|
Kathryn Pitrone, Alum
School of General Studies 2002
I completed my degree in 2002, but spent most of my Columbia experience at the university in the mid-70s. Air-conditioning was not a ubiquitous pleasure then, and finding a cool and quiet place to study might mean dim obscurity, virtually underground. I enjoyed hiding in the stacks at Butler Library.
That was a treasure trove. My favorite day at Columbia was the one when I stumbled on shelves of "Vanity Fair" magazines from the earliest days of publication. In the then dim and musty fastness of Butler Library, I had retreated into another world. I sucked down the wit and wisdom of another time while lolling on the hard, cool floor in the stacks. I forget what I ought to have been studying, but my mind was also hiding from responsibility in the chilly, sophisticated prose of generations before.
I lost track of time, and the place made no difference at all as I was somewhere else in all but a real way. Good and lost to my flesh, until my belly began to bite and the library threatened closing, I think. It has been too long now to remember what I read that day. It was being lost to myself, living entirely through my eyes, that made the day good. That was my favorite day at Columbia.
_______________________
RE CARSCH, Alum
School of Library Service 1968
The April 1968 turmoil and campus strike led the University to close Butler Library. The University's Library School was on the top floor of Butler. With the library closed, we were unable to attend classes.
A group of us got ourselves elected to the strike coordinating committee in order to moderate the strikers and get the University to open Butler, so we could resume classes. We had a bunch of buttons made up proclaiming "Documents to the People."
When the library was closed, I realized how important the right to information is in an open society. For the most part, since then, I've been working in the public sector. I’ve taught information literacy at a local college and continue to provide reference services at the San Francisco Public Library’s Main Branch.
____________________________
Ralph Scott, Alum, Staff Member, Student
School of Library Service 1970
School of General Studies 1968
In the 1960s I worked in the Special Collections section of Butler Library while going to school at Columbia. We received a gift of many films reels from the estate of Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, etc.). We had them stored on the upper floors of Butler Library in Special Collections. These were the days of using limited, 1930s-era, ammonia-based air conditioning in the library stacks. The upper floors got warm in a New York July.
As it turned out, the films were made of a silver nitrate base which, with heat and time, can turn into nitroglycerine. After inspection one July morning by the NYC Fire Marshall, the NYPD Bomb Squad was called, the building evacuated for several hours and the films removed, and in a bomb disposal truck and carried to a remote location (read Flushing Meadows) where as I recall they were blown up.
_______________________________
Ralph Scott, Staff Member, Student
School of General Studies 1968
School of Library Service 1970
In the 1960s I worked in Special Collections in Butler Library. We had a room called the Papyrology and Epigraphy collection where we stored the ancient texts. One afternoon, we let in and locked inside the room a distinguished classics professor to do research. The plan was when he was ready to leave he would press a buzzer to summon the staff member to let him out of the locked room. When we locked up at 6PM we were supposed to check the room to see if it was clear. My colleague who was responsible for locking up that day forgot and went home at 6. The professor had dozed off only to awaken around midnight. He heard the night watchman making his rounds about 1 a.m. and pounded on the door to be let out to use the bathroom! The guard, for security reasons, DID NOT have a key to the room. The Head of Special Collections who lived in Northern New Jersey was summonded by the police to come to Butler Library to let the professor out to use the facilities. By this time it was around 3/4 a.m. The Department Head was not a happy camper when we arrived for work the next morning, having spent most of the rest of the early morning in the Chock Full O' Nuts waiting for the staff to show up for work!
|