Bancroftiana, Number 119 Fall 2001: Librarians Celebrate Oral History Series

Librarians Celebrate Oral History Series

As hundreds of younger colleagues looked on, four retired library educators received their oral history manuscripts during the Coulter Luncheon on November 12, 2000, at the California Library Association's annual meeting in Santa Clara.

J. Periam Danton addresses Coulter luncheon guests.

The honorees comprise the first group interviewed in 1998 and 1999 for the Library School Oral History Series, a ROHO project to document the history of UC Berkeley's former School of Librarianship (later School of Library and Information Studies). The school trained thousands of librarians during its seventy-year history.

The four narrators were between 85 and 90 years old at the time of interview. Together they represent 160 years of professional experience as librarians and educators.

Grete W. (Frugé) Cubie graduated from Berkeley in 1935 and earned her Certificate in Librarianship in 1937. After serving in the San Francisco, Sacramento, and Oakland public libraries, she taught cataloging at the library school, along with Anne Ethelyn Markley, from 1947 to 1975. Of the push towards automation in libraries, Mrs. Cubie said in her interviews:

"Some people entered the library profession because they thought of it as an opportunity for administration. To some of these, librarianship, while an opportunity, was also a bit of an embarrassment because of the stereotype of a librarian as a timid person working with rather boring things, whatever they were. That problem of how librarians had been viewed in society . . . perhaps accounts for the astonishing speed with which some [librarians] turned toward automation in a somewhat uncritical way."

Grete W. Cubie (right) with her former student, retired Associate University Librarian Sheila Dowd.

J. Periam Danton joined the library school as its second dean, a position he held from 1946 to 1961. He added doctoral programs after World War II, upgraded the school's other degrees, and started the Library School Library. He was on the active faculty until 1976, and he continued publishing in the field until 1999. On the subject of "publish or perish" and the weight given research versus teaching, he said:

"They are not and cannot be given equal weight under the system we have at Berkeley, which produces distinguished departments manned by distinguished people. Nobody ever tests— do people teach well? Does the head of the department come and visit classes of these people, ever? It just doesn't happen."

The late Fredric J. Mosher (represented at the luncheon by his wife, Evelyn V. Mosher) came from Chicago's Newberry Library to lead the library school's instruction in reference service from 1950 to 1981. His interests centered on rare books, fine printing, and the history of books and libraries. Long an advocate of intellectual freedom, Professor Mosher was interviewed on the findings of the Fiske report (1956) on censorship in California libraries.

"The report indicated that most public librarians thought intellectual freedom was a great idea, but that in practice most of them selected books with the idea in mind of [avoiding] controversial materials," he said. "Most California librarians were actually real censors of their library collections. [They] were so intimidated that they ruled out any materials that would lead them into trouble."

Flora Elizabeth Reynolds graduated from Berkeley in 1934, took an M.A. in Latin in 1935, and completed a Certificate in Librarianship in 1936. She headed the Sausalito and Mill Valley public libraries before serving as head librarian of Mills College from 1955 to 1976. She talked in her interview about the career advice given students by the school's founding director, Sydney B. Mitchell, in 1936:

"He did say that in academic libraries you would find the ceiling very low if you were a woman, that most faculties were made up mainly of men who preferred to deal with men rather than women. So if you would like to advance administratively, it was advisable to go into public library work."

Asked how she and the other students received that news, Ms. Reynolds said: "It was the way things were. We accepted it."

The Library School Oral History Series now includes more recent interviews with Fay M. Blake, Robert D. Harlan, and Patrick G. Wilson. Last year, Berkeley's Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment chose the oral histories of Cubie, Reynolds, and Wilson for support as part of its Source of Community Leaders Series on distinguished Berkeley graduates. The individual volumes are available for study in The Bancroft Library and in the Department of Special Collections at UCLA.

—Laura McCreery
Senior interviewer in the Regional Oral History Office.