Back Talk — My Glorious Library Career: Part I

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

It might seem I came a little late to the library profession, joining ASU as director in 2015 after a career as academic and administrator, but appearances can be deceiving. My first library job came a lot longer ago than that.

Now, it may seem hard to believe that I was once kind of a nerdy kid, the sort who chose his college based on which one had the most minimal physical ed requirement — and then spent my freshman year gaming the system to evade as much of it as I could. (I still haven’t passed the swimming test.)

But for a kid growing up in El Paso, I was lucky in my school, because a team of American Jesuit priests had come to our town a few years earlier and taken over the building that had been headquarters of the Mexican Jesuits when they were hiding out from anticlerical political parties in the 1920s and 1930s. We had a handsome brick building on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande about two miles away

There were some extraordinary teachers, incredibly smart and committed and charismatic and in every way just the right sort of mentors for a bunch of boys on the border — about a third for them from across the border, because their parents could afford the modest tuition and figured that getting a high school degree from American Jesuits was a very good thing. They were pretty right about that, even though we kids were never smart enough to take real advantage that we could have of the bicultural possibilities.

Even though the school had only been open for about six years when I got there, it had a library of maybe 5,000 books, presided over by the incredibly serious and quiet Brother Murphy. School libraries had some magic in them for everybody in those days, when other libraries and bookstores (especially in El Paso) were limited in their powers of attraction. There were real books in that library. A little heavy on adventure yarns (Rafael Sabatini and Kenneth Roberts) and Doubleday Image paperbacks — their separate publishing line for specifically Catholic books. To be sure there were other books around as well, and Catcher in the Rye was passed hand-to-hand under the table. Larry had a copy and was excited to report to us that the cussing started right on the first page.

So the first library job of mine: my only marketable skill, from that day to this, is my typing. When I was 14, my parents had bought me a Smith-Corona portable for $90, and I spent five cents at the annual Jewish women’s book sale in the El Paso Coliseum (where they had the rodeos) on a very old booklet that showed where to put your fingers on which keys — and I was off to the races. I still type over 100 words a minute these days, but that’s partly the much better keyboards we have nowadays. I still get stiff necks from the summer I spent writing my doctoral dissertation on one of those machines and remember one day I typed so much that I had shooting pains in my forearms for twenty-four hours after.

But I could type, and Brother Murphy found out, so that meant I had a job. Study hall? Recess? I can’t remember, but the job was typing catalog cards for new books that came in. And Brother Murphy was serious. He (im)patiently and firmly taught me the correct format and the exact placement of every detail of author, title, and subject cards. This was not copy cataloging. I was taking the data (ok, we didn’t say “data” then) straight from the books themselves and laying out the cards just so. (And I learned alphabetizing rules as well!) There was no margin of error because, of course, it made perfect sense that the cards had to be perfect. The typewriter, I’m pretty sure, was manual, but the eraser was electric. It was about the size of a baseball, it plugged into the wall, and it had a spinning arm with a fierce eraser. (Was the head replaceable? I can’t remember.) Brother Murphy emphasized clean, precise, minimalist erasing — and as little of it as possible, thank you very much. The whole world of librarianship in a nutshell was there for us in that couple of thousand square feet.

I got good at it and can truly say that everything else I’ve ever done for money came from that experience. I guess it was what we’d now call an unpaid internship, but it still paid off.

Of course, this is all poignant to think about nowadays for a lot of reasons. The school opened about six years before I started and closed four years after I graduated — no market for private schools, even good ones with low tuition, in the El Paso of those days. I was lucky to find the place when I did. The building was soon sold off to the local school district and then a very few years later burned to the ground. I wonder what happened to those books — whether they’d been redistributed somehow to local Catholic schools or whether they just went up in smoke.

Deaccession, smoke, and budget cuts have taken out a lot of libraries over time. A lot has changed about libraries and school libraries since those days, a lot of it for the good. But that quiet, safe, orderly place, where Brother Murphy and the others demonstrated by example that books were valuable, were things to cherish, and could make a difference — that was quite a place.