A Well-Read Woman

I do recall a party that Ruth threw at her trailer for the troops in the Special Services office. She served a deadly punch that was laced with a variety of liquors and fruit juices which we referred to as “Rappaport Punch.”

Some of the troops went into something like alcoholic bizerkness. One trooper from St. Louis became so belligerent that he intended to slug me through the window of my vehicle as I was ferrying dazed troopers back to the barracks. I quickly rolled up the window and this fellow Bill smacked the glass and broke some knuckles. He wore a cast for a time . . .

After Ruth returned to the USA, Michael Ridgeway was ordered by the then Special Services major to clean out her office. Her files, many of which contained indecipherable scribbles and all kinds of numbers, were dumped on the center of the office floor and we took turns photographing ourselves with our feet on this heap of file folders. The caption for this activity was “Ruthless.”57

By 1970 Ruth was desperate to get out of Vietnam. In the form she had to fill out to officially quit, she had to name a reason. She simply wrote, “After 7 years and 9 months service in Vietnam I desire to return to CONUS [contiguous US].”58 Even though she didn’t have another job lined up, she left in October, finally quitting her mission in Vietnam, perhaps demoralized and defeated after eight years. She was tasked, like A. A. Allison had been with the HSAS, to write a history of the library system in Vietnam. She detailed the growth from just a few shelves into an enormous system, the chaos, and the budgeting and administrative issues. She commended the staff for “their know-how, experience, effort and energy; tirelessly they worked long and arduous hours to try to meet the growing demands.” She concluded:

The motto had to be [to] get the most material to the most men. Emphasis was primarily on quantity and availability, only secondarily on quality and service. After materials en masse, emphasis was placed on facilities, providing at least one place on post where a man could forget the war, if but for a little while, and sit in comfort, peace and quiet. As many a departing GI has said to many a librarian over the years, “our library, well, it was like a little bit of home…” The choice was deliberate and conscious. Under combat conditions with constant threat of destruction, even an enemy rocket in the Saigon Library in commemoration and almost as if to publicize National Library Week, 1970, certain priorities had to be observed. These were materials and more materials for the largest number of personnel.59

After Ruth left, the drawdown accelerated in the early 1970s, and the enormous military infrastructure in Vietnam was dismantled haphazardly. Books were either given to local Vietnamese libraries or shipped off to other base libraries.60

When she applied for her next job, at the Library of Congress, Ruth once again had to fill out a form that ended up in her FBI file. She listed her address from November 1970 to January 1971 while she was unemployed as “QTR 113 B, DCII House, Ford Island, Hawaii,” the naval base at Pearl Harbor. I’m not sure what she did there, but I like to imagine her on the beach with a mai tai, a pack of cigarettes, and a good book.

The military’s library system still continues to this day, although many have closed at bases in urban centers with nearby public libraries. It does not provide actual libraries in war zones anymore, perhaps because most recreational information can be found on the internet and because troops can easily order their own books online through websites such as Amazon. While I researched Ruth’s work in Vietnam, Greg and his four deployments to Afghanistan were in the back of my mind. He regularly perused the books that wound up in the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation rooms (MWR) from various sources—donations from “support the troops” organizations and some left behind by other service members—and was surprised by the gems he found. In 2010 he read Moby Dick over the four months he was at Bagram. Even though he was required to work twelve-to-sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, he still read every night he was there. It was his only escape and the one thing that got him through.

Part VIII:

Some Days I Wonder What Ever Made Me Become a Cataloger

WASHINGTON, DC, 1971–1993

Chapter 30

A week before Obama’s first inauguration, I was laid off from my first full-time job after I graduated from library school. I had been working for only nine months as a corporate archivist in the suburbs of Washington, DC, after moving there from Oregon. Although I had been unhappy in that position and was already looking for a new job, I panicked about being unemployed while living in such an expensive city. But I soon got a call about a reference librarian position in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division in the Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress. The job had seemed like a dream to me when I applied; I couldn’t believe then that I had gotten an interview.

I knew I needed to understand beforehand more about the library, so I took the official tour of the Jefferson Building. Walking into the Great Hall for the first time, I was dazzled by the beauty of the building, which looked more like a gilded palace than a library. I realized that whoever designed this building didn’t think of a library as just a warehouse for books; they wanted everyone who walked inside to be awed not just by the architecture but also by this building’s purpose. When the tour guide took

us up to the balcony overlooking the Main Reading Room, she pointed out the statues of some of the secular saints that lined the octagon-shaped room: Michelangelo, Beethoven, Herodotus, James Kent, Edward Gibbon, Plato, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Homer.

Afterward I walked to Eastern Market, a focal point of the Capitol Hill neighborhood that I had heard about. I admired the old row houses on the way and noticed that on this strangely warm Saturday in February, the sidewalks were crowded with joggers and families out doing errands. I knew that if I got this job, I would want to live in this neighborhood. I sat on a bench across from the market for a while, imagining that I worked at the Library of Congress and lived on Capitol Hill. I knew that if I could make it happen somehow, my life would be perfect.

During her last years of working in Vietnam and her months of unemployment, Ruth had her eye on the Library of Congress. Her friends from the air force, Pat Moesker (whom she had roomed with in Okinawa) and Pat’s husband, Bob, had moved to Capitol Hill in 1969 when he accepted a job at the Library of Congress in the Science and Technology Division. Her former army employee Bill Sittig had also started working there after he had come back from Saigon, as had Gabe Horchler, whom Ruth had interviewed but been unable to hire. She probably had at least a few more friends from the military who now lived in DC, and some of her cousins had also moved to the region.

Apparently, during her break after Vietnam, Ruth came to stay with Pat and Bob, or at least used their address for a few months. She started applying for cataloging jobs at the Library of Congress, hoping to utilize her expertise in sociology or German, and probably socialized with her friends and made new connections at the library. She eventually got a job at the end of August 1971 as a sociology cataloger under the supervision of Nick Hedlesky, the head of the Social Sciences Subject Cataloging Division.1 Although the job itself wasn’t prestigious, any librarian would consider it an honor and a privilege to work there. After traveling the world for thirty-three years and never staying in one place for more than a few, she was finally ready to put down roots. This palace of books and the cosmopolitan neighborhood that sprawled behind it would be the home and community—her “true chaverim”—that she had been seeking for so long.

The Library of Congress was founded in 1800 as a small library for congressmen in the Capitol. By 1975 it had grown to be the second largest library in the world, with seventeen million books, a staff of forty-five hundred, and a $116 million budget.2 In the late nineteenth century, with title, author, and subject access, it had set the American standard for the card catalog system; in 1901 it began distributing copies of cards to other libraries, saving them time and money.3 The post–World War II period of the Library of Congress was marked by an enormous increase in the acquisitions of collections and the development and expansions of its complicated cataloging system.4 The library published the Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the United States, a landmark guide for librarians. Cataloging in the United States had developed into three distinct branches: description (transcribing information from the front matter of a book into a catalog record), subject access (assigning linked subject headings to classify the book), and filing (assigning a call number to the book that facilitates discoverability both on the shelf and in physical relation to books on similar topics). Librarians across the country, and later the world, would look to LC to standardize its increasingly complicated rules into a universal and uniform cataloging system that would be adhered to in every library.

During World War II and its immediate aftermath, LC staff realized how crucial it was to increase the amount of international publications held by the library. Gathering recent publications from every country around the world, especially maps and newspapers, was vital so that librarians could fulfill reference requests for Congress, which was increasingly concerned with the Cold War. Besides hiring catalogers to handle the enormous volume of new acquisitions for English-language books, the library employed more catalogers and reference librarians with foreign-language expertise. Like Ruth, many of these catalogers were immigrants, and like her, some of them were refugees from countries undergoing great upheaval. Ruth’s friend and coworker, Kay Elsasser, was a Romance-language cataloger for many years. She remembers this group (American-born catalogers too) as “odd ducks” that probably wouldn’t have thrived in any other working environment. But LC welcomed foreigners, introverts, and anyone who had the needed expertise, regardless of personality quirks. And while arguments could be heated (especially about cataloging rules), these catalogers shared a close bond. They were able to come together at the Library of Congress to process the vast number of books coming down the pike, share their cultures with one another, and forge a truly global workplace.5

In the fall of 1971, Ruth started her new job on the second floor of the Annex Building, across Second Street from what was then called the Main Building.6 The annex was the hub of cataloging and book processing. Built in the 1930s to accommodate the overflow of books, it was now overflowing itself, and funding had been approved in 1965 for another new building. Three months before Ruth began her new job, construction started across Independence Avenue for the new building, which would be named for James Madison. One of her coworkers, Thompson Yee, remembers that Ruth would show up late nearly every day, rushing into the annex to sign her time card. Ruthless supervisors would put the cards away at 8:05 sharp and mark down anyone who was late.7

One of Ruth’s first projects was to recatalog the library’s Delta Collection, which included pornography, erotica, race-track guides, and other items confiscated by the FBI, the postal service, and other federal agencies. It also included other items considered obscene or at risk of theft that were acquired through copyright deposit (LC manages copyright registration for the United States and acquires much of its collection by requiring publishers to submit two copies of all publications registered).8 The Delta Collection was available to the public but was kept in a locked room and closely monitored. Until 1992 researchers could openly browse the general collections, but keeping these items in a locked room ensured that the library could monitor exactly who used them. According to a 1951 Library of Congress manual, the Delta Collection was stored near the Microfilm Reading Room, and researchers could view items there. The official justification for their separation from the rest of the collections was that “though not of unusual rarity or value in themselves, [the books] are nevertheless particularly liable to theft or mutilation if shelved with the general collections.”9 Furthermore, the library would not encourage researchers to use the collection and made it as embarrassing as possible to request items:

No reference service is given in connection with this Collection. Readers must obtain from the Public Catalog the author, title, and call number of any volumes they wish to see. They are allowed to have only one book at a time and are not permitted to take books out of the reading room area. Loans are made for official use only.

New books for the Collection reach the Microfilm Reading Room accompanied by two copies of the printed cards. These cards are used to maintain a classified shelf list and an author catalog for the staff’s own use. No subject entries are made.

Each reader on entering the Microfilm Reading Room signs his name and address in a register maintained exclusively for readers of Delta materials, and for each book which he requests he makes out a charge slip in duplicate. Statistics are obtained from the register and the charge slips.10

The fact that “no subject entries [were] made” was significant. Author Melissa Adler wrote that the books were not completely cataloged to the standards that other books were but were flagged with a delta symbol on the spine.11 A researcher could find the materials if they knew of a specific book or magazine title or author. But by denying these books subject headings, the Library of Congress would not encourage research on the topics of pornography, erotica, or gambling. Forty books that are now housed in the Rare Books Reading Room still have a note in their catalog records that reads, “Formerly in Delta Collection.”

By the 1960s the library had stopped accepting items from the FBI and did not continue to collect much in this area, because the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University had started broadly collecting pornography and erotica.12 Ruth most likely recataloged the items from the Delta Collection that were transferred to the social sciences collection. These would have included scientific books on sex in the areas of psychology and sociology or perhaps books on these topics in German. It’s unclear whether Ruth did this job alone or was continuing the work someone else had started. She had no qualms about sharing what her new job entailed and in fact joked about it in letters to friends. A man named George, who was stationed in Hawaii in February 1972, wrote to her:

You seem to have a good job and I envy you the chance to do something productive. Even though it is erotica, it’s needed by somebody or it wouldn’t have been written . . . Do you suppose you could absorb—along with the “expertise” in cataloging—enough of the subject matter and the technique to put out some of your own? It might pay the rent.13

After a page break, he continued, “I must have been a little drunk last night when I batted out the above, but I will let it ride.”14

Chapter 31