My Job At The Public Library
I wrote some time back about my first job – one that was at a Burger King and lasted all of three weeks. The next job would last much longer, for better or worse. Here is the story.
Three weeks is not really long enough to settle into any job, so I imagine I would have eventually found my rhythm at BK doing, well, whatever. I was not happy that my previous love for hamburgers had turned into an inability to smell one without getting a little queasy. But the biggest problem was that I was being paid $1.90 per hour ( a sub-minimum wage that the fast food industry enjoyed in the late 1970’s) and I was only finding my self on the schedule for an average of about six hours a week – perhaps a weekend evening and one weeknight. Yes, I understood that I was “the new guy” and that the store probably had too many employees, but if I couldn’t make any significant money, then what was the use in having a job? Especially one that prevented me from enjoying hamburgers?
One evening I came home and my mother told me of an opportunity. A friend of hers was an older lady who worked at the Fort Wayne Public Library. She told Mom that there was an opening for a “page” (a term I found incredibly stupid for someone expected to work around books all day). This job was for a high school or college kid who would mainly re-shelve books. The job paid $2.10/hr (the actual minimum wage then) and involved 20 hours/week during the school year and 40 hours/week in the summer.
I found myself presented with a yes/no proposition. I was told the job was mine if I wanted it. Compared with what I had been making at the BK, this sounded like Big Bucks and I jumped at the chance. The Fort Wayne-Allen County Public Library had been newly built in the late 1960’s, so by 1976 or so it was still modern in every respect. On the plus side, the air conditioned library was more comfortable than the hot kitchen of a Burger King. I can’t think of many other plusses.
I will confess that I never much liked the job. Everyone was nice, but I considered most people who worked there a little on the odd side. The most normal of them were quiet and bookish. Some were quite socially awkward. But I didn’t really work with most of them because my job was all about the books.
“Do you know the Dewey Decimal System?” was the first question my new boss (Myron) asked of me. I knew it well enough from using the school library to answer in the affirmative. Myron was head of the “Business and Technology” section, an area I at least found interesting. I soon became quite familiar with the Dewey Decimal System. B&T was the home to almost everything in the 500s (sciences and mathematics), 600s (medicine, engineering, and management/manufacturing) and 700s (arts, architecture, photography and sports).
Returned books were placed on carts and delivered to my section. I had to put them back on the shelves in numerical order. Unless they were oversized books, then they went to a second set of larger shelves that was a duplicate of the regular section, only with bigger books. Sort and shelve, sort and shelve, sort and shelve. That was my life for probably two+ years of high school.
The worst times were when I was caught up on shelving, and my assignment became to “read the shelves”. This meant cleaning up after the slobs who would pull something about botany (a 580) and put it back with books about botanical sciences (a 581). You would not believe how few people are capable of putting a book back exactly where they got it. Or maybe you would believe it. The areas that got lots of traffic were often a random jumble after a couple of weeks and it was up to we pages to straighten the whole mess out so people could find what they were looking for.
It was not all tedium. The last year or so a kid named Nick came to work with me. Nick was not the best influence on me, but we became allies – we thought of ourselves as “normies” in a sea of oddballs. We found ways to ride the little elevator for book carts up and down from the sub-basement and discovered the “restricted section” that was only accessible through the staff. I guess it was OK that a couple of hormonal high school boys got free access to the kind of books we would never take home to our mothers.
My friend Dan was looking for a job and I got him hired on – it is probably a good thing he and I didn’t work in the same department, or nothing would have ever gotten done. He worked in the genealogy collection, and area where Fort Wayne had some claim to fame.
I learned a couple of lessons there. Like don’t take advantage of your boss being on vacation so you can park in his assigned parking place. Some guys in maintenance had my car towed away. That lesson was not an inexpensive one when I had to go to the impound lot for my car.
I also learned that it was not a great idea to ask the head librarian for a raise. Fred Reynolds (“Mr. Reynolds” to everyone who worked there) had been in charge for decades. “When I was your age, we used to buy bread for a nickel, but everything is so much more expensive now. This library costs a lot to run and we give raises when we can, but this is not something we can do at this time.” I will say that my current city’s public library being led by a “CEO” is something that crosses between irritating and offensive to me. If “Head Librarian” was good enough for an old pro like Fred Reynolds, it should be good enough for anyone else.
Some guys I knew worked in factories or on construction sites. They made more money and seemed to me to be more engaged in “real life” than I was – making minimum wage in a comfy air-conditioned building as I put books back on a shelf. I was a government worker, I guess – but without the pay or benefits that most government workers get now. It was a job. Not an unpleasant job, but not one that came with many rewards either. OK, I guess the ability to check out car repair manuals on an extended basis was a benefit.
I wonder about libraries today. They seem to be de-emphasizing the “book business”. Yet they also seem to crave ever larger and more impressive buildings. I guess that is what happens when your library is run by a “CEO”.
All photos, from various sources, depict the Fort Wayne-Allen County, Indiana Public Library at approximately the time I was employed there in the late 1970’s. It has been substantially updated and remodeled in the decades since.
J. P.'s Blog 
This is the job I wanted, but could not get for some reason, when I was in high school. Instead I worked in a movie theater, for a terrible boss, and it was not good.
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I must say that the three guys who normally staffed the B&T librarian desks were great bosses. It was probably the only place where men predominated there (other than maintenance) and each was a nice guy who treated me well.
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Having my first job in a Burger Chef (and staying way too long), a job in a library would have been a highly welcomed change. Like you, I could not stomach hamburgers for a very long time.
The front portion of the Ft. Wayne library looks an awful lot like the Jefferson City library. Naturally, the current CEO is wanting to expand the building, despite it being on the edge of a crappy part of town.
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That is one of the great mysteries of modern life – libraries are getting out of books and everything is going digital – yet the physical buildings get ever larger. The main library in Indianapolis got a colossal addition several years ago, which is probably bigger than the original building. But I guess a CEO has to show progress in some way.
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To me, this actually sounds like a dream job…I’m 69 this year and still go to the library a few times a week! No matter where I’ve lived around the country, one of the first things I do is always get a library card! My first job was as a paper boy, my next, in a photo studio, which was on my career path anyway, so that’s OK. Ditto, I think minimum wage was 2 bucks, and I had a boss that paid me under the table and didn’t take taxes out. I consider it a blessing and pure luck that I did not have to work in the fast food industry. My parents admonished us not to do it, and even tho we were pretty poor for the era, I think my parents wanted us to double down on our studies rather than work a job like food service, or something that wasn’t “interesting” and of some educational value.
You know, when I was a kid, my big city central library was quite the place, with multiple departments, and a lot of opportunity for interesting work. They had a full book binding facility to repair books and actually put hard covers on books that came only as soft covers. A Great Lakes marine books specialty division, a state history division, and before video, even a 16 mm film division, with the ability to take out 16mm film copies of Hollywood films and documentaries and educational subjects.
You are correct tho, it was certainly the employer of choice for our cities “weird beards”, odd balls, alt lifestyle people, and people “not like us”, and of course, that wasn’t a bad thing! There’s a reason Carnegie went around the country funding so many small town libraries!
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I didn’t know about it at the time, but Fort Wayne demolished an old Carnegie library (that was a pretty grand building, befitting the city’s status as the second-largest in the state) before building this one that everyone marveled over in the late 1960’s. Looking at the photos, I had forgotten about the large pools in the floor with nothing to keep kids from falling into them other than strict German parents and good sense. I’ll bet those pools went away long ago.
That library had (and I believe still has) a national reputation as one of the top collections for genealogical research. The other really interesting thing they had was large framed works of art you could check out for a month or two at a time – I would see people carrying large, wrapped artworks in and out of the building and marveled at the concept (and still do). Also, B&T had a great selection of factory automotive service manuals, the holy grail when you need to do any real work on a car. I was amazed that the much larger Indianapolis library never offered such books, only giving you those generic third-party publications that only cover mechanical stuff on a range of models and years. Those are a poor substitute.
I, too, cautioned my children against jobs in fast food. I acknowledge that there are kids who learned work habits at those places, but as a parent I wanted to keep my own kids away from the stoners and worse who worked at the BK when I was that age.
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I dunno… the admonition to stay away from fast food jobs denies the kids the outlook of life working fast food. I’d argue working fast food — and with the public — is probably more motivation to work harder at not having to do that than anything else.
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That is a valid point. My oldest took a job for a few months near the end of his college years as a delivery guy for a sandwich chain. He said it was a thoroughly miserable experience. Maybe that was one of the things that gave him the grit to finish an additional seven years of formation until he was ordained as a Dominican Catholic priest. It worked out for him.
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Ditto on the art work loan thing…which I always thought was weird, but our library did the same…even if you didn’t have any money, you could at least enhance your life in the short term by bringing home a painting or sculpture to look at!
As for the teen work thing, I think we are long past the point of thinking all work has some value; short sheeting your school work to have some god-awful job making a conglomerate a fortune on your back while getting home stinking like fried food, might not be an option. I know a lot of people from many different levels of sociology and wealth, and I have to say, most of the really well off professional people I know came from households where they would have NOT allowed their kids to have those jobs, nor any job during the school year. Summer work only. My parents didn’t want me getting a small taste of money and starting to think twice about my educational goals.
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Whether kids should work or not is an interesting topic all in itself. Lots of parents we knew pushed (or at least highly encouraged) their kids into high levels of sports participation, probably in the belief that athletic scholarships would be the result. And, in many cases, that was true. Those sports activities (including “travel teams” that had families going several states away for weekend games during the school year) were far more time consuming than an after school job, in many cases.
We encouraged our kids to have jobs, and all three worked at a country club – the boys worked at the golf course (which resulted in winter months off) and our daughter (who had no interest in the golf course, though she could have had that job too) was a banquet server and worked summers at the pool/snack bar. All of them learned valuable lessons about how to deal with people and how to meet expectations. I believe that those jobs were far better for learning about life than the early jobs I had.
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Well an air conditioned library at minimum wage sounds better than detassling seed corn, but I was too immature during high school to be trusted with the dewey decimal system. Which reminds me of the “Conan the Librarian” sketch.
“Don’t you know the dewey decimal system???” 🙂 🙂 🙂
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I have read a few things about detassling, and understand that it is a thoroughly miserable job. So I agree, the air conditioned library job was a definite step up. “We don’t pay much but you don’t have to work very hard” is not the worst thing in the world when you are a teen.
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Ha, hilarious! And let us not forget Mr. Bookman!
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For a year or so I ran a technical library for our engineering dept. I thought it would be all about books and technical journals. However it was more technical searches using Boolean search terms. It was quite interesting. And I got to learn the Library of Congress cataloguing system.
First summer job for me was at police HQ working in the accident records dept. I ran printouts from microfilm of accident reports for insurance companies. Didn’t get to read the reports much, but someone who checked my work did, and if the print was too dark or too light I had to redo it. The report requests were unending from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM with an hour for lunch. If the weather was nice I’d ride my 10 speed to work the eight miles or so what it was. Most often it was the subway.
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The picture of the card catalog made me remember going to the library and loving it. I was never a “normie” though and could spend a lot of time just roaming the aisles and looking at books.
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I would not have been a “normie” everywhere, but I felt like I was at the library. And yes, I miss card catalogs. One was still in use in the law school library when I attended in the early 80s, but I am pretty sure it went away not long after.
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I’ve mentioned it before, but the McDonald’s that was my first summer job was a good lesson in hard work and staying busy. Our manager was all about cleaning when things were slow, so there was zero idle time. I like to think those summers helped to develop a good work ethic. But I would’ve liked the library job even better. Organization comes naturally for me and I enjoy it as a task (though the part about popular areas being in disarray would’ve driven me nuts). I also like the thought of being able to work without someone looking over your shoulder all of the time. The physical library concept seems entirely dated these days. The buildings seem to be moving towards gathering places, or at least a quiet place where you can spend time on the computer (unlike Starbucks).
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I will say that I had a lot of unsupervised time at that job. I like seeing things organized too, and a freshly re-organized section of shelves made me feel good. But there was also a kind of despair about it, like a parent who has the never-ending job of keeping a bathroom clean when there are multiple kids at home – the clean bathroom, like the library shelves in good order, lasts about a day, then the cycle begins anew.
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Very interesting post and lively comments
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Thank you.
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As long as we’re talking about libraries, someone hipped me to the fact that my local library had a huge digital collection of music posters, many from the ‘new wave” era, when I knew a lot of people In art school cranking them out for bands. They’ll be happy to take your collections too, and put them in the database. Another example of the local library being of value to the local arts and culture community, even in the digital age!
https://content.mpl.org/digital/collection/WCP/search
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I spent a lot of time at our local library in junior high and high school. The two librarians were likeable but a tad strange. Mr. Schaefer, the head librarian would only help you search for a book when you assured him that you had checked the card catalog (an antique wooden set of pull-out drawers) and that you understood the Dewey Decimal System when you went to the shelves after consulting the card catalog. You could only get so many quarters or dimes to feed the xerox machine before he frowned at you – you were expected to bring your own. Miss Montie, the children’s librarian, was nice but a little odd. She would have the children sit in a circle around her and she likewise sat on a milk stool at their level to read to them. I’d be trying to research some term paper topic and Miss Montie would have a loud reading session, complete with pauses, escalating voices, etc. for effect – the kids would sit with rapt attention. Her recitations of Charlotte’s Web were darn side more interesting than what I was working on. Meanwhile, my father, who drove me to the library, snoozed in the leather chair, occasionally snoring loudly. Ahh … school daze.
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Linda, this is actually quite a lovely story!
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Thank you Andy! I had a vivid picture in my mind of that whole scenario. I wish you could have seen the kids enjoying Miss Montie’s animated readings. She always wore a shawl and she’d be moving around so much, the shawl usually ended up in a heap on the floor.
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These are some great memories. You remind me of the people who would come in to read newspapers, often relaxing in comfortable chairs and dropping into a snooze. One old regular was a guy named Barney, who suffered from a tremor. He came in practically every day to spend time in one of those chairs.
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I’ve not been to the library in years and wonder if they still have the magazines and daily newspaper or not, especially given the fact that our two Detroit dailies are $1.00 for a skinny newspaper with more ads than news. I think the big draw now is the computer terminals and the librarians will give you a tutorial or help you out if need be.
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Amazingly enough, my Wauwatosa library, at one time a stand alone library, and now part of the Milwaukee County Library System, still gets some of the large city dailies, altho not always without a few days lag; as well as a lot of real paper magazines, like Esquire, Harpers, New Yorker, Smithsonian, Time, etc., and still has very comfy chairs! And yes, there are still people that go a few times a week (me included), and hang and read the periodicals! Thankfully, I can still get a printed daily New York Times and Chicago Trib locally, at least for the time being, and usually buy the Sunday NYT.
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I never worked in a library but I sure spent a great deal of my early life in them. The big ones were even more fun than bookstores. Online efficiencies have finally seduced me to the dark side. I made $1.65 and $1.80 working food service and work study jobs before jumping directly to a $3.85 construction job. They called me “Easy Money” and made me a flagger before they figured out how to lay me off after a month!
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I think half the value of early jobs is making you appreciate the later ones.
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They were a great incentive for me to stay in school!
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