enough to realize while I was down there, if I wanted to get into a position that could pay well, I was going to have to get a master's because it was either you needed a master's or you needed 15 years’ experience. And my 15 years’ experience had been spent in the kitchen. So, the only way I could sort of launch myself into getting in, making it a career and a profession for me. I thought there's no way I'm going to get into graduate school, but Jan said, “No, you don't have to do the GRE or anything. You can just, as long as you pay tuition, you can go. And later, we'll worry about that later.” So, it was true. You could take, I think you could take maybe 12 hours before you had to then take the GRE.

I also at that time found out that Kansas City Public would pay a little bit of my tuition if I, you had to keep like a C level. I applied for that and nobody else, maybe one other person was doing that. And she was doing it with the library school in Columbia. And I was doing it at the one in Emporia. This was a program that they offered. They had the funding, but people didn't really take much advantage of it.

I did it, and it worked for me. I was able, I eventually moved out of the children's department and over into what they called information services, which today you would know as reader's advisory. This was also when the Kansas City Public Library was transitioning from the card catalog to the online catalog. So that was a big deal, was teaching people how to use the online catalog. You had to be ready the minute you saw them huff and puff and get ready to jump up, make it easy for them and show them they could still search by the same parameters they did before by the topic or by the author or by the title, and they could do it from one spot and they could hop back and forth. You tried to walk them through that frustration.

And for a while, I remember your grandpa talking about that too, what they had to go through that down in Lubbock at the time. And people just didn't trust the computers. But anyway, so I was pretty good at that because I had been doing so many things with you guys as you were growing up with the different groups that you were involved in, scouting and Sunday school and things like that. I was pretty good at giving instructions to people that were feeling frustrated.

Kate: They were just like children.

Mom: Like children that needed a nap. Yes, I had to talk calm and be totally free and tell them what a good job they were doing. So, I really kind of thrived in that. found a niche to be in, I guess. Plus, I loved dealing with the questions that people asked. That just was interesting to me to be able to figure out what their source was that they were really looking for.

So, I spent a couple of years there, and I even did a job share there with another gentleman who had a preschooler that he wanted to be home with. We had to write up our request to do this. But we wrote up a request where we actually shared a desk, we shared a collection, we shared a budget. And that was my first collection that I actually got to nurture along, and that was audiobooks on tape.

He and I shared the collection of that. I did literature and poetry, and he did the nonfiction and business. We shared a desk and when they would write us in on the calendar, they would just use both of our initials and he and I would figure out who was going to cover on which days. Because my schedule could shift according to what classes I was taking. Then the big hump came when I had to take the GRE to actually stay in library school. And I don't know if you remember, but I took a course at UMKC to prep me for that, which was worth every dollar I took. And I still barely went through by the hair of my chinny chin chin with being able to get in. But also at that point, see, I had had like three classes or maybe four, maybe three, and I'd had an A in all of them.

And so, they didn't care. So anyway, that's why I was able to stay in at Emporia. And actually, I probably started there around ’89, and I really did not expect to finish before your brother finished high school. I thought he’d be out of high school before I finished that master's, but I was out in May of 93. So I beat him.

Kate: One year, I I guess I must have been in. I think it was eighth grade.

Mom: I thought you had one year with Austin with Nick in school.

Kate: I did. But yeah, but when he was a junior, I would have been in eighth grade. I remember going out to him for you for your graduation.

Mom: Okay. After my graduation and the very first thing we did…

Kate: You got a new car. Or maybe that was when you got a new job.

Mom: Yeah. When I got a full-time job, because at that point I was still well, actually, my job share had ended. And, and so I didn't have a job, there was not an opening at Kansas City Public at that time. And so that was when I also at that point, my Cobra insurance had ended. I needed to find a way to have insurance for myself. You guys were still covered under dad. I had been on the graduate student insurance at Emporia State. Somebody had talked to me about, take some graduate courses at UMKC. That's when I took that course in archives and one in special collections. Because the way they did their graduate, for graduate students, you could have student insurance under the graduate school program, and it would cover you for the whole year, not just while you were taking courses. Though for undergraduates, it was just the semesters that you were taking courses. And I was curious about that, and they said, “Well, because graduate students sometimes have a semester off for a project or something.” So that's why they covered them yearly. So that was my stepping-stone for one. I had my catastrophe insurance through UMKC. And that was a really good program for me because of those classes, because when I did the special collections course, we toured the special collection libraries there within Kansas City. We went to the Linda Hall. Remember the Linda Hall Library? Science and technology library. We visited that. We went to the Clendenning. That was a library of history of medicine, which was fascinating. And then we to Kansas City Star Library, the Marr Sound Archives. It introduced me to a whole kind of level of libraries that existed that weren't public. It never even really crossed my mind, you know, to do. That was a good experience for me.

Also that summer, I ended up signing up with a service there in Kansas City that placed people part time or just not even part time, but almost like, what's less than part-time, little short job. Temp jobs. Yeah, that's it. So they had temp positions at law libraries to kind of go in looseleaf filing. And I was vaguely, vaguely familiar with what the phrase looseleaf filing. But that job was at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, another special library that we didn't even know existed. That was way downtown in Kansas City, really like on the 10th or 12th floor of a huge building down there. And that was exciting for me to be driving into Kansas City and taking that elevator all the way up into that library. It was just me and really one other person much younger than me who ran the library. But I spent that whole summer working on the Commerce Clearinghouse collection. They were like the insurance laws for all the state. And they had so many piles, these packages would come in for the loosely filings of how to keep those laws, law books up to date. The one person working there never had time to work on it. Because once you get interrupted by a phone call, finding where you were when you left off, just doesn't work. You just kind of have to work straight through because you're the way you're collating things. That was a very much a learning experience and very boring, but it paid ,and it was something I could put on my resume. So, so I did it. It's like when I used to tell your kids to do one hard thing a day, that was my one hard thing to do for that year was all that looseleaf back filing.

But then the job came open at the Johnson County Library, and I have a feeling that could have been kind of a temporary position maybe for somebody that was on leave or something. But anyway, I got hired to do it. I had done some training in real reference work at Kansas City Public, but I'd never really been alone on my own at the reference desk before that. But I was getting used to learning different reference sources and the kind of the standard by which you do reference. I learned that at Kansas City Public because they would let me go upstairs and kind of was like kind of partially training me, I guess, in case a job came open. Anyway, I learned so much more about it when I was at Johnson County. And Johnson County was a perfect position for me because it was just, what would you say?

Kate: Two blocks from where we lived, the Antioch Public Library.

Mom: We had to cross a vicious highway to get there. The other thing I loved about that job was that kids from your grade school would come by there after school. And it was their hangout. And I knew their names. I knew who they were. And I looked at them so differently than the other staff that was at the reference desk. These would be like the sixth graders who were finally allowed to walk to the library after school. And they would be rowdy at their desks, and the staff would be rushing around trying to shush them. And I was thinking, but wait, I know these kids. They're nice kids.

Mom at the Johnson County Library in the 1990s. ©Mom

Kate: Remember when we came for the Russian timeline? We'd have all those books out there. All the ninth graders came together.

Mom: Yes, yes. And see, and that was the other thing. Yeah, all the ninth graders who had to do make their Russian timelines. And now I knew when they were coming. “You're doing your Russian timeline. Well, who do you have? “And I could take them right over to our Russian encyclopedia. And I loved it when they came in with different assignments, because they would have been the assignments that I knew you all had had. So, I had been connected to those kids as they came in. So that was really, really a fun time for me when I was first getting acclimated to working reference and that it happened to be in a library in our neighborhood was really kind of fun for me.

And then they had some collections there. Their librarian, their director was from Minnesota, and she had some really good ideas that she did with that library. One of the things was that she really was trying to find ways for that library to fit into the county community because it was a county library. Kansas City Public had been a city library, but even more than a city library, it was a library's district that was tied to the Kansas City Public School District. That was, its boundaries or the school district boundaries. It wasn't even so they had a smaller district than if they had been the Kansas City city district-wide library.

Kate: I didn't know that. Okay.

Mom: How that would work. That would have been the boundaries of the city, and they would their tax base would have come from everybody that you know, paid a tax who lived in Kansas City area, but Johnson County was a county-wide library. And it surrounded Olathe, which was our county seat, because Olathe stayed a city library. I always refer to them as the whole of the doughnut. We surrounded them. It was a very big library with a lot of branches. When I joined that library was really at a peak time of growth. Also, it was a highly educated population that lived there. So, you didn't have to think up programs to get the people to love you at the library. The people demanded programs. The people, the population there picked up the library and carried along because of the amount of use it gave the library, the support they gave the library, and it just was an amazing place to work.

And they had such an extensive reference collection. Kansas City Public had an old reference collection that was very academic and very educational. It was a wonderful place to start, but Kansas, but the thing that was different about Johnson County was what they had in the area of business. Your interviews that you did with your dad about working at Marion Labs and Ewing Kaufman. The Kaufman Foundation was really ramping up a program that they did there for entrepreneurs, a program that people applied for. And this was a big push, maybe with small business, maybe there was federal funds that came down to push this idea of small business and getting local businesses going in America. The Ewing Kauffman Foundation did a great entrepreneurial program.

And a part of that was that these people had to write up, they had to come, I believe, with an idea of a business they wanted to start. Maybe that was part of getting into the program, but while they were there, they learned how to write a business plan that they would then take to a bank to try to get a business loan. They started a program, and I don't know who reached out, which way, it was the library that reached out to them or them to the Johnson County Library, but they started a program of having these people come over and learn to use our reference collection and all of the resources that were there to help them learn how to analyze their population of who their customers would be, where they lived, what their incomes would be. They needed to be able to look and see who their competitors would be. And so we needed business databases, business directories that would give information about other, all the businesses within an SIC code, their business kind of identification number for the type of business that they did. And they needed to be able to research who are my competitors and what's their territory and how close I to where they are, things like that. And what things are these, people that live in this county and in this area, what are their interests?

We had all kinds of directories and books that gave kind of statistics on leisure activities for people in this area. How many own pets, you know, how many go to the movies? It was all guesstimates. But the fact that it came from a book and a reputable book with a citation, it could go into their business plan. We had a wonderful business librarian there who was just so generous in how she taught us how to use that collection. And then I got a wonderful librarian there that did their federal documents, their documents librarian, who's she did a little program she called a docs chat. And I don't, it may have been, don't remember how often it was, but it was before the library opened and we would go into the federal documents collection where things have a whole different way that they're put on the shelf. They're not by topic.

Kate: They have their own call numbers.

Mom: Yes, they're instead of being put on the shelf by topic, they're put on the shelf by the agency that produces that document. And she would take us within an area, and we would be looking at what the Department of Interior would be in that area. Well, what do they produce? You know, what are they collecting about Americans and what are they producing? Why would you, what would, if you were, I don't know, I can't, it's hard for me to come up with a good example, but the fact that we then had to begin to think about if somebody come in and asked particular questions about whatever, and maybe it was something that the feds collected and had done an analysis on which department would collect it. mean, we could use the catalog, but still.

When you're in a collection like that, you always want to look what's came before and what came after this document. What are things that are related to it? That was a wonderful education for me to have this woman at, and she turned out to be my manager. And then while I was doing all of this, and this was me just as a general reference librarian, Johnson County also had developed a little subset of documents called, for local government documents because this county had about 23 little cities in it. They were they had an area it was called Urban Affairs Information Services and was the Urban Affairs collection where we collected the city codes, city planning documents for these little cities and then a collection of resources like things published maybe by the Urban Institute or International City Managers Association or National Association of Counties. Documents that they produced were shelved in that collection. Well, it seemed to me like a boring area. I didn't know really what was in there. And it also seemed very confusing to me. But the girl who had it, the woman who'd had that position, she was quitting and was going to go, I don't know if she was going into business for herself, but she quit pretty quickly and they opened it up to other people on our staff and nobody applied for it. And I was the newest person there. I'd probably been there about four or six months, maybe six months, maybe I just passed probation period. I just thought, and I still think I was sort of in a temporary position, but I knew even though it seemed so overwhelming to me, I knew I better try this. I better go for this because it's permanent. And so, I did. I knew nothing about it, but I got it. It scared me so much that any time I was not on the desk, was in those stacks of that collection, pulling every single thing off the shelf, looking at it, seeing who published it and what was in it. It was kind of maybe a four shelf, five shelf area. But I was desperate to not lose this job. I was desperate to figure it out. And I turned out to be something that I just loved doing.

The librarian there, our director, because I was new in that position, she set up a day with me where we went around and visited every county agency in Johnson County. And she took me into the director's office of that agency and introduced me, and I was to be their liaison. That if that agency had any questions, they needed any like census data, if they were writing a grant and they needed information about kids of a certain age range in the county, what their needs were or anything like that. They could call me or email me and then and because I had this kind of little plus, I could get out of whatever I was doing because that came first.

One of the things that really dawned on me as I was working with county agencies and while I was working with that collection was every month, I would get these publications, one that came from the ICMA, International City Managers Association, and one that came from National Association of Counties, NACO. They were little booklets about, and you could see what they were doing from their association level. They were trying to create data and information that would be interesting to people that worked in those positions. They always add a little section of good ideas from other counties and good ideas from other cities. What programs they done that were successful and how you could replicate it. I would always flip through these before I would put them out on the shelf and see what things were going on.

And what dawned on me that I thought was so unfair was that they always had libraries listed under leisure services. They would have things that dealt with utilities or wastewater, I don't know, different agencies, the human services agencies, and here's leisure services, and there are libraries and parks. I thought it seemed so labeling, because leisure just meant it was for fun. And leisure meant it was for the weekend, or it was for after five. And yet, in my position there of working, you know, as a liaison between the county offices. For me, the library was what you did at work while you were at work, while you, to make your work better, to make your work more efficient, and it just always, in fact, I even wrote a letter. I know I remembered arguing with them about putting libraries with leisure services, but it was trying to change something.

Kate: They thought of people going to get their romance novels, right? That’s all they do at the library.

Mom: Yeah, that's all they do is they get their, you know, their book of the month thing or travel books. And I want them to be getting their statistics, their policy.

But another wonderful thing that happened to me while I was there at Johnson County, and this was in the ‘90s toward my end of my career there was our library had one position that worked directly under our director who was the grant writer for and so anybody within any department within the library that wanted a grant, she would be the grant writer for that. And you had to kind of go through her. I don't know if this happened through her, if either she wrote the grant, but I have a feeling that that's not what happened, that what happened was it was a juvenile justice grant. And you would never, mostly when you're in library land and you're looking for grants, you're looking at things from American Library Association or IMLS or something like that. And suddenly here comes a grant from the juvenile justice department.

And there was a big push in the ‘90s for juvenile justice and to try to change the lives of kids that were maybe on a path toward becoming criminals or ne’er-do-wells that might be in the system later and at a more expensive time to house them for many years. They were trying to capture these kids and find out what they could do when they were younger to turn their lives around and to avoid that kind of a future for them. I think it was the juvenile justice department at our county that came. One of the ideas that they had was in Johnson County that there wasn't a clear source for parents to turn to when their kids began to sort of act out and through that the county that we lived in they were, I think, maybe a little soft on kids, or maybe more so than if you had been across the county line in Kansas City and you were picked up. But they wanted a resource, one spot that parents could go to, to get information. They came to the library to say, “Could you create this if we get the grant?” The people above me orchestrated all of this, and they got the grant and when it came time to do it, I was asked if I would work on it. This was really kind of over my head. But I did know as a mom that when you have an issue, sometimes you don't want to ask your best friends like how do you handle this?

Kate: And you had some experience with a child who was in juvenile justice or whatever.

Mom: Well, a little bit. When you're dealing with teenagers that can run faster than you, and you don't want to talk about it necessarily to your best friends because you don't want your family's laundry out there wherever you see it. I really took it to heart. What I got to do was to go down, first of all, and meet with the juvenile justice office in Johnson County and meet with the social workers that were in there and talk to them about, what they had was a gigantic filing cabinet filled with pamphlets from different organizations. And they were filed under different topics. I spent a day down there going through that to see what kinds of things they collected, who produced this kind of information.

Then I also, I started thinking about it from every perspective of it's not just the parents that need information, but it's also the kids that need information, and it's also teachers, you know, maybe that need information. So, from this was born this website that we created, and I pretty much I worked on that by myself at the library with the help of county agency people. And I had a lot of time off the desk to do it, which was kind of a hard thing at work because not everybody that I worked with thought it was fair that I wasn't on the reference desk as much as I used to be. But they ended up using some of that grant money to hire somebody to come in part-time and work my reference desk hours, because I really was working on this around the clock.

I came up with a website, we called it jocofamily.net and the JoCo, Jo for Johnson, Co for County. But our library's website was jocolibrary.org maybe. We got the URL. I didn't even know how that was done. They hired somebody that I worked with on creating the website. I had time to work with him. I could tell him my ideas, and he could make it work, which was wonderful. And slowly began, I learned how to populate this. The other day, because you told me you wanted to talk about this, I went on, that website doesn't exist anymore because when the grant ran out, they didn't keep the project going but you can find it on archive.org.

Kate: It is? Yeah, that's cool. I'll find it.

Mom: You can see the website, and I had it arranged that when you first came to it you selected which entry point you wanted and whether it was parents, for students, or for professionals. And I ended up having the whole section in there for kids. Besides parents, mean, one of the biggest issues I thought was kind of a glossary of terms that once your kid gets picked up for something and you're suddenly put into the position of having to deal with people in juvenile courts, in the juvenile system, they throw a lot of acronyms at you and a lot of phrases. You know, is your kid on detention or is your kid on diversion? And you don't know what the difference is. The first thing I started with was kind of a glossary. How to spell out what you might be coming, those phrases that you need to know what they mean, but you don't know who to ask what they mean. And then for kids, I put in the same kind of things, but also information about teen suicide, also information about becoming, I forgot the phrase, but if you want to get your independence from…

Kate: Being emancipated?

Mom: Yes, emancipated, you could, what's the process of becoming emancipated because kids that want to run away, that's one of the things they're thinking about. I also had an area where they kids could ask questions, and it was anonymous when they went into a little form and all of those questions, and I got a lot that kids asked, went down to the juvenile court system and they created the answers. I didn't do any of those answers.

But being able to work on that resource was so good for me because it really made me think about how is information organized so that the user can find what they need and how do you make it the easiest for them to get to. So, that was a huge growth experience for me was to, well, for one thing, learning all about urban affairs, local government and collecting local government documents and working, doing research for county agencies and then putting together that website was a really pivotal time for me. And then, then I ended up deciding to, this was when you guys were all, Nick, our oldest, had brought my only grandchild at that time out to Oregon.

Kate: Before you go, can you talk about when the library moved to that new space?

Mom: Yes, that was amazing, wasn't it?

Kate: Yes.

Mom: To be part of that, how you move a library is very interesting.

Kate: Yeah, and that used to be like a big box store. I forget which store.

Mom: It was like a Best Buy or something like that, I forgot the phrase, but it was kind of a local one and it was it was just one big vacant square building.

Kate: Because I guess the Antioch Library was like the central library, right? But it was pretty small. It wasn't that big of a building.

Mom: It had been very small, and they had a little annex building where all of the area where the books were processed. What there's a name for that.

Kate: Like tech services?

Mom: I'm losing my lexicon of library terms. The tech services was in another building, and you had to, you know, like run in the rain or through the snow or ice back and forth. And they weren't face to face. So, if you had a question about a collection, you either had to call them or run over there. They want to everything in one area. They were they were looking for land ,and land was very expensive because the county was just doubling, tripling, they were growing, growing, growing. And where could be that it wasn't on the outskirts but could sort of still be in the center of the population area?

I don't know who it was, if it was our director or who, but got this idea that maybe we could do something with that big box store that had been sitting empty for so long. It really became a beautiful setting when they finished. Nobody could not really picture how is this ever going to look like a library. But it did, and it actually was featured, I remember, in an American Architectural Digest. It was on the front page of that, what they had done to kind of pop out the front part of the building. It also was where it was located was on a very busy street, but it had a big parking lot in front. It was sloped. I remember that was an issue for how to make an ADA when it was sort of sloped area, you know, to have ADA parking.

But also, there was a park right behind it. And of course, you didn't ever see the park because that was a big box that you were in. Well, they pulled out the back of it and made a huge floor to ceiling window, and that was like a reading area where you could look out and all you saw was the grass behind you. They structured the parking lot so that there were no cars in that area where that window was. A car might drive by, but it didn't park there, so you had this beautiful green view and where they put chairs. And I think that was also the area where they had art hung up on the walls to do art exhibits around that area. It came in way under probably what they had originally budgeted because it already had all the utilities to it, and the structure was there, and the structure was sound enough that they could just add onto it to create kind of tall ceilings and big light. I don't know if you remember when you walked in, there was a huge area that they blew out the ceiling with a big skylight that brought in light.

Design for the new Johnson County Central Resource Library upgrade in 2021. Courtesy of the Johnson County Library.

Kate: That was really nice too.

Mom: It was amazing. And though it really had the touch of the 80s with all of the purple and green, kind of purple, turquoise shades that were in it.

Kate: Yeah, I'm trying to think what year that was. I think it was when I was in high school.

Mom: Yeah, it was before you graduated. It was right on the cusp of, because they had started looking for that land, you know, and I had gotten my job up there, which, well, that would have been in ‘94. I got my job there at Central. So maybe you were a senior or maybe it was when you came back home from college.

Kate: Well, I feel like no, was in high school because I remember it's probably my, I remember going my senior year when the internet was like this new thing. And you brought home that like Newsweek article about the information superhighway.

Mom: Oh I did?

Kate: Yes. And I don't know if you remember this, you made me go to work with you to use the internet for like the first time. And you put me in this room with a computer and you were like, here, use the internet. And I didn't know what to do, what I was supposed to do.

Mom: Well, I was always bringing home things.

Kate: It's really funny. Yeah, I think I remember that room, too, they had like a reference, phone reference room, whatever that was called with a huge, that ginormous lazy Susan with all the reference books on it. That was so cool.

Mom: Yeah, the gigantic lazy, that was that's where we had phone reference. There were four stations around a huge wheel that was filled with.

Kate: Like double decker. I don't know, it was neat

Mom: Two shelves of reference books so that you could spin it to get what you needed. was and I think somebody that worked for the county made that for them. It was special for them. And then we were moving that library. I remember they had some company that came in that wrapped the shelves while they maybe that what they did was they had shelves on wheels that they pulled up next to the shelves, shifted the books over, wrapped them in like gigantic heavy-duty saran wrap on big trucks, hauled them down, and then they rolled them out and you could shelve. So that was how they moved the books, and that numbering system for that I know had a lot of complications built into it so that when you pulled them off and put them on a shelf and rolled them and pulled them back off, they were in the right order. I think there were some goof ups with maybe some of that based on which staff member was taking them off and putting them on and didn't quite understand the direct order, but everybody was involved. Everybody had to be on hands on deck for that move. It was quite a kind of little bonding experience.

And then the funny thing about it that people that did that, they ended up having the architects and builders, they ended up kind of being the favorites of the library community. Every time a branch was built, they were called in. And every time they always had the same complaints at every branch that the children's area wasn't insulated enough from the rest of the library. It was noisy and that the skylights always leaked.

Kate: That’s funny.

Mom: But, yeah, but then I just jumped ahead and told you that I ended up moving out to Oregon. About you and Austin were off at college and nobody was coming home to the big house. So, I was ready to move on and have an adventure of my own. It involved me quitting and selling the house and moving out to Oregon and restarting out here.

And I did have the foresight when I came out, before I left Johnson County, to photocopy, see, at the time I would have said Xerox, because we didn't say photocopy, all of the pages of the American Library Directory for Oregon. I brought out that section with me when I came, which was a wonderful little directory that told you everything about a local library. I don't know how often it was updated, but it gave even the names of the director, how many staff they, how many reference, how many were part-time, what the budget was, how big their collection was, what their specialties were, if they had any specialties. And see, there was even a time in my life when I filled out some of those forms when I worked in different libraries. You would have to, they would use staff to send back the data.

But anyway, I brought that out with me not really knowing if I was going to get another library job out here, but it turned out that I did. I was out here for about maybe close to nine months when I realized I was going to have to get a job for me to stay out here. I ended up walking into a library that wasn't too far from where we lived. It was a Clackamas County Library and talked to the man on staff there about what jobs and library jobs. And at the time, he got excited to find out my experience and that I was new to the area because they needed an on-call. That's about the first time that that ever worked out for me, where you just walk in and talk to somebody about it and they say, yeah, come on down. Well, I did get a job with them. It took a while to go through the parameters that you have to go through to get hired on it at their county. But I did get an on-call job, which I worked regularly in two different locations that they had. Always the worst hours, always Saturdays and Sundays and evenings. But it worked out because then I could be to be with Audrey and Hadley during the day if Nick and Beth needed help with them. So, that worked out for me.

And then I gradually added a part-time job down at Woodburn, which was another little town. It was about a 45-minute drive, but it was a great, I loved that little library. That's when I really began to be introduced to the different kind of ethnic groups that were here in Oregon, because that library sometimes when I was there in the evenings, I might be the only person in the library besides maybe one other staff member that spoke English because they were either Spanish speakers or Russian speakers because it was a very populous Hispanic town. And also, the Old Believers moved into that area. I really loved working at that library. It was a library that was really used by the kids in that community. Nights and weekends it was packed with kids and there would always be a few of them that were really there to do their homework, and they would come up and you'd have an opportunity to really help them work on a paper, maybe you know an essay they were writing or something like that. I really loved that part of that job.

Then I had just added on a third part-time job at Wilsonville when I had applied for a job at the State Library and that came open. I ended up spending more than a decade working at the State Library. And that was very similar, in a sense, to the job I had at Johnson County because I was working with state agency employees. So, at the State Library, the portion that I worked in, they worked on what's called an assessment, and that was codified. That was part of state law, so we didn't have to worry about losing money for our portion of the library. But the group that worked in reference there and collected the documents that the state produced, state documents, state reference, each agency paid a little assessment fee. It was called Government Research Services was the portion I was in. They may have changed the name by now, but they paid a little portion to fund us, and it was based on the number of employees they had, the number that were registered to use our services and then the amount of usage that they did. We licensed databases for them to use. I was introduced to a whole extra raft of even legal databases that I hadn't been used to before when I worked there, but it was still the same kind of position where these are people at work that are writing policy.

They’re maybe looking up… I remember one request I had that came from someone that was working in a senator's office, and they wanted samples of laws, gun laws that had passed easily in other states. And so, the kind of questions you got, you really took a lot of thought and research and how do you know I can find out what passed, but now I have to find out what passed easily.

Kate: I guess you're sort of like the, or did they have something like this? I was thinking about like at the Library of Congress, how they have the Congressional Research Service, you know, that's the kind of stuff you were doing, like at the state level.

Mom: Yeah, they also have a legislative admin that really does that for them. But theirs is more probably based on a lot that has to do a lot of what they do is like the cost of the law if it comes in. Analyzing and helping to write up the summary statements and things like that for a law. But they also do research. But this was, it all kind of fits in together, I think. Each area complemented the other to be able to give people that are working on the issues that your state's dealing with. One of the first questions I had when I got here was somebody from transportation that wanted me to find articles about concrete and how the effect of salt water on concrete because he was working on bridges all along the coast where you can have that water that's a mixture of fresh water and salt water, and the deterioration rate. I mean, all kinds of things from public health. It was just fascinating. And every day, it was something new. And every day, part of it was doing research for them. Part of it was teaching them what databases were available and how to use the databases.

I just always felt like people don't even realize, and it breaks my heart today when I hear what's happening to federal employees, because just like state employees, but on just a broader level, the good work that these people do for their communities, their state, their constituents, these agencies. They're all there in every part of your life. I mean, every part of your life. What I mean is throughout the day, things that your state or your county or your city provides for you, you touch every day. When you turn on the taps in the morning and you have clean water, to when you can drive over a bridge that doesn't fall down, to when you can flush your toilet and it works, or you get your food stamps when you need them, or you can open up a fresh case of strawberries and not get some kind of illness from them. The way they can so flippantly let these people go today and not try to protect those jobs just breaks my heart because it's like, they're not the ones that are extra or using up. They have nothing to do with the financial issues.

Kate: It's not wasteful to have them employed.

Mom: Yeah, actually, they're the ones that are saving because they are so efficient. And these are people that really, they're in their jobs because they love their job. There's something about it that they're drawn to. So that was my job at the state.

Mom’s last day at the State Library of Oregon with the grandkids, 2016. ©Mom

And then right as I was finishing at the state, I ended up getting a job over at Willamette Law School Library. I was probably there for five or six years, and that was part time. that was because the law school was so close to the state library, literally just two blocks away. I could leave my work at five or five till five and be over there at five o'clock and stay till nine. I. But it wasn't a tiring day.

Kate: It must have been a long day.

Mom: But it wasn't a tiring day.

Kate: That work was pretty easy to do sitting on the desk.

Mom: Mainly it was pretty easy. When you got a question, it was really hard. The thing I loved about it was the person who hired the student workers, because there was always a law school student, and they had to be a 2L or above. So they had to have already had one year of law school under their belt before they could apply for that job. And they were over at the checkout desk, which is also where the books that were on reserve were kept. If I was stuck with helping a brand-new student, they were always there to help. But most of the time, it was kids that would walk up to me, I remember this, walk up with their laptop open to page on Amazon books and ask me, do we have this book in the library? And I would say, “Yes, we do. And let me show you how to use the catalog. And while we're using the catalog, let's bookmark it on your computer, on your laptop, so you'll know what we have in the library. Now let me show you how to find it.”

And I got to know, I got to do a lot of really interesting work there for one of the law professors who did not want his class to use online resources. He only wanted them to use text resources. When they would come in, I would always say, “You're so lucky you've got Dr. Harry because he wants you to go to the shelf. Let me show you where the law is.” Or it could be even just looking up something in a law encyclopedia. But if it was a law that we were looking up, I could always say, “Now, when you're working on that issue, you're going to want to look before and what's after. Where does what you're looking for fit into the whole of what you're looking at?” Otherwise, they're just looking at something that pops up as a paragraph on a screen and they don't get the breadth of the breadth of knowledge.

Kate: The full context, yeah.

Mom: The full context. I'd say, “You're so lucky that you have to go to the shelf and look for this.” Even though I think they didn’t think they were. But you could talk it up, you know, on your way. And so, I learned a lot. I kind of had to scramble, you know. And I ended up putting together a couple of LibGuides. Remember LibGuides?

Kate: They still use LibGuides.

Mom: I ended up making a couple of Libguides for them on Oregon law. And I forgot what else but doing that really makes you, the librarian, do your own research and figure things out. So that was also a really good position for me to have toward the end of my career.

Then after I retired, well, we got a new director there who did not want to keep those of us who, because we had a lot of part-timers there. I think about four of us that filled in for nights and weekends and gradually got rid of all of them. But anyway, I was just glad to be able to, to get to have that experience during my life. My life as a librarian.

And then at the very end after I retired, I'll just throw this in a little fun thing I got to do. The year I retired was the year that granddaughter Willa was in fifth grade. I asked her mom if she would mind if I volunteered at Willa's school one day a week, and she said, “No, have at it.” And I ended up volunteering in her school library. I had Wednesdays with Willa. It was a good almost hour and a half drive to get there from here, where we lived, to get out to her little school, which was through her town and out in the country. I wanted to be there when school started, when the kids first came in and came down the hall. I would stay in this school library until maybe the last 45 minutes of her day. And then I would go in her classroom and do some things with her teacher or for her teacher. Or her teacher would have things in there. But I was there on Wednesdays because that was the day that she had library. So, she and I could wave while she was in the library.

And that was very eye-opening to me to see what school libraries in Oregon were like. Very kind of heartbreaking to see that they, in her school in particular, you know, she didn't have a librarian or library staff member that read to them. I don't think I hardly ever heard her read a story to the kids. She mostly put in little videos that they watched. And it was really a madhouse of getting books back on the shelf in between classes, having all the fairy books in one section, all the dog books, all the cat books, the dinosaur books, the Minecraft books, you know. It wasn't just simply reshelving, you had to think, okay, now where do the fairies live? But I loved seeing the kids, and I loved, I was glad to get to be there and even see how that level of library works also. So that is my life in libraries.

Kate: Yeah, well you also worked at Salem Public for a little bit too.

Mom: I did, when I retired. Yeah, was on call down there. It was like, okay, one more thing.

Kate: You just can't quit.

Mom: Yeah. I wasn’t quite done.

Kate: Were you kind of bored with retirement?

Mom: I was. Yeah. Yeah, so I did. I got a job down there and they were a librarian, a great deal of flux when I was down there. And I moved down from being on the reference desk to also being at the checkout desk. And I wasn't really good or fast at making change. So, I did work down there too. That was the finale.

Kate: Can you talk about now what you're doing with this vote coming up that will fund the libraries?

Mom: Yeah, I've been campaigning for a library levy that's going to be voted on here May 20th special elections and it's a levy. It's an option, local option levy. In Oregon, property taxes back in ‘97, there was a Measure 5 and then Measure 50 . Maybe it was Measure 50 and then Measure 5. That really limited completely the growth that property taxes can have. They can only grow at 3%, I guess, a year. And even though your house value can grow dramatically and plus our population has grown dramatically since ‘97. And so, the services that our town, our city that funds with, that funds those services with general funds and general funds, property taxes are what funds, general funds, there's just not enough to support, not enough general funds. We're about 13 million short for city services such as libraries and parks and our Senior Center 50+. So, I've been campaigning and working by the guy who's been heading up the library part is my old boss the old state librarian.

Kate: Who used to work for my grandfather, right?

Mom: Right. His first job out of library school.

Kate: It was so funny, yeah.

Mom: He was in Lubbock. The threads that run through library land. Was that he, yeah, his first job out of library school.

Kate: Yeah. That was it in Lubbock?

Kate: He was the business manager. And I don't know where he, he went from there, what his next position was after that. But yeah, then I bumped into him out here. I'm sure we probably met him at some time when you were real little.

Kate: Yeah, we might have. I remember him taking us. I remember they had a wonderful collection of like puppets for kids. I don’t know if you remember that at the Lubbock Public Library. That was fun.

Mom: I do remember we went down and see the puppets because their children's librarian had written a grant to do this puppet library program and didn't really think she'd get it. And then she did.

Kate: Did they have a whole puppet theater or something? It was really elaborate.

Mom: Yes, they probably that was part of the grant was having that elaborate theater belt and then doing the puppet program. So, she had these beautiful puppets down there. Grandpa took us down to see the puppets. And when I mentioned that to Jim, he said, “Oh yeah, I remember the puppet grant. So I have a feeling.”

Kate: He must have been there at that time.

Mom: We probably got to meet him. But anyway, so now I'm working with him again on this library levy. I've been doing that on Saturday mornings. I've been down at the library where we're handing out information and reminding people to turn in their ballots, hopefully. They're voting yes for the levy. We'll see what happens on that. Kind of a bad time to be asking people for more. But if they don't have more, they're going to definitely have a much, much.

Kate: They’ll have to cut back hours or something.

Mom: Our library has the fewest number of hours of any of any city our size in Oregon, well, fewest staff. It's way cut back already. We're not open past five during the week. We're not open on Sundays or Mondays. Even getting Saturday hours was kind of a miracle you know. And the bad thing about it is they did have a bond that totally rehabbed this library and allowed them to really update and upgrade the community rooms that are down there. Plus, we now have study rooms, which are small rooms that we never had before. And now they're not available on Sundays, on Mondays, or in the evenings, which impedes community groups meeting.

It's just such a such a tragedy. But trying to convince people is sometimes pretty hard to do. I miss the old days of Johnson County when, I mean, it was no problem to get funding for the library and all the libraries that they've been opening out there. So, it's going to be a real tragedy if it doesn't pass because they've already, city council has already said for sure they'll be closing. It'll be much reduced hours and much reduced staff.

Kate: Yeah. Well, that's fingers crossed it passes. Before we go, I wanted to encourage anybody listening who has heard about the cuts to the IMLS, which is so important. That's the Institute of Museum and Library Services that funds all kinds of library stuff across the country, including, it funded my most recent job in libraries. And it's really heartbreaking to see how that's going to affect libraries that everything from internet service to funds for rural libraries to stay open that hardly have any money. All kinds of things, so please call your representatives to encourage them to fight to restore that funding because and for those people to get their jobs back because they cut 80% of the staff at the IMLS, who are the people who run the grant programs.

Mom: Yeah, it really is a tragedy. It's heartbreaking, honestly, to see what's going to happen to these institutions. they honestly, the internet has not replaced it. If anything, the internet's made your ability to find what you need clearly and accurately and quickly even harder.

Kate: It is. That's true.

Mom: I really feel like the dependency on our online researching, which we call researching, looking it up on Google, or getting information from your social media apps and all, is not honestly, in some ways you could, people want to say, it's broadened my life. Well, if you really want to broaden your life, visit the library because that's where we don't filter. That's where you're the one who's in charge of what you're going to be looking up and asking for and researching. And when you use social media and you use the internet, you have blinders on. Those blinders are put on you by the very thing you're looking at.

Kate: Those corporations that only want you to see certain things.

Mom: Yes, and so without our library, we're just, to me, we're losing a place of sanctuary and even a place of renewal. I've always thought of libraries as a place for community renewal and personal renewal.

Kate: Yeah, I was thinking recently about how still to this day, every time I walk into a library, especially public library, I feel so happy. It always brings me a lot of joy tjust o walk in.

Mom: Look at all I have before me.

Kate: What will I find today?

Mom: Yes, I agree 100%. I'm so glad you grew up to value libraries and be a part of them.

Kate: I didn't realize how lucky I was as a kid. Like when you started working at public libraries. You would bring home books for, especially me. I don't know if you did this for Nick and Austin, because they weren't quite reading the way that I did. But you brought home books for me every single day, pretty much. Like a whole stack.

Mom: I never came home empty handed. even for Austin, who wasn't a reader, I would bring home music CDs. Drumming CDs, something like that.

Kate: I didn't realize how amazing that was until I went to college and realized, oh, I have to go to the library myself and look things up instead of just calling you to bring me home something I wanted or needed.

Mom: Well, still your big brother often calls and says, “Can you help? I'm working on the project. Can you find me some information on this?” And I say, “Yes, give me the details.”

I'm so happy that we all, I think, I'm lucky because you've all grown up to be curious, you’ve all grown up to be self-reliant. And I really think that that started with your experience of having libraries in your past.

Kate: Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you. This was really fun.

Mom: It was fun. I always like to view about libraries.

Kate: Which I know I'm thinking, boy, we've done this for decades, the library gossip, the stuff all the time.

Mom: Well, all right. What did Greg say about us?

Kate: We're like a medieval guild.

Mom: The Medieval Guild.

Kate: Of librarians.

Mom: You’re part of it, your family guild.

Kate: All right. Thank you.