Tape 21, Side A

[Begin Tape 21, Side A]

So we’re in 1985 or so: I’m done with Periodicals, and not exactly for good as it turns out, and I’m working at Earth Sciences with my old pal Julie Rinaldi. Earth Sciences: very tiny branch, well, a medium sized branch but a very tiny work area. It’s like a fish bowl. Have you ever been in there? As soon as you walk in the door you can see the entire staff, which was three: there was Joan Jenkins, she worked half-time, she basically did serials stuff: her husband was a big man on the Engineering faculty, David Jenkins, she was a diminutive British woman. She’s always worked half-time in the library though; she doesn’t now. And there was the head, Julie Rinaldi, she had a little office in the back: the office she always wanted [laughter]. She could shut her door and smoke in there.

So she actually wanted more than a cubicle; she wanted an office.

Yeah, she wanted privacy, total privacy. And a bunch of students, and that was it; and the operation manager basically ran the library day-to-day.

So that was what you were doing.

That’s what I did, yeah. And I really got into the whole branch life just fine, and Earth Sciences particularly. You know the Earth Sciences Library serves the, its primary clientele is the faculty and graduate students of the geology and geography and then the paleontology departments, and they were all over there in the building all together. You get to know the faculty real well, and the grad students, ‘cause you see ‘em all the time and, you know, you do them favors and help them out and help them find stuff and it makes for a very nice friendly atmosphere, plus I’m learning more and more stuff about actual reference, face-to-face reference: finding complicated stuff for people: when they come in with just a little bit of a citation or some misinformation or three fractured German words and the wrong numbering and everything like that, plus by then GLADIS had come into the picture and I could really make that GLADIS dance.

So you were glad to be out from under all this…

I was very glad, yeah: no real pressure, there was a lot of room for imaginative work and that sort of stuff, and not very much supervision, just a few students, you know, no big deal at all. I missed the money.

So you weren’t messing up people’s lives.

That’s right, yep. Nothing serious at all, back to… it wasn’t quite the cartoon world that I liked, but it wasn’t so serious. When I was in Periodicals sometimes Julie and Faye and I would go out to the Durant Hotel and just talk for hours and hours and hours up until, you know, nine or ten at night—this is after work—about all the problems and what we’re gonna do about this and what’s gonna happen there and how we’re gonna handle this situation: none of that, no homework, you know, nothing beyond eight to five, unless I wanted to.

So you left work at work.

Yeah, left work at work, pretty much. You know, I took some reference works home just to bone up on how to find stuff in the Bibliography of Fossil Vertebrates and that sort of stuff. It was real neat to see the dynamics between the paleontology people, all great field workers and happy guys, and the uptight weirdoes who worked in the geology department.

Really?

Yeah, not really, but they were, especially the geophysics people, were really nosebleeds and ass-wipes, but the paleontology people, you know, even the head of the department, they were all real cool, some of the geology people were too; but actually they all were pretty cool, there was just a few bad apples, which there’s bound to be. And maps! you know they have all the maps there. Never had to handle maps before. John Creaser, who worked in the Map Room: just a wonderful, wonderful individual and a mainstay of the library, nobody will ever know how much the library owes to John Creaser ‘cause he works quietly and, you know, doesn’t blow his own trumpet. But maps are a very strange stuff, a very strange kind of thing to deal with in a bibliographic atmosphere, you know, everything about them is twice as hard, from the shelving of them and the pulling them out to the finding them to the interpreting, helping to interpret them, and so on. There’s so many different kinds of maps, and he’s just plugged away for years: making sure they were catalogued right. He’d spend two half days a week at Earth Sciences, so he helped me figure out the whole map layout, plus there was a lot physical work in maps too, you know: wrestling map cases around and pulling the drawers in and out.

Because of the strange sizes and…

Yeah. And… that’s all, you know, that went on for five years.

Really? You worked there for five years?

Yeah, four or five years, yeah, and I got tired of that. I just happened to be talking to Esther Fulsaas, who by then had become head of Serials Cataloging. Ivan [Argüelles], through a strange series of events, had become monographic cataloger. There was a unit prior to CCD called BSD, and it was always run by a librarian, and Mercedes was the assistant head of BSD, Bibliographic Services Department, and the guy who was the head of BSD, Russell Gardner, now the late Russell Gardner, well that’s when he died, that’s when he became the late Russell Gardner—he’s the guy who thought up the name of GLADIS by the way: General Library Automated Database Input and Editing System, yeah, something like that: GLADIS.

Really. I never knew.

Yeah, there was a contest.

I always imagined this old lady with glasses on [laughter]: GLADIS.

Yeah, he died of AIDS… well, you know, a lot of people died of AIDS in the library: Gordon Allenbaugh, Ellis Sheppherd, two Acquisitions people…

Did you know Taylor…?

Taylor Hanson? Oh yeah, yeah; fastest damn typist I’ve every seen.

‘Cause he was a pianist.

Yeah, ‘cause he was a pianist, yeah, and a short story, and an author. He won some prizes for his fiction, yeah.

I didn’t know that.

Yep. Taylor Hanson, Frank Hawley. Interesting digression: Frank Hawley got into a—did you know Frank Hawley? He worked in the Systems office—

Tell me anything you know about Frank Hawley. I only got to know him right toward the end when we worked right next door to each other when I was in Serials Payment and he was in Systems and I used to see him because he was a smoker and he’d have to go outside: he always wore shorts.

Yeah, yeah, he always wore shorts.

And we’d just chat out there in the hall, we’d see each other out in the hall or out in the front and we’d chat, and I really liked that guy.

He was a great guy.

I really liked that guy and he’s… I felt so sad when he died, I mean, it was, you know…

Yeah, it was pretty bad.

But I’m sorry, what were you…?

He loved to do things for himself and he took it to more extremes than anybody I’ve ever known. You know he bought himself a printing press, learned how to use it, and then, you know, he printed up some things for various people on holidays. I knew he made his own clothes but it wasn’t till I knew him later that I knew he made his own shirts.

He cut his own hair.

Cut his own hair. Now I’ve done all those things too: I’ve made my own shirts, and I’ve cut my own hair but he was learning to weave, he had a loom and he was learning to weave, and I never did that, but he went out to Sonoma and sheered his own sheep! carded his own wool and wove it [laughter].

He’s not the guy that gave his cat a vasectomy is he?

No he isn’t, no he isn’t, but he probably could have. He grew hydropontic tomatoes in his apartment [laughs].

Oh that’s right, yeah, he mentioned that to me: that’s funny.

And he was doing all sorts of stuff with computers before, you know, way before he was in Systems, way before, you know, computers were a big deal.

Where was he working? Do you remember where he started out?

He started out, he was one of these conversion unit, I mean one of these Title II-C people; he was starting out on some kind of serials conversion and he worked in one of these efforts, and I guess he was in Serials Cataloging when he got onto the payroll; I think so, or one of these units between Serials Cataloging and Periodicals, yeah, I think he worked with Linda [Turitz]. At one stage in his career, when he was in Systems, somebody—now how did this happen? I don’t remember the whole story—but there was like a woman stalking him, and, you know, she was a former employee and she was in love with him and she was always there, always showing up, writing him; she got banned from the campus and it really affected him greatly, you know, he didn’t like this at all; it gave him some really emotional trouble.

Really.

Yeah, I remember that thing. Oh yeah, and she was also, she got it into her head that somebody else in the library was, she became jealous of somebody else—Jan Carter I think—for being in love with Frank and she was messing with Jan Carter’s life or something like that too.

And she didn’t know that Frank was gay?

No. Well I mean she was nuts. I don’t know what she knew; that wouldn’t have mattered, it wouldn’t have mattered, but she might have, you know, focused on some boy if she was able to put two and two together; but none of it was true, you know, it was just all stuff she made up. Whoa, Frank Hawley. Who else, what other ghosts are there walking around here?

Oh, Rick, people talk about…

Oh, Rick Velez, yeah, the incredible Rick Velez.

Really? What’s his story?

He was a master of languages, and I remember once he said he went over on Fleet Week, or not Fleet Week but there were some Russian sailors in town and so he went onto their boat and started talking Russian to them and he missed work for a couple days [laughter]. He was a party, you know, he was a party cat; I always think he was a leather guy; I’m not sure. But yeah, he kicked around the library, you know, worked in many different places. He was on the Reference, he was very… he was doing reference work, he was doing acquisitions work, he was doing cataloging work, yeah, he went around a lot. Yeah, that’s right, and Ben Yañez—we mentioned him: they come, they go.

Yeah. Did you know Ellis [Sheppherd] very well?

Oh yeah, Ellis was one of these people like, I mean I had to be in touch with the heads of all these places, so, yeah, Ellis and I worked out lots of procedures with exchange snags and gift snags and that sort of stuff; he was the one I brought those problems to, yeah, he was a real friendly happy guy.

It’s terrible too though to see people fade away, I mean I remember seeing Ellis and he just sort of turned kind of grey and just looked like a ghost before he died. I gather that he, now Frank [Hawley] would talk, I mean because of his way anyway, he would talk about it, he would talk about his T-cell count and he would talk about various technical things about how the disease worked: he wanted to know.

Yeah, yeah. He worked, I think he worked for the Center for… I know he worked for the Harvard or Yale or someplace library but he worked for the Center for Disease Control before it was in Atlanta, so he knew all that stuff, he knew a lot of medical stuff.

So he had known that before, he didn’t just study it up when he got AIDS.

No, well he probably studied on, but I remember one time he got it into his mind that he wanted to build a, I don’t know, was it a seismometer or, I mean, one of them things you use to measure earthquakes, so he went to Earth Sciences and started just picking up books and taking them out: he wanted to know everything there was about earthquakes. Well, before I leave Earth Sciences, that’s where I was in the big eighty-nine quake, I was in the stacks at Earth Sciences.

In the stacks… was that pretty scary?

By the way, Julie was pregnant about three times during the course of my tenure there at Earth Sciences, so really I ran Earth Sciences [laughter]….

Really?

… yeah, and they never paid me enough! Not really.

Really, so she was having a family at that…

So she was out a lot, yeah, couple, three times; in fact, and then when she came back things were always a little tense.

Really? because you would have sort of stepped into her shoes and…

Well she was a difficult person, and I like difficult people, but… and I liked it because, you know, she would have no recourse when I was difficult with her, you know, so I would, you know, I’d answer right back; we’d have these big raging arguments. It wasn’t good for the other staff but [laughter]…

So you’d really come back at her.

Oh yeah, that was part of the trip of working with Julie, yeah, and then we’d go out, you know, go out and have lunch or something like that. I house-sat for her a couple times.

She was Italian it sounds like [laughs].

Exactly, she was, she certainly was: she was fiery. But, you know, we had a symbiotic thing going there. So I’m back there in the stacks, yeah, because every now and then I would shelve books and she’d get mad at me: We’ve got students to do that; and I’d have to remind her: I’m shelving them at my level. When I put that book on the shelf that book, that sucker is shelved! And then, you know, there was all this rumbling and then I did what everybody else in Earth Sciences entire building does when there’s any kind of tembler: go cluster around the seismograph, and it was down there going [makes sound effect]; and all these other people are running out into the—doing the thing they shouldn’t do: they’re running out of the building into the sidewalk, but man...
Was the seismograph in a safe place?

No, no safer than any other place in that building, in fact least safe because it’s out in the open: there’s no structures on top of it. It’s strange, those scientists, that’s the first thing they want to do: go verify their senses [laughs], go verify that the marks on paper are there.

But oh, that was a… were you here then, in 1989?

Yeah, I was; the funny thing was—it was just after five, right?

Yeah, right, getting off time.

—I had just left work and I walk in this sort of bounding stride and apparently my walk kind of negates any sort of movement of the ground [laughter] because I didn’t even notice.

[Laughing] Wow, that’s pretty good ‘cause that was a big one.

I was just bounding across.

It was just normal…?

Yeah, my normal stride.

Or the rhythm of it was such that you were actually airborne during those times when there were fluctuations.

Yeah, and I only noticed because when I got close to home, or when I started getting out into—I lived in North Oakland then—I started noticing people out there looking up at their chimneys and if I had only noticed one that would have been one thing but I noticed a lot of people going out and looking up at their chimneys [laughter] and I thought: there’s either a strange convergence of chimney anxiety or something’s happened, so finally I figured it out.

Something’s happened and you don’t know what it is. Yeah, that was pretty bad, pretty bad.

So that was good being in that location.

Yeah, that was perfect, perfect thematic place to be. So I’m talking to Esther Fulsaas one day, she’s head of Serials Cataloging; she says: You know, I’ve got a position open. I said: I’m gonna apply for it, an LA IV: what’s one topped out position versus another, but I always, you know, I always wanted to get back into serials in some way but not through the big house* [Doe Library], you know, I was still keeping a low profile. Now here was a position that had no supervisory responsibility, it was just work, and it just seemed ideal. I didn’t even want to supervise students anymore; I didn’t want to have any responsibility for anybody else; I just wanted to, you know, sit me down at a desk and give me some problems. And I applied for that position and went through the interview process and got that job. So far every job I’ve applied for I’ve gotten.

So now who interviewed you, did Esther?

Esther and Cathy Gordon, who was acting head of Serials at that time, former head of Social Sciences Library. And got that job, got into Serials Cataloging; there’s Ed [Dessau]: Hi Ed; Ed’s back there in Serials Cataloging [laughs]. Who else was there then? Armanda [now Barone* ], she’s the… there are three librarians there by now, there used to be eight: now there’s just Esther, Veronica [Wakeman] and Armanda, and Armanda’s off in meetings all the time, you know, what Esther calls: being wonderful.

Really?

Yeah, she’s off being wonderful; it was kind of a slam. And, you know, some other people: let’s see, who else was there? Lisa Rowlison, and Ching, Ching de Chang, he’d just started there, he used to be in Acq, didn’t he, he used to be in Acquisitions. And I don’t know, maybe somebody else. Oh yeah: Jun Ki Kim, she was from Korea, she was actually never there. So I worked in Serials Cataloging for a few years, four or five years, and in 1998 I got out of Serials Cataloging and went to the Electronic Text Unit. The end [laughs].

We have more tape! You can’t do that [laughs]!

Okay, well I’ll just mention this: on the home front during this whole period there was, let’s see, you know, the high points are: two trips to Europe; got married, you know, took a while.
So you were living together for quite a while.

So I was living out on, got married in like eighty-two or something like that. In fact there was one time in there where I had to move out again because, you know, I’m so used to… wanted to be by myself, I just wanted to be by myself, but then I realized I’m not like that no more, you know.

You couldn’t go back to Redondo Beach.

I could, well I’d have to take Tina with me. Nope. In fact we did that a couple times, took a few trips. That’s when I learned how to drive, got a driver’s license and we drove down to the beach and San Diego and drove back up. That’s probably the last time I did any significant driving; that’s got to be, you know, fourteen years ago. I just… we had the… while Tina was gone the car was parked in the neighbor’s back garage and it was my job to move it out onto the street before she got back.

You mean just now, just recently.

Just recently, yeah, last week. So that was the first time I’d been behind the wheel in ten or eleven years.

Was it scary?

Oh yeah, it’s always scary because, you know, you might run into somethin’, but I just, I had to get in and out of reverse and just stayed in first and just drove around the corner and parked the thing and got out; whoa, that was a narrow escape.

You didn’t kill anybody.

Didn’t kill anybody.

Or run into any buildings, or…

That’s right, didn’t lose control. And yeah, so we actually did get married, but that was just… neither one of us believes in… you know, we don’t need no… [sings] We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall. We don’t believe in letting the state intrude in your personal life but, you know, you’ve got to get married for those benefits. She’d been working in like Safeway and Co-op, and they get real good benefits, but she stopped working there and went to work for a kid’s clothing store called Sweet Potatoes. She went to Lany College and got a degree in, you know, fashion, fashion excellence, and so she started going off into the garment industry and got that job at Sweet Potatoes and they didn’t have such good benefits, or somewhere in between there she wasn’t working and so we wanted to get her onto the sweet, you know, the lovely UC dental plan and medical plan, so… she kept her last name though.

Didn’t sell out completely.

That’s right, that’s right. I wouldn’t want no Mrs. Conkin anyway [laughter]. So ah… and, let’s see… I guess the only other high point is last year I’m reading my e-mail and I get a message comes up and says: Are you my brother Michael that I haven’t seen in twenty-seven years? And then I look and there’s another message signed Patricia whatever, Blackmore, another message says: I know you’re my brother Michael! [laughter] So I got in touch, there was a huge reconnection and we all got in touch with one another again; so now I know where all my siblings and half-siblings and their spouses and ex-spouses and children are; so I know where all these people are: suddenly I go from having, you know, completely no family to having these huge extended relationships, but I don’t, you know…

Mumble grumble…

I don’t really have a relationship, you know, but I know where they are [laughs].

If you need ‘em. That was all due to Patricia getting in touch with you?

Yep, she worked it out before and she worked it out this time too. She got in touch with Dennis. Now Dennis had been up in San Francisco all this time: he knew my number; he knew my number!
So you’d been right across the bay all that time. Were you in the book?

No, I wasn’t in the book but he knew my address because some years earlier, ten or eleven years earlier, Dennis, I mean before I, when I was still living down here in Berkeley I’d see Dennis on the street from time to time and, you know, he’d be living in hotels and he got really involved in the Berkeley—

In Berkeley?

In Berkeley, yeah, he lived in Berkeley, in Oakland, in various places in Berkeley and Oakland, I’d see him from time to time and he was doing psychic stuff. He got involved with the Berkeley Psychic Institute, and he was actually working with doctors and helping them improve their, their diagnostic techniques, nonverbal diagnostic techniques.

Oh, ‘cause you mentioned the psychic thing when you talked about his response to photographs.

Oh yeah, I said later on he was a psychic so maybe there was a sensitivity there. And he was hanging out with this young woman named… Pixie, Pixie; and I didn’t know it at the time but he’d also made some trips to—well, I guess this was later—but he got married to Pixie and I went to his wedding and he came over with Pixie, it was in like the hills in Oakland.

What year?

Jeez, eighty-two or -three or -four, something like that, early eighties. Pixie the psychic nurse [laughs].

Really?

Yeah, Pixie the psychic nurse. They were both psychics. Yeah, so he came over, he was over at the house before the wedding, and I guess Tina was somewhere else, she wasn’t there; you know I don’t go to weddings or funerals or parties or… What was that line that Ian Shoals said: If there are more than two people gathered I see that as an open invitation to fascism [laughter]. That’s what it is: Any organization composed of more than two people is an open, I don’t go to those. But I went to his wedding, you know, it was okay. So he knew where I was, he knew where my house was, he’d been to my house. And so, you know, it was just the thing, we just weren’t, he wasn’t interested; I wasn’t interested: nobody was interested. And I knew sort of, Bob was still down there and Gene was somewhere down there; I’m sure they knew where I was, more or less; I don’t think I was in the book so maybe they didn’t know exactly. But Patricia, you know, she got us all connected and she, you know, she just kept wearing everybody down; so now we’ve got all our addresses; we’ve spoken on the phone. I actually went down there last summer, in ninety-seven, to visit her and her husband; Tina and I went down there, just a quick trip, and we also went, whenever we go to San Diego we also drop in on Kathy Stanis, my old ex-girlfriend.

So you’re still…?

Oh yeah, we’re all still friends.

What’s she up to?

She’s still a legal secretary and she’s been living down in San Diego for twenty years or so. So, you know, met with them and swapped stories. I got all those great pictures from cousin Sylvia because she found out about the El Paso branch, cousins: what a concept, I had no idea. Brothers and sisters: weird enough; cousins: whoa. And so, you know, we still sort of keep in touch. Found out where my brother Gene was. She found out that he was just right down there, more or less, an hour’s, two hour’s trip away. By the way, I happened to be flipping the dials on the TV and the movie Dreamscape was on, and I remembered that Patricia had told me that my brother was doing bit work in the movies in the eighties. He was in a—who are those guys with the beards?—ZZ Top, he was in a couple of ZZ Top videos maybe; and he said he was in this movie Dreamscape, so I taped it, and I’ll be damned! He has a walk-on scene or two where he’s this menacing hit man.

Does he have any lines?

No, not the part that I taped, but there he is.

Let me turn this.

[End Tape 21, Side A]