![Marlene Morrisey, Josephus Nelson, Alan Fern and John Kominski](images/voices_1.jpg)
Josephus Nelson, Manuscript Division, confers with Marlene Morrisey, Alan Fern and John Kominski before the start of the "Library Voices" program. - Yusef El-Amin
By HELEN DALRYMPLE
Three former staff members of the Library of Congress—with a combined work history of 100 years—joined forces on April 10 to share with a receptive audience in the Mumford Room some of their stories about working at the Library. Marlene Morrisey (1941-1983), Alan Fern (1961-1982) and John Kominski (1960-1997) remembered their days at the Library with affection and wry good humor.
Josephus Nelson, manuscript specialist and head of an oral history project centered in the Library of Congress Archives, a part of the Manuscript Division's collections, was responsible for coordinating the program and bringing the three together to talk about their experiences. Nelson received a Billington/Krasnoff grant to start the oral history project during the Library's bicentennial celebration in 2000, and he has now interviewed some 27 former staff members, adding their recorded oral recollections to the written record of the Library's history.
Marlene Morrisey, as the senior member of the group, spoke first. She recalled that she met the chief assistant librarian, Luther H. Evans, who was also the director of the Reference Department, the first day she came into the Library for an interview in April 1941.
"I liked him from the start," said Morrisey. "He was friendly, had a merry look in his eyes, a good sense of humor and a quick mind." Evans sent her to Herbert A. Kellar, the director of a temporary unit called the Experimental Division of Library Cooperation, because he was looking for a research secretary with a college degree. She was offered a temporary, three-month position at $1,440 a year that same afternoon, providing she could pass the typing and shorthand tests. "I passed them," she said, "came to work three days later and stayed over 42 years."
Archibald MacLeish was the Librarian of Congress at the time, and Morrisey described her first meeting with him.
"I was introduced to Mr. MacLeish in a few days. He was a dashing fellow dressed in the 1920s style with flannel trousers and a yellow sweater. He had an aristocratic air and was very self-assured. … Most of us were afraid of him, but we all learned from his vigorous administrative approach. He demanded correct English, tolerated no careless errors and distinctly gave the impression that he had no doubts about his decision-making. … He was a hardworking, brilliant leader."
One of MacLeish's major accomplishments was a reorganization of the Library's administrative departments. "Instead of having some 35 divisions reporting to the Librarian," Morrisey said, "he wanted only six department directors, with the divisions grouped around them." While this made sense to many of the Library's managers, another of his proposals—to have all outgoing special materials such as maps, manuscripts, prints and music checked out at the central desk in the Main Reading Room rather than in the various divisions—was not so popular.
According to Morrisey, Evans and the division chiefs opposed this suggested change but were losing the fight until Evans included the following anecdote in his daily report to the Librarian. "Today I went down to Woodward & Lothrop [department store] to spend my last shoe coupon. I tried to get the sales clerk to bring the shoes to the first floor but she insisted that I take the elevator to the fifth floor [to the shoe department]." Morrisey noted that that was the last they heard from MacLeish about checking out all special materials from the Main Reading Room.
When she completed her initial temporary three-month assignment, Morrisey was assigned to Evans' office, and when he was appointed Librarian of Congress in 1945, she became his special assistant and remained in that position until he left the Library for UNESCO in 1953.
Morrisey said that although the Library staff in the 1940s was small enough for everyoneto know one other, the atmosphere was formal and last names were always used.
"I worked with Luther Evans 10 years before he said, 'Marlene, don't you think we know each other well enough to use first names?'
"It was a dignified environment; coats and ties for male staff and long-sleeved dresses for women were the rules of that time. And everything was done at a slower, more deliberate pace."
The threat of war in the spring of 1941 changed all that. Staff volunteered three evenings a week to develop lists of materials that should be evacuated for safekeeping, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was even busier, said Morrisey.
"Almost every division was involved in service to the military and to other agencies close to the war effort. We lent linguists to the military to teach the troops en route to Europe and Asia. We prepared bibliographies on war-related topics for war agencies' use. We supplied maps, put together songbooks, sent reading matter, contributed comic books with propaganda value. The Library staff worked 48 hours a week and carried briefcases home every night. If we failed to have our homework in hand, Dr. Evans would ask us if something were wrong. He lugged two cases filled with work every night and expected all his staff to do likewise."
![Mr. and Mrs. Boorstin](images/voices_2.jpg)
Librarian Emeritus Daniel J. Boorstin and his wife Ruth enjoy the reminiscences of former Library staff members. - Yusef El-Amin
Morrisey recounted the story of telling Evans that she would have to go on maternity leave in the fall. He made appropriate comments, she said, and then said she could be transferred to the back of the building and work in the Division for the Adult Blind (where presumably she would be out of sight) until she went on leave. Morrisey added emphatically, "This did not happen. I had my baby and returned to a private office and a secretary."
Morrisey became the executive assistant to the new Librarian of Congress, L. Quincy Mumford, in 1954 and remained with him in that capacity until he retired in 1974. She later worked as special assistant to the Register of Copyrights and then became the first specialist in the Manuscript Division's Library of Congress Archives, retiring in April 1983.
"There were not many days when I disliked coming to work," Morrisey said as she concluded her presentation. "Most of those 42 years I could hardly wait for another day of interesting events and new learning experiences. After all, as one colleague used to say, 'The Library of Congress is a very good address.'"
Alan Fern began his remarks by saying that his experience in coming to the Library of Congress was somewhat different, acknowledging that "Marlene is a hard act to follow." Fern said he was teaching at the University of Chicago in 1961 when he came to the Library to look at its collections on art nouveau. He met with Edgar Breitenbach, then chief of the Prints and Photographs Division, and "at the end of the day, it turned out I was not studying, I was being interviewed. I didn't know it was a temporary job," Fern added. "They didn't tell me that."
Fern was initially assistant curator for fine prints and became curator a year later. He worked on building up the collections and also took on "odd assignments—things Breitenbach didn't want to do—like working on computers and thinking about how they could be used."
Fern was named assistant chief of the division in 1964 and became chief in 1973 when Breitenbach retired. He said that some of his most interesting adventures involved the issue of film conservation, because the motion picture section was part of the Prints and Photographs Division until a reorganization of the Library in 1978.
Discussing the two Librarians under whom he worked, Mumford and Daniel J. Boorstin, Fern said that Mumford was mainly interested in processing, international relations and space expansion. "He delegated the reference divisions to the reference department." He remembered Mumford fondly as a "very, very open and kind man. We got to be good friends."
Fern said that Boorstin was interested in giving the Library a larger public profile, and as a result, Library exhibitions flourished under his leadership.
Fern was named director of the Research Department in 1976, which then encompassed most of the divisions that are now included in Area Studies and Public Service Collections, and then became director of Special Collections in 1978, when Research Services was formed, with separate directors for General Reference, Area Studies and Special Collections.
"I was asked to come up and take a different job, Special Collections. I didn't really want it because I always thought the action was in running a division." But, he added, "I'm glad I could spend 21 years with you, and I'm very pleased to be back."
Fern left the Library in 1982 to become director of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution; he retired in 2000.
"Fifteen minutes? That's like putting 'The Americans' [by Daniel J. Boorstin] into a pamphlet," said Kominski as he took the podium. Kominski began work at the Library as a reading room assistant in the Law Library while he was still in law school.
"It was 1959. I was in law school at Georgetown, and I went to my congressman, Eddie Boland [D-Mass.], to get a job. Boland played poker with Larry Keitt, the Law Librarian, and he said to me, 'I think he needs some help in the Law Library.'" Kominski soon had a job as a part-time GS-3, filing looseleaf pages. "My annual salary was less than the lowest paid LC employee gets now in a pay period," he said.
After completing law school and serving a stint in the Air Force, Kominski returned to the Law Library as a reference assistant in the American-British Law Division. He soon moved on to become assistant general counsel in the Law Library (the Law Librarian also served as the Library's general counsel at that time). By 1971 the office of general counsel was a separate unit in the Librarian's office, and Kominski became the youngest person ever appointed to the position of general counsel for the Library.
Kominski told how he particularly enjoyed working with staff members around the Library and helping them with various legal issues, from taxes (as a volunteer) to contracts. "I worked especially with contracts; the Library was really in the 19th century with regard to contracts [when I became general counsel]," he said. He worked closely with William J.Welsh, then director of the Processing Department, who later became deputy librarian under Boorstin and acting librarian after Boorstin's departure.
"Welsh said the greatest resource in the Library of Congress was its staff, and that really stuck with me. After that, with every opinion I wrote, I considered its effect on the staff. And I focused on the people with whom I was working; it was important to help them but also to try to educate them, so that in the end they learned a lot about law in their particular areas."
All three of the participants in the program responded to questions from the audience following their more formal remarks. Morrisey talked more about the Library's preparations for World War II and said they "were ready to go when Dec. 7 [1941] came"; Fern said that when he went into the stacks he was continually amazed at "the richness and the depth of the collections." But Kominski had the last word.
Asked whether he missed the Library, he said, "I sure don't miss the work, but I sure do miss the people!"