Flyover people
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
WHEN THE CAT comes inside after I’ve rearranged the furniture, she freezes, eyes wide open, toes splayed.
“This is not my beautiful house,” probably runs through her head.
It takes a minute for Tiger to settle in; the cat pokes around and realizes she is, indeed, in the right place.
That’s how I felt a few weeks ago when I stepped into Watson Library at the University of Kansas.
During my years at KU., I worked for Watson’s interlibrary loan department.
Renovations began while I was there and continued after I graduated and now the interior looks completely different than it did during my time on campus.
I’ve been in the building a few times since my college days, but it just doesn’t feel right to me. I’m lost. I step inside and look for the door to interlibrary loans, the old circulation desk, the woodwork, the card catalogs, but they’re nowhere in sight.
I think we’ve all experienced that – gone back to a place where we spent a chunk of our lives, a place where we invested our emotions, our energy - and upon returning years later, the physical structure or the people we knew are no longer there.
And we leave feeling a little empty because we haven’t been able to make a total connection with the past we remember.
In 1978, about the time I started working at Watson, the Kansas Legislature appropriated money for the library’s massive renovation; the gutting of the building began a year or so later.
When the jackhammers moved in, my boss, Lola Seymour, sometimes complained of headaches - she heard the pounding all day long. I worked only a few hours each day, making my way through hanging sheets of plastic tacked up to control dust.
The interlibrary loan office didn’t move during my time there, but it’s in a different location now.
The other day I spoke with Emporian Sherry Backhus who worked in Watson before, during and after the renovation. She was in the microforms department and her office moved around.
“We were in three different places before it all finally settled down,” Backhus said. “They tore out all the rooms, tore down all the offices, tore down all the walls.”
I loved working at Watson. My job was to locate books requested by patrons in libraries across the country. I used the card catalog to obtain call numbers, retrieved those books from the stacks, and prepped them for the mail room.
The active nature of the job was satisfying. Daily I’d go up and down the eight flights of stairs in the stacks. There were the east stacks, west stacks and center stacks.
Every time Watson Library comes to mind, I can’t help but think of my boss, because Lola was a big part of what made the job enjoyable.
Each afternoon while filing paperwork, I sat at a desk across from Lola; she and I would talk. Lola lived in the real world — off campus.
She was, I believe, in her early 30s and as I think about it, may have been the only mature adult that I had regular contact with during those three years at KU. In the big classrooms, I don’t imagine more than four or five professors even knew my name.
In our discussions, Lola would occasionally toss out advice such as, “Always put away money each week. Even if it’s only five dollars, save something.”
Many of the interior walls were removed during renovation, and natural light now pours into the spacious, carpeted areas; it’s a completely different environment.
On my visit to Watson, I longed to find a bit of the past — the dark woodwork, the coves of tiny rooms, that sense of belonging I once felt in the building. But those things just aren’t there anymore.
But finally, I walked into something familiar — the library stacks. On 3 West, it looked like the same lighting from 1981, the same windows overlooking the campus power plant, bookshelves still painted the same pale shade of blue.
Ah yes, in this renovated building, they left something from the old days behind for me. I found a little bit of home.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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