Tape 19, Side B
[Begin Tape 19, Side B]
So she’s telling you you should go for it.
She said: Yeah, you should consider this. I said: Gee, looks too hard, looks pretty hard to me. She said: Naw, you can do it. So again these people who think they know what I can do.
They’re pushin’ the Nazz*.
That’s right [laughs]; stop pushin’ me! and draggin’ on my coattails! And I just, you know, I’m an LA II, I don’t wanna just jump right into that thing, and plus I kind of liked this, and I liked to do the work; I really didn’t envision myself telling other people what to do. I had a decent experience, you know, with Jan [Carter], but she was so nice and wonderful about it all and funny; I just couldn’t, you know; I knew these characters a little bit already, and plus I was aware that there were personnel problems over there and that I’d be right in the middle of it, and plus what if I got the job and Terry Allison didn’t, because he would be the heir apparent, you know that could cause all sorts of tension, so I wasn’t interested in it really at all. But then some other people approached me, like Judy Walker and Grace Abiko and maybe somebody else, and said that they were… they didn’t want Terry Allison to get this job…
[Chuckles] The plot thickens.
… because they couldn’t… they just didn’t think he was… they thought he was bad, was going to be bad for the whole show and that he was just playing anyway, he was just toying with them, and from their experience with him as the Check-in Supervisor they just thought it would be awful, and, you know, he let people get away with murder and he wasn’t doing the right thing and he would… they just didn’t want him for a variety of reasons, they had some reasons.
Who was in this camp of people who didn’t want him?
Well Judy, Judy was working in Periodicals then I think.
Judy Walker?
Yeah, and Grace Abiko, you know, who’s out there in, wherever she is, Math and Bio-Sciences now. I think they were there, and there were other… I think somebody else was, I mean Periodicals dealt with Serials Payments and dealt with Serials Database Management Unit and dealt with Serials Cataloging, and so there were other… there might have been somebody else involved but I don’t really remember.
So they really wanted you. Did that change your…?
Oh, by then, by the way I should say that Serials, the Periodical Division—[mock serious voice:] by the way, this is very important, will you pay attention?!—Serials Department had a new head! They hired a bright, young, gorgeous, very businesslike woman named Faye Williamson, and Faye—I guess she’d, I don’t know exactly where she was from—oh, she worked for the National Library of Medicine, among other places.
She was really beautiful?
Yeah.
That’s usually not a…
Well she, yeah, no, I mean she didn’t look… I remember Ivan [Argüelles] later on saying: Oh she shouldn’t even be here; she should be in a corporate library or something like that. He was kind of disdainful of her, plus she probably turned him down—he probably hit on her.
[Laughing] Really? Was that his general modus?
Yeah, so I was finding out, finding a little bit about that. But she had become the new head and she and Margaret were great friends. Oh I think that was one of the reasons Margaret said: You know you would really like working with Faye; that Margaret thought I should go for it. And it looked like Terry was probably gonna get the job, so this deputation came to me and said: Please please please please please please please please. I mean they were really bent out of shape, and so I said: Okay, I’ll apply for it. You know, my principle is if people know you and know what you’re capable of and they still want you: you better go. I figured, you know, here are some of the heavy hitters, so I’ll have a built-in, and, you know, if Terry doesn’t get it, well A: maybe it’s his own fault for not doing the strategic work he needs to do to lay the groundwork for internal staff support, and B: let’s have some fun; let’s play; let’s play this game. And you know I’m just naturally wanting to go through the open doors. If the doors appear and they’re open then I’ll just go there and see what happens, and following my instincts, you know, so far I’ve been more or less lucky, you know, I haven’t fallen; the door didn’t open into a chasm. [syrupy voice] It opened into an elysian field of poppies and popcorn [laughter] and candy-colored skies. So I said: I’ll do it, I’ll apply for it. And I went and got some advice from Dorothy.
Was she kind of a mentor to you at this point?
Well she was the only one I could talk to, yeah, plus I trusted her, plus she seemed to have, you know, she seemed to have this mysterious wisdom; so I said: Should I do it? She said: Yeah, sure [laughter]. She said: You know you’ll have some competition. I said: Well I don’t care.
Did she mean Terry or other…?
Yeah, Terry, Terry, because he was the presumptive person ‘cause he’d been there a while, you know, and he was smart: he later on went to library school, well he ran the Newspaper Division for a while, and went to library school, got a degree and got some great jobs down in UC San Diego and I think some community college down there where he’s on the faculty now and I think he teaches, but… Well one of the things—I remember now—one of the things that people had against him was that he would vamp at the desk; he was flamboyantly gay, and this was 1977 [laughs], well it’s 1978, seventy-nine. I mean for Halloween he would come in dressed—you know I think that Linda Ronstadt album was out where she was on the cover with her shorts and her roller-skates, yeah, looking real cute and porkable [laughs].
[Laughing] Porkable and hanging out with Jerry Brown, yeah.
Yeah, so Terry came in, he had this beautiful head of blond ringlets, I mean all the time…
[Laughs] It was his hair?
That was his hair, yeah, so he came in on Halloween, he came in with his roller-skates on and real real tight high shorts and this T-shirt that was real tight and on the back of it it said: Best lay in the East Bay [laughter]. He came rollin’ in, so… and, you know, he would cruise at the desk while he was supposed to be doing… now Julio [Guillermo] would too; Julio always boasted that he would meet his girlfriends, meet girlfriends at the desk, but he was more quiet and you know he wasn’t so…
So Terry would be cruising for the guys and Julio would be cruising for the girls and Ivan would be hitting on everybody.
Yeah, it was a…
…sexually charged…
There was jism in the air.
…testeroni…
The scent of jism in the air… napalm in the morning. Yeah, so I think that was one of the charges they had against Terry, that he wasn’t, you know, sufficiently sober-minded at the old public service desk, but there were other things too, I just bring that one up. So, what can I say: I applied for the job; I had a disastrous interview because I couldn’t remember any of the things I was supposed to say, you know, I was kind of droning on and on [droning]: Yes and even now you yourself are starting to…
[Laughing] Arthur Puty*.
…and then I did this and then I did that (not unlike what I’m doing [laughs]).
Who was conducting the interview?
Well I had an interview with Faye and an interview with the staff, and you know I’d never experienced anything like that: sitting at a table with twelve or thirteen people, you know, looking at me and they were all asking questions.
So you were really intimidated, is that why you…?
I was just… I had an excruciating headache that day, I couldn’t shake it, and I was just out of it, and I didn’t like…
Just a bad day.
Yeah, I’ve never been good in groups: I’m much better one-on-one. Actually I’m at my best of course when I’m totally alone [laughs].
[Laughing] All by yourself.
That’s right. If I could just have interviewed myself. I had occasion later on to, ‘cause Faye asked for comments from everybody, and Terry was there: I read Terry’s notes about me—‘cause I got to see everybody’s files, you know [laughs], see all the files—said: I just listened to him going on and on and I thought: Boring! boring! boring! [laughs]
He put that in his notes? [laughs]
Yeah, something like that: Do we really want this person, you know, da da da da…? But then I, you know, apparently it was still very close. I don’t know who else applied; I really don’t remember who else applied, but it was Terry or me. It was so close that Faye had separate follow-up interviews with each of us, and I was much better then because I was… it was a different day; I was just with her; I was feeling good; I was, you know, sharp, savvy, articulate and said, you know: Gee, I’m sorry about that other interview but… And she wanted to make sure that I was tough enough and…
Because she knew the personnel problems were a bear?
Yeah, yeah, she started to hint… I mean the first meeting after I fired—I mean after I was hired, she laid it all out, but at this follow-up interview she just hinted that there were serious personnel problems. And I said: Well I’m game, you know. I happened to see Terry on campus during the course of this and he kind of [sniffs]… so I went up and I said…
[Laughs] Put up his nose at you.
Yeah, well he pretended not to see me, so I ran over to him and kind of butted him in the stomach [laughs] with my head, said: I’m gonna getcha! I’m gonna getcha! [laughs] Said: Come on, Terry, it’s just a fucking job!
So you actually liked him it sounds like.
Yeah, I liked Terry, I liked Terry a lot; it’s hard not to like Terry as far as I was concerned. I don’t know what the, you know, I still don’t remember what the problems they had with him, but maybe as a… he was just kind of… I don’t know, I really don’t know: thought he was too good for them or something like that.
What, you think that might have been his attitude?
They thought he was too good for… They thought he thought he was too good for… yeah, yeah. And he probably did think that on some level, you know, because he could be kind of dismissive and, you know, and la-di-da. So, to make a long story short: I got the job. So this is like December of eighty or something like that. I turned everything in the Conversion Support Unit over to Jan [Carter]; she became the head of that and…
So that was the kind of beginning of her illustrious library career?
Yes, absolutely, and she wound up in, after the project ran out she wound up in… she wound up in what was called Processing then: it was Mercedes’ outfit, which was then located down there where Acquisitions used to be, on the second floor.
Processing? Is it the same unit as Veronica Eaglin and Lupe Ochoa…?
Yeah, exactly; and then Mercedes went to BSD as the assistant head of BSD, and some of the people went with her and Jan went with her: that’s how she got into BSD, and she was the expediter for many years, solving all those BSD problems. So I guess I ah… so one day I went to work—I was an LA II—and said goodbye to all those people, and the next day I came in I was—well I guess Christmas vacation was the, you know, the end-of-the-year break was, ‘cause I came in with Ronald Reagan in 1981 [laughs], that’s when he first started, and also in there John Lennon was killed, and that was kind of the end of eighty, so that was kind of the end of an era.
And weren’t the hostages coming back from…?
That’s right, yeah, finally the hostages, that was the whole hostage crisis thing: poor Jimmy, Jimmy didn’t do that one very well, you know, he sent the team of rescuers over there and they got stranded in the sand and they had to—that didn’t work out: he just couldn’t do anything right, and then there was that whole thing with him and the rabbit.
[Laughing] What was the thing with the rabbit?
When he was canoeing—he couldn’t catch a break then—he was canoeing in… [laughs] the way I remember it was…
[Scottish accent à la Monty Python] It’s a ferocious rabbit!
Exactly. They were canoeing out in the river and this ferocious rabbit started swimming at them and Jimmy had to beat it off with a paddle, you know, so he showed his fear in the face of this rabid rabbit or whatever it was; and then there was that photograph of him after he completed some marathon.
The race, yeah, where his eyes are kind of rolled up in his head and he’s falling over.
Yeah, he looked all messed up, yeah, and he was going on and on about the malaise, you know, he took a retreat of malaise watchers to Camp David and was always going on and on about the malaise and so Ronald Reagan was the solution to that: it was morning in America and, you know, I got a brand new job. So suddenly I’m mister big time, mister big shot.
Did a lot of things change at the university when Reagan came in? Did you feel that?
No, I didn’t, no. We were used to…
‘Cause didn’t they start making funding cuts right away, or at least…?
No, I didn’t hear any of that.
So the library was still doing pretty well for funding.
Well, you know, we were supposed to be watching the budget all the time, you know, and trimming where we could, but it was a couple years before we really had to start considering losing positions, or at least when you released a position you knew that it was not coming back. For example, when Serials Cataloging lost Sherry Hughey, they didn’t get a replacement, and one sticking point when I finally left was they were going to let me go to Systems but it would have meant taking that line position with me so that Periodicals would have lost a position, and I wasn’t… they didn’t like that.
So tell me how you dealt with your… was it the personnel problems that were the first order of business?
Well the serious personnel problems… I mean the not so serious personnel problems were just some people weren’t carrying their loads, and the more serious personnel problem involved, you know, one of the unit supervisors in there, and, you know, when you have a supervisor who’s not carrying the load that’s a little trickier because they’re… you can’t do their work, you know, you can’t take the time to supervise the people that they’re supposed to be supervising. But it was a really screwy organization and I never got a chance to change it because it was all, you know, people reported to two or three different people, you know, you had a little public service component in which you reported for that period of time to the Public Service Supervisor and when you did check-in you reported for that period of time to the Check-in Supervisor and if you did any claims you reported for that period of time to the Claims Supervisor, so it was a very flat structure with all these weird multiple reporting lines, so….
The hierarchy was just not very clear or...?
Right, it wasn’t very clear, and this was something that was inherited and Faye was still grappling with some of these things and it just never worked out, never worked out quite right. I was starting to make some changes when I finally left but never quite got there until, you know, Public Service was physically separated from Check-in, or when they became put into two different units and when Claims became completely automated, and Check-in itself became automated: that’s when that was all solved.
Oh really, that took care of a lot of…?
Yeah, that took care of it. I mean the whole Check-in thing, they should have automated that as soon as they could, but they didn’t. As is the case now, managers don’t understand Check-in, they don’t understand the nature of it and how difficult it can be and how arduous it is; I mean on the one hand it’s very routine and repetitive, maybe even tedious, but on the other hand you have to be considering millions of variables all at the same time as you’re doing it, so it has a strange balance of, I mean on the one hand it’s production work, on the other hand it’s exacting detail, so… it’s odd, and even managers of Serials Departments sometimes don’t understand it because they don’t, you know, they haven’t really done it themselves or gotten deeply into it.
So did you have to fire somebody or move somebody out or…?
No, no, I just had to watch, I had to watch everybody, you know, people were put on various short leashes, and the first thing that happened was, you know, Faye divided the group into people that I would be responsible for, and positions, and positions that she would be responsible for, and problems that she would be responsible for and problems that I would be responsible for, and then we’d meet and, you know, hash it out. So there was a lot less hands-on work there at the beginning, most of it was just talking: talking, talking, talking and learning, learning, learning and, you know, going to meetings, meetings every week, more talking, and then starting to counsel people, you know, starting to crack down in a disciplinary way on people’s bad habits, and, you know, that has to be done in a certain way and certain protocols have to be followed so that you can do it right, especially if you’re trying to set somebody up to fire them [laughter]: you know you have to give the oral warning and tell them and then into a written warning and say if there’re any repetitions we’ll give you another and then da da da da. We weren’t really trying to do that, we were just trying to shape people up, but, you know, those people are wily [laughter], you can’t shape ‘em up. There was a… in fact [laughs], you know, some of the things were just silly, like person X—I won’t say her name but her initials are Norah Foster—she apparently would—this was a little bit before my time—she would spend an inordinate amount of time when she came in in the morning in front of the mirror in the break room, oh, you know, primping, getting ready, da da da. And finally Margaret, she got a Dymo label out and she made this little label and stuck it on the mirror, it said: no grooming, no excessive grooming. So that was there when I came in: no excessive grooming, directed specifically at…
Did Norah respect this?
Yeah, I think she did, yeah.
Well my kind of almost introduction to Norah was she and Henryk [Kubica] eating ice-cream with Cointreau or something, you know…
How civilized; how sophisticated, yeah.
…a nice alcoholic concoction that they were eating there, and it kind of gave me an impression [laughter]. [Hispanic accent à la the Firesign Theatre] You can’t train them to do nothing.
That’s right: [same accent] They whiz where they want to; that’s right. Well in them days you could smoke in the break room.
Really?
Yeah, so people in there smoking all the time; you could go in there and smoke. Althea could smoke at her work, you know, she had a little binding station there, so she smoked back there. That was real interesting. Eventually we had a meeting that banned smoking, and I smoked then too.
Was it Althea who just retired?
Yeah, she just retired. She was working in Preservation down here when she retired, but then she was the fearsome… talk about intimidating: all the new students were intimidated by her. She wore the same thing every day, you know, it was like a jeans vest, and sometimes she had this crazy hat on. She had weaponry at her desk: she had like a big hook that she used for de-binding, de-boning books, and sometimes when people would come over there she’d pick up her hook and say: What?! Go away! So she was quirky.
And people were really afraid.
New students were sometimes afraid of her, yeah. There were a lot of big people working at the library; in fact I remember there was a student bulletin board and some smart student had written: eat the fat LAs [laughter]. Students were cool, you know, a lot of the students were cool. We had one student who was too tall for the stacks. He only worked a couple of weeks, yeah. He had to go in there; he was bent over all the time, so he had to get another library job.
Where he could stand up.
Yeah, he could stand up. So, you know, I was learning all the ropes here, the ropes of supervision; I even took a class on Coping with Difficult People [laughter]. It was through Extension.
They still give that class.
Oh they do? This is good.
Yeah. Was it good? Was it useful?
Well, it was pretty good. These were some serious, the case studies were really difficult people.
Oh really, even beyond your people?
Yeah. Yeah, you know, Norah was kind of difficult because of her communication patterns, but some of the others were just, you know, they were trying to get by doing as little as possible, yet they still had some heart. That’s the thing about library people: no matter what, I mean no matter where they’re at, they often display a great deal of—or at least they say—interest and commitment to the goals of the library, especially public service: you couldn’t tear people away from public service at the periodical desk—maybe it was because they can meet people [laughter]…
Julio is…
Yeah. But they were good, and you know serials public service as a specialty wasn’t recognized as such, but it really was. So I had to learn all these things in public service; I had to spend my time at the desk. I wasn’t supervising public service people; I was supervising Terry—more the technical services side.
Was that rough? I mean was Terry resentful?
No, he was cool; he was cool, because he, you know, he started to think that this was a favor, I mean this was beneficial to him anyway. He didn’t want to get into this; he wanted to go on to library school and eventually did, so he didn’t mind too much.
So he was a little bit like that guy who became number five and got drafted into the Marines who said…?
[Burst of laughter] Yeah, well, yeah: All right! All right! Bitchin’! Semper Fi! Well he [Terry] didn’t like the fact that just, you know, that somebody inferior to him had gotten the job that he applied for; didn’t like that.
The best lay in the East Bay got aced out by a Fruitvale…
Yeah, that’s right, those fucking ectomorphs!
…Nimrod.
Yeah, right. That’s the way ectomorphs think, you know, they think they deserve the best. Well so, you know, I’m getting into all these personality problems and difficulties and I’m counseling people and also I’m responsible for resolving the snaggiest of the snags because there was no mechanism really for dealing with the nasty problems: people had problems they just set them aside, or they didn’t do them or, you know, they just let them go: similar to what’s happening now. But I started getting all this stuff funneled to me and pretty soon behind my desk—the way it was set up, you know, there’s the head and the assistant head desk sitting side by side and everybody else is out there sitting at the rotary files, so we’re all gazing, gazing at these, the workers, at the drones. Behind my desk I had this huge, you know, my shelves were completely filled with problems, and that’s the part I liked: solving those problems.
So you liked the troubleshooting aspect.
Yeah, because it took me all over the place, all over the library, you know, into Acquisitions: met and started to deal with Barbara Hill and Marilyn Ng*, and Gary was the assistant head of—Gary, you know, the AVMC guy?
Oh, Gary Handman.
Gary Handman, he was the assistant head of Acquisitions at that time; the head of Acquisitions was somebody that it took me—it took me a while to understand that this wasn’t two people because people kept saying: Oh you have to go see Marion Murdock. Well do I go see Mary or Murdock?! [laughter] No, you idiot: Marion Murdock! [laughter] I don’t want to see Mary and Murdock; why can’t I just see Murdock? But I don’t remember that person; Gary was the one to talk to. And, you know, out into the branches because, you know, all this stuff was flowing out into the branches. So I started digging all the, you know, crazy branch people and all the serials people out at the branches; could see right away that there’s a big disconnect between the work the serials people do and what the branch heads think is going on. So just getting really deep into it, but around about this time Dorothy Gregor becomes not head of Serials Department anymore but AUL for Tech Services: Assistant University Librarian for Technical Services, so she’s out of the picture leaving a vacancy: Faye applies for that job; gets it; so suddenly I’m all by myself; Faye is head of Serials. And that went on for a while; that job got posted and Julie Rinaldi, who had cycled through a little bit during the conversion project and had been working at Stanford on the same sorts of things, became the head of Periodical Division.
We’re getting right to the end.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is maybe a good transition.
Yeah, so now we’re like in eighty-one, eighty-two, something like that.
Uh huh, and you’re now on your own?
Well no, I’ve got a new head now. I’ve got a new head: there’s a new Serials Department head, and there’s a new Periodical Division head, and there’s a new AUL for Tech Services, so that’s my matrix.
[End Tape 19, Side B]
So she’s telling you you should go for it.
She said: Yeah, you should consider this. I said: Gee, looks too hard, looks pretty hard to me. She said: Naw, you can do it. So again these people who think they know what I can do.
They’re pushin’ the Nazz*.
That’s right [laughs]; stop pushin’ me! and draggin’ on my coattails! And I just, you know, I’m an LA II, I don’t wanna just jump right into that thing, and plus I kind of liked this, and I liked to do the work; I really didn’t envision myself telling other people what to do. I had a decent experience, you know, with Jan [Carter], but she was so nice and wonderful about it all and funny; I just couldn’t, you know; I knew these characters a little bit already, and plus I was aware that there were personnel problems over there and that I’d be right in the middle of it, and plus what if I got the job and Terry Allison didn’t, because he would be the heir apparent, you know that could cause all sorts of tension, so I wasn’t interested in it really at all. But then some other people approached me, like Judy Walker and Grace Abiko and maybe somebody else, and said that they were… they didn’t want Terry Allison to get this job…
[Chuckles] The plot thickens.
… because they couldn’t… they just didn’t think he was… they thought he was bad, was going to be bad for the whole show and that he was just playing anyway, he was just toying with them, and from their experience with him as the Check-in Supervisor they just thought it would be awful, and, you know, he let people get away with murder and he wasn’t doing the right thing and he would… they just didn’t want him for a variety of reasons, they had some reasons.
Who was in this camp of people who didn’t want him?
Well Judy, Judy was working in Periodicals then I think.
Judy Walker?
Yeah, and Grace Abiko, you know, who’s out there in, wherever she is, Math and Bio-Sciences now. I think they were there, and there were other… I think somebody else was, I mean Periodicals dealt with Serials Payments and dealt with Serials Database Management Unit and dealt with Serials Cataloging, and so there were other… there might have been somebody else involved but I don’t really remember.
So they really wanted you. Did that change your…?
Oh, by then, by the way I should say that Serials, the Periodical Division—[mock serious voice:] by the way, this is very important, will you pay attention?!—Serials Department had a new head! They hired a bright, young, gorgeous, very businesslike woman named Faye Williamson, and Faye—I guess she’d, I don’t know exactly where she was from—oh, she worked for the National Library of Medicine, among other places.
She was really beautiful?
Yeah.
That’s usually not a…
Well she, yeah, no, I mean she didn’t look… I remember Ivan [Argüelles] later on saying: Oh she shouldn’t even be here; she should be in a corporate library or something like that. He was kind of disdainful of her, plus she probably turned him down—he probably hit on her.
[Laughing] Really? Was that his general modus?
Yeah, so I was finding out, finding a little bit about that. But she had become the new head and she and Margaret were great friends. Oh I think that was one of the reasons Margaret said: You know you would really like working with Faye; that Margaret thought I should go for it. And it looked like Terry was probably gonna get the job, so this deputation came to me and said: Please please please please please please please please. I mean they were really bent out of shape, and so I said: Okay, I’ll apply for it. You know, my principle is if people know you and know what you’re capable of and they still want you: you better go. I figured, you know, here are some of the heavy hitters, so I’ll have a built-in, and, you know, if Terry doesn’t get it, well A: maybe it’s his own fault for not doing the strategic work he needs to do to lay the groundwork for internal staff support, and B: let’s have some fun; let’s play; let’s play this game. And you know I’m just naturally wanting to go through the open doors. If the doors appear and they’re open then I’ll just go there and see what happens, and following my instincts, you know, so far I’ve been more or less lucky, you know, I haven’t fallen; the door didn’t open into a chasm. [syrupy voice] It opened into an elysian field of poppies and popcorn [laughter] and candy-colored skies. So I said: I’ll do it, I’ll apply for it. And I went and got some advice from Dorothy.
Was she kind of a mentor to you at this point?
Well she was the only one I could talk to, yeah, plus I trusted her, plus she seemed to have, you know, she seemed to have this mysterious wisdom; so I said: Should I do it? She said: Yeah, sure [laughter]. She said: You know you’ll have some competition. I said: Well I don’t care.
Did she mean Terry or other…?
Yeah, Terry, Terry, because he was the presumptive person ‘cause he’d been there a while, you know, and he was smart: he later on went to library school, well he ran the Newspaper Division for a while, and went to library school, got a degree and got some great jobs down in UC San Diego and I think some community college down there where he’s on the faculty now and I think he teaches, but… Well one of the things—I remember now—one of the things that people had against him was that he would vamp at the desk; he was flamboyantly gay, and this was 1977 [laughs], well it’s 1978, seventy-nine. I mean for Halloween he would come in dressed—you know I think that Linda Ronstadt album was out where she was on the cover with her shorts and her roller-skates, yeah, looking real cute and porkable [laughs].
[Laughing] Porkable and hanging out with Jerry Brown, yeah.
Yeah, so Terry came in, he had this beautiful head of blond ringlets, I mean all the time…
[Laughs] It was his hair?
That was his hair, yeah, so he came in on Halloween, he came in with his roller-skates on and real real tight high shorts and this T-shirt that was real tight and on the back of it it said: Best lay in the East Bay [laughter]. He came rollin’ in, so… and, you know, he would cruise at the desk while he was supposed to be doing… now Julio [Guillermo] would too; Julio always boasted that he would meet his girlfriends, meet girlfriends at the desk, but he was more quiet and you know he wasn’t so…
So Terry would be cruising for the guys and Julio would be cruising for the girls and Ivan would be hitting on everybody.
Yeah, it was a…
…sexually charged…
There was jism in the air.
…testeroni…
The scent of jism in the air… napalm in the morning. Yeah, so I think that was one of the charges they had against Terry, that he wasn’t, you know, sufficiently sober-minded at the old public service desk, but there were other things too, I just bring that one up. So, what can I say: I applied for the job; I had a disastrous interview because I couldn’t remember any of the things I was supposed to say, you know, I was kind of droning on and on [droning]: Yes and even now you yourself are starting to…
[Laughing] Arthur Puty*.
…and then I did this and then I did that (not unlike what I’m doing [laughs]).
Who was conducting the interview?
Well I had an interview with Faye and an interview with the staff, and you know I’d never experienced anything like that: sitting at a table with twelve or thirteen people, you know, looking at me and they were all asking questions.
So you were really intimidated, is that why you…?
I was just… I had an excruciating headache that day, I couldn’t shake it, and I was just out of it, and I didn’t like…
Just a bad day.
Yeah, I’ve never been good in groups: I’m much better one-on-one. Actually I’m at my best of course when I’m totally alone [laughs].
[Laughing] All by yourself.
That’s right. If I could just have interviewed myself. I had occasion later on to, ‘cause Faye asked for comments from everybody, and Terry was there: I read Terry’s notes about me—‘cause I got to see everybody’s files, you know [laughs], see all the files—said: I just listened to him going on and on and I thought: Boring! boring! boring! [laughs]
He put that in his notes? [laughs]
Yeah, something like that: Do we really want this person, you know, da da da da…? But then I, you know, apparently it was still very close. I don’t know who else applied; I really don’t remember who else applied, but it was Terry or me. It was so close that Faye had separate follow-up interviews with each of us, and I was much better then because I was… it was a different day; I was just with her; I was feeling good; I was, you know, sharp, savvy, articulate and said, you know: Gee, I’m sorry about that other interview but… And she wanted to make sure that I was tough enough and…
Because she knew the personnel problems were a bear?
Yeah, yeah, she started to hint… I mean the first meeting after I fired—I mean after I was hired, she laid it all out, but at this follow-up interview she just hinted that there were serious personnel problems. And I said: Well I’m game, you know. I happened to see Terry on campus during the course of this and he kind of [sniffs]… so I went up and I said…
[Laughs] Put up his nose at you.
Yeah, well he pretended not to see me, so I ran over to him and kind of butted him in the stomach [laughs] with my head, said: I’m gonna getcha! I’m gonna getcha! [laughs] Said: Come on, Terry, it’s just a fucking job!
So you actually liked him it sounds like.
Yeah, I liked Terry, I liked Terry a lot; it’s hard not to like Terry as far as I was concerned. I don’t know what the, you know, I still don’t remember what the problems they had with him, but maybe as a… he was just kind of… I don’t know, I really don’t know: thought he was too good for them or something like that.
What, you think that might have been his attitude?
They thought he was too good for… They thought he thought he was too good for… yeah, yeah. And he probably did think that on some level, you know, because he could be kind of dismissive and, you know, and la-di-da. So, to make a long story short: I got the job. So this is like December of eighty or something like that. I turned everything in the Conversion Support Unit over to Jan [Carter]; she became the head of that and…
So that was the kind of beginning of her illustrious library career?
Yes, absolutely, and she wound up in, after the project ran out she wound up in… she wound up in what was called Processing then: it was Mercedes’ outfit, which was then located down there where Acquisitions used to be, on the second floor.
Processing? Is it the same unit as Veronica Eaglin and Lupe Ochoa…?
Yeah, exactly; and then Mercedes went to BSD as the assistant head of BSD, and some of the people went with her and Jan went with her: that’s how she got into BSD, and she was the expediter for many years, solving all those BSD problems. So I guess I ah… so one day I went to work—I was an LA II—and said goodbye to all those people, and the next day I came in I was—well I guess Christmas vacation was the, you know, the end-of-the-year break was, ‘cause I came in with Ronald Reagan in 1981 [laughs], that’s when he first started, and also in there John Lennon was killed, and that was kind of the end of eighty, so that was kind of the end of an era.
And weren’t the hostages coming back from…?
That’s right, yeah, finally the hostages, that was the whole hostage crisis thing: poor Jimmy, Jimmy didn’t do that one very well, you know, he sent the team of rescuers over there and they got stranded in the sand and they had to—that didn’t work out: he just couldn’t do anything right, and then there was that whole thing with him and the rabbit.
[Laughing] What was the thing with the rabbit?
When he was canoeing—he couldn’t catch a break then—he was canoeing in… [laughs] the way I remember it was…
[Scottish accent à la Monty Python] It’s a ferocious rabbit!
Exactly. They were canoeing out in the river and this ferocious rabbit started swimming at them and Jimmy had to beat it off with a paddle, you know, so he showed his fear in the face of this rabid rabbit or whatever it was; and then there was that photograph of him after he completed some marathon.
The race, yeah, where his eyes are kind of rolled up in his head and he’s falling over.
Yeah, he looked all messed up, yeah, and he was going on and on about the malaise, you know, he took a retreat of malaise watchers to Camp David and was always going on and on about the malaise and so Ronald Reagan was the solution to that: it was morning in America and, you know, I got a brand new job. So suddenly I’m mister big time, mister big shot.
Did a lot of things change at the university when Reagan came in? Did you feel that?
No, I didn’t, no. We were used to…
‘Cause didn’t they start making funding cuts right away, or at least…?
No, I didn’t hear any of that.
So the library was still doing pretty well for funding.
Well, you know, we were supposed to be watching the budget all the time, you know, and trimming where we could, but it was a couple years before we really had to start considering losing positions, or at least when you released a position you knew that it was not coming back. For example, when Serials Cataloging lost Sherry Hughey, they didn’t get a replacement, and one sticking point when I finally left was they were going to let me go to Systems but it would have meant taking that line position with me so that Periodicals would have lost a position, and I wasn’t… they didn’t like that.
So tell me how you dealt with your… was it the personnel problems that were the first order of business?
Well the serious personnel problems… I mean the not so serious personnel problems were just some people weren’t carrying their loads, and the more serious personnel problem involved, you know, one of the unit supervisors in there, and, you know, when you have a supervisor who’s not carrying the load that’s a little trickier because they’re… you can’t do their work, you know, you can’t take the time to supervise the people that they’re supposed to be supervising. But it was a really screwy organization and I never got a chance to change it because it was all, you know, people reported to two or three different people, you know, you had a little public service component in which you reported for that period of time to the Public Service Supervisor and when you did check-in you reported for that period of time to the Check-in Supervisor and if you did any claims you reported for that period of time to the Claims Supervisor, so it was a very flat structure with all these weird multiple reporting lines, so….
The hierarchy was just not very clear or...?
Right, it wasn’t very clear, and this was something that was inherited and Faye was still grappling with some of these things and it just never worked out, never worked out quite right. I was starting to make some changes when I finally left but never quite got there until, you know, Public Service was physically separated from Check-in, or when they became put into two different units and when Claims became completely automated, and Check-in itself became automated: that’s when that was all solved.
Oh really, that took care of a lot of…?
Yeah, that took care of it. I mean the whole Check-in thing, they should have automated that as soon as they could, but they didn’t. As is the case now, managers don’t understand Check-in, they don’t understand the nature of it and how difficult it can be and how arduous it is; I mean on the one hand it’s very routine and repetitive, maybe even tedious, but on the other hand you have to be considering millions of variables all at the same time as you’re doing it, so it has a strange balance of, I mean on the one hand it’s production work, on the other hand it’s exacting detail, so… it’s odd, and even managers of Serials Departments sometimes don’t understand it because they don’t, you know, they haven’t really done it themselves or gotten deeply into it.
So did you have to fire somebody or move somebody out or…?
No, no, I just had to watch, I had to watch everybody, you know, people were put on various short leashes, and the first thing that happened was, you know, Faye divided the group into people that I would be responsible for, and positions, and positions that she would be responsible for, and problems that she would be responsible for and problems that I would be responsible for, and then we’d meet and, you know, hash it out. So there was a lot less hands-on work there at the beginning, most of it was just talking: talking, talking, talking and learning, learning, learning and, you know, going to meetings, meetings every week, more talking, and then starting to counsel people, you know, starting to crack down in a disciplinary way on people’s bad habits, and, you know, that has to be done in a certain way and certain protocols have to be followed so that you can do it right, especially if you’re trying to set somebody up to fire them [laughter]: you know you have to give the oral warning and tell them and then into a written warning and say if there’re any repetitions we’ll give you another and then da da da da. We weren’t really trying to do that, we were just trying to shape people up, but, you know, those people are wily [laughter], you can’t shape ‘em up. There was a… in fact [laughs], you know, some of the things were just silly, like person X—I won’t say her name but her initials are Norah Foster—she apparently would—this was a little bit before my time—she would spend an inordinate amount of time when she came in in the morning in front of the mirror in the break room, oh, you know, primping, getting ready, da da da. And finally Margaret, she got a Dymo label out and she made this little label and stuck it on the mirror, it said: no grooming, no excessive grooming. So that was there when I came in: no excessive grooming, directed specifically at…
Did Norah respect this?
Yeah, I think she did, yeah.
Well my kind of almost introduction to Norah was she and Henryk [Kubica] eating ice-cream with Cointreau or something, you know…
How civilized; how sophisticated, yeah.
…a nice alcoholic concoction that they were eating there, and it kind of gave me an impression [laughter]. [Hispanic accent à la the Firesign Theatre] You can’t train them to do nothing.
That’s right: [same accent] They whiz where they want to; that’s right. Well in them days you could smoke in the break room.
Really?
Yeah, so people in there smoking all the time; you could go in there and smoke. Althea could smoke at her work, you know, she had a little binding station there, so she smoked back there. That was real interesting. Eventually we had a meeting that banned smoking, and I smoked then too.
Was it Althea who just retired?
Yeah, she just retired. She was working in Preservation down here when she retired, but then she was the fearsome… talk about intimidating: all the new students were intimidated by her. She wore the same thing every day, you know, it was like a jeans vest, and sometimes she had this crazy hat on. She had weaponry at her desk: she had like a big hook that she used for de-binding, de-boning books, and sometimes when people would come over there she’d pick up her hook and say: What?! Go away! So she was quirky.
And people were really afraid.
New students were sometimes afraid of her, yeah. There were a lot of big people working at the library; in fact I remember there was a student bulletin board and some smart student had written: eat the fat LAs [laughter]. Students were cool, you know, a lot of the students were cool. We had one student who was too tall for the stacks. He only worked a couple of weeks, yeah. He had to go in there; he was bent over all the time, so he had to get another library job.
Where he could stand up.
Yeah, he could stand up. So, you know, I was learning all the ropes here, the ropes of supervision; I even took a class on Coping with Difficult People [laughter]. It was through Extension.
They still give that class.
Oh they do? This is good.
Yeah. Was it good? Was it useful?
Well, it was pretty good. These were some serious, the case studies were really difficult people.
Oh really, even beyond your people?
Yeah. Yeah, you know, Norah was kind of difficult because of her communication patterns, but some of the others were just, you know, they were trying to get by doing as little as possible, yet they still had some heart. That’s the thing about library people: no matter what, I mean no matter where they’re at, they often display a great deal of—or at least they say—interest and commitment to the goals of the library, especially public service: you couldn’t tear people away from public service at the periodical desk—maybe it was because they can meet people [laughter]…
Julio is…
Yeah. But they were good, and you know serials public service as a specialty wasn’t recognized as such, but it really was. So I had to learn all these things in public service; I had to spend my time at the desk. I wasn’t supervising public service people; I was supervising Terry—more the technical services side.
Was that rough? I mean was Terry resentful?
No, he was cool; he was cool, because he, you know, he started to think that this was a favor, I mean this was beneficial to him anyway. He didn’t want to get into this; he wanted to go on to library school and eventually did, so he didn’t mind too much.
So he was a little bit like that guy who became number five and got drafted into the Marines who said…?
[Burst of laughter] Yeah, well, yeah: All right! All right! Bitchin’! Semper Fi! Well he [Terry] didn’t like the fact that just, you know, that somebody inferior to him had gotten the job that he applied for; didn’t like that.
The best lay in the East Bay got aced out by a Fruitvale…
Yeah, that’s right, those fucking ectomorphs!
…Nimrod.
Yeah, right. That’s the way ectomorphs think, you know, they think they deserve the best. Well so, you know, I’m getting into all these personality problems and difficulties and I’m counseling people and also I’m responsible for resolving the snaggiest of the snags because there was no mechanism really for dealing with the nasty problems: people had problems they just set them aside, or they didn’t do them or, you know, they just let them go: similar to what’s happening now. But I started getting all this stuff funneled to me and pretty soon behind my desk—the way it was set up, you know, there’s the head and the assistant head desk sitting side by side and everybody else is out there sitting at the rotary files, so we’re all gazing, gazing at these, the workers, at the drones. Behind my desk I had this huge, you know, my shelves were completely filled with problems, and that’s the part I liked: solving those problems.
So you liked the troubleshooting aspect.
Yeah, because it took me all over the place, all over the library, you know, into Acquisitions: met and started to deal with Barbara Hill and Marilyn Ng*, and Gary was the assistant head of—Gary, you know, the AVMC guy?
Oh, Gary Handman.
Gary Handman, he was the assistant head of Acquisitions at that time; the head of Acquisitions was somebody that it took me—it took me a while to understand that this wasn’t two people because people kept saying: Oh you have to go see Marion Murdock. Well do I go see Mary or Murdock?! [laughter] No, you idiot: Marion Murdock! [laughter] I don’t want to see Mary and Murdock; why can’t I just see Murdock? But I don’t remember that person; Gary was the one to talk to. And, you know, out into the branches because, you know, all this stuff was flowing out into the branches. So I started digging all the, you know, crazy branch people and all the serials people out at the branches; could see right away that there’s a big disconnect between the work the serials people do and what the branch heads think is going on. So just getting really deep into it, but around about this time Dorothy Gregor becomes not head of Serials Department anymore but AUL for Tech Services: Assistant University Librarian for Technical Services, so she’s out of the picture leaving a vacancy: Faye applies for that job; gets it; so suddenly I’m all by myself; Faye is head of Serials. And that went on for a while; that job got posted and Julie Rinaldi, who had cycled through a little bit during the conversion project and had been working at Stanford on the same sorts of things, became the head of Periodical Division.
We’re getting right to the end.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is maybe a good transition.
Yeah, so now we’re like in eighty-one, eighty-two, something like that.
Uh huh, and you’re now on your own?
Well no, I’ve got a new head now. I’ve got a new head: there’s a new Serials Department head, and there’s a new Periodical Division head, and there’s a new AUL for Tech Services, so that’s my matrix.
[End Tape 19, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:05 PM
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