Tape 19, Side A
[Begin Tape 19, Side A]
We’re at Moffitt Library.
Reality check. Oh yeah, ICLFs: then there was ICLF One, and then there was ICLF Two: two separate call number groupings, each from A to Z, then somebody had to go back and annotate all this on the cards.
And if somebody messed up, if they didn’t catch the cards then you couldn’t tell where in the hell it was.
Yeah, that’s right. You couldn’t tell what was going on, exactly. And then you would think they would have learned their lesson, but no, apparently: another group of stuff had to be sent to storage again and not only was block storage mode preserved so there was gonna be a third block but then they changed the numbering: it wasn’t ICLF Three—maybe there was an ICLF Three, but this was a later generation—it was called ICLF A, or maybe it started with D or something like that. It was messed up, so another, you know, this happened for three or four more rounds I guess, so there were three or four huge groups of block storage out there, each with stuff in them from A to Z call number order. And then somebody got the bright idea of shelving things by size so that...
Are you being ironic?
No, this was a good idea.
Uh huh, okay.
It increased the workload incredibly but it meant that at least when… first of all it was space effective and it would mean that you could inter-file, you could add things as you went along because you weren’t filing things in call number order.
You didn’t have to make room.
Exactly. So they set up a size array and they gave each array a number, like an alpha, like YD or YC or whatever, and then they would just assign the book an occurrence number with a stamp, you know like YD123, and the next one in that size range would be YD124, and so on.
Now who was coming up with these plans?
I don’t know. It was way before my time, I mean I met this when I was there.
So they already had it set up that way.
Already had it set up. So what that meant was that they had to come up with this interstitial method of record keeping; so they’d take a book that had a perfectly fine call number on it and they’d stamp it on the top YD12345 or whatever and then they’d make up a card or they’d photocopy one of the cards and then something came into being, or maybe it followed along something that was already in being, called an ICLF catalog. Just what we needed, another catalog. And it had the ICLF number prominently on it. And then somebody would have to go to the shelf list card or something and add this. I think they added this or maybe they just added a statement like ‘in ICLF’ or something like this. So then there were YD numbers to consider and YF numbers to consider, but what it meant for me was that—because I was going to write the ICLF or the storage statement protocols: how to construct a storage statement—was that there was no way that I could discover what was in storage unless I went out there, so I started going out there. Scott Miller, he was kind of like the Willyce Kim of his day; he was working for Ken Legg. Every morning, or sort of every morning—no, it wasn’t every morning, it wasn’t every morning—but he’d roll up in his big truck, like, you know, real early in the morning, six-thirty, seven or something like that, and Jan and I would go out and spend half a day at ICLF, you know, just trying to run down some of the problems that we had: trying to figure out what was in storage, where was it, and where was it really, was it really out there, and what was out there. So we wound up going out to ICLF all the time and then riding back with Scott, you know, or he would make several trips back and forth and on one of them we’d catch the trip back.
Was Jan in library school then?
No, no, no.
That was later.
Yeah, much later. Who knew that she would go to library school.
What, you didn’t think she was the librarian type?
No, I didn’t think she was, no. But we all change and grow [laughs]. So that was interesting, seeing ICLF, and there was all sorts of stuff out there that wasn’t in any order.
Really?
Yeah, there was stuff in cages that were locked up, some EAL* stuff in cages, like Tibetan scrolls, or Tibetan pornography—that’s one of the rumors: somebody always says there’s a big collection of Tibetan pornography out there in storage. The EAL stuff was locked up; the Bancroft stuff was locked up, you know, archival stuff; but there was stuff just sprawling, you know, yeah, newspaper bundles that were in no order at all, stuff that was waiting to be put in some order.
Like Charles Foster Kane’s basement? [laughs]
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, when they finally moved all this, when they built the new facility, NRLF: Northern Regional Library Facility, when they finally built a new temperature-controlled, lighting-controlled state of the art storage facility, the people who had to move all this stuff also had to take care of the record keeping. That was a mammoth project. I think by then Scott Miller was working—had gone over to the NRLF side of things--so he helped manage that, and there was no better person for it. And so but that’s what, that’s what we were doin’, doin’ all that stuff, doin’ all this input and I was learning all this MARC tagging and more lore about serials. Really started to really love them serials and work, you know, yeah, ‘cause serials… I got a first taste of serials cataloging there, and… what happened…?
So you were being taught cataloging basically by, I mean partly, it sounds like, by doing it.
Yeah, exactly, yeah; no, I didn’t get any help; no, they were all busy with their things, and there was a lot of turnover and a lot of activity, I mean there was always… and their focus kept changing. I remember it now as being turmoil all the time, but they were digging it, you know, they were…
So nobody really took you in hand and showed you particular…?
No, no.
It was a little bit like learning karate and jujitsu or something.
Yeah, yeah, kinda, kinda like, kinda like that, just following along, find something that sparks your interest and go on with it. You know it’s the only thing, I think it’s probably the only thing like that that I actually kept at, because all the other stuff I just dropped after I discovered [laughs] you have to work at it or study it, you know.
So you mean you think you showed more stick-to-itiveness on this than on other things.
Yeah, I think so, possibly because I was getting paid for it too, a little bit, but I was working on my own, I mean I was spending a lot of time on my own studying this stuff and, you know, I would stay after work and do computer input stuff.
What did you think about the computers? I mean that was all new, right?
I hated them!
I mean in the army they were just using typewriters.
Right, yeah, oh I liked, I mean I liked them up to a point, but I remember Rick Beaubien—what was it? there was something called Serials Database Input Unit or something like that, and I think he was working for that, I mean there was like a nascent systems office, I mean there were systems people around, guys who later on started Innovative Interfaces: Steve Silberstein and Walt Crawford, so they were around, you know, they... Some people say they stole everything they [laughs]…they stole everything they…
They developed it on company time…
Yeah, right, right.
…and then made some millions of dollars.
Well when I first saw an Innovative check-in card on screen I said: Geez, Silverman* told ‘em that [laughs]. It looks just like a manual check-in card. So Rick Beaubien was working…
Do you think this is why Silberstein was beholding to Alan for…?
Ah I don’t know, I’m not sure.
Complex relationships here…
Could be, yeah, could be. Yeah, he’s had it good, he’s always had a place to live…. What? Where was I? [laughs]
Rick Beaubien?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He said: You know you really ought to get into this computer stuff ‘cause I am and I think this is the way to go. I said: Aw geez Rick, it’s too much. I don’t want to be sitting in front of a computer all day, you know...
[Laughing] Little did you know.
…enslaved, chained, manacled to the machine, serving the machine, no, I don’t wanna do that. He said: Okay. I should have listened to him. I’d be working for Bernie Hurley* today; I’d be the deputy Chief Scientist.
Well ‘cause he was right that you were gonna be chained to it anyway.
Yeah, it took a while though, I held it off as long as I could.
Really?
Yeah. So I liked it but I didn’t want to be… also I knew that if I started doing it I’d become obsessed with it, that I’d really… yeah, yeah, and I didn’t want that to happen; I knew that I’d…
So it would just sort of eat the rest of your life?
Yeah, exactly, ‘cause I’d be sitting there all the time: Let’s go! Take me! [laughter] ‘Cause I knew it was just the sort of thing, you know, that’s why I never took cocaine or heroin: I knew I’d become addicted right away.
And that would be your life.
That would be it, yep. So I was happy just to do it to that level, but I was really interested in the coding aspect of it and, you know, transforming all this information into coding, and I was getting good at it.
So you did become a cryptographer after all.
Exactly, yeah, there was a little cryptography to it, for sure, all that translating, but, you know, it’s supposed to make… we weren’t supposed to be concealing information [laughter].
Although, sometimes…
You never know because, you know, unless you know how to read a MARC record sometimes you can’t tell exactly why you retrieved a record, you know, if you do a search in Melvyl or something and you get a record that doesn’t reflect anything at all, any of the search terms you used, you don’t know what the hell happened unless you look behind the scenes. So I was getting into all that MARC stuff. Let’s see, how did this happen? How did this happen? Oh, well, Margaret Ide, who was in charge of the ISSN Unit before it became the Conversion Support Unit, had become the Assistant Head of Periodicals. No. Periodicals was an operation that was always run by a librarian—well, for most of the time—a librarian and an assistant, a librarian and a library assistant who was the assistant to the head: there was a head and an assistant head and the head was a librarian. And the former guy had left and Margaret took his slot, and now, you know, a year and a half later or a year later or something like that, Margaret was going to leave, so there was… and also by now all the projects were winding down; people were looking for other slots, and, you know, they were offering… a lot of people… let’s see, who were on the projects, various projects at that time that got taken over: Frank Hawley...
Did you know him very well?
Yeah, he was a serials cataloger.
I mean maybe we should have a list of the ones that we’ve mentioned that are dead now.
Frank Hawley, the late great Frank Hawley, he’s gone; Ben Yañez, he’s dead. Let’s see… well some of the other people that we’ll meet will die right away.
Damn.
Yep. So who else was… you know, Linda was on the project, Mitch was on the project: Mitch wound up in the Newspaper Room, Linda wound up in Serials Cataloging I think. Oh, Esther… Hester Seiple had left, I think she went to Santa Cruz or someplace, she got a better job, and Esther Fulsaas was a serials cataloger and they put her in charge of the project. Oh here’s a couple of cool cute stories involving the students, well one of the students: Laurie Hart. She was a… well I won’t characterize her, I’ll just tell a couple of stories.
Come on, come on now, characterize her. Go out on a limb, Conkin!
No, I won’t do it; I won’t do it. I discovered she had… Well she was kind of bubbly and she was flighty, real cute, and I guess she was—I’m not sure—I guess she was smart: I don’t remember what anybody’s disciplines were, but she had—this was before call-waiting and all that sort of stuff—but somehow she had her home phone wired up to work, so that if she weren’t there at home her calls would be forwarded to work, and I discovered this once because the phone rang and rang and I went over and answered it, because the students had a different phone, and the guy says: Uh, is Laurie there? I said: No, she’s not here right now. And he said: Who’s this?! [laughter] ‘Cause he thought he was calling her at home, you know, her boyfriend or something like that, so, you know, I had to apply a little corrective action there. And another thing was [delayed burst of laughter], when Esther came down there she would, you know, every now and then she would… I guess she had a little cubicle—the rest of us didn’t have—there wasn’t that much cubicalization—but she had kind of a little…
[Laughing] Cubicalization.
Think globally, act cubically. She had a little doorway, so when she wanted to be not disturbed she would put a little piece of paper on a string and string it across her doorway and the little piece of paper had a message on it or something like: Do not disturb; and that was kind of odd; but she’d be in her little cubicle and the students would be working at a table or something out there and Laurie had the habit of humming under her breath; and one time, you know, things had gone on and on and Esther sometimes you can tell when she’s getting upset you can hear these loud sighs—Shayee reports this [laughter]—these loud sighs and grumblings, and finally she stormed out her office, you know, her face is red, and she says: Listen, I am a trained musician and I cannot stand this tuneless humming! And Laurie was quite taken aback because there was no warning.
She might not even have been conscious she was doing it.
True, too true. And ah, there’s ah, lots of stories, lots of stories about the students, but let’s just move on.
But you’ve always said, just about this thing with Esther though, that… ‘cause she’s really intimidating, I mean especially to students…
She can be intimidating, yeah.
But you said that you actually always kind of liked her and even liked her feistiness.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, ‘cause she was, well right away you could see she was… she was all heart, and she really knew her beans. That’s always, you know, always impressed me: she really knew her beans and she really, I mean her heart was in her work. You know she could tell you stories about the former head of Serials Cataloging, Miss Pick; those were in the days when you had to call everybody mister so and so or miss so and so.
Miss Pick.
Miss Pick, yeah, and all the things that Miss Pick told her and all the, you know, she ah… it’s deep, you know, the roots of serials cataloging are deep in Esther, you know, and it really is her life, a lot of it.
So she took it all to heart, what Miss Pick said.
Yeah, yeah, plus the spirit of serials cataloging as opposed to, you know, [gravely] monographic cataloging: completely different thing. Plus she has this huge, this capacity for the retention of history and details and that sort of stuff; so I mean she really is probably one of the preeminent serials catalogers in the country if not the world.
Really? Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, she can hold her own with anybody, but at the same time she doesn’t, you know, she’s never gotten the recognition she deserves because she wouldn’t be a librarian, you know, she wouldn’t publish, she wouldn’t go out and do things for her career: she was interested in the work here and getting it done, and getting it done well, because she is a musician and she has that need to get it done exactly right [laughs], yeah, so that it makes music.
That comes from the musical training in a way?
I believe it’s all part of the same thing, you know, it’s all part of Esther, you know, that’s how she sees and behaves, plus she’s a, you know, at this time she had her Jaguar [laughs].
She did?
Yeah, she had a Jaguar—I think it was a Jaguar… What was it? Oh I don’t remember now. Was it an XKE? It might have been an XKE, but it was a fast car. What the heck was that?
Wow. Was she still married then?
I don’t know; I don’t know anything about her other than, you know, she came down; she knew everything; she could tell these boys and girls how to go; and you know later on I found out that she really did know everything, seemed authoritative to me, and I knew that she was a fast driver and went to rallies.
Really? And she would race?
I don’t know if she raced, but she would go to races. The reports I heard was that she would drive real fast; but that’s really all I knew at that time, and she was another character, you know, there’s lots of them. I’m becoming aware that there are lots of characters in the library, not as many as in the post office, because that really is a, well it’s a different level of character, you know, I guess this is more of a character magnet and that was more of a character sump pit or something like that: you just fall into and stay there; you’re lucky to be alive.
I meant to ask you when we were on the post office phase if when you started hearing about these people ‘going postal’, as they say, you know, brining guns to work and hosing down the workplace with an Uzi or whatever it was: did that make sense to you, I mean were there disgruntled post office people back in the day when you were there?
There were but they weren’t that harmful, plus there was this incredible tolerance for all sorts of squirrelly behavior at the post office. There was a guy working there, I thought he was, you know, later on I sort of, I’d retroactively depict him as a right-wing gun nut, but at that time I just thought he was an oddball; but I had heard that he barricaded himself in one of the postal buildings, you know, and set up actual bags full of letters as part of the barricade and had some weaponry and kept ‘em in there; but they didn’t fire him, you know, he got over it, whatever it was, and they let him out and he was working. Nobody mentioned this to me until, you know, he didn’t have a reputation; they said: Oh yeah, that guy, yeah, remember the time he…? And there were guys… one of the things that… you know people talk about the postal employees goofing off but it’s very hard for them to goof off because they drive those vehicles and people report them all the time.
Oh, really?
Yeah. There was a couple that were, you know, a guy and a gal carrier that were out there in their vehicle going at it and they got busted by some civilian; you know, maybe they got a letter in their file, I don’t know; and I got away with murder for a long time, so they… Well what happened later on was, I mean there’s some truth to the… some Postmaster General said that: Well, you know, we’ve got more veterans in the post office now than we ever had before. I think there’s some truth in that. A lot of these, I mean this wasn’t a big problem then, when I was working there; this happened later and I think a lot of it had to do with increasing automation especially in the—these often happened in the larger post offices where there’s all this contraption, you know, so it’s very loud, I’ve heard that these things are extremely loud, you know these automatic sorting machines and that sort of stuff: extremely loud, A; B: you have to keep up with them. When you’re tending a machine and the machine’s picking up letters and you have to look at the addresses on a screen while the machine is too, and the machine’s got it’s own pace, so that adds to the tension too. So veterans who know how to use weapons…
And maybe a little post-traumatic stress… okay… and keeping up with the machines…and loud machinery…
Yeah, and just natural, you know, government bureaucracy and the continued tightening up; plus it’s a huge—you know, if any of that stuff wasn’t true—it’s a huge production machine ‘cause you know that stuff just keeps coming in and coming in and coming in and you’ve gotta move it out all the time: it never quits. No, I wasn’t particularly surprised, but then it was only surprising in that, I mean you could see the seeds of it but it wasn’t that big a deal then, when I was working there.
Have you embraced the expression: ‘going postal’?
Going postal, sure.
It’s in your vocabulary now?
Yeah, well there was another, what was the… there was a variation on that recently: going… no, I don’t remember. Because I think the latest one that was in the news, one of these workplace shoot ups wasn’t a post office, it was some other...
Oh, so maybe it’s shifting, the attention is shifting to a different…?
Well I think ‘going postal’ is a deathless phrase, it’ll always be there. Yep. I don’t think it’s happened in the post office. But I think there is something about that kind of work, especially in the big operations. So there are all these… there are some strange characters. Anybody can get a civil service job; you’ve got to fight to get a library job.
[Laughing] Only the toughest people end up in the library.
Right, but the weird ones stay: when the going gets weird [laughs] the weird stick around [laughter].
So really? Does that account for why we’re sitting out here talking? [laughs]
Could be, could be, yeah. I think we have what it takes.
We’ve got the right stuff.
That’s right, the right stuff. So we know that the project is winding down. Some people are looking around for other slots, and I didn’t want to just be plunked down anywhere: I wanted to try to pick it if I could; so this LA IV position came open in Periodicals and I didn’t really think I was ready for that ‘cause that was really heavy-duty supervision, ‘cause, you know, it was like a twenty FTE operation, you know, one or two hundred K budget a year or something like that.
So it was the supervision that was the main sticking point? ‘cause your technical skills it sounds like were pretty much up there, or you were learning real fast anyway.
Yeah, plus it was back in that place that I had already worked before, and talk about your characters: they got ‘em, they got ‘em in there.
Who was in there?
Oh, who was in there was… well let’s see, there was… the head of the unit was a nice quiet polite Finnish lady called Helvi, and let’s see, there was a Check-in Supervisor who was… oh there was an assistant head while she was going away; there was a Check-in Supervisor who was Terry Allison, and there was a Circulation Supervisor who was Sheila Voinovich, and then there was the Check-in staff, and maybe Judy Walker was doing some claim stuff in there too, and Grace Abiko; but the Check-in staff was, among names that we’ll all recognize, you know everybody who’s paying attention: Lea Mascorro, Rick Love, Alan Silverman, Julio Guillermo, Norah Foster, Althea Rios then was running the binding.
She’s changed her name?
She went back to Althea—that was her married name—Althea Marion I think. She’s gone; she escaped; she retired. Let’s see, who else? A couple other people that I don’t remember their names, they went pretty quickly. Kate Fletcher wasn’t there then, she was there after me I guess. I can’t think of anymore right now; I’m sure it’ll come… and, you know, like ten or eleven students. And well Terry Allison, the Check-in Supervisor, had also applied for this job. We knew that he was… well, that’s what happened: it was certainly clear that he was going to apply for it ‘cause that was an LA III position that he had, and, you know, I’m looking around. Actually, I actually had thought of applying for this position because Margaret, who was in it, came to me and said, you know: Think about this. I said: Geez, I don’t know. She said: No, you can do it; ‘cause she had just done it for a year and a half.
We have to turn the tape over.
[End Tape 19, Side A]
We’re at Moffitt Library.
Reality check. Oh yeah, ICLFs: then there was ICLF One, and then there was ICLF Two: two separate call number groupings, each from A to Z, then somebody had to go back and annotate all this on the cards.
And if somebody messed up, if they didn’t catch the cards then you couldn’t tell where in the hell it was.
Yeah, that’s right. You couldn’t tell what was going on, exactly. And then you would think they would have learned their lesson, but no, apparently: another group of stuff had to be sent to storage again and not only was block storage mode preserved so there was gonna be a third block but then they changed the numbering: it wasn’t ICLF Three—maybe there was an ICLF Three, but this was a later generation—it was called ICLF A, or maybe it started with D or something like that. It was messed up, so another, you know, this happened for three or four more rounds I guess, so there were three or four huge groups of block storage out there, each with stuff in them from A to Z call number order. And then somebody got the bright idea of shelving things by size so that...
Are you being ironic?
No, this was a good idea.
Uh huh, okay.
It increased the workload incredibly but it meant that at least when… first of all it was space effective and it would mean that you could inter-file, you could add things as you went along because you weren’t filing things in call number order.
You didn’t have to make room.
Exactly. So they set up a size array and they gave each array a number, like an alpha, like YD or YC or whatever, and then they would just assign the book an occurrence number with a stamp, you know like YD123, and the next one in that size range would be YD124, and so on.
Now who was coming up with these plans?
I don’t know. It was way before my time, I mean I met this when I was there.
So they already had it set up that way.
Already had it set up. So what that meant was that they had to come up with this interstitial method of record keeping; so they’d take a book that had a perfectly fine call number on it and they’d stamp it on the top YD12345 or whatever and then they’d make up a card or they’d photocopy one of the cards and then something came into being, or maybe it followed along something that was already in being, called an ICLF catalog. Just what we needed, another catalog. And it had the ICLF number prominently on it. And then somebody would have to go to the shelf list card or something and add this. I think they added this or maybe they just added a statement like ‘in ICLF’ or something like this. So then there were YD numbers to consider and YF numbers to consider, but what it meant for me was that—because I was going to write the ICLF or the storage statement protocols: how to construct a storage statement—was that there was no way that I could discover what was in storage unless I went out there, so I started going out there. Scott Miller, he was kind of like the Willyce Kim of his day; he was working for Ken Legg. Every morning, or sort of every morning—no, it wasn’t every morning, it wasn’t every morning—but he’d roll up in his big truck, like, you know, real early in the morning, six-thirty, seven or something like that, and Jan and I would go out and spend half a day at ICLF, you know, just trying to run down some of the problems that we had: trying to figure out what was in storage, where was it, and where was it really, was it really out there, and what was out there. So we wound up going out to ICLF all the time and then riding back with Scott, you know, or he would make several trips back and forth and on one of them we’d catch the trip back.
Was Jan in library school then?
No, no, no.
That was later.
Yeah, much later. Who knew that she would go to library school.
What, you didn’t think she was the librarian type?
No, I didn’t think she was, no. But we all change and grow [laughs]. So that was interesting, seeing ICLF, and there was all sorts of stuff out there that wasn’t in any order.
Really?
Yeah, there was stuff in cages that were locked up, some EAL* stuff in cages, like Tibetan scrolls, or Tibetan pornography—that’s one of the rumors: somebody always says there’s a big collection of Tibetan pornography out there in storage. The EAL stuff was locked up; the Bancroft stuff was locked up, you know, archival stuff; but there was stuff just sprawling, you know, yeah, newspaper bundles that were in no order at all, stuff that was waiting to be put in some order.
Like Charles Foster Kane’s basement? [laughs]
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, when they finally moved all this, when they built the new facility, NRLF: Northern Regional Library Facility, when they finally built a new temperature-controlled, lighting-controlled state of the art storage facility, the people who had to move all this stuff also had to take care of the record keeping. That was a mammoth project. I think by then Scott Miller was working—had gone over to the NRLF side of things--so he helped manage that, and there was no better person for it. And so but that’s what, that’s what we were doin’, doin’ all that stuff, doin’ all this input and I was learning all this MARC tagging and more lore about serials. Really started to really love them serials and work, you know, yeah, ‘cause serials… I got a first taste of serials cataloging there, and… what happened…?
So you were being taught cataloging basically by, I mean partly, it sounds like, by doing it.
Yeah, exactly, yeah; no, I didn’t get any help; no, they were all busy with their things, and there was a lot of turnover and a lot of activity, I mean there was always… and their focus kept changing. I remember it now as being turmoil all the time, but they were digging it, you know, they were…
So nobody really took you in hand and showed you particular…?
No, no.
It was a little bit like learning karate and jujitsu or something.
Yeah, yeah, kinda, kinda like, kinda like that, just following along, find something that sparks your interest and go on with it. You know it’s the only thing, I think it’s probably the only thing like that that I actually kept at, because all the other stuff I just dropped after I discovered [laughs] you have to work at it or study it, you know.
So you mean you think you showed more stick-to-itiveness on this than on other things.
Yeah, I think so, possibly because I was getting paid for it too, a little bit, but I was working on my own, I mean I was spending a lot of time on my own studying this stuff and, you know, I would stay after work and do computer input stuff.
What did you think about the computers? I mean that was all new, right?
I hated them!
I mean in the army they were just using typewriters.
Right, yeah, oh I liked, I mean I liked them up to a point, but I remember Rick Beaubien—what was it? there was something called Serials Database Input Unit or something like that, and I think he was working for that, I mean there was like a nascent systems office, I mean there were systems people around, guys who later on started Innovative Interfaces: Steve Silberstein and Walt Crawford, so they were around, you know, they... Some people say they stole everything they [laughs]…they stole everything they…
They developed it on company time…
Yeah, right, right.
…and then made some millions of dollars.
Well when I first saw an Innovative check-in card on screen I said: Geez, Silverman* told ‘em that [laughs]. It looks just like a manual check-in card. So Rick Beaubien was working…
Do you think this is why Silberstein was beholding to Alan for…?
Ah I don’t know, I’m not sure.
Complex relationships here…
Could be, yeah, could be. Yeah, he’s had it good, he’s always had a place to live…. What? Where was I? [laughs]
Rick Beaubien?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. He said: You know you really ought to get into this computer stuff ‘cause I am and I think this is the way to go. I said: Aw geez Rick, it’s too much. I don’t want to be sitting in front of a computer all day, you know...
[Laughing] Little did you know.
…enslaved, chained, manacled to the machine, serving the machine, no, I don’t wanna do that. He said: Okay. I should have listened to him. I’d be working for Bernie Hurley* today; I’d be the deputy Chief Scientist.
Well ‘cause he was right that you were gonna be chained to it anyway.
Yeah, it took a while though, I held it off as long as I could.
Really?
Yeah. So I liked it but I didn’t want to be… also I knew that if I started doing it I’d become obsessed with it, that I’d really… yeah, yeah, and I didn’t want that to happen; I knew that I’d…
So it would just sort of eat the rest of your life?
Yeah, exactly, ‘cause I’d be sitting there all the time: Let’s go! Take me! [laughter] ‘Cause I knew it was just the sort of thing, you know, that’s why I never took cocaine or heroin: I knew I’d become addicted right away.
And that would be your life.
That would be it, yep. So I was happy just to do it to that level, but I was really interested in the coding aspect of it and, you know, transforming all this information into coding, and I was getting good at it.
So you did become a cryptographer after all.
Exactly, yeah, there was a little cryptography to it, for sure, all that translating, but, you know, it’s supposed to make… we weren’t supposed to be concealing information [laughter].
Although, sometimes…
You never know because, you know, unless you know how to read a MARC record sometimes you can’t tell exactly why you retrieved a record, you know, if you do a search in Melvyl or something and you get a record that doesn’t reflect anything at all, any of the search terms you used, you don’t know what the hell happened unless you look behind the scenes. So I was getting into all that MARC stuff. Let’s see, how did this happen? How did this happen? Oh, well, Margaret Ide, who was in charge of the ISSN Unit before it became the Conversion Support Unit, had become the Assistant Head of Periodicals. No. Periodicals was an operation that was always run by a librarian—well, for most of the time—a librarian and an assistant, a librarian and a library assistant who was the assistant to the head: there was a head and an assistant head and the head was a librarian. And the former guy had left and Margaret took his slot, and now, you know, a year and a half later or a year later or something like that, Margaret was going to leave, so there was… and also by now all the projects were winding down; people were looking for other slots, and, you know, they were offering… a lot of people… let’s see, who were on the projects, various projects at that time that got taken over: Frank Hawley...
Did you know him very well?
Yeah, he was a serials cataloger.
I mean maybe we should have a list of the ones that we’ve mentioned that are dead now.
Frank Hawley, the late great Frank Hawley, he’s gone; Ben Yañez, he’s dead. Let’s see… well some of the other people that we’ll meet will die right away.
Damn.
Yep. So who else was… you know, Linda was on the project, Mitch was on the project: Mitch wound up in the Newspaper Room, Linda wound up in Serials Cataloging I think. Oh, Esther… Hester Seiple had left, I think she went to Santa Cruz or someplace, she got a better job, and Esther Fulsaas was a serials cataloger and they put her in charge of the project. Oh here’s a couple of cool cute stories involving the students, well one of the students: Laurie Hart. She was a… well I won’t characterize her, I’ll just tell a couple of stories.
Come on, come on now, characterize her. Go out on a limb, Conkin!
No, I won’t do it; I won’t do it. I discovered she had… Well she was kind of bubbly and she was flighty, real cute, and I guess she was—I’m not sure—I guess she was smart: I don’t remember what anybody’s disciplines were, but she had—this was before call-waiting and all that sort of stuff—but somehow she had her home phone wired up to work, so that if she weren’t there at home her calls would be forwarded to work, and I discovered this once because the phone rang and rang and I went over and answered it, because the students had a different phone, and the guy says: Uh, is Laurie there? I said: No, she’s not here right now. And he said: Who’s this?! [laughter] ‘Cause he thought he was calling her at home, you know, her boyfriend or something like that, so, you know, I had to apply a little corrective action there. And another thing was [delayed burst of laughter], when Esther came down there she would, you know, every now and then she would… I guess she had a little cubicle—the rest of us didn’t have—there wasn’t that much cubicalization—but she had kind of a little…
[Laughing] Cubicalization.
Think globally, act cubically. She had a little doorway, so when she wanted to be not disturbed she would put a little piece of paper on a string and string it across her doorway and the little piece of paper had a message on it or something like: Do not disturb; and that was kind of odd; but she’d be in her little cubicle and the students would be working at a table or something out there and Laurie had the habit of humming under her breath; and one time, you know, things had gone on and on and Esther sometimes you can tell when she’s getting upset you can hear these loud sighs—Shayee reports this [laughter]—these loud sighs and grumblings, and finally she stormed out her office, you know, her face is red, and she says: Listen, I am a trained musician and I cannot stand this tuneless humming! And Laurie was quite taken aback because there was no warning.
She might not even have been conscious she was doing it.
True, too true. And ah, there’s ah, lots of stories, lots of stories about the students, but let’s just move on.
But you’ve always said, just about this thing with Esther though, that… ‘cause she’s really intimidating, I mean especially to students…
She can be intimidating, yeah.
But you said that you actually always kind of liked her and even liked her feistiness.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, ‘cause she was, well right away you could see she was… she was all heart, and she really knew her beans. That’s always, you know, always impressed me: she really knew her beans and she really, I mean her heart was in her work. You know she could tell you stories about the former head of Serials Cataloging, Miss Pick; those were in the days when you had to call everybody mister so and so or miss so and so.
Miss Pick.
Miss Pick, yeah, and all the things that Miss Pick told her and all the, you know, she ah… it’s deep, you know, the roots of serials cataloging are deep in Esther, you know, and it really is her life, a lot of it.
So she took it all to heart, what Miss Pick said.
Yeah, yeah, plus the spirit of serials cataloging as opposed to, you know, [gravely] monographic cataloging: completely different thing. Plus she has this huge, this capacity for the retention of history and details and that sort of stuff; so I mean she really is probably one of the preeminent serials catalogers in the country if not the world.
Really? Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, she can hold her own with anybody, but at the same time she doesn’t, you know, she’s never gotten the recognition she deserves because she wouldn’t be a librarian, you know, she wouldn’t publish, she wouldn’t go out and do things for her career: she was interested in the work here and getting it done, and getting it done well, because she is a musician and she has that need to get it done exactly right [laughs], yeah, so that it makes music.
That comes from the musical training in a way?
I believe it’s all part of the same thing, you know, it’s all part of Esther, you know, that’s how she sees and behaves, plus she’s a, you know, at this time she had her Jaguar [laughs].
She did?
Yeah, she had a Jaguar—I think it was a Jaguar… What was it? Oh I don’t remember now. Was it an XKE? It might have been an XKE, but it was a fast car. What the heck was that?
Wow. Was she still married then?
I don’t know; I don’t know anything about her other than, you know, she came down; she knew everything; she could tell these boys and girls how to go; and you know later on I found out that she really did know everything, seemed authoritative to me, and I knew that she was a fast driver and went to rallies.
Really? And she would race?
I don’t know if she raced, but she would go to races. The reports I heard was that she would drive real fast; but that’s really all I knew at that time, and she was another character, you know, there’s lots of them. I’m becoming aware that there are lots of characters in the library, not as many as in the post office, because that really is a, well it’s a different level of character, you know, I guess this is more of a character magnet and that was more of a character sump pit or something like that: you just fall into and stay there; you’re lucky to be alive.
I meant to ask you when we were on the post office phase if when you started hearing about these people ‘going postal’, as they say, you know, brining guns to work and hosing down the workplace with an Uzi or whatever it was: did that make sense to you, I mean were there disgruntled post office people back in the day when you were there?
There were but they weren’t that harmful, plus there was this incredible tolerance for all sorts of squirrelly behavior at the post office. There was a guy working there, I thought he was, you know, later on I sort of, I’d retroactively depict him as a right-wing gun nut, but at that time I just thought he was an oddball; but I had heard that he barricaded himself in one of the postal buildings, you know, and set up actual bags full of letters as part of the barricade and had some weaponry and kept ‘em in there; but they didn’t fire him, you know, he got over it, whatever it was, and they let him out and he was working. Nobody mentioned this to me until, you know, he didn’t have a reputation; they said: Oh yeah, that guy, yeah, remember the time he…? And there were guys… one of the things that… you know people talk about the postal employees goofing off but it’s very hard for them to goof off because they drive those vehicles and people report them all the time.
Oh, really?
Yeah. There was a couple that were, you know, a guy and a gal carrier that were out there in their vehicle going at it and they got busted by some civilian; you know, maybe they got a letter in their file, I don’t know; and I got away with murder for a long time, so they… Well what happened later on was, I mean there’s some truth to the… some Postmaster General said that: Well, you know, we’ve got more veterans in the post office now than we ever had before. I think there’s some truth in that. A lot of these, I mean this wasn’t a big problem then, when I was working there; this happened later and I think a lot of it had to do with increasing automation especially in the—these often happened in the larger post offices where there’s all this contraption, you know, so it’s very loud, I’ve heard that these things are extremely loud, you know these automatic sorting machines and that sort of stuff: extremely loud, A; B: you have to keep up with them. When you’re tending a machine and the machine’s picking up letters and you have to look at the addresses on a screen while the machine is too, and the machine’s got it’s own pace, so that adds to the tension too. So veterans who know how to use weapons…
And maybe a little post-traumatic stress… okay… and keeping up with the machines…and loud machinery…
Yeah, and just natural, you know, government bureaucracy and the continued tightening up; plus it’s a huge—you know, if any of that stuff wasn’t true—it’s a huge production machine ‘cause you know that stuff just keeps coming in and coming in and coming in and you’ve gotta move it out all the time: it never quits. No, I wasn’t particularly surprised, but then it was only surprising in that, I mean you could see the seeds of it but it wasn’t that big a deal then, when I was working there.
Have you embraced the expression: ‘going postal’?
Going postal, sure.
It’s in your vocabulary now?
Yeah, well there was another, what was the… there was a variation on that recently: going… no, I don’t remember. Because I think the latest one that was in the news, one of these workplace shoot ups wasn’t a post office, it was some other...
Oh, so maybe it’s shifting, the attention is shifting to a different…?
Well I think ‘going postal’ is a deathless phrase, it’ll always be there. Yep. I don’t think it’s happened in the post office. But I think there is something about that kind of work, especially in the big operations. So there are all these… there are some strange characters. Anybody can get a civil service job; you’ve got to fight to get a library job.
[Laughing] Only the toughest people end up in the library.
Right, but the weird ones stay: when the going gets weird [laughs] the weird stick around [laughter].
So really? Does that account for why we’re sitting out here talking? [laughs]
Could be, could be, yeah. I think we have what it takes.
We’ve got the right stuff.
That’s right, the right stuff. So we know that the project is winding down. Some people are looking around for other slots, and I didn’t want to just be plunked down anywhere: I wanted to try to pick it if I could; so this LA IV position came open in Periodicals and I didn’t really think I was ready for that ‘cause that was really heavy-duty supervision, ‘cause, you know, it was like a twenty FTE operation, you know, one or two hundred K budget a year or something like that.
So it was the supervision that was the main sticking point? ‘cause your technical skills it sounds like were pretty much up there, or you were learning real fast anyway.
Yeah, plus it was back in that place that I had already worked before, and talk about your characters: they got ‘em, they got ‘em in there.
Who was in there?
Oh, who was in there was… well let’s see, there was… the head of the unit was a nice quiet polite Finnish lady called Helvi, and let’s see, there was a Check-in Supervisor who was… oh there was an assistant head while she was going away; there was a Check-in Supervisor who was Terry Allison, and there was a Circulation Supervisor who was Sheila Voinovich, and then there was the Check-in staff, and maybe Judy Walker was doing some claim stuff in there too, and Grace Abiko; but the Check-in staff was, among names that we’ll all recognize, you know everybody who’s paying attention: Lea Mascorro, Rick Love, Alan Silverman, Julio Guillermo, Norah Foster, Althea Rios then was running the binding.
She’s changed her name?
She went back to Althea—that was her married name—Althea Marion I think. She’s gone; she escaped; she retired. Let’s see, who else? A couple other people that I don’t remember their names, they went pretty quickly. Kate Fletcher wasn’t there then, she was there after me I guess. I can’t think of anymore right now; I’m sure it’ll come… and, you know, like ten or eleven students. And well Terry Allison, the Check-in Supervisor, had also applied for this job. We knew that he was… well, that’s what happened: it was certainly clear that he was going to apply for it ‘cause that was an LA III position that he had, and, you know, I’m looking around. Actually, I actually had thought of applying for this position because Margaret, who was in it, came to me and said, you know: Think about this. I said: Geez, I don’t know. She said: No, you can do it; ‘cause she had just done it for a year and a half.
We have to turn the tape over.
[End Tape 19, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:06 PM
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