Tape 18, Side A
[Begin Tape 18, Side A]
You can hear the bells in the background. We are at the Moffitt Library. Well…
Set me up [laughs].
We left off: you dropped out of UCB, you dropped all your classes, and you took a library LA II job; and you had moved in with Tina—that was a little while before that, I think—and it’s 1979. What do you think?
Yeah, that’s about right. Let me go back one… because I was thinking about one thing that I did back when I was going to Merritt or before that, when I was living with Kathy Stanis. Her brother I mentioned had a… her brother and his wife had a guitar place called Paragon Music in Walnut Square and this was when I think the Berkeley Monthly was just getting started and there were a couple of other free handout papers and Kathy and I started doing ads for Paragon Music that appeared in these, you know, drawing ads and roughing them up and putting that sort of thing, getting them in these papers. So there’s a bunch of ads floating around in these papers for Paragon Music, and that was really fun because they let you… you know I sort of was drawing the pictures or coming up with… I was the idea man and then Kathy would finish it out with words and mockup, rough-up.
So you were using your artistic ability?
Yeah, so I got a chance to actually do a little bit.
And most of them were original drawings that you…?
Yeah, I mean we weren’t getting paid for it, although I could get guitar strings or something like that, or maybe a deal on a guitar, something like that. But it was fun to do that and to see it actually being published. And some of the things I did were a little too far out for them so they got tamed down. There was a lot of crazy stuff, but you know the theme was guitars, so you could play with that, and you know the guitar is a lovely… you know it has all those curves and has all those lines: curves, lines, lines curves: say no more [laughs], so you could do all sorts of things with that. And when I was at Merritt in one of these art classed I ran into Polly Schmidt, a woman named Polly Schmidt, who was starting her own business down there on Solano, sort of in Albany, called… she called it—this is a really stupid name: Garden of Good Things, but it was a real nice place. Now it’s Schmidt’s Tobacco. It’s up there, it’s a house right off Solano that’s a shop; it’s a house that’s a shop, and I did some logos and things like that for her, and I was thinking: Oh, I’ve got something going here; do some ads; but it never panned out and she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
What? Really?
[Laughs] That’s what I heard. I hadn’t seen her for a while and then I heard that she had taken a flyer off the Golden Gate Bridge. Her husband, Mr Schmidt, is now running the Schmidt’s Tobacco Company and he got rid of all the gewgaws and stuff and made it into this other thing.
Wow, that’s kind of a wild finish.
So that’s a little story I had to throw in there.
So at that point you thought that maybe you’d be getting into advertising like Gene?
Well no, just a… [laughs] yeah, that would be something, wouldn’t it? I just thought, well maybe there’s a way… I still had no idea what was happening [laughs] or how anything was gonna turn out, but it was clear that I had to figure out some way to make some money; that’s why I finally dropped out and got a job, because I realized that the school thing was not gonna go anywhere, you know, I was never gonna finish [laughs]. One way or the other I was going to have to give that up, and here was a perfect opportunity, you know, just a segue from working as a student to hiring on full-time, and I liked the work, liked aspects of the work, liked the whole library scene, that was cool, and I particularly liked the fact that it was run by women: that was a big consideration, always has been, still.
Really? Tell me why.
You know I think men who get into library management, or maybe any management for that matter: fuckin’ pricks; I mean just get right down to the bottom of it, and I should know because I was there for a while and turned into a little bit of a fucking prick, so…
[Laughing] So you think it more readily happens to men than to women.
Oh I think it’s, yeah, it’s testosterone poisoning or it’s genetic coding or whatever it is, but give ‘em a little bit of power and they start walking around, you know, start tossing their weight around [laughs]. It can happen to the best of us [laughs].
Shayee* calls it testeroni.
[Laughing] Testeroni… But the library seemed, I mean… You know: the United States Army: run by men; Post Office: run by men. Other people that I knew were all working for organizations, but the library historically… Even though when I started there the librarian was Joe Rosenthal, not a real man [laughs] but enough of a man. But, you know, where the work was done and at almost every stage below him and…
So that was Dorothy Gregor was in…?
Well Dorothy Gregor was the head of Serials, yeah, so I didn’t see any further than her at that time, but, you know, I started to... The catalogers were sort of half and half; branch heads: more women than men. To me it had a distinct feel to it and as I spent more time at it I came to see that I was right.
Yeah? It was confirmed?
Yeah. You know there still are hard-nosed women in library management but there’s a degree of humanity and warmth and not cutthroat dealings that comes through the female side of things.
Yeah, and I haven’t noticed there being too many Maggie Thatcher he-girls.
[Laughs] He-girls, yeah, there are a few here and there; I mean it’s a profession, after all it’s a codified profession, and when that happens there’s a certain amount of competitiveness and trying to outshine the other person because your progress depends on certain things, you know, the way you present yourself and… But only in times of budget crisis is it, you know, who can you screw, I mean who can you step on, whose neck can you step on and who can you play power games with and that sort of thing, and then the humanity’s gone entirely and the kind of manager that comes to the fore is, whether male or female, they’re gonna be meat axe wielders and machiavellian types, or as close as it can get in the private sector, you know. Most of the people who do management in the public sector are people who couldn’t last, who wouldn’t last very long being managers in the private sector. They’re lucky they got a job.
When you started in the library in seventy-nine was it pretty flush, was the budget pretty… there was money?
Well I think there hadn’t been too many major changes for quite a while but there was also a lot of soft money, you know, a lot of temporary money, and that’s what I was on: Title 2C funding, government funding; and that looked like it was gonna go on for another couple years at least, and it did. And, you know, in the background there was some sort of commitment by the library that everybody on Title 2C funds would be carried over if they were there when the funds dried up, and actually it came to pass just like that: it actually happened. I can’t imagine anything like that happening now, but they went out of their way to make sure that everybody got a job, one way or the other. So I mean some people applied for open positions but some people were also just plopped down into one place or another, and it worked out just right; so I guess there was enough money.
So you mean people who were on projects?
Uh huh, right, yeah. And that was the big project that we were all involved in at that time was retrospective conversion of card-based cataloging into machine-readable mode, MARC formatting and so on. And it meant… there was kind of a small army of people in various libraries all over the country who were on Title 2C funds. Here there was a lot of cooperation with Stanford, so sometimes you’d see people cycling in from Stanford to do little temporary projects and vice versa, so there were people here… most of the people here were working on UC things, but every now and then there were people who were working on Stanford things. And yeah, the library school was thriving, you know, turning ‘em out, turning out those librarians, and so there was a cadre of smart, ambitious young computer-friendly types working on doing this conversion, and what they needed to fuel this machine was cards, and that was… the conversion unit proper was headed by somebody named Hester Seiple, and she assembled—working with Dorothy—a staff of people, including some who are still here, like Linda Turitz, who was Linda Lyoshin then, but her husband, Mitch Turitz, was working there. I don’t know if they were… they were hooked up.
Is he in private industry now?
He’s in San Francisco State Library now; he’s the serials librarian for San Francisco State. I believe that’s where he is. And a whole bunch of other people, let’s see, anybody who’s still around now… no, but one of the Stanford people that came around was Julie Rinaldi and she later comes into the picture here, and I don’t know…. But they used to have these big meetings all the time, and Ivan Argüelles was hired as the head of Serials Cataloging, so they’d get Ivan and Hester and some of these catalogers together and they were always hashing over strategy all the time because it was changing all the time as they discovered more and more new things, and there were card sets all over the room—it was down there in that big room where Systems is now—and I got hired as the head of the Conversion Support unit, basically it was me and a bunch of students, and so we were managing this huge flow of cards back and forth in and out of the catalogs, and they were put into various categories; and so one of the early ways I got to know lots of people was they would come down looking for cards because we would leave little pink slips in the catalogs, you know, with our names and with our initials and the date on them, so they would come down and that’s how I started to meet Esther and Veronica and all the serials people.
Veronica Eaglin?
Veronica Wakeman.
And Esther Fulsaas?
Esther Fulsaas… some of those other Serials Cataloging people; also people from the public service sector would come around looking for cards because that was the huge catalog, was the catalog, you know, the catalog that was in the loan stack hall was the public service catalog as well. I mean we were taking cards out of those catalogs and for all anybody knew, keeping them.
And then you would leave notes.
Uh huh, saying who had it, who took it and when.
So you got to know a lot of the people. What was it like working with a lot of students? Did you like being in a… you were sort of a supervisor for student workers?
Well, yeah, and a lot of them were my ah, you know, we were all students together at a certain point and then suddenly I was the boss. Oh, I forgot—among a million things—when I was still a student, one summer, Dorothy came around and said: I… the head of the Biochemistry library, at that time there was a biochemistry library, has to go have an eye operation and would you be interested in going over and running that library for the rest of the summer? And I said: What? What are you talking about? I’m just a zhlub!
To run the library, wow.
As it turns out it was a tiny little library. She was the only person there; there were some students. And I said: Sure, Dorothy, if you think I can do it. And she said: Yeah, I think you can do it. She was pretty quick that way: she’d just call ‘em as she saw ‘em and let the chips fall as they may. I mean I was just a student library employee, of course I was…
This was before you were actually…
This was before I actually got hired. I was doing it on the clock.
That’s kind of amazing.
I was a student library employee but I was a thirty-three year old student. I was older than the other student library… except maybe, well Ed* was there too. Well so most of that summer I went over to the Biochemistry library and sort of learned from the ground up how to run a branch library and it was kind of... it was a little tiny library, so it was microcosmic, but it had elements of everything that I could later use when I went to Earth Sciences. So it belonged to the Biosciences library really, so I had to ask. I said: Send somebody over to at least show me how to receive material, what to do, how to check the orders, how to clear things, and so on; and they sent Randy Wilson over. So that’s how I met Randy Wilson, and he just told me a whole universe of stuff and he helped me out real well; but that was a kick because, you know, most of the time I was completely alone; it was a strange… they didn’t have a… they had an office there so I could just shut myself in the office and do my work or read or whatever. They had a ledger system for charging books out, their little library, you know, it was mostly grad students and professors. So they’d go in there, they’d take a book and they’d write it out on a ledger and they’d walk out with it; so I had no contact with the patrons whatsoever [laughter], which was good because I was busy with all the stuff that was coming in in lugs and sending stuff out in lugs and trying to deal with the bad recording system that they had there and so on. But nobody was watching me, nobody was paying attention to my timecard, you know, there may have been some hours on there when I wasn’t actually there [laughter]. But it was all part of the experience, all part of the learning process. And I saw Linus Pauling over there in that—whatever the name of that building is, I can’t remember—it’s that tall building over there. And also—this is a real digression now; these things just keep popping into my head—I forgot this whole thing about Lee Roy, my friend Lee Roy Peck. He was up here and, you know, he was working at odd jobs here and there and then he decided, he applied for a nutritional study at Morgan Hall, and the nutritional study meant that he would have to be sequestered in Morgan Hall for like, you know, three months. And the whole point of this was, you know, that he would get $125 a week, and since he would have no opportunity of spending this money he’d come out of it with a huge hunk of cash, and that sounded good to him. So they would take six or seven guys and sequester them on the penthouse, what they called the penthouse at Morgan Hall, and they had everything they needed: they would ship in books for them, they had record players, you could have your musical instruments there: the only thing was you couldn’t eat what you wanted, you had these shakes four times a day, and [laughs], you know, these were all nutritionally calculated, whatever they were studying, you know, selenium or whatever, they’d get a certain amount of that and the shake was the background to it, and they could put all these flavorings [laughs] in it, but that’s what you had was four shakes a day, something like that, and then they had to wear a certain kind of clothing: everything had to be clean; it wasn’t antiseptic; they could only interact with the staff and each other, and they had to keep their hair and fingernails trimmed all the time because they measured them, and they all had color coded jugs for their excretions because that was measured and weighed too, so they had to… [laughs] you had to poop in a can and give that to somebody [laughs]. And then every now and then they’d have them running on treadmills, and they’d do breath tests while they were on the treadmill, and every now and then they’d take them somewhere for underwater weighing.
Underwater weighing?
I think it was over by the gym somewhere, yeah, so they could get a real, you know…
So under water you get a more accurate weight?
Yeah, I guess so. They weigh you in the water or something: some kind of Archimedes* deal [laughter], I don’t know what it is [laughs]. Yreka!* So but that was a chance to go out. They didn’t chain them together like in a chain gang, but they watched them all the time, you know: you couldn’t smoke, couldn’t drink. You know every now and then somebody would flip out and run screaming out of the door and that would kind of poison things but still they’d go on.
And Lee Roy didn’t flip out and run screaming out the door?
No, no. He was kind of crazy the first time he went through one of these things. At the end of it all he wanted was artichoke hearts [laughter]. He wanted to go to the store and he bought five or six jars of you know those little artichoke hearts in oil and just ate those: that’s all he could think of. But see I was supplying them, when night fell I would go over there and they would lower a string, you know, a safety pin sort of thing, down from the penthouse and I’d give ‘em some smokes and [laughter] whatever, whatever else, some sandwiches.
[Laughing] Did you screw up the…?
Probably screwed up several generations of nutritional experiments. We had to, didn’t we. But see that wasn’t the first one, I mean that wasn’t the only one. He kept doing this; this was like his job for a while. As a matter of fact after one of them he decided that he should get unemployment insurance and he went… the unemployment people said: No, you were a volunteer. So he went over to Boalt Hall—it was very uncharacteristic of him—but he went over to Boalt Hall and he studied the books, you know, he found case law and all sorts of examples and he challenged them by declaring that he was a paid volunteer [laughs]; he sort of invented this category that he was a volunteer, yes, but he was a paid volunteer, and he beat it! [laughter] So he got unemployment. So between his nutritional studies he would collect unemployment insurance.
So he’s kind of a jailhouse lawyer sort of a guy.
Well it was unusual for him to do something like that but he worked that right up. I think then he was hanging around with Harvey Lauria, and I don’t know, maybe I won’t talk about Harvey.
Why not?
Well let me go back to… see Morgan Hall was right across from this building where the Biochemistry Library was, and so every now and then I could go out on the balcony of that building and, you know, you could talk to him on the phone, you could always talk to these people, and he’d get out in the penthouse and we’d kind of wave at each other; and one time I was up there and there was an earthquake and the building started swaying and rocking, so I went out on the balcony and saw all the guys in the study out there, they were waving at me too; everybody was out; probably the worst thing you could do, go outside; stay under a doorjamb or something like that. So that was where that digression came from, because I had pictured myself: Oh I was working at Biochemistry and there was this earthquake and I went out and: Hi, here are all the guys from Morgan Hall, they’re out here too.
Harvey Lauria is this guy who—you know this is really thirdhand stuff—he was… what was his discipline? physics I believe. He was studying… he was a graduate student in physics here, I think, and he got cataracts, and it came over him really suddenly.
And he wasn’t very old, huh?
No, he was around the same age that we are: fifties; he’d be fifty now, something like that, a little older maybe. And he dropped physics, dropped all that, and started getting into biochemistry because he was going to investigate cataracts, he was gonna develop a cure for them, so he advertised for a reader and Lee Roy was looking for things to do and he hooked up with Harvey and he would read stuff to Harvey.
So his cataracts were bad enough that he…?
He could only… I was over there once and I [laughs] I took a lamp and shined it right in his face, you know, we were just… and he said he could barely see that. So he could see a little brightness if the lamp was right in his face, but otherwise not. And the thing about it was you look at him and you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with his eyes at all, you know, he’d just walk around the street. He would walk around—you know he wore open-toed sandals—and he’d walk around the street with no assistance and walk real fast too. Sometimes… I heard that he walked off a BART platform once, and he just turned right around and hopped right back up, and there was a train coming; he just turned right around and hopped right back up. I don’t know if that’s true. I saw him walk into a dumpster once, just wham! and he would do that. So his feet were all scarred up; his toes were all messed up, but he was not going to make any concessions like that, and when he’d walk through a crowd he’d bump into people, and the only thing he would say—he’d never say excuse me or anything or slow down or anything like that—if he’d bump into somebody he’d say: Poor vision, poor vision; that’s all he said: Poor vision, poor vision, poor vision; you know, he’d walk around, you could hear him coming sometimes: Poor vision, poor vision. No vision is more like it; but he was quite a character.
How far did he get in his medical studies?
I think he got pretty far but then I heard that there was a point—he was studying at UCLA too—there was a point where the University… he got into a thing with the University of California and he couldn’t progress any further: they denied him money or a lab space or something like that, and the way I heard it was—and it sounds like typical University of California bullshit—they were bouncing him out of their program by saying he could not possibly do original research because he needed an assistant, so they knocked him out. This is what I heard. He appealed…
But don’t they all have assistants now?
Yeah, right, they all have assistants and you know that they’re taking credit for a lot of their assistants’ work too; sometimes they give them a little, you know, a co-author or something like that.
So it sounds like they wanted him out.
Yeah, he might have been obstreperous. He could be very abrasive and very insistent when he wanted something. But he was smart and funny. I have no doubt that if he had backing he would have come up with something; but he was also restless; he was always involved in various schemes. I remember once he and Lee Roy were going to the track all the time because Harvey had got it in his mind that he could come up with a system, a foolproof system for beating the ponies. So they were going to the track all the time; and then there were various stock option investment schemes and import-export—I think that’s what he’s doing now—he’s doing import-export; I think I heard that he sold a boatload of honey to the Pakistanis or something like that—no, no; he was trying to sell some honey to the Chinese, and he did manage to sell a boatload of Pakistani rice, basmati rice, to somebody, I forgot where. That’s what he’s interested in now is getting the Pakistani basmati rice because, you know, in all the places now it’s the Indian basmati rice that’s so big everywhere, but the Pakistani basmati rice—according to Harvey—is just as good.
And he’s got a corner on the market.
He’s got a corner on the market and he was also, you know, as part of his cataract thing, he was also convinced that nutrition, you know, that there were some nutritional aspects, so he was devouring tons and tons of bee pollen. That’s what he was on one time I remember: bee pollen; but you know he always had some scheme going.
And Lee Roy was involved with most of these things?
Yeah, yeah. I mean it went beyond the reading thing and into other areas. But it was hard for Lee Roy sometimes because, you know, Harvey was very demanding and he had no, you know, his internal clock had been completely reset, so he’d call Lee Roy up at three am and, you know: Lee Roy, Lee Roy, come over here! and get him into some kind of thing, and Lee Roy did it.
That’s what they say about Stevie Wonder: The cat’s blind, he don’t know what time it is.
[Laughs] He don’t know what time it is; he don’t care. Right. Well they do, you know, all those circadian rhythm studies.
Okay, we’ve gotta turn the tape over.
Oh boy, see, I’ll never get finished [laughter]. I’ll never finish!
[End Tape 18, Side A]
You can hear the bells in the background. We are at the Moffitt Library. Well…
Set me up [laughs].
We left off: you dropped out of UCB, you dropped all your classes, and you took a library LA II job; and you had moved in with Tina—that was a little while before that, I think—and it’s 1979. What do you think?
Yeah, that’s about right. Let me go back one… because I was thinking about one thing that I did back when I was going to Merritt or before that, when I was living with Kathy Stanis. Her brother I mentioned had a… her brother and his wife had a guitar place called Paragon Music in Walnut Square and this was when I think the Berkeley Monthly was just getting started and there were a couple of other free handout papers and Kathy and I started doing ads for Paragon Music that appeared in these, you know, drawing ads and roughing them up and putting that sort of thing, getting them in these papers. So there’s a bunch of ads floating around in these papers for Paragon Music, and that was really fun because they let you… you know I sort of was drawing the pictures or coming up with… I was the idea man and then Kathy would finish it out with words and mockup, rough-up.
So you were using your artistic ability?
Yeah, so I got a chance to actually do a little bit.
And most of them were original drawings that you…?
Yeah, I mean we weren’t getting paid for it, although I could get guitar strings or something like that, or maybe a deal on a guitar, something like that. But it was fun to do that and to see it actually being published. And some of the things I did were a little too far out for them so they got tamed down. There was a lot of crazy stuff, but you know the theme was guitars, so you could play with that, and you know the guitar is a lovely… you know it has all those curves and has all those lines: curves, lines, lines curves: say no more [laughs], so you could do all sorts of things with that. And when I was at Merritt in one of these art classed I ran into Polly Schmidt, a woman named Polly Schmidt, who was starting her own business down there on Solano, sort of in Albany, called… she called it—this is a really stupid name: Garden of Good Things, but it was a real nice place. Now it’s Schmidt’s Tobacco. It’s up there, it’s a house right off Solano that’s a shop; it’s a house that’s a shop, and I did some logos and things like that for her, and I was thinking: Oh, I’ve got something going here; do some ads; but it never panned out and she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
What? Really?
[Laughs] That’s what I heard. I hadn’t seen her for a while and then I heard that she had taken a flyer off the Golden Gate Bridge. Her husband, Mr Schmidt, is now running the Schmidt’s Tobacco Company and he got rid of all the gewgaws and stuff and made it into this other thing.
Wow, that’s kind of a wild finish.
So that’s a little story I had to throw in there.
So at that point you thought that maybe you’d be getting into advertising like Gene?
Well no, just a… [laughs] yeah, that would be something, wouldn’t it? I just thought, well maybe there’s a way… I still had no idea what was happening [laughs] or how anything was gonna turn out, but it was clear that I had to figure out some way to make some money; that’s why I finally dropped out and got a job, because I realized that the school thing was not gonna go anywhere, you know, I was never gonna finish [laughs]. One way or the other I was going to have to give that up, and here was a perfect opportunity, you know, just a segue from working as a student to hiring on full-time, and I liked the work, liked aspects of the work, liked the whole library scene, that was cool, and I particularly liked the fact that it was run by women: that was a big consideration, always has been, still.
Really? Tell me why.
You know I think men who get into library management, or maybe any management for that matter: fuckin’ pricks; I mean just get right down to the bottom of it, and I should know because I was there for a while and turned into a little bit of a fucking prick, so…
[Laughing] So you think it more readily happens to men than to women.
Oh I think it’s, yeah, it’s testosterone poisoning or it’s genetic coding or whatever it is, but give ‘em a little bit of power and they start walking around, you know, start tossing their weight around [laughs]. It can happen to the best of us [laughs].
Shayee* calls it testeroni.
[Laughing] Testeroni… But the library seemed, I mean… You know: the United States Army: run by men; Post Office: run by men. Other people that I knew were all working for organizations, but the library historically… Even though when I started there the librarian was Joe Rosenthal, not a real man [laughs] but enough of a man. But, you know, where the work was done and at almost every stage below him and…
So that was Dorothy Gregor was in…?
Well Dorothy Gregor was the head of Serials, yeah, so I didn’t see any further than her at that time, but, you know, I started to... The catalogers were sort of half and half; branch heads: more women than men. To me it had a distinct feel to it and as I spent more time at it I came to see that I was right.
Yeah? It was confirmed?
Yeah. You know there still are hard-nosed women in library management but there’s a degree of humanity and warmth and not cutthroat dealings that comes through the female side of things.
Yeah, and I haven’t noticed there being too many Maggie Thatcher he-girls.
[Laughs] He-girls, yeah, there are a few here and there; I mean it’s a profession, after all it’s a codified profession, and when that happens there’s a certain amount of competitiveness and trying to outshine the other person because your progress depends on certain things, you know, the way you present yourself and… But only in times of budget crisis is it, you know, who can you screw, I mean who can you step on, whose neck can you step on and who can you play power games with and that sort of thing, and then the humanity’s gone entirely and the kind of manager that comes to the fore is, whether male or female, they’re gonna be meat axe wielders and machiavellian types, or as close as it can get in the private sector, you know. Most of the people who do management in the public sector are people who couldn’t last, who wouldn’t last very long being managers in the private sector. They’re lucky they got a job.
When you started in the library in seventy-nine was it pretty flush, was the budget pretty… there was money?
Well I think there hadn’t been too many major changes for quite a while but there was also a lot of soft money, you know, a lot of temporary money, and that’s what I was on: Title 2C funding, government funding; and that looked like it was gonna go on for another couple years at least, and it did. And, you know, in the background there was some sort of commitment by the library that everybody on Title 2C funds would be carried over if they were there when the funds dried up, and actually it came to pass just like that: it actually happened. I can’t imagine anything like that happening now, but they went out of their way to make sure that everybody got a job, one way or the other. So I mean some people applied for open positions but some people were also just plopped down into one place or another, and it worked out just right; so I guess there was enough money.
So you mean people who were on projects?
Uh huh, right, yeah. And that was the big project that we were all involved in at that time was retrospective conversion of card-based cataloging into machine-readable mode, MARC formatting and so on. And it meant… there was kind of a small army of people in various libraries all over the country who were on Title 2C funds. Here there was a lot of cooperation with Stanford, so sometimes you’d see people cycling in from Stanford to do little temporary projects and vice versa, so there were people here… most of the people here were working on UC things, but every now and then there were people who were working on Stanford things. And yeah, the library school was thriving, you know, turning ‘em out, turning out those librarians, and so there was a cadre of smart, ambitious young computer-friendly types working on doing this conversion, and what they needed to fuel this machine was cards, and that was… the conversion unit proper was headed by somebody named Hester Seiple, and she assembled—working with Dorothy—a staff of people, including some who are still here, like Linda Turitz, who was Linda Lyoshin then, but her husband, Mitch Turitz, was working there. I don’t know if they were… they were hooked up.
Is he in private industry now?
He’s in San Francisco State Library now; he’s the serials librarian for San Francisco State. I believe that’s where he is. And a whole bunch of other people, let’s see, anybody who’s still around now… no, but one of the Stanford people that came around was Julie Rinaldi and she later comes into the picture here, and I don’t know…. But they used to have these big meetings all the time, and Ivan Argüelles was hired as the head of Serials Cataloging, so they’d get Ivan and Hester and some of these catalogers together and they were always hashing over strategy all the time because it was changing all the time as they discovered more and more new things, and there were card sets all over the room—it was down there in that big room where Systems is now—and I got hired as the head of the Conversion Support unit, basically it was me and a bunch of students, and so we were managing this huge flow of cards back and forth in and out of the catalogs, and they were put into various categories; and so one of the early ways I got to know lots of people was they would come down looking for cards because we would leave little pink slips in the catalogs, you know, with our names and with our initials and the date on them, so they would come down and that’s how I started to meet Esther and Veronica and all the serials people.
Veronica Eaglin?
Veronica Wakeman.
And Esther Fulsaas?
Esther Fulsaas… some of those other Serials Cataloging people; also people from the public service sector would come around looking for cards because that was the huge catalog, was the catalog, you know, the catalog that was in the loan stack hall was the public service catalog as well. I mean we were taking cards out of those catalogs and for all anybody knew, keeping them.
And then you would leave notes.
Uh huh, saying who had it, who took it and when.
So you got to know a lot of the people. What was it like working with a lot of students? Did you like being in a… you were sort of a supervisor for student workers?
Well, yeah, and a lot of them were my ah, you know, we were all students together at a certain point and then suddenly I was the boss. Oh, I forgot—among a million things—when I was still a student, one summer, Dorothy came around and said: I… the head of the Biochemistry library, at that time there was a biochemistry library, has to go have an eye operation and would you be interested in going over and running that library for the rest of the summer? And I said: What? What are you talking about? I’m just a zhlub!
To run the library, wow.
As it turns out it was a tiny little library. She was the only person there; there were some students. And I said: Sure, Dorothy, if you think I can do it. And she said: Yeah, I think you can do it. She was pretty quick that way: she’d just call ‘em as she saw ‘em and let the chips fall as they may. I mean I was just a student library employee, of course I was…
This was before you were actually…
This was before I actually got hired. I was doing it on the clock.
That’s kind of amazing.
I was a student library employee but I was a thirty-three year old student. I was older than the other student library… except maybe, well Ed* was there too. Well so most of that summer I went over to the Biochemistry library and sort of learned from the ground up how to run a branch library and it was kind of... it was a little tiny library, so it was microcosmic, but it had elements of everything that I could later use when I went to Earth Sciences. So it belonged to the Biosciences library really, so I had to ask. I said: Send somebody over to at least show me how to receive material, what to do, how to check the orders, how to clear things, and so on; and they sent Randy Wilson over. So that’s how I met Randy Wilson, and he just told me a whole universe of stuff and he helped me out real well; but that was a kick because, you know, most of the time I was completely alone; it was a strange… they didn’t have a… they had an office there so I could just shut myself in the office and do my work or read or whatever. They had a ledger system for charging books out, their little library, you know, it was mostly grad students and professors. So they’d go in there, they’d take a book and they’d write it out on a ledger and they’d walk out with it; so I had no contact with the patrons whatsoever [laughter], which was good because I was busy with all the stuff that was coming in in lugs and sending stuff out in lugs and trying to deal with the bad recording system that they had there and so on. But nobody was watching me, nobody was paying attention to my timecard, you know, there may have been some hours on there when I wasn’t actually there [laughter]. But it was all part of the experience, all part of the learning process. And I saw Linus Pauling over there in that—whatever the name of that building is, I can’t remember—it’s that tall building over there. And also—this is a real digression now; these things just keep popping into my head—I forgot this whole thing about Lee Roy, my friend Lee Roy Peck. He was up here and, you know, he was working at odd jobs here and there and then he decided, he applied for a nutritional study at Morgan Hall, and the nutritional study meant that he would have to be sequestered in Morgan Hall for like, you know, three months. And the whole point of this was, you know, that he would get $125 a week, and since he would have no opportunity of spending this money he’d come out of it with a huge hunk of cash, and that sounded good to him. So they would take six or seven guys and sequester them on the penthouse, what they called the penthouse at Morgan Hall, and they had everything they needed: they would ship in books for them, they had record players, you could have your musical instruments there: the only thing was you couldn’t eat what you wanted, you had these shakes four times a day, and [laughs], you know, these were all nutritionally calculated, whatever they were studying, you know, selenium or whatever, they’d get a certain amount of that and the shake was the background to it, and they could put all these flavorings [laughs] in it, but that’s what you had was four shakes a day, something like that, and then they had to wear a certain kind of clothing: everything had to be clean; it wasn’t antiseptic; they could only interact with the staff and each other, and they had to keep their hair and fingernails trimmed all the time because they measured them, and they all had color coded jugs for their excretions because that was measured and weighed too, so they had to… [laughs] you had to poop in a can and give that to somebody [laughs]. And then every now and then they’d have them running on treadmills, and they’d do breath tests while they were on the treadmill, and every now and then they’d take them somewhere for underwater weighing.
Underwater weighing?
I think it was over by the gym somewhere, yeah, so they could get a real, you know…
So under water you get a more accurate weight?
Yeah, I guess so. They weigh you in the water or something: some kind of Archimedes* deal [laughter], I don’t know what it is [laughs]. Yreka!* So but that was a chance to go out. They didn’t chain them together like in a chain gang, but they watched them all the time, you know: you couldn’t smoke, couldn’t drink. You know every now and then somebody would flip out and run screaming out of the door and that would kind of poison things but still they’d go on.
And Lee Roy didn’t flip out and run screaming out the door?
No, no. He was kind of crazy the first time he went through one of these things. At the end of it all he wanted was artichoke hearts [laughter]. He wanted to go to the store and he bought five or six jars of you know those little artichoke hearts in oil and just ate those: that’s all he could think of. But see I was supplying them, when night fell I would go over there and they would lower a string, you know, a safety pin sort of thing, down from the penthouse and I’d give ‘em some smokes and [laughter] whatever, whatever else, some sandwiches.
[Laughing] Did you screw up the…?
Probably screwed up several generations of nutritional experiments. We had to, didn’t we. But see that wasn’t the first one, I mean that wasn’t the only one. He kept doing this; this was like his job for a while. As a matter of fact after one of them he decided that he should get unemployment insurance and he went… the unemployment people said: No, you were a volunteer. So he went over to Boalt Hall—it was very uncharacteristic of him—but he went over to Boalt Hall and he studied the books, you know, he found case law and all sorts of examples and he challenged them by declaring that he was a paid volunteer [laughs]; he sort of invented this category that he was a volunteer, yes, but he was a paid volunteer, and he beat it! [laughter] So he got unemployment. So between his nutritional studies he would collect unemployment insurance.
So he’s kind of a jailhouse lawyer sort of a guy.
Well it was unusual for him to do something like that but he worked that right up. I think then he was hanging around with Harvey Lauria, and I don’t know, maybe I won’t talk about Harvey.
Why not?
Well let me go back to… see Morgan Hall was right across from this building where the Biochemistry Library was, and so every now and then I could go out on the balcony of that building and, you know, you could talk to him on the phone, you could always talk to these people, and he’d get out in the penthouse and we’d kind of wave at each other; and one time I was up there and there was an earthquake and the building started swaying and rocking, so I went out on the balcony and saw all the guys in the study out there, they were waving at me too; everybody was out; probably the worst thing you could do, go outside; stay under a doorjamb or something like that. So that was where that digression came from, because I had pictured myself: Oh I was working at Biochemistry and there was this earthquake and I went out and: Hi, here are all the guys from Morgan Hall, they’re out here too.
Harvey Lauria is this guy who—you know this is really thirdhand stuff—he was… what was his discipline? physics I believe. He was studying… he was a graduate student in physics here, I think, and he got cataracts, and it came over him really suddenly.
And he wasn’t very old, huh?
No, he was around the same age that we are: fifties; he’d be fifty now, something like that, a little older maybe. And he dropped physics, dropped all that, and started getting into biochemistry because he was going to investigate cataracts, he was gonna develop a cure for them, so he advertised for a reader and Lee Roy was looking for things to do and he hooked up with Harvey and he would read stuff to Harvey.
So his cataracts were bad enough that he…?
He could only… I was over there once and I [laughs] I took a lamp and shined it right in his face, you know, we were just… and he said he could barely see that. So he could see a little brightness if the lamp was right in his face, but otherwise not. And the thing about it was you look at him and you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with his eyes at all, you know, he’d just walk around the street. He would walk around—you know he wore open-toed sandals—and he’d walk around the street with no assistance and walk real fast too. Sometimes… I heard that he walked off a BART platform once, and he just turned right around and hopped right back up, and there was a train coming; he just turned right around and hopped right back up. I don’t know if that’s true. I saw him walk into a dumpster once, just wham! and he would do that. So his feet were all scarred up; his toes were all messed up, but he was not going to make any concessions like that, and when he’d walk through a crowd he’d bump into people, and the only thing he would say—he’d never say excuse me or anything or slow down or anything like that—if he’d bump into somebody he’d say: Poor vision, poor vision; that’s all he said: Poor vision, poor vision, poor vision; you know, he’d walk around, you could hear him coming sometimes: Poor vision, poor vision. No vision is more like it; but he was quite a character.
How far did he get in his medical studies?
I think he got pretty far but then I heard that there was a point—he was studying at UCLA too—there was a point where the University… he got into a thing with the University of California and he couldn’t progress any further: they denied him money or a lab space or something like that, and the way I heard it was—and it sounds like typical University of California bullshit—they were bouncing him out of their program by saying he could not possibly do original research because he needed an assistant, so they knocked him out. This is what I heard. He appealed…
But don’t they all have assistants now?
Yeah, right, they all have assistants and you know that they’re taking credit for a lot of their assistants’ work too; sometimes they give them a little, you know, a co-author or something like that.
So it sounds like they wanted him out.
Yeah, he might have been obstreperous. He could be very abrasive and very insistent when he wanted something. But he was smart and funny. I have no doubt that if he had backing he would have come up with something; but he was also restless; he was always involved in various schemes. I remember once he and Lee Roy were going to the track all the time because Harvey had got it in his mind that he could come up with a system, a foolproof system for beating the ponies. So they were going to the track all the time; and then there were various stock option investment schemes and import-export—I think that’s what he’s doing now—he’s doing import-export; I think I heard that he sold a boatload of honey to the Pakistanis or something like that—no, no; he was trying to sell some honey to the Chinese, and he did manage to sell a boatload of Pakistani rice, basmati rice, to somebody, I forgot where. That’s what he’s interested in now is getting the Pakistani basmati rice because, you know, in all the places now it’s the Indian basmati rice that’s so big everywhere, but the Pakistani basmati rice—according to Harvey—is just as good.
And he’s got a corner on the market.
He’s got a corner on the market and he was also, you know, as part of his cataract thing, he was also convinced that nutrition, you know, that there were some nutritional aspects, so he was devouring tons and tons of bee pollen. That’s what he was on one time I remember: bee pollen; but you know he always had some scheme going.
And Lee Roy was involved with most of these things?
Yeah, yeah. I mean it went beyond the reading thing and into other areas. But it was hard for Lee Roy sometimes because, you know, Harvey was very demanding and he had no, you know, his internal clock had been completely reset, so he’d call Lee Roy up at three am and, you know: Lee Roy, Lee Roy, come over here! and get him into some kind of thing, and Lee Roy did it.
That’s what they say about Stevie Wonder: The cat’s blind, he don’t know what time it is.
[Laughs] He don’t know what time it is; he don’t care. Right. Well they do, you know, all those circadian rhythm studies.
Okay, we’ve gotta turn the tape over.
Oh boy, see, I’ll never get finished [laughter]. I’ll never finish!
[End Tape 18, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:08 PM
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