She answered our questions about her interests and experiences:

Q: What initially brought you to the University? What role did you start in? What other roles have you held?
I arrived in September 1968, coming to the UChicago campus as the wife of an incoming graduate student. In this role I was promised a job on campus! I had graduated in June 1968 from Indiana University, Bloomington, with a B.A. in Spanish language and a minor in Italian language. In the spring of that same year, I had student-taught in Evansville, Ind., where my family lived, in preparation for teaching Spanish in a secondary school, and came with experience in filing at both a law office and in IU’s Student Administration Office. I had never been to Chicago. So, being inexperienced, I decided to apply for the offered campus job.

After arriving securing an apartment in University housing at The Plaisance at 60th Street and Stony Island Avenue, I went to University Personnel and was offered a job at Harper Library in the Cataloging Department where I worked for Betty Cole, making copies of already held titles and updating card records. Secondly, I was to work with Cataloger Ilga Vitolins to learn about catalog cards (the bibliographic data record for an item held in the libraries), and the rules to file these cards into the card catalogs, with the future purpose of taking responsibility for training and supervising student employees to file catalog cards.

From that first day, I met staff and students from all around the world, even from countries I had only read about in books (places like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine, being part of the USSR at that time). All around campus and at any time of the day I heard conversations in so many languages other than English. I found all of this so interesting and revelatory. From the beginning I just loved my job, enjoyed this exacting work, while using my language training skills. I loved being in the Cataloging Department, working with and learning from such highly educated and interesting individuals.

Q: How has your role changed/grown over the past 55 years?
In 1970 the libraries began moving into The Joseph Regenstein Library, which was a lot of physical work and many changes. Filing in the much larger card catalog was always interesting, with so many folks coming and going, using the card catalog and seeking help from the Reference Desk librarians. My work processing has changed greatly over these years, going from typed cards to online records with changes to new online systems several times, to no card catalog and to sitting at a terminal much of the day.

Q: What is it that you enjoy about UChicago? What’s kept you here all these years?
These changes have kept me learning and interested. Many books which throughout these other changes have come to my hands have given me chill bumps in awe and made me catch my breath from emotion—for instance, from Special Collections a copy of an early edition of Martin Luther’s translation of The Bible into German; and from the original Crerar Library, a huge set of very large and heavy volumes of the Surgeon General’s Report of the Civil War, documenting battles, casualties, wounded soldiers, with photographs and serial photographs of surgical treatments.

I have been grateful for the many benefits we employees are offered by the University. I have benefited from excellent and wonderful care at the UChicago Medicine hospitals and clinics and even the ER. A job I still enjoy and find purposeful, with good benefits and health care keep me going.

Q: What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I love the Hyde Park neighborhood and I love Chicago with all the great music here – CSO, Lyric Opera, chamber music and other small groups, Harris Theater events, Grant Park Orchestra summer concerts, WFMT radio. I have been here for good.