A Well-Read Woman

OKINAWA AND VIETNAM, 1959–1970

Chapter 26

When asked about how she ended up with her first job as a librarian, Ruth liked to tell a funny story: “The head of all air force libraries in the world met me at a cocktail party. And the joke has been he sent me to Okinawa to sober me up. Because he fed me too many martinis, and he stuck me on an airplane and shipped me overseas.”1 She might have met Harry F. Cook, the chief of the air force libraries, at a party, but an air force librarian named Ruth Sieben-Morgen was the person who helped Ruth obtain the job in Okinawa and served as a mentor to her during her first few years as a librarian. The many letters between the two Ruths in Rappaport’s collection at the US Army Heritage and Education Center reveal the arduous federal employment process and also a wisecracking friendship. The date of the infamous cocktail party remains unknown, but it most likely took place in 1958 or earlier. It is possible that it even happened before Ruth decided to become a librarian, and it could have been the reason she chose to go to library school; Ruth always looked out for advantageous connections. Sieben-Morgen put in a name request (the terminology for when an employer has a specific person in mind for a position) for Ruth probably in August 1958 when she graduated. Ruth was also pursuing other job leads, including one at Mills College.

Ruth wrote Sieben-Morgen an excited, appreciative letter when the air force contacted her and estimated she would leave for Okinawa on October 30.2 But in December she was writing her again, more subdued this time, about her reluctance and confusion over why the process was taking so long. She was frustrated with the flip-flopping among the air force bureaucracy about their initial rejection of her application and with how she didn’t know whether she was being considered for positions in Okinawa or Korea. She suspected she had received a negative reference from Perry Danton, the chair of Berkeley’s library school, and indeed she was right.3 Ruth was also concerned that her employment for the PIO in Israel and for the Zionist organizations might have been misunderstood. She claimed she had friends who had been in Israel with her then who now worked for the US federal government and that she herself had been a US civil servant a few years earlier. “So I don’t really see where any of this is relevant, but under the circumstance, I cannot help wonder . . . whether somebody along the line had a strange notion?” she asked.4 Understandably she had not mentioned anything about her employment with Max Lowenthal in this application or in her previous one for her job at the Oakland Army Base in 1952, when she had to undergo a loyalty review. Even though the Loyalty Review Board was abolished in 1953, Ruth still had to undergo a background check by the FBI in order to obtain federal employment.5 Her earlier work as a Zionist and in Israel would continue to be suspect.

Regardless of all the confusion, Ruth accepted the Okinawa job in early January 1959.6 She had been telling friends and family about the job since the fall. Many of them wrote and congratulated her and wished her well on her new adventure, as they announced their own news of births and children growing up. She most likely had joked that her odds of finding a husband were greater in Okinawa than in Berkeley; her friend Ilya wrote to her, “Your mathematics might be all right, but it very seldom helps to travel 3000 miles to get a male.”7 At age thirty-five in 1959, Ruth’s chances of finding a husband were diminishing, but she would not give up yet, or at least not give up joking about her travails as a single woman.

Ruth’s first job at the Naha Air Base was as a field librarian at the federal employee general schedule 7 (GS-7) level earning $4,980 per year. She had been considered for a GS-9 appointment, appropriate for an employee with a graduate degree, but had been deemed a GS-7 due to her lack of experience working in a library. The GS system had been instituted in 1949 to regulate federal salaries and make them comparable to the private sector. The system also helped ensure that civil-service employees with similar experience and education were being paid fairly. She may have been disappointed by this ranking and salary, but it is likely that she did not have to pay housing costs in Okinawa. Working under a librarian named Mary Jane Lin, she got ample experience in all aspects of librarianship. She described this position in a later job application:

Serving military personnel and their dependents with a collection of 24,000 volumes. In charge of four site libraries with holdings of 6740 volumes. Classifying, cataloging, weeding; reference work; readers’ advisory; publicity; book reviews. Training of indigenous and/or military personnel. Selection and acquisition of books, phonograph records and magazines. Assistant to Chief Librarian.8

She seems to have enjoyed the work and cutting her teeth as a real librarian. But she chafed at the rules about working a regular schedule, unpaid overtime, comp-time hours, and travel itineraries. Mary Jane Lin and Ruth butted heads about her constant late arrivals in the mornings, and both seem to have written at least a few letters to Sieben-Morgen about these issues. Sieben-Morgen tried to explain the rules, which she didn’t agree with either, in a letter to Ruth in September 1959, adding that all the librarians at other bases were working unpaid overtime too and that none of them earned comp time regularly. Sieben-Morgen urged her to follow the rules to make peace with Lin and, with foresight, noted, “Some day when you are supervisor, you’ll see her problem. You’ll have to insist on promptness from every member of your staff, and sell your standards by your own example. . . And for gosh’s sakes don’t give papa Danton the satisfaction: your lack of promptness was one of the things he spoke of about you, remember?” She added cryptically, “We know of course what was behind that.”9

Ruth drafted a letter back to Sieben-Morgen to defend herself, although she migh

t not have sent it. She insisted that other librarians had told her to track her comp time and that shifts had been unfairly dumped on her at the last minute when other librarians wanted a day off. She was angered by an incident where she had to take an Easter shift, presumably so that the other librarians who were Christians could take the day off. She pointed out the impossibility of making a firm schedule when her transportation (often by plane or helicopter) to and from the site libraries was not reliable, especially during typhoon season. A few months later she wrote to Sieben-Morgen inquiring about a job posting for a librarian at the Yakota Air Base. She mentioned that she wanted administrative experience and that her “stomach [had] very literally had its share of helicopter flights and [had] currently taken to rebelling openly in flight.” Sieben-Morgen regretfully notified her that the job would be taken by the wife of a pilot.10

Sometime in early 1960 Sieben-Morgen came to Okinawa, presumably for an inspection visit. She wrote Ruth a letter thanking her for her hospitality and the lovely time she had: “Your party was the most elaborate ever I’ve been part of and I was awfully impressed too by the people who came especially your site commanders and CO [commanding officer]. That was good, Ruth, and thank you for it.”11 These strengths of Ruth’s—her sociability, hospitality, and flattery of the right people above her—were strategies she had honed for a long time. While these tactics hadn’t always worked for her in the past, the elaborate hierarchy and social rules of the military seemed to be a natural fit for her. Although she loathed bureaucracy and often battled those she worked closely with concerning arcane minutiae, Ruth was more than willing to play this game, not only to get ahead but also because it was a game she enjoyed.

Even though Ruth was working with other women librarians and got along well with most of the male officers at Naha, she still could not escape sexual harassment and discrimination there. In 1961 she expressed interest in applying for a GS-9 job at the Wakkanai Air Station. She wrote:

I realize that they are looking for a man, but if they are at all interested in a woman, then the following might be of interest to them. I have just finished working on isolated sites (three of them) for two years. I’m the only Caucasian woman at any of these sites and I’ve lived with the troops anywhere from 3 to 18 days at a stretch on my monthly visits…My whole point here being that everyone of us is agreed that the job I now hold is really a man’s job, but everybody also saying they much prefer a woman!!!!!!! Those are the little ironies of life!12

Ruth knew that sexism was more than a little irony of life, but in 1961 it was still legal to advertise jobs for men or women only. She was not afraid to speak about these issues to her superiors and to point out that her skills and abilities as a librarian were equal to any man’s. Coupled with the fact that officers’ wives got priority in hiring, her disadvantage as a single woman—even in the field of librarianship, which favored them—was blatant.

In May 1962 Ruth wrote a letter to Colonel Foote, reporting sexual harassment from another colonel:

Saturday night, after midnight, at the Naha Officers’ Club, Colonel Thompson began to harass me about official library business. My attempts to change the subject and to move away from him were to no avail, and he ended his verbal attack by repeatedly telling me:

“You are a fool… The only reason Sgt. Eberwein likes working in your library is that he expects to get a piece of tail from you, and if he doesn’t get it soon he’s going to quit… I haven’t gotten mine yet either, … Why don’t you just quit and get the hell out of here so I can close that damned library…”

This was not the first time I was subjected to verbal abuse by Col. Thompson, but it is the worst to date.13

Thompson was just one of many men who harassed Ruth throughout her long career, but the letter shows that Ruth would not just accept it as part of the job, if she ever did when she was younger. She was not afraid to report him, even if there would be no action (and in this case, there likely wasn’t). Documenting and reporting sexual harassment in 1962—two years ahead of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which gave new protections to women in the workplace, and thirteen years before the term “sexual harassment” was even coined—Ruth refused to be quiet about the injustices she regularly suffered, and she didn’t care if speaking out gave her a reputation as a difficult woman.

In 1961 Lin wrote an evaluation for Ruth, describing her weaknesses as a professional librarian:

Miss Rappaport has had difficulty adjusting to library routines—making work schedules, keeping hours posted, etc., and has had difficulty in meeting given suspense dates [deadlines]. Her working relationship with the library staff and base personnel has not always been successful, though she is well liked by personnel at the sites she serves. The ability to do good, or even outstanding, library work is present, but Miss Rappaport must learn to conform to the military library program and its demands, and to show more mature judgment in handling library problems and personnel.14

Ruth surely was aware of her faults, and if she tried to reform her professional ways at this time, it was temporary. Throughout her career Ruth usually ran late, always had a messy desk, and struggled to diplomatically manage her employees. On the other hand, she would continue to follow the most important tenet of librarianship: the patron always comes first. Ruth would go the extra mile to find a needed book or source and no doubt charmed officers and patrons with her wizard-like knowledge of call numbers, subject headings, and publications.

Major Sara P. Moesker (known as Pat) was a captain in the air force in Okinawa while her husband was stationed in Korea. She was assigned a bedroom next door and a shared bathroom with Ruth, and the two became fast friends. Moesker worked with top-secret material and radio communications but spent a lot of free time in the library. She remembered the endless hijinks involving Ruth, who nearly backed up a truck off a pier and teetered dangerously on a ladder to hang decorations around the library in Okinawa. She was amazed by Ruth’s ability with languages, her gift of remembering everyone, and her skills as a captivating conversationalist at cocktail parties. The two women would remain good friends for the rest of their lives.15

In 1961 Ruth was cited in a report for making the most library site visits and writing the best reports in the Pacific Air Force (PACAF) command.16 She had attended many of the PACAF library conferences and networked her way across Southeast Asia. She was restless and hungry for more responsibility, more power, and a chance to make a significant impact in the lives of people who also sought books and information the way she did. In the fall of 1962, the navy’s Headquarters Support Activity Saigon (HSAS) advertised a job for a librarian because the navy didn’t have one there, nor did any branch of the military. There was no library to speak of, and Saigon was becoming a hotspot. This was the opportunity Ruth had been waiting for.

Chapter 27

Ruth traveled to Saigon from Okinawa in November 1962 for the HSAS job interview and to see if she liked the city.1 The loosely defined mission for this one-year position was, first, to establish a library in Saigon to serve all branches of the military (not just the navy) and second, and if she wished to continue after that, to expand the system to perhaps six to eight annex libraries at new military bases around the country. As she wrote about this job opportunity in the summer of 1963 in a mass letter to friends and family, “It was presented as a challenge, and oy, how I’m beginning to hate that word . . . However, like a hooked fish I bit.”2

She explained to them the situation she had walked into:

The program is still being envisioned, but if, when and how it shall be implemented is still a mystery. So far, I’ve worked harder than on any other job and much less to show for it all. The difficulties, both internal and external[,] seem at times insurmountable, and the gaps between the envisioned and the existing program would be funny if [they] weren’t so sad. In place of a main library, a service-center depot and branches, I’m in three little rooms, 1100 sqft., in a hotel, with almost 5,000 books o

f which only about 800 are properly cataloged and classified and one local national employee who hardly knows any English.3

With few supplies and a shoestring budget, Ruth started organizing the books available by color-coding their spines, requesting donations from other military libraries around the world, and ordering magazine subscriptions and new books from catalogs. She moved the library from an administrative office to a space in a bachelor officers’ quarters (BOQ) in a former hotel, using an old bar counter as the circulation desk. At this time, Ruth implemented her field delivery kit program to men stationed in remote areas, an idea that had been conceived by librarians in World War II. She selected eight magazines and eighty paperbacks per month to be delivered to these advisory teams. In addition, men could request any book by mail, and an interlibrary loan program was established with other military libraries in the Pacific. “The man in the rice paddies had something to READ,” Ruth concluded triumphantly in a report many years later.4