Memoirs of a Librarian

Memoirs of a Librarian
Chapter One

THE SIXITIES

I began my library career as a student in 1961 at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. I doubt that the library science faculty had any idea how their world was going to change! We were not the students who normally came through this school. After all, it was the beginning of the sixties. We argued, questioned and did things that were outrageous.

Every year before Christmas, the freshman class was to put on the program for the staff, faculty and students of the school of library science. In the past there had been book reviews, book talks, etc. We were different. We took the poem “The Night Before Christmas and transferred it to a beatnik poem about books and libraries. I wish I had kept a copy…it was hilarious! I wore a long white turtleneck sweater and black tights and read the poem while brandishing a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. We talked about books like Chaucer, Tropic of Capricorn, Lady Chatterly’s lover and so forth and ended up throwing paperback copies of the books into the audience.. I think we were the only ones having a good time….every one else was in a state of disbelief.

Things continued in that vein until we graduated and went our separate ways out into the big world of public libraries and school libraries. I accepted a position with the Houston Public Library as a children’s librarian in 1965. For a while I worked in the main library in downtown Houston. While I was there the female staff got very excited by an advertisement that came out in Playboy magazine. It was a Tipparillo ad. I need to see if I can find a copy online and add it to this. There was a beautiful woman sitting holding a book…she obviously had no clothes on and the book was strategically placed to cover her…she was looking up over the book. The ad said, “Should you offer a Tipparillo to a librarian? Then in parenthesis it said, “yes, but offer to light it for her, she’ll have to put down that book!”

We purchased many copies of the magazine and posted that ad in every lounge for staff members to see! Thank God! We might be getting free of that awful image of the little old lady with her hair in a bun and a pencil behind her ear!


Then there were those of us that wore mini-skirts. Some patron always seemed to be calling and complaining to the powers that be about those mini-skirts in the libraries! Heaven forbid!

Oh yes…that first job paid a whopping $4000.00 a year! You must remember though, a brand new VW Beetle cost around $1300.00 in those days! I soon got a raise and a promotion to assistant librarian at one of the nicer branches. One of my jobs was to keep track of the overdue books. Once a month a Houston Police Officer would report to my branch to escort me to various addresses where we demand our library materials be returned. Didn’t Stephen King write a story called “The Library Police”? Some of the places we went to were cordoned off with police crime tape and we were informed that everything in the house or apartment was being kept for evidence and we couldn’t get our books back. The library was in an affluent section of Houston and so some of these people had expensive art books out worth hundreds of dollars.

Well, by 1967 I was the Branch Head Librarian for one of the newer branch libraries in Houston. The hours were long and the headaches many. One Saturday morning a patron came in and announced that there was a motorcycle gang parked on the lawn of the library and people were afraid to go past them to enter the library. I called the supervisor of branch libraries and found there was nothing I could do about it…it was public property and if they were not terrorizing people or trashing the place they had the right to be there.

I got married that year and resigned from the public library. The next day I started my career as a school librarian in a Houston Jr. High School. I was there for one year. My husband and I saved all our money that year and then took off to hitchhike all over Europe. But that is a story for another time. We did not return home until 1970. Stay tuned for Chapter 2 The Seventies.