[Publib] Back in the day

[Sara Weissman]

The older librarian thread got me to remembering when I was a wild and crazy "Young Turk", hired into an academic reference dept with the ink still wet on my MLS. The two oldest librarians in the dept were:
--a man who'd fought a valorous and horrible war in a tank in North Africa in WWWII. You never heard any of this from him, for like all his generation he was modest, self-effacing about that. It gave him an unflappable calm about the minutae that drove other people nuts. He knew 'publish or perish' was a pretty flyweight comment ...
--an elderly (ie, probably 3 or 4 years older than I am now!) woman of erect and queenly carriage, with--gad, yes!--the bun and sensible shoes. She, among other things, was completely fluent in Latin.  I didn't see myself needing that skill but I sure admired the fact she had it.
   They were very kind to me ... didn't pat me on the head, tho' I'm sure they wanted to.  Rather, they chuckled into their cuffs and tried to channel/focus my 24-yr old energy.
   I'm very glad I thanked them, in their lifetimes, for starting me off right.  And I am, slowly, beginning to develop as much patience as they had ....

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Reference Dept
Morris County Library
http://www.mclib.info
(973) 285-6969