University of California • Berkeley Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Library School Oral History Series Fredric J. Mosher REFERENCE AND RARE BOOKS: THREE DECADES AT UC BERKELEY'S SCHOOL OF LIBRAR1ANSHIP, 1950-1981 With Introductions by Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie and Michael K. Buckland Interviews Conducted by Laura McCreery in 1999 Copyright £> 2000 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well- informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ************************************ All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Fredric J. Mosher dated March 15, 1999. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Fredric J. Mosher requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Fredric J. Mosher, "Reference and Rare Books: Three Decades at UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950-1981," an oral history conducted in 1999 by Laura McCreery, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2000. Copy no. Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie, Fredric J. Mosher, Evelyn Mosher, and Alexander Cubie on the UC Berkeley campus, March 1991. Cataloging Information MOSHER, Fredric J. (1914-1999) Librarian Reference and Rare Books: Three Decades at UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950-1981, 2000, xiii, 201 pp. Family background, education in North Dakota; doctoral study at the University of Illinois; postwar library studies at the University of Chicago graduate library school; head of reference at Chicago's Newberry Library, late 1940s; to UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950: impressions, loyalty oath controversy, teaching reference and bibliography from 1950-1981, comments on deanship of J. Periam Danton, others; intellectual freedom and the Fiske Report of 1956 on censorship in California libraries; 1960s, 1970s, deanship of Raynard C. Swank, Institute of Library Research, Fulbright in Denmark, the Free Speech Movement; faculty views of computers for librarianship; interest in the history of printing, rare books, and the history of books and libraries. Introductions by Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie, Senior Lecturer Emerita, School of Librarianship, UC Berkeley; and Michael K. Buckland, Professor, School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. Interviewed 1999 by Laura McCreery for the Library School Oral History Series. The Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Regional Oral History Office wishes to express its thanks to the following individuals and organizations whose encouragement and support have made possible the Library School Oral History Series Patricia Anderson Farquar Memorial Fund Morley S. Farquar, Patron Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment Alumni Association of the School of Librarianship and School of Library and Information Studies Corliss S. Lee In Memory of Patricia Anderson Farquar: John Baleix Willa K. Baum Robert L. Briscoe Irene Frew Jean E. Herring Lester Kurd Jean C. Marks Rebecca D. Mclntyre Sharon A. Moore Corinne Rathjens Marlene B. Riley Juanita S. Vidalin In memory of Fredric J. Mosher: Ricki A. Blau Brigitte W. Dickinson Charlotte A. Tyler San Francisco Chronicle June 17, 1999 Fredric J. Mosher Fredric ). Mosher, professor emeritus in the School of Informa tion & Management Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, died May 30 of a heart attack at his home in Kensington. He was 85. Mr. Mosher taught in the depart ment from 1950 — when it was called the School of Librarianship - until his retirement in 1981. He headed instruction in refer ence and bibliography and taught the history of books and printing. His research centered on the history of books, printing, publishing and early forms of bibliographical de scription. Mr. Mosher also was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Royal School of Li brarianship in Copenhagen in 1963-64 and worked on the Eigh teenth Century Short Title Catalo gue in the British Library- in London in 1977 and 1978. Among his publications was "A Guide to Danish Bibliography," which he co-authored with Erland Munch-Petersen, published in Co penhagen in 1965. He also compil ed, with Archer Taylor, "The Biblio graphical History of Anonyma and Pseudonuma." While in retirement, he was a major contributor of scholarly arti cles on the subject of American printing to the revised edition of the "Lexikon des gesamten Buchwes- ens," the leading encyclopedia on the history of books. The Bancroft Library's Regional Oral History Office recently record ed his biography. "Fredric Mosher was a dedicated teacher who pre pared thoroughly for class and charmed his students with his wry wit and dry sense of humor," said Michael Buckland, a colleague of Mr. Mosher and former dean of the school. Bom in Oakes, N.D., Mr. Mosher Deceived his bachelor's degree in 1934 and his master's degree in En glish the following year from the University of North Dakota. , He earned a Bachelor of Library Sciences degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. In 1950, he received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois. Before arriving at UC Berkeley as an instructor in 1950, he taught En flish at the University of Illinois from 1936 to 1943. He then served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant from 1943 to 1946. Later that year he was hired at the Newberry Library in Chicago as an apprentice librarian Mr. Mosher is survived by his wife of 62 years, Evelyn Mosher of Ken sington, and his sons, John Ran dolph Mosher of Tacoma, Wash., and Allan Mosher of Youngstown, Ohio, and three granddaughters. A memorial service for Mr. Mosher has been held at Trinity United Methodist Church in Berke ley. Contributions in his honor may be made to the Bancroft Library at die University of California, Berke TABLE OF CONTENTS--Fredric J. Mosher PREFACE i INTRODUCTION by Crete W. Cubie v INTRODUCTION by Michael K. Buckland ix INTERVIEW HISTORY by Laura McCreery xi BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xiii I FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, EARLY EDUCATION 1 Grandparents, Parents, and Early Life in North Dakota, From 1914 1 Schooling in Oakes, North Dakota; First Library Job 6 Attending High School in Grand Forks; Early Career Interests 7 University of North Dakota; Courting Evelyn Varland 10 II GRADUATE STUDIES, THE WAR, AND THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY 13 Marriage, 1936; Doctoral Study at University of Illinois, 1936-1943 13 Life in Urbana, Illinois; Teaching English 15 Deciding on a Dissertation; Considering Librarianship 18 Working at the Newberry Library and Attending Library School, 1946-1950 20 U.S. Army Service in World War II, 1943-1946 23 Finishing the Ph.D. after the War; Revising a Book for Publication 28 The Newberry Library: From Apprentice to Head of Reference 30 Further Recollections of Attending Library School, 1946-1948 36 III ON THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP FACULTY, 1950s 39 Coming to Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950 39 The Loyalty Oath Controversy; Early Impressions of Berkeley 42 The First Semester at Berkeley 44 Early Experiences at the School of Librarianship; Colleagues 46 Deanship of J. Periam Danton 49 Recollections of Edith Coulter and Delia Sisler 50 Teaching Reference and Bibliography 51 Promotions to Assistant and Associate Professor; Meeting with Clark Kerr 52 Teaching the History of the Book; Summers in the Rare Book Room 54 Impressions of Students; Admissions Process 55 The Deanship of J. Periam Danton; Establishing Doctoral Programs 58 Loyalty Oath Controversy 63 State Aid to California Public Libraries 65 Recollections of State Librarians Mabel Gillis and Canna Zimmerman Leigh 68 Coit Coolidge and the Richmond Public Library; Men Librarians Group 69 Faculty Club Lunches; Donald Coney and the Main Library Staff, 1950s 71 IV FOCUS ON TEACHING AND INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM 76 Fighting Censorship During the McCarthy Era 76 Study on Censorship in California Public Libraries 80 Publish or Perish 82 Working with Rare Books 86 History of the Book Course; Roger Levenson and the History of Printing 87 Mentoring Doctoral Students 90 Planning and Teaching Courses; Preparing Students for Reference Work 91 Foreign Language Requirements for Students; Teaching Government Publications 96 More on Intellectual Freedom and the Fiske Report of 1956 99 Interactions with California's Legislature; Censorship Bills 103 More on Teaching Reference; Anecdotes from the Newberry Library 104 Summer Program of the School of Librarianship 107 The Sisler Book Prize 109 Clark Kerr's Presidency; School of Librarianship' s Lack of Visibility 110 The School Moves to South Hall 112 Recalling Other Faculty Colleagues of the 1950s and 1960s 114 V MID-CAREER ISSUES AND EXPERIENCES, 1960S AND 1970S 117 The Deanship of Raynard C. Swank, 1963-1970 117 The Institute of Library Research 120 Fulbright Lectureship to Denmark 123 The Royal Library School; "What Americans Can Learn From the Danes" 126 Research in Denmark; Thoughts From Abroad on the Kennedy Assassination 131 Returning to Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, 1964 133 The Firing of President Kerr 140 Civil Rights and Other Concerns of the 1960s 142 More on Dean Swank and the Institute of Library Research 143 Faculty and Student Interest in Computers for Librarianship 146 A Split Faculty at the School; Changes to the Curriculum, 1960s 148 Stereotypes About Librarians and Library Work; Gender and Librarianship 152 Dean Swank and His Programs ; More on the Faculty Split Over Computers 155 Leading a Team of Reference Teachers 158 Poetry for Reference Students; Miss Coulter's "Trick" Question 163 The Rare Book Room Joins The Bancroft Library 166 Swank's Resignation and the Deanship of Patrick Wilson, 1970-1975 167 The Post-Master's Certificate; Doctoral Recruitment 172 ALA Accreditation 174 Quarter System Versus Semester System 176 VI LATER TEACHING AND RESEARCH; RETIREMENT 177 The Deanship of Michael K. Buckland, From 1976 177 Name Change: School of Library and Information Studies 180 Effect of Proposition 13 on Libraries 183 Sabbatical to the British Library, 1977-1978 184 Promotion to Full Professor, 1979 187 Retirement, 1981 189 Writing for the German Lexikon, From 1984 191 Contact With the School Since Retiring; The Advent of SIMS 192 Thoughts on Retirement 195 TAPE GUIDE 198 INDEX 199 SERIES PREFACE—Library School Oral History Series The Library School Oral History Series documents the history of librarianship education at the University of California, Berkeley. Through transcribed and edited oral history interviews, the series preserves personal recollections of those involved with Berkeley's graduate library school since the 1930s. In the process, the interviews touch on the history of libraries in the Bay Area and California and on remarkable changes to the profession of librarianship over time. Certain lines of inquiry are central to all the interviews. What were the changes to the School of Librarianship (later the School of Library and Information Studies) over the years? How were decisions made, and by whom? Historically, what is the proper role of and training for librarians? How has that changed? What, in the opinion of those interviewed, is the public's view of librarianship? Library education at Berkeley spans nearly a full century. In 1901 Melvil Dewey, founding director of the New York State Library School and author of the Dewey Decimal classification system for books, wrote to University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, encouraging him to start a library school on the West Coast. Berkeley offered the first summer courses in librarianship in 1902, and summer training continued intermittently until 1918, when library education joined the curriculum of the regular academic year. In 1921, a Department of Librarianship was authorized for the College of Letters and Science, with instruction to begin in 1922. The state library school in Sacramento, which had offered courses since 1914, closed its doors in 1921, turning over the training of librarians to the University of California. In 1926, Berkeley's departmental program became a separate graduate School of Librarianship, which existed until 1946 under the leadership of the founding dean, Sydney B. Mitchell. In the early years, with a staff of two core faculty members, Edith M. Coulter and Delia J. Sisler, Mitchell offered both a graduate Certificate in Librarianship and a second-year course leading to the Master of Arts degree. Generally the school accepted only fifty students each year from among several hundred applicants . In 1933, under new accreditation standards, the American Library Association named Berkeley a "Type I" school, one of only five so designated because of its graduate degree offerings. In 1937 an endowment grant of $150,000 from the Carnegie Corporation assured the school's place among American educational institutions. ii After World War II, during the deanship of J. Periam Danton (1946- 1961), the school grew dramatically in size of faculty and number of students, while expanding and specializing every area of its programs. The graduate certificate was replaced in 1947 with a Bachelor of Library Science degree (BLS) and in 1955 with a Master of Library Science degree (MLS); Ph.D. and Doctor of Library Science (DLS) degree programs were inaugurated in 1954; and the school developed its own Library School Library as a branch of the main Doe Library. With the deanship of Raynard Coe Swank (1963-1970) came the school's first attention to computers and automation for libaries, an issue which eventually found its way into the curriculum and was taken up also through the school's Institute of Library Research. Swank's leadership culminated in the school's move from its quarters inside Doe Library to the venerable South Hall, one of two original buildings of the Berkeley campus (and the only one remaining) . Throughout the seventies and eighties, under the leadership of Patrick Wilson and Michael Buckland, significant changes came to the curriculum and the faculty, as reflected in the eventual change of name to the School of Library and Information Studies. In the late eighties and nineties, the school and its curricula were evaluated as part of a larger review of the campus and its mission as a research university. The school had only one permanent dean during this period, Robert C. Berring, who served half time from 1986 to 1989. Much of the assessment took place under a series of acting deans. Eventually the School of Library and Information Studies ceased admitting new students, while the campus administration contemplated whether it had a future. Although the threat of complete dissolution was beaten back, in part owing to the efforts of alumni and their "Save Our School" campaign, the school was, in effect, compelled to close down its operations. It reopened as the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), which graduated its first master's students in 1999. Although a few faculty members have remained, the new school's curriculum bears little resemblance to the old, as it offers an electronically based, rather than print-oriented, training. SIMS did take over the library school's endowment and its location in South Hall. As of January 2000, SIMS also administers the alumni association that incorporates graduates of the former school. To date it has not sought accreditation from the American Library Association. Meanwhile, schools of librarianship across the country have closed, changed their missions, or been subsumed under other graduate schools. The library systems devised so carefully by nineteenth and twentieth century founders have given way--in academic, public, and special libraries of every kind—to new ways of recording and managing collections and providing service to patrons. The Regional Oral History iii Office's Library School Oral History Series provides a strong narrative complement to written records of a key educational institution at a crucial time. With traditional education for librarianship fast disappearing, this series, like ROHO's broader University History Series, can serve as an enlightening case study of changes in education occurring throughout the United States. A significant gift from Morley S. Farquar in memory of his wife, Patricia Anderson Farquar '53, allowed this series to begin in the fall of 1998. Additional gifts from the Class of 1931 Oral History Endowment and the Alumni Association of the former School of Librarianship /Library and Information Studies, along with important individual donations, have further supported the collection of interviews. A key to creating this series has been the longevity of the individuals selected to be narrators. The first four interviewees for the series were born in 1914 or earlier and were between eighty- five and ninety years old at the time of their interviews. Two of them were students at the school in the 1930s, and their recollections shed light on the founding faculty members. Two of them had substantial experience in California public libraries. Three had long careers on the School of Librarianship faculty. Other narrators in the series will add their experiences as students, faculty members, and deans. Taken together, these oral histories will offer a rich history of librarianship education throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Special thanks go to the wise and thoughtful team of advisers for the Library School Oral History Series: Michael K. Buckland, Julia J. Cooke, Mary Kay Duggan, Debra L. Hansen, Robert D. Harlan, J. R. K. Kantor (who also proofread every transcript), Corliss S. Lee, and Charlotte Nolan. Special thanks go also to those whose ideas, assistance, and goodwill helped the series come to life: Willa K. Baum, Anne G. Lipow, Christine Orr, Shannon Page, Suzanne Riess, and Leticia Sanchez. The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to augment through tape-recorded memoirs the Library's materials on the history of California and the West. Copies of all interviews are available for research use in The Bancroft Library and in the UCLA Department of Special Collections. The office is under the direction of Willa K. Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of Charles B. Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Laura McCreery, Project Director Library School Oral History Series August 2000 Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley iv Library School Oral History Series October 2000 Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie, A Career in Public Libraries and at UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1937-1975, 2000 J. Per lam Danton, Dean and Professor at UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1946-1976, 2000 Fredric J. Mosher, Reference and Rare Books: Three Decades at UC Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950-1981, 2000 Flora Elizabeth Reynolds, "A Dukedom Large Enough": Forty Years in Northern California's Public and Academic Libraries, 1936-1976, 2000 Oral Histories in Process Fay M. Blake Robert D. Harlan Patrick G. Wilson INTRODUCTION by Crete W. (Fruge) Cubie Upon Edith Coulter's retirement the School of Librarianship waited a year before Fred Mosher came from the Newberry Library, Chicago, to join an expanding faculty at Berkeley. The appointment was well worth the waiting because the school gained a worthy successor to Miss Coulter in the teaching of Reference and Bibliography. At the same time Fred's arrival made possible continuation in the curriculum of a course taught by Delia Sisler until her retirement: History of Books and Printing. It was offered by Fred and the colleagues who shared with and succeeded him during the many years when librarianship, in its encompassing sense, made up the school's curriculum. When Fred Mosher came to Berkeley in 1950 his preparation for these subjects was the best. At the Newberry Library his humanistic mind had been nourished and he had found his profession as librarian, teacher, scholar. Rapidly advanced from apprentice to head of reference, he came to Berkeley to share with his students his own fulfillment and pleasure in good reference service. Knowledgeably and with meticulous thoroughness, he went about developing a course that would send graduates into the field with confidence and competence in realizing their expectations. Fred had helped them see the rewards, the stimulation of the search and its often unexpected turns, the exercise of resourcefulness, the sometimes amusing results. Like Edith Coulter before him, he relished such recollections with a chuckle and a slowly spreading smile. The ready acceptance by his colleagues of Fred as head of a team of reference teachers owed much to his attitude and manner. His reasonableness, his appreciation of what others brought and gave, his personal modesty matching strong convictions—such qualities invited and sustained cooperation. As new teachers joined the team during Fred's more that thirty years of active service, some whose doctoral research he had supervised, his beneficient influence continued. Fred was, and still is, gratefully remembered by many graduates who made a satisfying career in librarianship. Reference librarians among them remember him with special fondness. When the Mosher family was on its way home from Fred's Fulbright lectureship at the Royal School of Librarianship in Copenhagen (1964-65), they enjoyed some days of travel in Germany, France, and Belgium. For Fred there was a special opportunity to visit the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz and the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp. It was his day in the home and printing house of Christophe Plantin that gave him very special pleasure and was at the top of his traveler's tale when he returned to Berkeley. He had savored the experience of being in vi the house where humanists had visited and been published, where all was still intact in its totality and the presses in working order after more than 300 years of use. In the first days of Fred's return to the school there was much talk of this before he got to telling us what else had happened in his year away. Before long Fred found a way of helping students enrolled in the History of Books and Printing course to realize the meaning of "the art of printing." Together with Roger Levenson of San Francisco he found an 1861 Caslon Albion press to install in the basement of South Hall. Here students experimented with types and typesetting and the whole printing process under the watchful eye of Roger Levenson. They secured manuscripts of modest size and printed them in limited editions under the imprint "The South Hall Press, University of California." For his recreational and private enjoyment Fred also installed a handpress and well-stocked type cabinet in his study; here he printed gifts for his family and friends. I was the lucky recipient of one, a box of elegant stationery, a retirement present printed while I was traveling in Europe after having taught my last class in 1975. I returned engaged and shortly to be married to Alex Cubie, and so with laughter and a reference to Murphy's Law, Fred brought his gift, fresh from the press but with a soon-to-be outdated name. After it was properly adapted, I enjoyed using it with hundreds of reminders of Fred's intention. Of all the years I knew Fred I like most to remember him as family man and friend. My memory spans the time from his arrival in Berkeley with his wife Evelyn and their son Randy to an evening's telephone chat between friends only days before Fred so suddenly left us. When he came to the school it took no time at all for friendship to flourish between the young Mosher family and Ethelyn Markley, a friendship in which I was happily included. Shared views of what matters most in librarianship drew Fred and Ethelyn together, and an affinity in understanding the nature and worth of their respective subjects. They were equally committed to passing on that sense to their students, and as teachers they soon developed a mutual appreciation and regard. They both had the gift of friendship in great measure. The Moshers1 warm welcome into their home soon made it thrive. Ethelyn and I were invited to Evelyn's delicious meals, informally after work and on festive occasions to honor a person or a holiday. The serendipity of Fred and Ethelyn "s shared birthday did its part. February nineteenth was their day and was celebrated at the Moshers ' with hardly a year missed while Ethelyn lived, and then only when one or the other was away. Evelyn set an exquisite table with gleaming silver, sparkling crystal, and her treasured Danish china, blue on white. Fred's birtnday vii wish was the same each year, for a prune cake baked with an old family recipe; and each year Evelyn carried it to the table, candles blazing in numbers of some combined birthday formula. Fred would go to the small organ to tune us up for "Happy Birthday." With my marriage to Alex Cubie the friendship expanded, and with our move to Santa Cruz visiting took on a new dimension. North or south, it brought leisurely days together to enjoy shared interests. Music stood high among them. The Moshers1 home on Arlington Avenue had a "music room," perfectly equipped for listening and viewing. Here Fred would bring Alex up to date on his collection of recordings and select what we would all enjoy together, especially when there was a tape of their son Allan's most recent concert performance. As Allan Mosher's career as music teacher and performer unfolded it was his parents' joy to "attend" his latest performance. They had the best possible incentive for taking early advantage of what sound and video technology can bring to the home. Visits in Santa Cruz gave us outdoor pleasure in summertime, of meals in the garden and walks along the ocean. With fall and winter came holidays and arrival of the Monarch butterfly in Natural Bridges State Park. I look back on Thanksgivings together on Fair Avenue when, dinner preparations made and the turkey roasting, we would walk to the eucalyptus grove where the butterflies spend the winter. Luckily weather was favorable for midday sun to fill the sky with whirring wings, orange on luminous blue. The butterflies became the symbol of Santa Cruz for Fred, who never failed to mention them in letters. Fred had ways of keeping in touch with friends besides visiting and letter writing. Sometimes the desire to share found tangible expression. Alex's collection of music recordings is enriched by gifts from Fred who, having added a disc or tape of a much-enjoyed performance to his collection, wanted Alex to have one; and a parcel went off in the mail. Once a box of apples arrived to let us taste the "Jonagolds" that had just appeared on the market and on the Moshers' table. One kind of parcel I remember with particular warmth; it was addressed to me at intervals over many years. When Alex and I took up part-time residence abroad, the kind of printed or typewritten documents that appear in desk baskets ceased to come from South Hall. Ever the alert librarian and thoughtful friend, Fred spontaneously decided to keep me informed by sending what he thought I should read. The parcels tended to be bulky but kept coming, and I owe it to Fred's faithful effort that 1 did not lose touch with the library school. When I think back on Fred's last years, I am glad for two events that enriched his life to the end. The first was the joy of attending a performance of Haydn's "The Creation" in Hertz Hall, April 1998, listening to his son's bass-baritone voice a quarter century after viii Allan's first appearance on that stage before going east for his conservatory education. I am glad too that Fred was granted time to enter with zest and finish with satisfaction his series of recorded interviews on the School of Librarianship. Only a few days before his death Fred and I talked on the phone and touched on our just-finished sessions. We heartily agreed on having enjoyed them. With thoughts of Fred, and more thoughts so recently shared, I am glad for having been asked how I remember him. Crete W. Cubie Senior Lecturer Emerita University of California, Berkeley Santa Cruz, California July 2000 ix INTRODUCTION by Michael K. Buckland Fred Mosher had already been at Berkeley for twenty- five years when, in January 1976, I arrived from Indiana to join what was then called the School of Librarianship. A Graduate Council review committee chaired by John Wheeler had issued a report on the school in 1974. The Wheeler Report urged a broadening of the school's scope. The school was advised to extend its interest in library services to concern itself with information services in other, additional institutional contexts and to be more concerned with what was then called "Information Science." I was recruited as dean with instructions from the Chancellor's Office to modernize the school and to implement the recommendations of the Wheeler Report. There had been serious and unpleasant disagreements among the faculty and it was very clear that the level of conflict had to be reduced. Fortunately, the faculty themselves had also come to the same conclusion. It helped that I came in as a complete outsider and with quite varied experience. Both factors made it easier to establish rapport with the varied points of view. Fred Mosher had quite specific views on how and what to teach. He emphasized giving students first hand experience with important reference books, he valued paying attention to the historical development of the field, and he considered the foreign language requirement for doctoral students to be important. But for a decade the pressure had been to move in quite different directions. Computers and information science began to consume large amounts of faculty positions and school resources. His views on what should be taught and how had been losing ground. He had come to Berkeley with quite specific research projects and he worked hard for many years on them. Unfortunately, in two of his areas of interest he found himself upstaged by other authors who published more limited studies on the same topics, apparently unaware that Fred had been working on them, and so, for that and other reasons, his publications were fewer than his work would ordinarily have warranted. My impression was that Fred had felt that his contributions and his work had been somewhat under-appreciated for a considerable period of time, but he always treated me very well and he was a constructive influence in the redirection of the school. As we discussed what new opportunities there might be in professional education for database administration, records management, archives, corporate information management, and other areas, Fred took a positive stance. Anyone who went to work in these areas, he declared, would have to have the service-oriented skills of a well-trained reference librarian and, so far as he could see, they would almost certainly need to be fluent in finding government information. Such students, he said, would need to take his courses whatever else they might do. It was this constructive attitude by Fred Mosher and others that enabled the school to make a significant strategic re-orientation without the battles, bitterness, and entrenchment that can so easily accompany efforts at change. Fred also took the initiative to be supportive in practical ways. He thought it important, when I arrived, that I should get to know retired members of the faculty and so, soon after my arrival, he and his wife Evelyn arranged a dinner party in their home, carefully seating me between Crete Fruge and Anne Ethelyn Markley. In 1988 my wife and I left Berkeley for a year abroad and rented out our house. A few days before we left, the arrangements we had made for our son, Anthony, to have somewhere to stay in Berkeley during his college breaks collapsed. Fred immediately invited Anthony to stay in the Mosher home, which he did with enjoyment during his 1989 spring break. We remain very grateful. By 1977 he was eligible for sabbatical leave and I urged him to make the most of it. It proved possible to arrange for him to be attached to the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue team at the British Library in London, which gave him the wonderful privilege of roaming the library's stacks. This year abroad was very fruitful and resulted in publications and promotion to full professor. It was very good to see Fred productively and usefully occupied with his research during his retirement years, unfortunately interrupted by failing health. Part of his legacy is in his work on intellectual freedom in the 1950s, part of it is in his specialized publications, and another part is in grateful students. He is often spoken of fondly when I encounter alumni . At his memorial service, as several people paid tribute to Fred's positive, resilient attitude, his Christian faith, his caring for others, and that distinctive smile that accompanied his dry sense of humor, I reflected that we should all hope to be so fondly remembered. Michael K. Buckland Professor University of California, Berkeley April 10, 2000 Berkeley, California XI INTERVIEW HISTORY During the planning stages of the Library School Oral History Series, several names came up repeatedly as "must-do" interviews. These narrators were named by their colleagues as essential to any comprehensive history of the School of Librarianship (later School of Library and Information Studies). Fredric J. Mosher was one of these. In his thirty-one years of teaching, from 1950 to 1981, Professor Mosher oversaw the school's instruction in the pivotal area of reference and bibliography. (His predecessor for these subjects was Professor Edith M. Coulter, one of three people who made up the school's first faculty.) He was also a specialist in the history of books, printing, and libraries. When I went to Professor Mosher "s Kensington home in February of 1999 to introduce myself and the oral history project, I discovered an eager collaborator with a quiet demeanor and a ready smile. Though we sat in the living room at first, we soon chose his downstairs office as the site for our interview sessions. The cozy room would muffle harsh background noises on my tape, and he would have ready access to his bookcases and filing cabinets. We did not commence interviews until March, as the Mosher home was to be a flurry of family activity until then. Both Professor Mosher and his wife of sixty-two years, Evelyn, would celebrate their eighty-fifth birthdays during February, and his sister Carolyn in Seattle was having a birthday as well. There would be visits from his two sons, Randy and Allan, and the grandchildren. Professor Mosher sat for oral history interviews from mid-March to the end of April. After a while we settled on Friday mornings as our regular time. Often we worked to the accompaniment of spring rainstorms, and once it poured so hard outside that the sound came through on the tape. During interviews, we sat at opposite ends of the large couch in Professor Mosher 's office, with the tape recorder between us and all our papers spread on nearby surfaces. He always had a few pertinent things to show me from the neat piles he had arranged on the daybed nearby. Between tape sides, he always got up and stretched his legs; he disliked sitting still for long periods. Professor Mosher 's interviews proved thoughtful and appealing. He spoke slowly and deliberately, and he had an unusual capacity to follow my line of inquiry and explore it fully without wandering or jumping xii ahead. I came to admire this combination of openness and discipline, and I was delighted by his playful sense of humor. At the end of eight sessions, we had recorded twelve and a half hours of tape and covered the main periods and issues of his career. Although we touched only occasionally on personal things, Professor Mosher revealed himself as a gentle person whose foremost priorities rested with family and church. In counterpoint, such topics as intellectual freedom brought out in him a forceful manner and strong views. On May 28, 1999, four weeks after the interviews came to an end, I phoned Professor Mosher to say the tapes were not yet transcribed and to ask his patience during the long editing phase of the project. Though he was glad to know where things stood, he assured me he did not mind delays. I encouraged him to think about who should write the introduction to the manuscript and to select a photo of himself as well. Sadly, that very weekend, Professor Mosher suffered a heart attack and passed away. Two of his colleagues, Michael K. Buckland and Robert D. Harlan, were kind enough to help with the review of interviews so this manuscript could be produced posthumously. The text was edited only lightly, and no significant changes or deletions were made. All of us who were involved have tried to uphold Professor Mosher 's high standards. Now that we have committed his words to paper, we hope this memoir will find the audience it deserves. Laura McCreery, Interviewer/Editor March 2000 Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley xiii Regional Oral History Office University of California Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION (Please write clearly. Use black ink.) Your full name fREPRjC J 6 H // Date of birth /^>frM/gy 19 //^ U S£ U/ iF£ _ Birthplace Your spouse Occupation ftAU £C (*J I F £ _ Birthplace /7/f T£SI#Aj 56U.T// Your children_ c Where did you grow up? Oft Present community /f £ L>4ltj'676 AJ , C ft t- I Education fi.G.(\ / * A^ Occupation(s) Areas of expertise i\£f£(?£v<£ ftvy 8lBLi&6R ftPfty tfllfdgy <7 f / i can Other interests or activities "-/T£ LL £< 7k A*- Core. »i Organizations in which you are active INTERVIEW WITH FREDRIC J. MOSHER I FAMILY BACKGROUND, CHILDHOOD, EARLY EDUCATION [Interview 1: March 15, 1999] ##' Grandparents, Parents, and Early Life in North Dakota, From 1914 McCreery: Good morning. It seems to me that you have just had a significant birthday, if I recall from our last conversation. Mosher: Yes. My birthday is February 19 and I was eighty-five. Born in 1914. McCreery: Congratulations. Mosher: Thank you. McCreery: Let's start right there, then, with having you tell me a little bit about when and where you were born. Mosher: I was born in Oakes, North Dakota. This town was founded because two railroad lines intersected there, and therefore it was a good place for traveling men to live. There was a lot of that. When the town was founded the only way of traveling long distances was by railroad. I was born above the movie theater in Oakes, North Dakota, and I've been a movie fan all my life. I don't know whether that has anything to do with it or not. [laughter] We soon moved to a little rented house in Oakes, and I lived in Oakes until we moved for one year to Minneapolis when I was four and five. Then we moved back to Oakes again and '## This symbol indicates that a tape or tape segment hajj begun or ended. A guide to the tapes follows the transcript. stayed there until I was in junior in high school, when we-- this isn't what you want to know right now, is it? McCreery: This is fine, actually. Perhaps you could just tell me a little bit about your grandparents, if you know much about them. You can start on either side of the family. Mosher: I saw the only living grandparents I had only once [each] . Both my grandmothers were dead by the time I was born. My maternal grandfather was John Ireland. He had served in the Civil War as a drummer boy, and he was a farmer most of his life. He visited us, just one or two days, on his way from Minnesota to Oregon, where he lived the rest of his life. And I saw him only that once, when I was a just a baby--one or two years old, maybe a little less. I'm not sure. We went to Allegan, Michigan, where my father [Fred Smith Mosher] had been born and where his father was living then, and that's the only time I saw the paternal grandfather, Albert Mosher. He was born in Vermont and had a butcher shop in Allegan. When I saw him he lived on a farm near Allegan, I think. That's all very dim in my memory. McCreery: Why did you see him only the one time? Mosher: Because he was living in Allegan, Michigan, which is a long way from Oakes, North Dakota. And we didn't travel easily those days. Besides me, I have an older brother and a younger sister, and that would mean taking three children along on the train. It would be quite a trip. McCreery: You mentioned Oakes was a good place for traveling people to live, and I know your father sold insurance. Mosher: Yes, that's right. McCreery: Is that how you ended up there? Mosher: No, he didn't sell insurance then. He sold insurance later on. He was a traveling salesman when I was born. He traveled for a farm implement company, the Moline Plow Company. And he had most of southern and western North Dakota as his territory, so he would be gone from Monday through Friday most of the time and only home on weekends. And of course it wasn't long after I was born when he got a car and wasn't dependent upon the trains any longer. I suppose that's why Oakes, North Dakota never became much of a town. It had around 1,000, 1,200 inhabitants when I was born, and I don't think it's much more than a couple thousand now. McCreery: What about that year when you were four or five that you left Oakes? What were the circumstances of that? Mosher: My father went to the head office, the Minneapolis office, of the Moline Plow Company as an assistant manager, and so the whole family went. My brother went to school and I went to kindergarten in Minneapolis when I was between four and five. My father did not get along with the manager of the office, and I think he quit. And he went back to Oakes, and there he first started selling insurance with an insurance agency in Oakes. But this was the time of the post-World War I Depression, and it hit particularly hard in such places as North Dakota. They depended largely on wheat, the price of which was not so high. The insurance did not work out, and Dad got a job with the National Biscuit Company selling cookies. He traveled around North Dakota selling the cookies of the Nabisco. We thought that was great because the sample cases he had we could eat when he came back. [laughter] That was every week. But that didn't last long, either, and he got back into the employment of the Moline Plow Company and stayed with them until the Depression, 1929. McCreery: What kind of memories do you have of your dad from when you were growing up? Mosher: Well, I felt that I had to do what he told me to do. He was never- -there was no corporal punishment involved that I can remember. I'm really kind of puzzled about him—not puzzled, I guess, but I really don't know him so very well because he was gone so much during those formative years. He was sort of a father authority figure that didn't play much part in my everyday life. McCreery: That was very common, of course, for many people. Tell me something about your mother and where she came from. Mosher: Mother [Georgie Ireland Mosher] was one of eleven children. Her mother had come from Norway as an infant and she married John Ireland, I'm not sure when. She had eleven children and then died of tuberculosis when she was in her early forties. At that time my mother was in the fifth grade and sort of in the middle of the group, of the family, and she had to stay home—quit school— and take care of the family. She was eleven years old. And of course, the death of a mother was an awful blow to her, which she never really got over. McCreery: Where was her family living then? Mosher: My mother was born in Minnesota. Elbow Lake, I think it is. But my father, or my grandfather, had moved with the family to Glidden, Wisconsin where the lumbering was going on. My mother had older brothers who worked in the lumber industry, and my grandfather ran a livery stable in Glidden. When her mother died, everything went to pieces, of course. They stayed on in Glidden for a while, and then they moved out to North Dakota, to a little town named Benedict, North Dakota, where my father and mother met. McCreery: Tell me something about your memories of your mom. Mosher: I think she was one of the most wonderful people who ever lived. I was very close to her, and I worked a lot with her in the house. I helped her clean the house. And she was subject to migraine headaches and when they hit, why, I would try to take care of her—give her cold cloths for her head and that sort of thing—and just be there to take care of the house. She was usually out of it when she had one of these awful headaches. McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: She was, nevertheless, a happy person, a jolly person, and looked on the bright side of things. And, well, everyone liked her. She was interested and interesting, and although she'd never graduated from eighth grade even, she read a lot and was knowledgeable about a great many things. Do you get some of your interests from her? Oh, I'm sure I do. Well, she was responsible for most of my beliefs and opinions and knowledge for quite a long time. How much older was your brother? My brother was not quite two years older. He died just--I don't remember now when—three or four years ago, but he had been suffering from diabetes for many years and lived in St. Louis. He was one year and nine months older than I, and I think there was always quite a bit of sibling rivalry there. We both were very good in school, and he was much better at sports and much more interested in sports than I was. I didn't ever engage in any athletic activities— primarily, I realize now- -because I wasn't any good at it. [laughter] And I had to wear glasses. My eyes weren't--! couldn't see too well. Well, I was near-sighted. It was sort of interesting that this near- sightedness prevented me from getting a commission in the navy, McCreery: for example, and prevented my being included in sports. But since about 1978, I've had 20/20 vision. I don't wear glasses and I don't need glasses to drive. I use glasses only for the small dif f icult-to-read print. And that's because near-sightedness tends to correct itself in time? Mosher: I guess so. McCreery: I have heard that. I keep hoping. [laughter] Mosher: I noticed it first because of watching TV, and needing my glasses for TV. And suddenly—or not suddenly, I guess over a period of time--I found that I took my glasses off to watch TV. The optometrist confirmed this. McCreery: Did you maintain much closeness with your brother later in life or see him often? Mosher: I didn't see him often because we never lived in the same town, except for a short period of time. Before I came out here he was living near Chicago, too. But otherwise, we just haven't seen much of each other. In those younger periods of our lives we were quarrelsome and very unhappy with each other a lot of the time. In fact, everyone thought that we were fighting all the time. But he was larger, of course, and bigger and stronger, and so I didn't win out. McCreery: Tell me something about your younger sister. Mosher: Yes, Carolyn. She's still living. She lives up in Seattle. I spent a lot of time with her, taking care of her and playing with her. She quit school—quit going to the university—and got married fairly young after she had only two years at the university. And she had several children and remarried twice, and has not had a happy adult life, except now she's very happy with her grandchildren. McCreery: Are you close to her, would you say? Mosher: Yes. Of course, I have a son living up in the Seattle area, and my sister Carolyn has lived up in that area for quite a few years now. She used to live in Denver, but we've seen each other quite a bit. Well, there was a long period of time when we didn't, because we were tied down to our own families at home. McCreery: Do you know the story of how your parents met each other? Mosher: Yes, at least I was told my father was a traveling salesman up in North Dakota, middle North Dakota near Minot. And restaurants in North Dakota, I presume even today, are pretty sorry affairs. They were, I'm sure, worse back then, early 1900s. Let's see, my father met John Ireland, mother's father. He was quite a convivial fellow--he liked to talk with people-- and I guess grandfather John took pity on Dad and invited him home for dinner. And Mother was responsible, of course, for the home, pretty much, and that's how they were introduced. And it didn't take long for them to get married. Schooling in Oakes, North Dakota; First Library Job McCreery: What do you remember about growing up in Oakes and going to school there? Mosher: It had a good school system, I thought. The teachers were all well prepared and interested in what they were doing, and I learned a lot. I thought, and I still think, it was one of the best school systems I know about or have experienced. I did well in school, always. My chief ambition was to become valedictorian of the class. My brother, because he didn't pay enough attention, I think, to his studies—he ' d skipped a grade and he was only a salutatorian, so I wanted to be valedictorian. McCreery: [laughs] There's that rivalry again. Mosher: Yes. The trouble with that was that when I was a junior in high school we moved up to Grand Forks. And you had to go four years to high school in Grand Forks to have any honor at all as far as scholarship was concerned, so I lost any incentive of that sort when we moved to Grand Forks . McCreery: What size was your school in Oakes? Mosher: Oh, it can't have been more than two or three hundred. A new building was built while I was going there. I started taking music lessons then and became very much interested in the piano, and of course read a great deal and even worked in the library a little bit. McCreery: Oh, you did? Tell me about that. Mo she r: McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: The librarian was a good friend of our family, and I liked working with books . I liked books , but after a while I got pretty tired of going in and reshelving books. [laughter] So I just quit. I didn't want to do any more. It seemed like an endless task. Every day it was the same thing. The school and the Was this the public library? It was a public library in the school, public library were the same. Do you remember that librarian's name? Yes, she was Stella Christensen. She was the wife of the local dentist--or a local dentist--who was a good friend of the family, too, and the dentist we all went to. Attending High School in Grand Forks; Early Career Interests McCreery: Some of your early roots are there, then, in the library. How did you happen to move up to Grand Forks during high school? Mosher: My brother was two years older. He was through high school and he needed to go to the university, and so Mother and Dad decided that they would move to where he went to school instead of trying to support him elsewhere, although he had worked in grocery stores, and he probably would have made it anyway. This position opened [for my father] in Grand Forks as assistant manager of a farm implements company. The successor to the Moline Plow Company was the Minneapolis Moline Power Implement Company, and this was its first year, 1929. We just got moved, started school, Dad took over his job, and the Depression hit. [It was] a brand new company and still all based on farms, and the bottom dropped out of everything, so he lost his job right away. Eventually he took various minor jobs traveling around, but he became an insurance salesman and stayed an insurance salesman then for the rest of his life. McCreery: But that grew directly out of the stock market crash and the Depression? Mosher: Yes. McCreery: What did you think of Grand Forks upon arriving there in the midst of high school? Mosher: Oh, I, of course, hated to leave Oakes and all my friends, because I did have some good friends in Oakes. You know, I had lived there all my life. And I guess I should say the first year was simply miserable. I was very unhappy, didn't know anybody, and I spent all my time on school, my courses, and of course got superior grades—none of which did me any good as far as becoming a valedictorian. [laughter] But I should have said, in connection with Oakes, that there was a math teacher at Oakes--Thelma Swinkle, from whom I took algebra, and she made this course so interesting. You know, algebra simply was so interesting to me that I decided that I was going to become a math teacher. That was my ambition from then on, until at the university I did not get an A in calculus, I think it was. And I had A's in practically everything else, especially everything in English, so I decided I would major in English instead of math. But I got a minor in math and physics. I was very much interested in science, too. McCreery: Did that interest persist? Mosher: Well, yes. Of course it does. I never took any more courses after the university, but in a strange way it played a part in my being drafted into the army. I didn't want to be drafted in World War II, and the University of Illinois, where I was then, had a program for what they called ASTP--student servicemen would come there for courses, and they circulated the university asking for anybody who could possibly teach physics or math to volunteer. Well, this would keep me out of the army, so that's what I did. And I actually started teaching physics until I was classified 1-A and drafted. Just two or three days [of teaching], was all that was. McCreery: That's kind of a surprising use of your math interest there. Before I forget, what was your religious upbringing as a child? Mosher: We were always Presbyterians, and that's where I was baptized and became a member of the church. I was quite active in the church as a child. We went to church faithfully every Sunday and to Sunday school, of course. And most of our social activities centered around the church, which was a good experience. The pastors were nearly always interesting and good people, good with children. My mother always wanted me to become a minister. She thought that's what I should do. And I had no interest in that at all, no call whatsoever, but she wanted me to go to the Presbyterian university, Carleton [College], in the same town as St. Olaf [College] in [Northfield] Minnesota. But at that time ministers weren't allowed to smoke or drink or play cards or dance. [laughs] That wasn't the kind of life I was looking forward to. [laughter] McCreery: Tell me a little bit more about how you adjusted to living in Grand Forks. You said the first year was a big adjustment. Mosher: Yes. I made a kind of reputation the first year, particularly with the English teachers and anyone who had me in class, I guess. One morning, early in the fall of the second year, a student came up to me and asked if I was Fred Mosher and introduced himself as Bill Kruger. He was the editor of the Centralian, the high school newspaper, and he said he had been asked by Frank Clement, the adviser to the paper, to look me up and see if I didn't want to work on the high school newspaper. Well, I thought that was a great idea, so I said I certainly would. And so I reported to Frank Clement, and then Bill and Frank gave me my first assignment, which was to go and write a story on the high school band. I still remember it. And then I became assistant editor of the newspaper, and that made all the difference because Bill Kruger became a good friend, and he's still my best friend. He visited here just a couple months ago. Frank Clement was the physics teacher at the school, and he lived with the family of the girl that Bill was going with at the time, and whom he later married, so he spent quite a bit of time, Frank did, with Bill and Helen, driving around. He liked to drive in the rain at night, and he liked to go out and get hamburgers and this sort of thing. And I liked to play cribbage and so did Frank and Bill, and we became cribbage players and got all involved. I remember the first night I stayed over with Frank and Bill, we didn't come home before eight or nine o'clock or whatever, and both my brother and my mother were very much worried about me. Well, what could have happened to me? The rest of the senior year was just full of activities, mainly centering around the Centralian; however, I also got involved in lots of other things. There were clubs that I joined. I became a member of the debating team and I entered a speech contest, which became a statewide contest and I organized—or my teacher organized for me--a piano recital, just for me, in the spring. And let's see, I'd written a story 10 McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: for my English class and the teacher had entered this in the state contest, and the story won the state contest. I also entered the piano contest for the state. It was just one thing after another. I didn't get anywhere with the state piano contest, and that convinced me that I really didn't have the talent to become a pianist, which I would like to have been. And I did not succeed in the speech contest. The debating team was reasonably successful. I think we won most of our debates. These various clubs had dances and so on that had to be organized. I think I was president of one of the clubs, so the senior year was full of activity, and I didn't spend very much time on my studies. I couldn't see any necessity for getting good grades, or better grades than the rest of the people, since they wouldn't do me any good, I thought. But I got good grades anyway. I just didn't spend so much time, but I still learned very quickly and had the reputation of being a bright student and so on. But you still wanted to be a math teacher at that point? Yes, that's what I thought I would be. Was it a given that you would go on to University of North Dakota? Pretty much, because that's where we were. And I certainly wanted to go on. I really wanted to go to the university. And both Mother and Dad wanted all of us to go to the university, to higher education. Now the Depression was of course in full swing by this time. Yes, '31 is when I graduated from high school. But by 1931, I guess my father hadn't decided to be in the insurance business yet. That was later. University of North Dakota; Courting Evelyn Varland McCreery: But you and your brother were both able to attend University of North Dakota right away? Mosher: Yes, we both finished the university in three years, with summer school. So he went for three years and then he was an 11 accountant, and he got a job right away down in Oklahoma with a friend of my father's. And so he was gone from about 1932 on. We had to move from the house we had rented in Grand Forks --it was very large and a very nice house—to a much smaller and less nice house in 1931, I guess, when I started the university. And then I finished in 1934. I took a lot of courses. I don't know how I managed to do it, but I did, because in 1931 Evelyn and I began to go together. McCreery: Now how did you meet? Mosher: Well, that's a fairly long but interesting story. It turned out that when we moved to Minneapolis from Oakes, Evelyn's family moved into the house we'd been renting. They came up from South Dakota, and when we came back from Minneapolis to Oakes, they were still living in that house. We bought a house somewhere a couple blocks away, so we know we must have played together-- just a couple blocks apart. But Evelyn's family left to go back to South Dakota for a while, so we didn't really strike up any kind of acquaintanceship. But her family moved up to Grand Forks after two or three more years in South Dakota, and she was in Grand Forks when our family moved up there. McCreery; Mosher: Both Evelyn and I were in a history class. We were seated alphabetically. I was in the front- -Mosher, middle of the front- -and because her name was Varland, she was way back in the room. I turned around and looked at her and thought, "Oh, I've never seen an angel before. She looks just like an angel." Well, that was just that, because she became ill with pneumonia and had to drop out of school that term. I didn't really see much of her again until—she was the best friend of Helen Pederson, who became Bill Kruger's wife. And on one of the drives with Frank Clement, Bill and Helen and Frank stopped and picked up Evelyn before coming to pick me up, and that started it. That was in the spring of 1931. Okay, so when you first met her in that history class--! know you're both the same age— how old were you then? Just sixteen. It was 1929. Fifteen? It was 1929, so I guess we were fifteen. But we didn't really- -we never had a date out with each other, separately, until '31. It was all very closely tied up with Frank Clement, this physics teacher, and with Bill Kruger. 12 Another thing that happened that needs to be mentioned here, I guess, was that we needed money. And there weren't any jobs. The only job I could find was delivering newspapers. Grand Forks Herald was the daily newspaper in Grand Forks, sort of famous recently because of that flood. They kept publishing the newspaper, even though there was hardly anything left to Grand Forks . Anyway, I had a morning route and an evening. In the morning I usually left the newspaper office about six, six- thirty and the evening about four, four-thirty. So I'd go to the university and then I'd take these paper routes. For the next, oh, let's see, five years, I guess, that's how I managed to get tuition and so on for the university. I don't know why I began to think about that, or why I thought it was necessary to bring it in right now, but at any rate, that kept me pretty busy even as I was taking a double load of courses, more or less. And I don't know, somewhere along the line—well actually what happened was that I decided I wanted to get married, and I didn't think I was going to do very well- -I thought I would probably be better able to find a job teaching English, or what I really wanted to do was to write. I thought that teaching English would give me an opportunity to write. Completely wrong, of course, but that's what I thought at the time. And so I switched. I decided, well, my major was going to be English. I didn't think there was any chance of my ever teaching at a university or college, but I thought maybe I should get a job teaching in secondary schools, so I better take some education courses and get a teaching credential. So I did the three-year bachelor's degree and then decided to do a master's degree in English, and I did that. Then I was offered a job teaching English at the University of North Dakota, so I taught there for one year. 13 II GRADUATE STUDIES, THE WAR, AND THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY Marriage, 1936; Doctoral Study at University of Illinois. 1936- 1943 Mosher: I realized by that time that if I was ever going to do anything more than teach- -well, even if I was going to do nothing but just teach at the University of North Dakota, I had to have the doctorate. Now Bill Kruger at the same time had just finished a bachelor's in physics and he had been writing around for possibilities for a degree in physics, a Ph.D. And he got one at the University of Illinois. When I learned that he had found this position at the University of Illinois, I told him, "Well, if you can get an assistantship — I think they called them- -I'm sure I can, too," so I wrote to the head of the English department and got the job, [laughs] because they needed, oh, something like --well, I don't know how many assistants there were, but they needed a lot because everybody had to take freshman English at the University of Illinois, and they opened the doors to any graduate of the Illinois high schools. Anyway, I was offered the position and took it—which caused a wedding that fall [laughter] and a honeymoon trip to Illinois, which was a nightmare. McCreery: How so? Mosher: We traveled by bus, really very poor buses. We couldn't afford to stay anywhere except with relatives in Minneapolis, and we didn't have any place to live in Urbana, Illinois. We had no idea that it would be hard to find a place to live, but in a university town trying to find a place to live in September- no. So it wasn't comfortable honeymoon. Then, well, that's still quite a bit ahead of the story, I guess. McCreery: That's fine. You took your master's, then, in English at University of North Dakota and taught there? Mosher: That's right. McCreery: So this must have been around 1936 you got married? Mosher: '36 we were married. McCreery: Okay. Mosher: The bachelor's degree in 1934 and the master's degree in 1935, and I taught '35 to '36. I could have stayed on, but Evelyn agreed that I should go on since I had a job at Illinois. McCreery: Yes. I'm wondering what you recall about the larger events during that period. You've talked about the effects of the Depression, of course, and that was reaching out to everyone. What about, for example, when [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was elected? Mosher: Yes, I wasn't able to vote yet. My mother and father were both Republicans. My mother thought that Prohibition was one of the greatest goods in the world. Roosevelt came in and took away Prohibition, which she thought was a great mistake. So she didn't like Roosevelt. And I tended to follow her opinion, so I didn't believe in alcohol either and I thought--! didn't understand what Prohibition meant by way of crime, so I was all against Roosevelt. In fact, I never voted for Roosevelt--not that I voted for the Republicans . I voted for Norman Thomas . I don't know what party he was part of, but he ran for president nearly all the elections I can think of back then. Of course, you see, I was delivering papers all this time, so all the news-- McCreery: Yes, you were keeping up pretty well. Mosher: I was keeping up with the news, yes. We even had to sell extras occasionally. McCreery: What about your own writing interests? You mentioned switching to English partly out of an interest in writing. What did you want to write? Mosher: Probably fiction. I guess what gave me the impulse was winning this contest. See that little book up there [points to bookcase] ? McCreery: Oh, yes. 15 Mosher: Very top shelf. That's the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, and that's what I won. That was the prize for winning the contest. It gave me the idea that maybe--! liked to write, and I'd written a lot of stories for classes, but I didn't have any burning desire to write. Nothing was compelling me to write anything in particular, and I guess that's one of the reasons why I never did. I can put words together in a clear and meaningful way, but I don't have the ideas, I guess, as far as fiction goes. McCreery: As you said, you found out that teaching English didn't leave you a lot of time for other things. Mosher: That's right. It had nothing to do with writing. Life in Urbana, Illinois; Teaching English McCreery: It's interesting that you essentially followed your friend to Urbana to take a job there. What did you think when you and Evelyn were newlyweds and arrived there? What did you think of that community? Mosher: I thought it was awfully hot in September. [laughter] We liked it of course, although we were very lonely. It helped to have Bill there. He lived in some local fraternity house of graduate students, and they didn't serve meals on Sunday or weekends or something. At any rate, he was very often over at our house. Of course, he married the next year- -unfortunately for him, I think, because he announced to the head of the [physics] department that he was going to be married, and the head of the department said, "You can't have your job next year, then. We won't employ anyone who's married." So this made Bill angry enough to just quit his job. And he started teaching physics then up in Naperville, Illinois. They were married one year after we were. Urbana, at that time, had these tremendous elm trees. [There were] all kinds of opportunities for hearing music and seeing plays--and lots of people in the same department, about the same age, and the same position I was. We made a number of good friends. And that was our first year of marriage, and we enjoyed it thoroughly. McCreery: And you solved your housing problem? 16 Mosher: [laughter] We finally did find a place. It was far from a good place to live, but it was adequate. The landlady was fond of telling everybody—the local president of the WCTU--is that right--yes, Women's Christian Temperance Union—she wouldn't have any alcohol in anything she owned, any house. She made us sign a two-page document telling us what we could do and what we couldn't do, when we could brush our teeth. There were other people living in the house too, you know. We shared a bathroom with somebody. And it worked out, but it wasn't a very happy situation, as far as our landlady was concerned. The next year we lived with one of the English teachers . There was an English teacher who had her own house not far away from where we first lived, and we lived with her for a year. McCreery: What did you think of the university? Mosher: I was impressed of course, and rather dismayed by how little I knew. To do graduate work in English, I was plunged into courses that I wasn't really very well prepared for, because the preparation at Grand Forks, or the faculty there, wasn't so great. And we had at Illinois the top-most Milton scholar, Harris Fletcher--the top-most in the world, I would say. And Spenser scholar H. S. V. Jones became my adviser. He was there, and oh, I could go on and mention about ten others who were really tops in English at the time. And of course the other students were, most of them, ahead of me in preparation. But I decided early on in my master's degree at North Dakota—you had to have a dissertation, and the dissertation was an edition of a Middle English manuscript of Wyclyfite sermons, which I transcribed. We had a manuscript from the British Museum in photostat. I had to transcribe it and then edit it. And as it turned out, enough time had elapsed--! decided I could do only half of it, so I did only half of the manuscript. Meanwhile, the head of the department wanted me to get my master's degree that June. So I pushed it through. They allowed me to do only half of it. For my Ph.D. I was going to do the whole thing and really edit it properly. Well, that's what I started working on with H. S. V. Jones, because he was at that time the only Middle English, early English, specialist. He taught the courses at Illinois. I began to investigate and discovered that these Wyclyfite sermons had already been done, so I couldn' t— they 'd never been edited [but] they had been, I guess, a dissertation of someone at Yale, maybe. And so I had to find something else for a dissertation. And I wasn't in any hurry to do that, but I decided to stay with my early [English] field, anyway. 17 McCreery: Mosher: But I had a lot of catching up to do in early English literature. I was teaching, of course, three courses a semester. It was freshman English. And each of them [were] required [to write] a theme a week, each one of the students, so I'd have about seventy- five to eighty themes to read every week. This got old pretty fast. I decided after a couple of years that I really didn't want a degree in English anyway, if that's what it meant. But I didn't have any particular interest in any particular literature, so there were a lot of decisions to be made. I decided somewhere along the line that maybe what I really seemed to be interested in was language, and that I might become a lexicographer. I wrote around and talked to my adviser about the possibility of--but later on there were other reasons why I didn't go into that. Did you enjoy teaching in general—the students? Not especially. McCreery: We were just talking a moment ago about how well you liked, or didn't like, teaching freshman English while you were studying at the University of Illinois. What was it that you didn't enjoy so much? Mosher: I didn't feel I was able to teach them much of anything. It was very hard to measure improvement. By what measures we had, you could see that there was some improvement maybe, but the students in general were uninterested. They'd had twelve years of it and didn't like it well enough to learn the simple basics. It was awfully hard to get them interested enough to do anything. It was required, they had to do it, so they did it as well as they could, but you couldn't help them much. I don't think you can teach people how to write. Either they are able to or they aren't able to. One of the discouraging things about the situation at Illinois then was that proficiency tests were administered at the beginning of each year, and everyone had to take that proficiency test. If [students] passed that proficiency test, [they] didn't have to take freshman English. So what you got were- -you didn't get any of the good people, or any of those who naturally were good writers ; you got only those who were bad enough so they needed more help at the university. 18 There was even further segregation in that there were certain classes, certain sections, reserved for engineers, so you'd have a class full of engineers --most of them are not very literate at eight o'clock in the morning- -taking a course they didn't see any use for, had no interest in. I thought it was hopeless. McCreery: Was there any opportunity for you to teach anything besides basic composition? Mosher: No. That's all. Well, yes, what I did was to give them a reading program. They had to read certain books and we tried to--one of the chief reasons they didn't want to write was that they weren't good readers. They'd never read much of anything, so one of the purposes of the course was to encourage them to read. But you know, it wasn't a course in reading, it was a course in writing. Deciding on a Dissertation; Considering Librarianship Mosher: Now, as I said, I just gave up on it, really, and decided that that wasn't what I wanted to do. I suppose that was maybe the only fortunate thing about the war coming along. It gave me an opportunity to get away from it. Although, before I went into the army, I decided that I would become something else. And I thought of being a librarian too, as well as being an lexicographer . McCreery: Where did that idea come from, do you remember? Mosher: Librarian? Yes. I was walking home with one of my fellow assistants who knew another graduate student who was going to library school. And Gibbon Butler, my friend in the English department and fellow assistant, said to me, "Why don't you think of becoming a librarian? So-and-so likes the school." And it sort of was illuminating to me. I hadn't even thought of library work as a possible profession before. And so that started me thinking, well, maybe that would be better for me than teaching. So before I left Illinois I had the idea of becoming a librarian. McCreery: It's interesting how a chance suggestion can have a big effect sometimes. Mosher: Yes, that's right, 19 McCreery: Meanwhile, you were working your way towards your Ph.D. Tell me a little bit more about the person who became your adviser and your mentor. Jones, you said? Mosher: H. S. V. Jones. I don't really know what his first name was. Everyone called him H. S. V. Jones. [laughter] He was a Harvard graduate and the world's most respected Spenser scholar. Well, he was very remote and rather a cold person, I thought. Whenever he met or passed anybody—any woman that he knew—on the sidewalk, he would take off his hat and bow and be very formal. I don't think I had any meetings with him except in class or seeing him about the necessary paperwork—no talks about what I was doing or what I wanted to do or anything like that. He did see me through. I did finish the preliminary examinations for the doctorate. It took me a couple years after I started, because my written examinations weren't as good as some members of the committee thought they ought to be, and I was told to wait for another year before taking the oral. Professor Jones stood by me all the way through that, didn't give up on me. I did finally pass the oral examination, and the next job was to find something for a dissertation. And since he was my- -I don't know whether he suggested it or not. I guess maybe he did suggest that I take a subject he was interested in, and that was the early English translations— or I guess it was the fifteenth-century English translations of the Psalms. He thought this was an important bridge to modern English. It would bring together the interest in words and interest in early literature, and he would be the adviser. I got that title accepted and started collecting new translations and working on getting some kind of idea of what the dissertation might be, when Professor Jones died of a heart attack. I was really up a tree or something then, because he was the only one on the faculty who would be able to guide that dissertation. I didn't know enough to do it by myself. Then I decided that maybe I would forget about the Psalms and do something more lexicographical, and I decided on the subject of "The Syntax of Roger Ascham." Now Roger Ascham was an Elizabethan writer who was the tutor of Queen Elizabeth. He wrote on various— well, "The Syntax of Roger Ascham" indicates that he wrote on the subject of grammar- -English grammar and so on. This was an early stage in the development of modern English. And this meant that I should change my advisers. I had to change advisers anyway, but a new member of the faculty had just come in who was an Old English and Old Middle English 20 scholar, Henning Larson, from the University of Iowa. He became my adviser, and I started out on the idea of "The Syntax of Roger Ascham." Later on the war intervened, and later on this became—this is jumping way ahead of the time. McCreery: That's okay. Mosher: I thought a lot about becoming a librarian while I was in the army, and I wrote to the head librarian--! was stationed in the Hawaiian Islands for quite a while--! wrote to the head librarian of Hawaii for suggestions and so on. And I wrote to [Sydney B. Mitchell], the dean of the University of California library school, asking about being able to come to California and what he thought of my plans. And it became obvious that really I ought to finish the doctorate, since I was that close. It didn't seem to me that a dissertation entitled "The Syntax of Roger Ascham" would be of any benefit to a future librarian, [laughs] so I gave that up. I wasn't ^very much interested in it anyway. Working at the Newberry Library and Attending Library School, 1946-1950 Mosher: The opportunity to become a librarian evolved in a strange way, too. I wrote to Henning Larson, told him I was planning to change to librarianship. Before I knew it — this is after I'd been discharged from the army--I got a letter from Stanley Pargellis, who was the head librarian at the Newberry Library in Chicago, telling me that he had been talking with Henning Larson, who was my adviser and who at that time was dean of liberal arts at the University of Illinois. Henning Larson had suggested that I might be interested in working in a library, and Pargellis was just desperate for librarians. There weren't any. Library schools had not been functioning—librarians had all been drafted, or most of them had— and he needed someone to stand behind the reference desk. Henning Larson thought-- [the Newberry] is a library in the humanities --that I might be able to do it. So Pargellis offered me a job, basically. And that seemed to satisfy a good many needs for me. It would get me back to Illinois where I could finish my doctorate. It would give me library experience. And it turned out that Pargellis had a scheme of making this an apprenticeship under the G.I. Bill of 21 Rights. I would work at the Newberry and go to the University of Chicago library school, get my degree and experience at the same time, and the Newberry would provide me with experience in all departments of the library, from binding preparation to cataloging. Seemed like a good deal, and so we went back to Urbana and stayed with friends, and I went up to see Pargellis and he was all for it. I started work the next day. [laughter] That's practically what I did, and it was no problem at all. I knew enough to be behind the reference desk--I could help people — and I liked doing it. I liked Pargellis and the Newberry Library. I had been at the Newberry before when I was a student at Illinois, so I knew what a good place it was. I enjoyed working, did well, went to library school—and thought that was awful. McCreery: Ah! [laughter] Well, how do you mean? Mosher: Well, it was a very, very poor library school at that point. They had lost to the armed services most of their faculty, one way or another, and they were just managing to get along by having people from the community teach or people in the library school—they didn't have much of a faculty left, really, so it was some of the worst courses I've ever had. And I thought at the time that it was the worst educational experience I'd had. Of course, it didn't bother me much because I was working in a library, and of course I had taught, you know, how to use a library in the freshman English course. They all had to write a library theme, pick a subject on how to use the library, so I knew about using libraries besides from just my own experience. So at the very beginning of the summer of 1946— Evelyn and my older son Randy were in Urbana staying with a friend, and I could not find a place to live in Chicago. There just weren't any places—nothing in the newspapers. I was allowed to stay in a YMCA for a certain number of weeks, and then I couldn't stay there any longer. I have to mention another person at this point who went to the Newberry with me from Illinois—Ben Bowman. He was also an English Ph.D. candidate and was searching for— he had failed his tests, his preliminary exams and doctoral exams at the University of Chicago, and his wife was teaching at the University of Illinois during the war, so that's why he was in Urbana. The two of us that Henning Larson had suggested went together to be interviewed by Pargellis, and both of us decided to accept his plan. So we started together on this venture. I 22 McCreery: Mosher : don't know why I thought I had to bring him up now, but--oh, he and I both were staying at the YMCA. We couldn't stay there any longer. This was during the summer, and Pargellis, whose family spent the summer in Maine, had a large apartment in Chicago. He suggested that we just come and live with him until we found a place to live. We lived with him all summer. We couldn't find any place to live, but toward the end--in the meantime I'd been corresponding with Sydney Mitchell of the library school here in Berkeley. And the university had for graduate students at that point--! guess it was what they call University Village now--it was just being started. I had applied for one of those, thinking, "Well, if we can't find a place to live in Chicago, we'll have to go to California." But just then, the Lutheran pastor—oh, what do you call it- -who had made Evelyn a member of the church in Grand Forks was then living in Chicago at the old Chicago Lutheran Bible School, which was in the area just west of the loop. There were dormitories there that were now being used as dormitories for Lutheran theological students. There wasn't any Bible school anymore, but the dormitories were rented to Lutheran students, and Evelyn found out about this. A good friend of Evelyn's who lived in Chicago found out about this and told us about it. We applied for one of the flats in this dormitory- it had been converted into apartments—and got one. Just then learned that there was an opportunity to get a place in California, but we decided we'd better stay in Illinois because of the doctorate problem. And so we rented the place. It was three bedrooms around one bathroom and a hallway. It needed painting and so on, and I did that while Evelyn got ready to come. She and Randy came up in September then. From then on we were pretty well set in Chicago. We stayed there for a couple of years and then we moved to— the Newberry Library had an apartment building close to the library itself where we finally were able to get an apartment, but it was hard to get anything in those days. You had to be put on waiting lists and you couldn't get a gas stove for a long time. We finally did. A refrigerator and so on were just impossible to get, so we put things out the window. To keep cool. We had a little electric pan on the stove—no, that isn't the right word for it--to cook on. McCreery: Kind of a hot plate? 23 Mo she r: Yes, a hot plate. U.S. Army Service in World War II. 1943-1946 McCreery: You had the one son by then? And where was he born? Mosher: He was born in Champaign, [Illinois], Oh, I skipped over all that, eh? Yes, in 1943 he was born in Champaign. And three months later I was drafted and had to report to Michigan in June. He was born in March. McCreery: You got to meet him first? Mosher: Yes, I saw him for three months and we took him—both Evelyn's parents and my parents were living in Grand Forks, so we decided that she'd better go to Grand Forks and live with Randy, because she had a baby. I went back to Grand Forks with her and deposited Evelyn and the baby, and then I had to come back to Michigan for entrance into the army. McCreery: What happened in your army service? Mosher: It was mostly just waiting and being useless and hating every minute of it. What could they do with an English teacher? [laughs] Nearly all the English teachers that had become my friends and so on were able to get commissions one way or another, but nobody would give me a commission because of my eyesight. In fact, I even had a position lined up to become an English teacher at Annapolis. When I happened to learn of an officer who was an English teacher at Annapolis, and he was being called to active duty—active sea duty--I thought I could replace him. Everything went fine until my eyes were examined, you know, so no commission for that. I was just waiting to be drafted, and I was drafted into the infantry-- just drafted into the army, I guess. But I had been told by other people that maybe some English teachers [were] doing jobs as classification people, interviewing new entrants into the service, seeing what kind of jobs they could handle. Since I'd been a teacher, I ought to be able to talk with people and find out whether they were truck drivers or what. As it turned out that's mostly what they wanted, the truck drivers. Anyway, the person who interviewed me agreed that would be fine and sent me to Camp Lee, Virginia, for basic training—a special kind of basic 24 McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: training, not the regular infantry training but a special kind of training for clerks, I guess, mainly. That was in July. Camp Lee, Virginia. I'd never experienced heat like that before. But anyway, then I went to a school in Washington—Jefferson University or College? [Washington & Jefferson College] It was near Washington, Pennsylvania—for six weeks or a couple months , and then I was shipped out to Fresno to a reclassification center there at the fairgrounds. And Evelyn and Randy, after I'd been there for some months, were able to come out. I got out there, they came in March, and we were together there near the fairgrounds until the next January. Then this replacement depot was disbanded and I was put into a group to be disposed of one way or another and was sent to Dayton, Ohio, where I waited, oh, a few weeks for them to decide where I could go. Finally it was decided to send me to Hawaii, by way of Salt Lake City and Seattle. I don't know. I didn't feel that I was accomplishing anything. All during that time it didn't make any difference about this classification bit, really. It was just something the army had to go through, I guess. So I stayed in the islands until-- well, the group I was with had been assigned to go to Guam to establish a classification depot there on the first of September. We had all been given carbines. Up until that time I'd never had a gun except when we were in basic training or learning how to shoot a rifle. But we were given these and they needed to be cleaned up. I was out behind the barracks, cleaning up my carbine, when the radio announced the first atom bomb. So we weren't sent to Guam on September the first. I was eventually sent back to headquarters of Haycomb Field as a clerk typist. By the time I had enough points to be discharged, I was about the only one there who could write a letter. [laughs] Do you remember your thoughts upon hearing about the bomb? Oh, I thought it was wonderful. I didn't know anything about what had happened, you know, what was involved, but [it meant the] end of the war. Yes, just that fast, everything changed, didn't it? Yes. It surely did. Was there anything redeeming about your army experience personally? 25 Mosher: The time that Evelyn, Randy, and I were together was good— didn't have anything to do with the army. What I was trying to say was that I don't think I did anything except harm the military capabilities of the United States. I had no interest in become a hero of any sort . [Interview 2: March 19, 1999] ## McCreery: When we finished taping our last session early this week, we were talking about your service in the army during World War II, and of course the war had ended by the time you were released in 1946. You were talking generally about your thoughts about the war and the military and I just wondered if you could add any postscript to that. Mosher: Oh, all my life I objected to the idea of war, and from as early as I can remember I vowed never to participate in one. But when it came right down to it, I couldn't see putting Evelyn and my newborn son Randy in a position where they couldn't support themselves in any way, or I would probably be unable to support myself, so I didn't seriously consider conscientious objection. In fact, I hardly knew that there was such a thing—real formal conscientious objection. I had to take ROTC at the university—Reserve Officers Training Corps—and I detested that and tried to get out of it every way I could. And I was called before— and I pleaded conscientious objection when I was a sophomore I think, or junior— one of the years I was going. And I wasn't allowed to --I was brought before a committee and asked the question, "If some German soldiers or enemy soldiers came to your house and raped your sister, would you try to stop them?" And I said sure. "Well, then obviously you're not a conscientious objector," so I was denied being a conscientious objector for ROTC, and I had to go on taking the courses. But a very kindly dean of liberal arts suggested that I try to get out of it by some other means. I was, I told you, delivering papers every afternoon, and this was very inconvenient to ROTC because they had drill after school. I petitioned to get out of ROTC that way and it worked, [laughs] so I never did finish ROTC. But I guess maybe that experience convinced me that I wouldn't be able to validate myself as a conscientious objector. I didn't know how it worked. But although I really--! can't think of anything during my service in the army that I in any way enjoyed in connection with the army itself. I met some people who became friends. I liked to play cribbage, and I found someone who liked to play 26 cribbage and we played cribbage every night, but otherwise, I could only look forward to the day when I was no longer a prisoner, as I considered myself. McCreery: You were a sergeant upon discharge? Mosher: I became a sergeant, yes. McCreery: What were your feelings then, when you got out? Mosher: About this time I was beginning to feel not so unhappy—after I said I hated it every minute of it and so on, but I did enjoy Hawaii so much that when it came right down to it, I thought even of staying on in the army so that I could stay in the islands. But I had enough reason to observe that where you wanted to be in the army was not probably where you were going to be. So anyway, I didn't seriously consider it. I just wanted to get out and be responsible for myself. As I mentioned before, I was trying to figure out how I could become a librarian rather than a teacher. And by the time I had enough points to get out, I had corresponded with various people and pretty much decided to try to become a librarian. I knew that meant going to a library school. I think I told you something about corresponding with Stanley Pargellis at the Newberry. McCreery: Perhaps you can just pick up then upon your discharge from the army. Did you return immediately to Chicago? Mosher: No. Evelyn and Randy were both in Grand Forks yet. I was discharged out here in California, and off the boat I took a train immediately to Grand Forks and just waited to see what would happen. I went out to the university, and they were looking for tutors for students who had come back to the university and needed special help. McCreery: In Grand Forks? Mosher: Yes, in Grand Forks, so for the rest of that year living in Grand Forks, I tutored in some kind of government program. I could have gone back to teaching at North Dakota, and of course they wanted me to come back at Illinois, but I had decided pretty much that I didn't want to teach freshman English any more. Then this letter from Pargellis came, and so I decided to go back to Illinois and see what it was all about at any rate. I did know that if I was going to stay in academia, I'd have to 27 have a doctorate. I'd come too close to that to just give it up. McCreery: What did that letter contain, exactly? Mosher: I wish I had it. I do have it somewhere. I spent quite a bit of time this past week looking in old boxes, and I've got all the correspondence between Evelyn and me ever since we first knew each other, I think, but I can't find the correspondence about the Newberry Library or any of the early library experiences. And I know they're around somewhere. Anyway, it simply reported that Pargellis had been to the University of Illinois to see if there was anyone there who could be a reference librarian at the Newberry. That dean, who was my adviser then, suggested my name and Ben Bowman's name. We were both graduate students in English. So he more or less offered me the position and suggested this way of getting a library school degree, by going to the University of Chicago library school while working at the Newberry in a kind of apprenticeship deal and at the same time being able to work in various departments—all the departments of the Newberry library- -while going to library school. It seemed like a good deal to me, so we went back to Urbana and stayed with friends . Ben and I went to Chicago and talked with Pargellis and decided to accept his offer. And that worked out very well. I think I told you about the difficulty of finding housing and so on, but the library experience was very good. I did work in every department of the library. I got an excellent idea of what goes on behind the scenes. And I was able to, I think, do a good job as reference librarian. I could answer most of the questions that came in—lead people to the right sources . McCreery: By apprenticeship, they meant the chance to work in all departments? Mosher: Well, yes— they meant go to the University of Chicago library school and work in the library at the same time- -some kind of financial business there worked out between the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Newberry Library. As far as I know, Ben Bowman and I were the only two who ever took advantage of it. I never heard of anyone else who worked in a library and went to library school, under the G.I. Bill of Rights at any rate. 28 McCreery: Do you recall your salary as an apprentice at the Newberry? I think it may be on your c.v. or something. Mosher: I guess I don't. It was oh, thirty—I'm trying to think. I think I came to Berkeley for $4,200 and I think I was getting $3,600 at the Newberry. This was after the apprenticeship was over. I had my degree from the library school and the apprenticeship part of the library program was over with, too. In fact, both of us had been appointed heads of the reference department by this time, and so we had regular jobs there. Finishing the Ph.D. after the War; Revising a Book for Publication Mosher: There's a lot more to be said about what happened at the Newberry besides just working in the library. I was determined to finish my degree, and I didn't have a subject. The Newberry Library had a program of fellows and the Newberry Library fellow professors or scholars could come to the library for a certain period of time and work and advise the library on purchasing and on the quality of its holdings. And one of these fellows had been John T. Flanagan, a professor of American literature from the University of Illinois. And one of the jobs of these fellows, also, was to locate material for the library and to get acquisitions for the library. It seemed to Pargellis, and probably other people, too, who were involved in acquisitions that it would be a good idea to try to get the literary papers of the Chicago authors. Chicago had a kind of literary renaissance, with a lot of rather famous American authors writing in Chicago. And also, the most important magazine of literary criticism, of book reviews, during this period from 1880 to 1930 or something like that was The Dial . And Flanagan and others at the Newberry got in touch with the heirs of Francis Fisher Browne, who was the editor of The Dial, and got his papers, so they were at the Newberry. Flanagan, knowing this--I mean, that these papers were there—thought they ought to be investigated and suggested The Dial as a subject for a dissertation under him, which sounded good to me. I liked Flanagan, although I didn't know him very well. He was gone, I think, before I came to the Newberrty. It seemed just sort of ready made and an especially a good subject for a fellow who was going to be a librarian. Literary review magazines seemed to me to be a much better subject than 29 "The Syntax of Roger Ascham," so I switched to that and everybody approved it. I started reading The Dial, oh, I don't know how many volumes, and I also began to collect further papers. The papers of William Morton Payne, who was the chief literary editor of The Dial, were not at the Newberry, but I found out where they were and managed to interview the lady, whose name I can't remember right now. Anyway, she gave his papers to the Newberry Library, so I had access to them, also. I interviewed everybody I could think of who was still around. So that settled the problem of the dissertation, finally. I had my final examination on the dissertation just before I left for California, September of 1950. I came out late because I had to have this meeting at Illinois about the dissertation, which was just a formal thing. You probably wouldn't have to have it nowadays, but in those days you had to have certain meetings. At the Newberry Library, when I was working on this dissertation—this was not part of the Newberry. I did my work at the Newberry separately from this. This was on my own time, of course. While I was there I got involved with still another project. Archer Taylor, who was a professor of German here at Berkeley and who had retired from the University of Chicago and was rather a famous scholar, had written a book on The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyraa— that ' s how I got into that. Well, Archer Taylor was out here in Berkeley and the Newberry Library had agreed to publish his book on anonyma and pseudonyma, and the copy came in to the Newberry and Pargellis had me take a look at it just to make sure it was okay to be printed. As I looked through it, I found all kinds of mistakes-- just typographical mistakes—and I thought it needed to be proofread and I also, from what little I knew about bibliographical history and so forth, noticed a number of—well, I began to check up— a number of errors involved and questions that needed to be answered. I pointed out enough of these to Pargellis so he said, "Well, looks to me as though you'd better go over this and revise it as much as it needs to be." That wasn't a simple short task because I didn't finish doing it until I was out here. It meant really redoing the whole thing because it was so loaded with— mostly just superficial errors, you know, but Pargellis said, "I don't want the Newberry Library to publish anything with any errors, and certainly we should avoid as many of them as we can." 30 Then I began to correspond with Archer Taylor, and he agreed that this ought to be done. I was writing the dissertation and actually writing The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma, and working at the library from, oh, about 1948 to 1950. The Newberry Library: From Apprentice to Head of Reference Mosher: I don't know where to bring in the idea of coming out here. Should I talk more about the Newberry? McCreery: Yes. If you don't mind, I would like to stick with that for a moment . Let ' s return to when you first came to the Newberry in the apprentice position. Mosher: Yes, the first thing was standing behind the reference desk and taking care of that. McCreery: Can you describe the atmosphere there for me? Mosher: Yes, I certainly can. It's a library restricted to the humanities. It began as a general library which collected everything and then somebody else- -well, then Chicago began to think of libraries as important and left enough money to establish a library. Well, they didn't want to establish two general libraries, so the second request was for the John Crerar Library. The John Crerar Library became a science library, and the Newberry gave up the science and even transferred books to Crerar. Two very excellent research libraries . So it was always intended to be a library for scholars. It was supposed to have research materials that scholars would be able to use, and it wasn't intended to be a library for the general public, so the general public didn't use it much. Most of the patrons of the Newberry Library were scholars from the surrounding universities, particularly in Chicago, but [scholars from] anywhere in the middle west or all over the country would come there and use the materials that the Newberry held. But some people did come to the library to just use it as a library—come and sleep over the newspapers or the magazines-- and created problems of various kinds. 31 McCreery : Mo she r: McCreery: Mosher : McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: But most of the questions that you would get at the reference desk would be from scholars who had come to use the particular materials of the Newberry. They would like to go through them as quickly and easily as possible, and so the people at the reference desk would help them find the materials. And there were card catalogs and so on, but they had to be--as a special service to scholars, which meant all readers, if you wanted a book to hold a book in your hands, it would have to be paged for you. In other words, the stacks were not open. They got very good service, and a great many of the questions at the reference desk were just about how can I get these materials. So you learned quickly the setup of the library and the stacks and how to find the materials in them, which is different in every library. Did you enjoy reference service? Oh, yes. It wasn't long before I decided I'd just as soon stay there the rest of my life. And well, I would have, I think, because I thought it was a wonderful library and I liked working there . But it was in the center—you know, 1000 North in Chicago, so it was really not quite the center of Chicago, but very much so, very close to the center. And we managed all right, because the Newberry had an apartment building of its own. It was the first building built for the library while the library building was being built. It was made into the Irving Apartments and rented out mostly to Newberry employees, but possibly other people, too. Where was that building? It was only two blocks from the library. Street. It's on North Clark You and your wife and son were able to live there starting in "46, was it? No, '46 there was no room in the Irving Apartments, so I think I mentioned that we found a place at the Chicago Lutheran Bible School, '46 to '48. Then I guess it was '48 I became head of the reference library, head reference librarian. What about the Newberry building itself? There was just half a building at the time. Only half of it was built with the idea that there was, of course, land for the rest of it. It was an entire city block, and just half of the 32 McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: building was built. Then when the library needed more space, it was much too expensive to build the same thing again- -build in the same way—and so it just sat there for a long, long- well, I've forgotten now. It was after I had left there that they sort of added a second part to it. Still, it was not built of the same materials. As a matter of fact, I haven't been back there since it was redone. The departments that I was particularly interested in were the rare book department that Gertrude Woodward was head of and the Ayer Collection that Ruth Butler was in charge of. Ruth Butler was the wife of Pierce Butler, who taught at the University of Chicago. I think I must have mentioned him. Maybe not. Anyway, I had courses under him at the University of Chicago library school, and he and his wife lived in the same apartments we lived in, the Irving Apartments that belonged to the Newberry Library. We were not in the same building, but this building was built around a courtyard, which made it pretty good for children. But I was beginning to talk about why I left the Newberry. Well, here was Randy, and this was not a very good place for a child-- 1000 North, no, I said Clark but it's North State Street. He was beginning to start school, and it was a pretty awful school. No playground. They would--! can't think of the word--rope off the street for recess periods, and this was a really--un-"anything you can think of" place for kids. I wouldn't let Randy walk to school. I took him to school myself and at noon, fortunately, when I had my lunch, I could go and pick him up and take him back home again, because it was a dangerous street. Traffic was terrible, and the people who lived around there were not very law-abiding, I guess you might say. It all worked out. I can see why that was not ideal, though, for raising your son. No, well, that's right. So the only thing we could do if we stayed on at the Newberry, eventually, would be to live in one of the suburbs and come in by train. That meant a daily commute of some time, and I didn't want to commute. I didn't want Randy to go to school where he was going, so I decided we'd better leave. The stage was set for your finding an opportunity elsewhere? Yes, I was looking for another place. Of course I was too busy to bother too much about what I was going to do next. I had all these projects going at the same time. I could stay on at the Newberry as long «.s I wanted to, but Pargellis said that 33 the library could not afford both Ben and me, and it looked as though I would have the better opportunity to find another position. So that was sort of the way it was put. He'd keep us on for a while, both of us, but one of us would have to go. McCreery: Before we talk about your coming to California, let's talk a little bit more about your time at the Newberry Library- - specifically, what were the circumstances that led to your being promoted to head of the reference department? Mosher: Both Ben Bowman and I came in at the same time. Basically what the Newberry needed was someone to man the reference desks . Well, the reference librarian had been there for many years- - his name was John Windle--and was a highly respected librarian, but he really had become tired of working in a library. He and his wife both liked antiques and were working toward opening an antique business, and so he would come to the library late nearly every morning and sometimes he wouldn't come at all. Sometimes days would go by without our ever seeing him. The mainstay- -the one who was really the reference librarian during all this time- -was a woman named Bess Finn. I often told my classes when I was teaching reference that all I learned about reference was from Bess Finn. She really knew how to handle reference situations, and she knew her collection very, very well. She knew all about Chicago history. There were so many people who would come in- -just the general public --and ask about some feature of Chicago history, because the Newberry library was in Chicago and history was its chief subject. At the desk of the Newberry Library there would be files of typical questions that people would ask about the area and about the library. McCreery: She set those up? Mosher: Yes, she had set them up. She was a very good librarian, although she had never gone to library school. Most of the people in the Newberry Library had never gone to library school. McCreery: But that was common then, was it not? Mosher: Well, yes. I suppose so. McCreery: Or you tell me. I don't mean to put words in your mouth. [laughs] 34 Mosher: Certainly a library like the Newberry--see, many libraries run by governments require the library school degree in order to fill a position as a librarian; the Newberry had no such reason for insisting on library school graduation, because not a penny of support for the Newberry ever came from government. It came only from its original bequest, which was mostly near-northside Chicago real estate, so it didn't really diminish in value much. I think the Newberry thought that it had enough money forever to do whatever it wanted to- -proved not to be true, but that's a story after I left there. Anyway, Bess Finn agreed with Ben and me that Windle wasn't doing his job and was interfering with our ability to do our jobs. Pargellis, of course, the chief librarian, was aware of all this- -that he was coming in late and wasn't very much interested anymore. He saw the opportunity of getting rid of Windle, giving him enough money to establish his antique business, and putting us in as permanent employees, at least one of us eventually. So that's what happened. I never did like it very well that we came in and Windle went out, but you couldn't blame anyone except Windle. He just wouldn't do his job. By that time, I had worked with Mrs. Woodward, Gertrude Woodward, in the rare books room, which was a fascinating place. It's a wonderful collection of rare books. She had made a bibliography of all the incunabula there—one of the big collections of incunabula in the country. Ruth Butler, too, although I wasn't much interested in the Ayer Collection. It was a library of anything to do with the American Indian, basically. It was such a good bequest, by the way, that by the time when I was there, Ruth Butler was buying almost anything that mentioned an Indian. [laughs] It was a wonderful collection, and I liked working with it. McCreery: How did it come about that you and Mr. Bowman sort of shared the duties of head of reference? Mosher: That was simply when Windle left and they wanted- -we were both there and both sort of sharing the whole business anyway, because Windle wasn't bothering with it much. And I don't know why they didn't make Bess Finn head of the reference department. She deserved to be, but she just wasn't. McCreery: Was it just the three of you, then? Mosher: No, that was another reason why I became a teacher in a library school. They employed people to stand behind the reference desk, and they had been successful in the case of Ben and me. - 35 Pargellis, particularly, would just see somebody, someone would ask for a job, and he'd give them a job, and we didn't have any say about it, at first, at any rate. They didn't have any library school education, didn't know anything about libraries, and we had to give them library school, really. That made me think, well, maybe there is something to library school. I think I mentioned once that I felt that library school was largely a waste of time, but I began to revise my opinion when I learned how much library school did teach to someone who didn't know anything about libraries. McCreery: I take it, then, that you had to supervise these people that Pargellis hired? Mosher: Yes, yes. Well, they'd come in and they'd be working with us [laughs] mostly doing- -well, they obviously couldn't do it. You know, they'd have to call upon one of us all the time, or on Bess Finn, and they didn't know the operation of the library, so that convinced me that library schools fulfilled an important function. McCreery: How did you and Mr. Bowman split up your duties? Mosher: I don't think we did. We just—whatever came up we really— see, actually we weren't heads of anything, we were just working there. That was just a title. Pargellis did all the important things like budgeting and hiring and all that. Bess Finn was still there, too, to do the—well, she was there all the time. But there wasn't too much—it wasn't too complicated a business. It all ran by itself, pretty much. McCreery: Do you recall the size of the total staff of the Newberry at that time, about? Mosher: I never thought of a number. There were probably no more than fifty. Let me think. There was a genealogy department, a separate library on another floor. It was very active. It had a large collection of family history, but it had no more than three or four employees. There were a lot of— you might call them student assistants. They would be going to school somewhere and working at the Newberry in the meantime. 36 Further Recollections of Attending Library School. 1946-1948 McCreery : Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: McCreery: Mosher: In light of the comment you just made that you began to see value in library school, let's return just a moment to your own experience in library school. We did talk about that a little bit last time. I think you said the courses were terrible. the school there. Wasn't Yes. But tell me just a little bit about it founded by Louis Round Wilson? Yes. Was he still there? No, that was the problem. The faculty had been dispersed and not replaced, and so there were just people who didn't know how to teach or organize courses who were teaching. They were just very, very poorly done. Of course I would have to keep reminding myself that I was different from most of the students, because I had had so much experience. I was having experience in a library and I had had so much experience teaching how to use a library in the freshman English courses that I knew most of what they were—well, all I had to do to get through library school was to attend the classes. After the first two classes I was excused from attending them and given the opportunity to take special courses under Pierce Butler. At one point, Ben and I both decided that we didn't need the degree; we'd just quit going to library school. So we talked to the dean of the library school about us quitting, saying that it wasn't going to do us any good. He didn't want that to happen. I can't think of his name now. He became librarian at Stanford, eventually. But he suggested this. They wouldn't require us to take all these required courses that we didn't need to take, [laughter] that we already knew all the material—and to take courses under Pierce Butler, who graciously agreed just to--the courses weren't being offered at that particular time, but he would meet with us once at the beginning of the course, and we'd write a paper and that would be it. Pierce Butler was very deaf and it was hard for him to teach regularly. I remember the first time we ever met with him, he had a great big hearing aid and he put it out on the 37 table and said, "Talk into that." [laughter] that he taught me very much, really. I didn't feel So anyway, the one who taught the library administration at that time in the University of Chicago library school was the Chicago Public Library librarian. She was, oh, maybe a little past middle age. She'd never done anything except come up through the ranks in the Chicago Public Library. She didn't know anything about teaching, or she didn't know what to teach. She certainly didn't know very much about administration of any libraries except the Chicago Public, which was not a very well- run library at that time. So that was sort of typical of the courses we took. The wife of one of the professors who was a librarian taught a course, also, and she tried very hard, but she didn't know how to teach. So, as I said, the whole thing was simply a waste of time. McCreery: Who taught reference and bibliography, which became your specialty? Mosher: Well, that's a good question. I think we were excused from that course, because we both were working in reference. We did take some additional courses or separate courses under the chief reference librarian at the University of Chicago, whose name escapes me now—she's a well known reference librarian-- but it was just, you know, a very perfunctory account of how she did reference work at the University of Chicago, which was not very good because she didn't stand behind the desk and do reference work; she would work with the faculty members who needed help. I learned, frankly, nothing that has been useful to me about working in a library from going to a library school. McCreery: Now the degree you took was a BLS? Mosher: That's right. That was another problem there because, see, the University of Chicago library school was founded in order to give graduate experience or more than one year of library school. Actually it was founded to give the doctorate in librarianship, and it was the first library school to give doctorates . There wasn't any first-year program when it started. There was a program for a second year of librarianship study, and so that this first degree was a master's degree, and then most everybody who went to the University of Chicago library school 38 was in it for the doctoral program. A very large number of very good librarians went through that doctoral program. Just at the time that Ben and I went there, they decided to give a first-year program, a bachelor's degree. We were one of the first classes to have to get the bachelor's degree in librarianship. That's why I have a BLS instead of an MLS. Of course, that was all that was being given here in Berkeley until some years after I came. McCreery: Did you have much interaction with the American Library Association while you were in Chicago at any time? Mosher: No, I did not. I didn't have time. As I said before, I'm not a joiner, and I didn't like having to go to meetings. And I wasn't particularly interested in library association business. They seemed to be interested only in public libraries, and I didn't think that I would ever be in interested in public libraries at that time. At that time I was going to become a university librarian. That's what I wanted to be. I didn't want to have to fuss around with the problems of public libraries. Oh, I attended, I think, some meetings of the ALA when they met in Chicago- -very few, though. I did not have time to, and I was completely uninterested in most of the subjects . I went to meetings of the American Library Association after I came out here. The school always sent someone to represent the library school, particularly at the mid-winter meeting. So I did not have any experience with the American Library Association in Chicago. McCreery: We've talked about how you were finishing up your Ph.D. at this same time that you were head of reference at the Newberry. You told me you ended up with the topic about The Dial publication, and so on. Who ended up your adviser? Mosher: Flanagan. McCreery: Flanagan, the person that we just talked about this morning. Mosher: Yes. 39 III ON THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARIANSHIP FACULTY, 1950S Coming to Berkeley's School of Librarianship, 1950 McCreery: Now you say the Ph.D. degree came, or the final exams came, in September of 1950. By that time it sounds as if you had already lined up the job at Berkeley? Mosher: Well, I was on my way out here. McCreery: Perhaps you can just tell me how you first began considering the job at Berkeley and how the contact was made and so on. Mosher: Yes. It was in the summer of 1950. I was finishing my dissertation. I think I had it all written and was just getting it approved. I had it in my mind, of course, the fact that at least within a year or two I was going to have to find a job somewhere. The first job I think I ever asked for- -well, library job- -was I thought I'd like to be at Boulder, Colorado. I'd heard a great deal about it from a friend, and so I wrote to the head librarian at the University of Colorado library and asked for a position, explaining all the details. "Sorry, we don't have any position to offer you." So that's all I'd been able to do. One day I got a letter from then-Dean [J. Periam] Danton at Berkeley asking me if I'd be interested in a position teaching at Berkeley, at the library school. McCreery: Were you acquainted with him at the time? Mosher: No, I'd never heard of him before. He had gone to the University of Chicago library school, got his doctorate. He knew Pierce Butler. I also know that they needed new faculty members. He had corresponded with all the library schools. McCreery: Do you know how he got your name? 40 Mosher: Yes. He got my name from Pierce Butler. Pierce Butler suggested to Danton that I might be able to teach history of the book. What he wanted was someone to teach history of the book. Well, he did have someone, had had someone-- [John] Barr Tompkins was on the library school faculty. He resigned from the faculty—stayed on as a librarian at The Bancroft Library, but he resigned from the faculty- -because he did not approve of Danton 's marital problems. Danton and the wife of the Assistant [University] Librarian had fallen in love and had gotten married- -divorced and married- -and it was all blown up. You could hardly believe that anything like this could happen nowadays. Well, it couldn't happen nowadays. But it created a real scandal, especially in the library and the library school. And, well, most of the librarians and the library school faculty were not on speaking terms even, with Danton, for a while. Barr Tompkins resigned, as I said, because of this. He didn't want to be associated with Danton anymore. I mean, it must have been real hard feelings if you quit your job in sort of a moment's notice. Anyway, Danton was left to try to find someone to teach history of the book, which was a required course. There weren't many people around. I must have been at the bottom of the barrel, because [laughs] I had never taught history of the book, didn't know much about the history of the book. But I talked with Pierce Butler about it, and Pierce thought I could handle it and he said, "Anyway, it would get you out there to California, and you'll be able to find a library job once you get out there." So I agreed. I did want to come out here, and of course I was really--it was a hard time putting together, you know, the fact that I had quit teaching English because I didn't want to teach--! vowed that I'd never teach again, and I'd gone into library work to get out of teaching—and here was a job teaching! But I did want to come to Berkeley, [laughs] Danton wanted someone to interview me before they employed me. [laughs] He was going to the American Library Association convention--! think it was in July and I think it was in Cleveland. And nobody flew in those days. He came by train and he had to change trains in Chicago, so his train was due to arrive at Union Station or whatever in Chicago at a certain time and, if I were there, we could walk together over to where his train would leave for Detroit or Cleveland, whatever it was. [laughs] So this happened. We met and walked to the 41 train he wanted to catch--and well, I don't think he said anything right then and there, but I soon got a letter from him offering me the position. I think I had- -I didn't bother him very much. I should not have accepted the position as instructor, because I was going to have my doctorate and if you had a doctorate, you ought not to be hired as an instructor. At any rate, that settled that. The salary was good enough, $4,200, and the university would pay my moving expenses, and I'd have time enough to get my doctorate absolutely completed. This was July, I think. McCreery: Do you remember much more about your interview with him in the train station? Mosher: No, I don't remember much of anything. Well, he just looked me up and down. I think he just wanted to see that I wasn't a [laughs] monster and that I had clothes on, or something! But he just sort of looked me up and down and I don't know whether he said, "You'll do," or not, but he inferred that. [laughs] McCreery: He was offering a full-time job, however. Mosher: Yes, it was a full-time job as instructor. McCreery: Did you know what else you would teach besides history of the book? Mosher: I did not even know that. Well, no, that's right, 1 did know that- -but that would be the second semester. I didn't know what I would teach the first semester. That's one of the reasons why I was able to be late in coming in the fall. I didn't have anything to teach. That same year—the fall of 1950--there were three new additions to the faculty: Reuben Peiss, and Will Ready, and me. Both of them were there, had already come, and Will Ready had been appointed to teach reference. Reuben Peiss was teaching- - well, I think, introduction to librarianship or something like that, and I was to teach history of the book the second semester. The first semester I was to teach methods of research along with two other members of the f acuity- -LeRoy Merritt and I guess Peiss, I don't remember right now- -but that was a course that not many people would be taking. It turned out, I think, there were two people who took it. There were three faculty members and two students. [laughter] So the first semester I was here I had nothing to teach, nothing to do, except prepare for methods of research in the spring semester. McCreery: Let's continue our discussion of your decision to accept the library school job at Berkeley. Mosher: Well, I did try to find out more about what the situation was here . McCreery: Before you came out from Chicago? Mosher: Before I came out. A graduate of the library school worked at the Newberry and told me that there was a big scandal involving the dean, and that the faculty and California librarians in particular were divided about this. McCreery: Did you know what she was referring to at the time? Mosher: No. She told me then that it was a matter of the dean having got divorced and remarried and having married the wife of the assistant librarian at Berkeley—who later went on to become librarian of Harvard College, by the way. There were people who said, [sighs] there was good reason for the divorce because Lois ' s--Lois Danton' s--f irst husband didn't want to have any children, and she did [want children] . That was why she was willing to marry Danton, under what was considered at that time scandalous circumstances. Also [the fact] that--I can't think of his name, I could look it up--but the assistant librarian [Douglas Bryant] went and cried on everybody's shoulder and made a big fuss about it--didn't go through the divorce graciously. The Loyalty Oath Controversy; Early Impressions of Berkeley Mosher: But there was another reason why I hesitated, or why I thought there might be a problem about coming to Berkeley, that this was the beginning of the oath controversy. McCreery: Yes, the loyalty oath. Mosher: It was a really serious problem here, of faculty resigning and lawsuits. I didn't know anything about this really until I got faint glimmerings of it from people I talked with in Illinois, but I was accustomed to signing the same statement. The University of Illinois required every faculty member to sign a statement saying he'd never been a member of the Communist Party. Well, what's all the fuss about? Everybody does it. I realize now that if I'd known all the circumstances, it would have been a big factor in whether I would come or not, but by the time I found out about it, all the arrangements had been made. That's perhaps enough about "before coming to Berkeley." McCreery: You had been stationed in Fresno and you certainly knew California, but what were your impressions of Berkeley, the place, when you first arrived? Mosher: I liked it very much, of course. The climate and the—I've always thought it an ideal place in which to live and one of the most beautiful spots I've ever seen. I liked particularly the climate because I don't like hot weather. I don't like cold weather. [laughs] And I've sort of felt ever since I arrived like a prisoner of the fog. I don't like to get very far away from it. [laughs] I love fog. I don't like warm, sunny weather. I suppose this is my North Dakota upbringing. But anyway, we sort of were in the same situation as when we first went to Illinois. We didn't have any place to live. August, and even September, are not good times to find places to live in Berkeley. But fortunately I had a cousin who was an insurance agent in Oakland. He was then still single, and I called him up and told him, look, Dean, you have to find us a place to live, and I specified what I wanted. At the same time Evelyn's parents decided to come out to California and live with us. Evelyn's mother's mother had recently died, and Evelyn's father was the victim of a stroke and couldn't talk and had a hard time getting around, so she had him to take care of--and, well, just decided they'd come out and live with us, so we needed a house big enough for two families, sort of. My cousin found a place around on Del Norte Street, a large house with four bedrooms and a view and a fireplace, all the things that I'd specified. [laughs] Furthermore, Dean- -that was his name, Dean Whitesel, my favorite aunt's son—went on vacation back to Minneapolis where his parents lived, where he'd grown up and left his Studebaker convertible and his apartment for us to use while he was gone the first couple weeks. [laughter] So we came by train, and after stopping in Colorado to visit my sister for some time—not very long, because we didn't have very long— and arrived at night, stayed in Dean's apartment that very night. The next morning I had to be at The Faculty Club for a luncheon in my honor. McCreery: In your honor. 44 Mosher: Well, you know, first time anyone had seen me except Danton. I remember driving from Oakland to Berkeley—wait a minute — yes , that's right—and parking on the campus, not far from the library. And after the luncheon and various other things -- getting a library card and so on— I got into my car and had to stop a passerby to ask how do you get out of this place? [laughs] I didn't know which way to turn or how it would be possible to get to a public street. I was sold. McCreery: I'm glad to hear you got a library card on your first day. Mosher: Yes. The only assistant librarian at that time was Marion Milczewski, and after lunch he took me to—the library and the library school used to have lunch together frequently at The Faculty Club— and gave the authority for me to get a library card. Yes, I needed that right away because I was working on the Anonyma and Pseudonyma, yet. And then I was shown to my office too, on the fourth floor of the old [Doe] library. Of course, that's where the library school was then. McCreery: That must have been right around the time they moved to the fourth floor. Or perhaps they were in the process of moving? Do you recall? Mosher: Let me think. I guess it hadn't moved yet, and it wasn't on the fourth floor, but my first office was up on the fourth floor. McCreery: In any event, it was around the time you came. Mosher: Yes. Yes, I had thought we were going to move— I had been led to believe by Danton that the library school was going to be in the annex, was going to have a brand new building, but it turned out that, of course, we weren't. We stayed where we were for a while. I think maybe just about the time I came they were moving. The First Semester at Berkeley McCreery: Perhaps you could just say a little bit more about what your duties were right away, since you were coming late after the semester started. Mosher: As I reported, I had nothing to do except attend faculty meetings, which there weren't very many of, and to get acquainted. As I said, I was working on the Anonyma and 45 Pseudonyma book. That kept me very involved, and I didn't have anything to do by way of courses, except this one course that we divided up the three of us into--I don't know who took the first part of the semester. I think I had the last part of the semester, so I didn't have anything to do the first two- thirds of the semester. McCreery: Again, that was you and Mr. Ready? Mosher: I'm not sure—no, it was Mr. Merritt, LeRoy Merritt, whose house by the way, this was, before we moved in. McCreery: This house we're in now? Mosher: Yes. This was LeRoy Merritt 's house. Not then, but we bought it from him. And Reuben Peiss, I think. McCreery: The course was shared by three, who each took a part of it. Mosher: Yes, that's right. And in different time intervals. McCreery: So you had some time to get settled into your new house and so on? Mosher: Oh, yes, and we needed it, too, because Evelyn's parents didn't come until—it was 1950--Korean War--our furniture didn't come for, well, until the very end of September. We moved into this house that was rented for us. We had a house, but there was no furniture in it. The next door neighbor was an elderly lady who was very friendly and whose son lived a couple blocks away. They lent us couple of army cots and some bedding. McCreery: Pretty spartan? Mosher: Yes. McCreery: What did your wife think of all of these changes in your lives? Mosher: She has always liked Berkeley, and we were so glad to get out of Chicago. And for Randy--the very first day he went—he was late to get into school, second grade, and his teacher was a lovely young woman. He had had an old battle axe in Chicago, [laughter] who'd been there for years and years. We had had her over for dinner one night and you could see why- -well, she wouldn't be a real inspiration to the first-graders. But both Randy and- -I think something a little bit long here- -not long, but we stayed at my cousin Dean's apartment for the first couple weeks. It wasn't too bad there. We had time to get acquainted with our next door neighbor, and Evelyn had time to 46 do a lot of housecleaning and get sort of settled in the neighborhood before our furniture came. Then around the first of October, her parents came and their furniture. It was all, well, just really delightful because the weather and everything pleased us so much. And there were no particular problems at the library school. Everything was functioning all right. And certainly no problem for me because I didn't have anything to teach. McCreery: [laughs] Well, you did start teaching, though, later in that semester. Can you describe your first teaching experience here? Mosher: No, I've said there were only those two or three students, so we just sat around and talked. I didn't know anything about the methods of research except, you know, what do you do? What are the methods? They had some guidelines from the others, but they hadn't taught the course either. Maybe LeRoy Merritt had --I think I just drew on my own experience on what you do in research. I don't remember the students at all. At that time we didn't have a doctoral program, but there was a second-year master's program and the first degree was a bachelor's degree. Early Experiences at the School of Librarianship; Colleagues McCreery: What were your impressions of the library school itself when you were in your first year, do you recall? Mosher: I liked it, of course. After I started teaching the history of the book, I began to realize that my previous teaching experience had been very one-sided. I had students before- only students who were not very good and forced to take a required course; here all the students were graduates of a university before they came in my class, and they all were very much interested in the subject because this was going to be their permanent occupation, and this was the only education they had. So they were all eager and anxious to learn and all very much stimulated and unqualified. So it was fun to teach them. Barr Tompkins had left me a set of notes indicating what books the library had that would be useful in the history of the book course. These were all in the so-called rare book room, which was just an extra room where—we didn't have a rare books department. So I spent quite a bit of time from before 47 the spring semester just finding these books. Every week I had an exhibit of the books that I was talking about in the course, and the students loved this. It's a very interesting subject, the history of the book, and I said I didn't know very much about it, but I had learned a great deal at the Newberry, working at the rare books library. Mr. Pargellis had often given me groups of books to decide what to do with, which included a lot of rare materials, so I had begun to learn something about it. The students were just fun to work with. I liked Berkeley and the university and the library school and the whole situation well enough, so I decided I didn't want to do anything else- -especially didn't want to move away from this climate. McCreery: [laughs] Tell me something about your faculty colleagues in the school. Mosher: The teacher of cataloging was [Anne] Ethelyn Markley, and we were fairly closely associated because we needed to correlate our courses. Cataloging students needed to know where to find information about the books they were cataloging, and so I needed to teach in reference- -now I'm jumping ahead of myself. I wasn't teaching reference then. Anyway, I didn't get so well acquainted with Ethelyn the first year. We did correlate courses, and so I taught what she needed and she taught what I needed. I needed some information from the cataloging courses. I think she was about a perfect cataloging teacher, that's what I think, and a very friendly and intelligent and helpful colleague. I don't know whether—well, it turned out, not at first, but we learned that we both have the same birthday- -February 19--and so we began to celebrate our birthday together. That usually meant that we ' d have dinner together that Evelyn prepared at our home. Sometimes we'd go out. Crete [Fruge Cubie] was on the faculty, but I had very little to do with her because she was just the assistant to Ethelyn. I've already mentioned LeRoy Merritt. I think he was not a good teacher. I felt that he didn't belong on the library school faculty. He had a bad stutter and he was not self- confident. And anyway, he was not well liked as a teacher. I liked him all right, got along fine with him, but I didn't ever think he was a good teacher, nor did I respect his publications 48 very much either, interested in. But he was interested in stuff that I wasn't McCreery: Mr. Ready came at the same time you did? Mosher: Yes, Mr. Ready. I was trying to think of the ones who were there before. I guess it was sort of a new slate of people, wasn't it? McCreery: Yes, Mr. [Carleton B.] Joeckel was there, I gather, for a short time. Mosher: Yes, but he was --he taught one course, maybe, and he was not very important in the faculty, although he came to faculty meetings and he was a very likeable person. Of course, he had tremendous experience and authority and background, and everyone looked up to him as one of the czars of the library profession, sort of. And I think his knowledge and everything about him was very good. His wife was a sociable person and invited people to their home, and we had many good times with them. Will Ready didn't belong on the faculty. He was a Canadian and had not had much experience with American libraries at all. In fact, I don't think he had had any. He was from Canada, so his being put in to teach reference was a real mistake. He should never have taught reference in an American library school. McCreery: Were you and he asked to share that duty at first? Mosher: At first it was thought that we were going to, but when I came late, he'd already started and he said he'd prefer to just do the whole thing himself, so I never taught reference the first year. It wasn't until he left that I taught reference. He was more interested in writing than in librarianship, and his students felt that he had given them short shrift. He stood up in front of the class and told stories instead of teaching reference. But who knows, I don't know what teaching reference—there are various ways of teaching it. But the students didn't like him. Reuben Peiss was not well all the time. He died, of course, two years later. He had been involved with a number of important library areas. The most recent thing he had done was, after the war, organize collecting for American libraries the books that had been published in Europe during the war. And particularly he was involved with Portuguese and Spanish 49 books — Portuguese, especially. I can't remember the details now of his life, but he was a very, very brilliant person. I think he was a good librarian. He was a good teacher. And of course he was acquainted with practically all aspects of librarianship and knew all the librarians in the county, I think, of any importance. That's an overstatement, but I think he was an important part of the faculty that first year. Anyway, I had great respect for him and very little respect for Will Ready and not much respect for LeRoy Merritt. Deanship of J. Periam Danton Mosher: I don't know, that first year, just what I thought about the dean, Danton. He seemed to do his job well. Certainly he worked hard at it. The office was very well run, partly because of his staff, which consisted of one person. The school size was limited to fifty students that first year, only fifty students. This [staff member] Annette Goodwin, of course — ever since Danton came at any rate and probably before that- -had been the mainstay of that office. She knew all the workings of the university and especially as it related to the library school. She had no student assistant help or temporary help and so on, but she was the one that knew how to work with the university. Danton was very good at this, too. He did his annual reports and kept his correspondence up to date and was on top of everything that happened at the school. I don't think [Danton was] ever well liked by the students. I don't know exactly why. But he never got any good reports about his course he taught--he taught administration of libraries, but there was the introduction to librarianship course that he was mostly involved in. I thought he was a good teacher, but 1 think that there was something about him that students just didn't like. I don't know what. Perhaps he was too autocratic. Maybe a good example, or some kind of example, of what he was like. Every student had a desk in the fourth floor corridors of the library, and Danton would walk through and if anybody didn't have a coat on or didn't have a necktie, he would point this out to them: "Well, you'd better dress the way a professional person dresses." 50 That's another thing. He got that much involved with making them, well, correspond to what he thought was right. But that first year I really didn't have much contact with him and felt that things were going along all right. I wasn't interfered with, at any rate. Recollections of Edith Coulter and Delia Sisler [Interview 3: April 2, 1999] ## McCreery: When we met last time, a couple of weeks ago, we ended talking about some of your colleagues in the library school during your first few years there, starting in 1950, and also about the courses you were teaching at that time. One of the things I wanted to do today was to ask about your recollections of the early faculty of the school. I wanted to ask in particular about Miss Edith Coulter, who I gather was still around at the time you arrived. Can you tell me a little bit about her? Mosher: Yes. She shared an office with Miss Markley and Mrs. Fruge [Cubie] , which was in the same corridor as my office. She came to faculty meetings pretty regularly, or I often saw her at lunch at The Faculty Club. I didn't really have much to do with her, except that I talked with her as you talk with any faculty member. When I asked her if she had any suggestions for teaching reference, which I had never done before — and I knew that she was a very successful and very popular teacher of reference and bibliography—she said, "Well, I really don't want to tell you anything about how to teach reference. I think you ought to decide how you want to teach it and what you want to teach. I'm willing to give you information, if you ask me for it, but I don't want to tell you anything about it." So I didn't, although I was feeling very—well, I really didn't know what I was doing the first time I taught reference. I had to develop my course the way I thought it ought to be. Mr. Ready, who had taught it the previous year, had presented a very formless course, in which he basically just stood up and talked about reference, as I understand it. I didn't visit his classes. I didn't think that was the kind of course I wanted. I thought that they ought to know the basic reference materials , and I thought the course ought to make them learn about them. The only time I remember Miss Coulter telling me anything about teaching reference was when I started teaching the 51 government documents part of the course. I think that she actually volunteered this information to me. She came into the office and told me that she knew that I was teaching government documents and she thought California state documents were very important. She told me about a work that was a very good bibliography of California documents and that I ought to be sure to include that, which I did then, because I didn't know anything about California documents at that point. McCreery: What was the name of it? Mosher: I can't tell you right now. Otherwise she was a very pleasant person to be around. She and her sister, Mabel, lived together in a house on Hawthorne, I think it was. And we were--Evelyn and I were invited there for a meal, or meals. The whole faculty was occasionally, I think. And so we became very friendly. I remember the time she was elected or appointed for some honor from the American Library Association for reference work, and she was very pleased about this. It had been announced at a faculty meeting which she attended, but she was not feeling good at this point. I remember, coming from The Faculty Club back to the library school, she had to sit down and rest a while. She was not a very great influence on my work. I think that Miss [Delia J.] Sisler would have been more of an influence, because she taught the history of the book and that's what I was most interested in, but I practically never saw her since she avoided the university and the library and the library school most of the time. I don't think I had more than a few words with her ever, just because she didn't want to be involved with the library school she was no longer part of—which I think she felt unfairly deprived of somehow. So she had frankly no effect upon my work, and I didn't know her very well. Teaching Reference and Bibliography Mosher: We mentioned Barr Tompkins before. He had left me a list of books that he had shown as examples of the books that the course was about, but that's all. He had no notes or anything of that sort. He wasn't unfriendly, but he was very busy as head of the Bancroft reference service. And I don't think he was particularly interested in my being successful anyway, because he had resigned in protest and the conditions under 52 which he was protesting were still in effect. But he was always outwardly cordial and friendly and I really didn't--! had to develop these courses all by myself in other words. McCreery: How did you approach that task? Mosher: Well, first of all, I thought that experience, actual experience with the reference works was important, so I developed a series of assignments of questions that were mimeographed and given to the students to do each week. At first I did this all by myself, but later I was able to have help from the office in mimeographing and typing the copy from which you mimeographed, and mimeographing the stuff. The office provided one person, part time. I think the first class that I taught in 1950 was the last one limited to fifty students. Then we began to accept more students—about as many as we could get, because libraries were clamoring for more librarians. They had to come through the library school, so we increased the number of library school students as much as we could. In fact, we admitted many students I thought should not have been admitted, but they were admitted because they were so needed in the field. The first few classes were very, very good, I thought. That's why I was inclined to stay in the position, because the teaching was so much different from anything I'd done before. I had sworn never to teach again, but I liked teaching library school students. I had more than one opportunity to leave during that time. Ray Swank, who was the head of the Stanford library then, offered me a job as an acquisitions librarian, which Will Ready accepted; I turned it down. I don't know whether- -well, he offered it to me, at any rate. And I was offered a job that I almost took at the University of Kansas, in Lawrence. Bob Vosper, who had been at UCLA, asked me to be his assistant librarian. Promotions to Assistant and Associate Professor; Meeting with Clark Kerr Mosher: I said that if I were made associate professor at Berkeley I would stay. I had just been made assistant professor, just then. 53 McCreery: Yes, because you came in as an instructor, you said last time. Mosher: Yes, that's right. I'd just been made, after two years, an assistant professor. And it was hard for the administration, hard for everyone, to then immediately make me associate professor. McCreery: How so? Mosher: Because obviously they didn't know what they were doing, I guess. [laughs] I'm not sure why. That's the indication I got. Well, [sighs] I suppose if I started talking about this, I might as well go ahead, but it finally came to the point where everyone agreed—the faculty, the library school, and so on, that they'd like to have me stay at Berkeley. So Clark Kerr, who had just been appointed chancellor of the university, called me in. He said it was his first task as chancellor, was to talk to me about this problem that the administration had. He suggested a plan that would up me to a higher salary the first year and give me the promise of being reviewed for associate professor the next year. And this would please the administration and everyone. So anyway, it made it possible for me to stay on. Otherwise, I was just at the point of going. McCreery: What was the administration's problem that he described to you? Mosher: That it would make them look foolish, or it would interfere with the operation of promotion, and so on. Generally, if I were just made assistant professor, it would seem as though they didn't know what they were doing [to have] me become an associate professor immediately. That was the idea I got. It was okay to become associate professor, but not immediately. Because associate professor, of course, got tenure, and that's what I wanted. I'd been there long enough to see that you had to have tenure to really — McCreery: What were your impressions of Clark Kerr at that meeting? Mosher: I liked him very much. He was young and very knowledgeable and very persuasive, and had obviously considered the problem and sought a solution which was acceptable, so I liked him. McCreery: Had you met him before that? Mosher: I don't think I had ever met him, no. And I didn't have much to do with him afterwards. McCreery: So you were able to work that out with him? Mosher: Well, sort of. You might call it blackmailing on my part. [laughs] I've been told that that was held against me for a long time, because they don't like to have promotions forced. They like to have the promotions scheduled along regularly. I didn't feel that I was doing anything very bad, because I thought I should not have been only an instructor for the first two years, but that was the way it worked out. I, of course, was very reluctant—although I liked Bob Vosper very much, I was very reluctant to leave Berkeley for Lawrence, Kansas, especially since Evelyn's family had come out to Berkeley to live with us. Nobody wanted to go back to the middle west. So there were two decisions I had to make the first couple years of teaching. I was pleased, of course, that people wanted me to stay, and I was pleased that the courses were going along and the students seemed to like the way it was all operating. Teaching the History of the Book; Summers in the Rare Book Room Mosher: The history of the book course was very popular, and the students enjoyed it thoroughly because they got actually to handle these very rare and historical books from the Bancroft. We had an exhibit every week in the—well, not in The Bancroft Library because they weren't in The Bancroft Library then. I think it was called the office collection or something like that — and stashed away in a sort of store room, but right next to the room where I taught. The library school had a classroom on the third floor. It was right next- -well, it's all been changed so much now— I don't know, unless you want to talk about all that. McCreery: That's fine. Mosher: The rare books were in this particular room, as I think I mentioned before, all in no particular order. And because I needed more than $4,200 a year, I asked for and was given the opportunity to work during the summer— there wasn't any summer school then— in the rare book room, just surveying it and making a report on what was there and rearranging it so that it could be used. So that's the first summer, I worked at the rare book room as, I might say, a rare book librarian. But 55 there was no rare books department, and these books were just labeled as office collection, I think. I can't remember the date, but one night there was a flood. It wasn't the first year. A sewer pipe, or some water pipe burst above the room where the collection was housed, and I was called at something like eleven or twelve o'clock at night, because I was presumably in charge of this collection. I dashed down to the library and steam was coming down, and water was coming down from the ceiling. A number of staff members had been called, too, and we all immediately started pulling the books out of the so-called rare book room and into what was the library school classroom. They did get the water stopped and not very much was damaged because on the top of the shelves were a collection of not very important books — a collection on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam--! think they'd been given to them, or another similar, not-too-important collection. The really rare books were not much damaged at all. They had been put out of harm's way. And the next morning after, the library staff was there drying them out, page by page, and so on. Then they had to move them someplace, and that's when they started to become part of the rare book room. Well, that's when the rare book room was established, I think. They didn't become part of the Bancroft for years after that. Impressions of Students; Admissions Process McCreery: Let's return to your teaching for a moment. You were preparing these courses pretty much from scratch. Mosher: That's right. Entirely from scratch. McCreery: But they were going well. Mosher: Yes. McCreery: As you began teaching, what did you think of your students? Mosher: Oh, yes, the reason for liking what I was doing was the students. As I mentioned before in teaching freshman English at Illinois, there were no good students. All the students that knew how to write, that had learned anything, had taken the proficiency test and had been excused from it. But her