Description:
Evelyn Davis talks about her life, and her careers as a social worker and in the library.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Evelyn Davis
Interviewer: Buddy Johnson
Interview Date: July 30
Interview Location: Downtown Library, Oklahoma City
BJ: Today is July 30, and we are in the Downtown library in Oklahoma City in the Oklahoma room with Evelyn Davis. My name is Buddy Johnson and I’ll be talking to Evelyn about her life and about her career with the Metropolitan Library System. So, would you please give us your full name, and tell us where and when you were born.
ED: Evelyn K. Davis. I was born January 20th in Saint Anthony’s Hospital in Oklahoma City.
BJ: Okay, and where--who were your parents?
ED: Samuel Kenneth Owens and Anna Lucille Owens.
BJ: Okay, and do you have any siblings?
ED: Yes, I have one sister who was born on Halloween. Her name is Beverly.
BJ: Okay. Is there anything relative to her being born on Halloween? Do they have later implications in life, or…? Any other coincidences?
ED: I hope not. But we always do note her birthday.
BJ: Okay. So where was the family home?
ED: Oklahoma City.
BJ: Okay, what-- can you give us not an address but a neighborhood?
ED: My earliest neighborhood was immediately across the street from St. Anthony’s Hospital where my grandmother ran a rooming house for families of patients in the hospitals, and we lived there until I was about…three years old… on the second story of the old house and I estimate it was built in the first decade of the century, at which time we bought a brand new house way out west on Northwest Tenth Street, just across May.
BJ: And, let’s see, now, let’s ask about your grandparents then. Who were your grandparents?
ED: My grandparents were Fanny and Arthur Alelong, and, for much of his life, my grandfather was a telegraph operator with Rock Island Line Railroad, and when he died, my grandmother had a telegraph key engraved on his tombstone.
BJ: Where does he rest?
ED: Rose Hill Cemetery, Oklahoma City.
BJ: And so those would be your…those would be your mother’s--
ED: Yes.
BJ: And so that’s interesting, I’ve never heard of a boarding house for patients—for the patients’ families. That’s neat.
ED: I guess it’s the primitive version of the Ronald McDonald House.
BJ: Neat. Was your grandmother particularly compassionate, or was it strictly a commercial enterprise?
ED: She needed the money.
BJ: Okay. And, what did your—what about your paternal grandparents. Did you know them?
ED: My paternal grandfather died before I was born. He was a well-known citizen in the Carter Counter/Murray County area of early day Oklahoma. He was an entrepreneur, considerably older than my grandmother; she represented his second family. He was a member of the Woodsmen of the World, and he was inducted into membership in a local Indian tribe, and he and another gentleman, named George Province, flipped a coin to see…for whom the settlement, which is now a ghost town, would be named. My father commented many years later, “Well I guess Province sounded better than Owensville.” But the two men donated money for school and the cemetery, and the cemetery still stands, and my father’s whole side of the family is buried there.
BJ: Do you know…were there…is there a family, I guess legend for lack of a better word, each side of your grandparents’ side…how did they come to Oklahoma? What was their origin story? Were they pretty early arrivals?
ED: Yes. Yes they were, they went back quite aways. On my mother’s side, when her great grandparents met, my grandfather fought on the side of the North in the Civil War. My grandmother, Annabelle Montgomery, obviously fought, her family fought on the Southern side, and when they decided to marry, they made an agreement that they would never, ever, discuss the war. They had a long and harmonious marriage.
BJ: So then, you…you grew up… in that area, I’m not sure what the neighborhoods called it, over a Tenth in May…is that where you lived most of your life?
ED: Yes, in fact, my parents lived in that house for so long that they paid off the mortgage. They lived there I believe at least fifty-five years.
BJ: Okay. So you could probably walk to the May Theater, then.
ED: We could and did.
BJ: Okay. What was that like? Was it a nice theater?
ED: At the time it was… and we went to see Gone with the Wind for only fifty cents.
BJ: What other…what other haunts did you have in your neighborhood that you could walk or ride to?
ED: The memory is so old that it’s almost apocryphal, but on the corner now where stands Whittaker’s Grocery, which is a long-time grocery store of ill repute.
BJ: It’s across from the fairgrounds, right?
ED: Yes, yes, it is. There used to be an old barn and it was tumbling down and it had old slabs of marble in it and huge, ugly cobwebs, and they neighborhood legend among the children was that there was a portrait there, with a knife in it, and the blood would drip down if you dared to go in there, so we didn’t go in there much.
BJ: Did you ever see it?
ED: Of course not.
BJ: I just wanted to know if you went in there at all.
ED: Yes. I did. But I didn’t see that. And right across Tenth Street, I can remember before it was the new fairgrounds, I remember my father taking us for a walk through it and there was an old water well, and it was obvious that it was a piece of farmland.
BJ: I heard that one time, either it was or intended to be a, like a, model farm for whatever for OSU Tech or whatever it was called then.
ED: That would make sense because OSU Tech is just a mile to the west…but I never heard that.
BJ: Now—so—where did you go to school?
ED: Linwood Elementary.
BJ: Okay. And then you would have gone to Taft, or?
ED: That is correct.
BJ: Okay.
ED: And then I went to Northwest Classen, which at the time was brand new, and rated as one of the top three high schools in the country.
BJ: So what kind of a student were you?
ED: *Laughs* I was eccentric, to put it mildly. I was neurotic, hostile; I didn’t fit in very well. I remember…one year, all the students, or at least most of them who were socially accepted, would walk across the playground hand-in-hand, making a long line. And I remember it happening again in about my fifth or sixth year; the fad came around again and they did it again, and I remember thinking, “I guess I just missed it.” because I never got to do that. I was an avid reader; I always got in trouble for reading either a head in the book, or something I wasn’t supposed to be reading.
BJ: What kind of-- did you have any extracurriculars in that time? When you were like in high school or whatever, or were you…if you weren’t popular, did you…you know, Newspaper, or anything like that?
ED: I wanted to get involved in the newspaper. We had a Latin club, and I was in that…and we had a marvelous creative writing class, and, at our latest high school reunion, there are still members of that class, and…one of us called our long-time teacher, who said, “You were the best class I ever had; you were the most creative.”
BJ: Now, let’s see, and you stayed in that house, or your family did, right? So, you didn’t move during that time. Did you…what were your career aspirations during at time? Like, let’s say starting junior high and high school…what did you want to be?
ED: I always drew, and…up until the last art teacher, my work was praised, for some reason, just as you can climb a tree when you’re a child and you don’t think about it, it’s just automatic; you don’t think about where you put your foot, or you might fall. You just climb the tree. Well that’s how I drew. And I was lucky enough to have a natural imagination and rhythm that I have unfortunately lost over the years, but I drew everything from Tarzan, by whom I was greatly influenced, to fairies.
BJ: Did you read a lot?
ED: Oh, yes.
BJ: Did you read Burrows or Tarzan
ED: I did, I did.
BJ: What all kinds of things did you read?
ED: I read everything I could get my hands on. I read my uncle’s old high school history books, I read old high school—and we’re talking about maybe about the twenties or thirties—literature books, or English books.
BJ: Did you…were there any…did you have any models then? What were your—not necessarily role models—but people you looked up to, or that you admired, either nationally or locally, or family, or anything like that?
ED: I admired my uncle, the one who had all the textbooks. Had it not been for my uncle, I would never had had the knowledge of an interest I have in music, art, theater, literature. He was a profound influence on my life; I could remember in junior high school, when we still had the train running between Oklahoma City and Norman. My parents put me on the train, and I drove the road down to Norman to attend a performance of Hamlet. And he always introduced me with great pride as his niece, and when I entered college, he gave me a check for fifty dollars, which back then was a lot of money, and he said, “I want you to use this to buy something that you would enjoy that you could not otherwise afford.” And I bought a front row center ticket to see Dame Judith Anderson, and I bought a score to the Messiah, and I think I bought a sweater.
BJ: Wow, fifty bucks really went around back then.
ED: They did.
BJ: How much, before we get you out of high school, what…how much of the city belonged to you at that time…what was your range at that time? Did you have a car, or…?
ED: We had a car. First we had our mother’s ancient thirties Chevrolet, which was named Clementine, and then we had a wretched, undependable Plymouth, which my folk always referred to that as “damn Plymouth,” and then we got a fifty Chevy, which ran like a watch for well over a hundred thousand miles, and we took family drives after church, and I always remembered my father driving us to the northeast side of town, which was really out of bounds for us, since we were white bred as they come, and he said, “We will never live in a place like this. We will always have some place nice to live.” Well this of course, I suspect, was the result of my lifelong love for old neighborhoods, and disreputable neighborhoods.
BJ: Was it just…did he make it attractive…by
ED: No.
BJ: It just had an innate attraction to you?
ED: It did. It did.
BJ: Okay.
ED: The first time I ever went out with someone who had a car, they said, “Can we drive down Reno?”
BJ: Well what was Reno like then?
ED: Reno back then…*laughs* the street of ill repute. The whole area down there, Reno, California, Grand, just south of Main Street, was a hot house upon shops, off-color movie theaters, bars, saloons…it was wonderful.
BJ: So you could get into just about any kind of trouble you wanted to down there?
ED: Well, we could get into the pawn shops. I don’t know if they would have let us, even us, into a saloon.
BJ: Okay. One more thing I want to ask you real quick was, given the location of your home which was a little but north of some of the…undeveloped parts of the city, not to mention the fairgrounds course, but like Mulligan Flats and things like that… did you ever go down there to Sand Town?
ED: Oh yes.
BJ: What were those like? Because they’re pretty well gone now. There’s a little bit of the Flats left, Sand Town and…
ED: Mulligan Flats in inexplicably building new brick houses and tearing down some of the old ones, but in the time I when went through it, it had paved streets, which drained very poorly so that there were pools of water, and I recall a drug bust, oh maybe ten years ago, and they listed all the addresses of the homes in this area, which they had been tracking, and I swear every third address, I had either been by, or knew about. So, it was basically a hot bed of inappropriate activity, but as an adult, I had walked and driven through Mulligan Flats a hundred Times. I have never been threatened or disturbed.
BJ: And so other than these new brick homes, which are probably habitat for something--
ED: They’re not habitat, they have no style, no offense to habitat, but there are real change, and they’re also starting to call it…is it West Long Village? I believe it is.
BJ: That may be its plat name, I don’t know, so I don’t think it was ever officially called that.
ED: But a hundred years ago, it was called Mulligan Flats. And it was very close knit.
BJ: So it didn’t really change a lot--
ED: Oh, no. People lived there who could afford to live elsewhere.
BJ: Okay. So, then when you got to college, what did you…where did you go and what were your…what was your major and goals and things like that.
ED: When I was in high school, I was the school neurotic. And I was not happy in high school, and I deliberately chose Oklahoma City University because many of my classmates were either going either to OSU or OU, and all I wanted to do was to get away from them. And when I did, I blossomed. Life changed, and it changed for the better.
BJ: Okay. So in what ways?
ED: I made new friends, found new interests, I wasn’t so cuckoo anymore. My first major was business, which I despised. I had no affinity for business, economics, accounting, and I finally screwed up my courage and went up to the Dean, and said, “I’d like to change my major.” And for the first time in my life, I heard the phrase, “Would you like to share that with me?” So I did, and was allowed to change my major to English, which is what I always wanted.
BJ: And what did you want to do with your English degree?
ED: I wanted to write. And I did quite a bit of writing, and I was published in my two years of my high school poetry and anthology, and at least once in college, and one of my professor said, “You really should pursue this, you have real talent.” And I regret not having pursued it, just as I regret not having followed my childhood dream of drawing for fairytale books. Because I’ve been doing that off and on for years.
BJ: Well there’s still time. So do you…now you graduated with your English degree, and what did you do with it? How did you begin your career?
ED: I graduated with a degree in English. And, due to my first year in business, I had typing in shorthand skills, so I went to the Oklahoma Office of Employment, and went to work as a clerk for vocational rehabilitation, which was both interesting, when you thought about the big picture, and incredibly boring clerically. And then I went on to find a job as a social worker with the welfare department. I’m sure I am one of the very few applicants who waited long enough on the roll that she was called in for an interview without political influence, I remained there for twelve years; I did everything from AFDC to daycare to child abuse and neglect, and it was fascinating; in order to function with child abuse and neglect, you had to have a mixture of compassion and detachment.
BJ: And you found you had that?
ED: I think so.
BJ: For a certain reservoir of it?
ED: I think so. There were a couple of times where the situation would be so bad or so urgent that one forgot about one’s detachment and simply moved and moved quickly.
BJ: Were there any emergency situations?
ED: Yes.
BJ: What kinds of things did you see on, you know, I don’t want to see on a daily basis, but what, I mean, what were some of the more chronic problems?
ED: I will spare you the more graphic problems. There are some stories that I would’ve told, or that I lived through, that I don’t feel are appropriate for this tape. They probably represent the stupidity and viciousness of human nature, as much as anything I have ever seen. I believed then and I believe now that people should have to take a test to be parents. I suppose one of the most chilling encounters I have ever had was with a woman who hated men. She hated herself, she hated the world, she hated her child. Her brand-new baby pulled on her hair, and she slapped him. She said, “Nobody pulls my hair.” And I worked with this woman for quite a while, and I knew she was dangerously volatile; she would call her child dreadful names, and never bat an eyelash. I finally wrote a letter to the presiding juvenile judge, and she and I talked, and I frankly tried to talk her into placing the child for adoption. I said, “This is not good for the child, and frankly, as an adult, it is not good for you. You don’t need this child.” And she said, “I know I don’t.” She said, “I’ll have him all packed and ready to go, I’ll have an emergency foster care placement for him, tomorrow afternoon.” For some reason, I followed my intuition and I drove by her house, late that afternoon. He was standing in front of the house, with his suitcase, fully packed, ready to go. We later had a parental rights termination hearing, and the judge looked at her, and said, “Ma’am, how do you plan to raise this child, if the court should allow you to keep him?” And she looked at him haughtily, and said, “The good Lord and I will raise this child.” And the judge said, “I don’t think so.” And he terminated her rights. She turned on me in a fury, because I’ve been working with her all this time, and I felt guilty because she did trust me. As a result, I had a police escort to a car.
BJ: So you had twelve years of that, and then, or not totally twelve, but you know, a lot of that.
ED: It lingers vividly, and I’m sorry to say it, but I liked the people’s stories, and I liked the neighborhoods. It was like getting paid to go slumming.
BJ: I was gonna say, you get to mix your avocation with your vocation there.
ED: Alas, I did.
BJ: So, where…what part of the city are you living in now, in your, during your twelve-year sojourn? Into the…
ED: Back then I was living in a micro shack over on Northeast 48th on McKinley. I lived there for well over twenty years. And about fifteen years ago, I moved into a house where I live now, which is, oddly enough, directly north of my high school, Northwest Classen. It’s within walking distance.
BJ: And, let’s see, you do have a different last name than your parents do; do you want to talk about how you got that? Or is that a chapter you don’t want to open, or?
ED: I was married very briefly, less than two years, and I liked the way my married name sounded, better than my maiden name, so I’ve kept it all these years.
BJ: Now, what’s the bridge between social work and the library. How did you come to the library?
ED: It was an ad in the paper. The library—I’m sorry, the welfare department—by this time, had computerized, and rigidified. Before, one social worker did everything. You had to know everything to help your client, from BA to social security to child welfare to commodities, housing; they specialized, then split everything up in separate offices, and it became nothing but paperwork: it was very impersonal, you said the same thing to everybody you talked to, and at the time I was setting up daycare. It was boring; I was ruining my hand by writing things down because back then, we still had carbon paper, and I was frankly burned out. The only way I could be of service to the client was to fill out endless reams of paper.
BJ: So more work than social.
ED: Yes, and for some reason, I was looking through the paper, and I saw an ad for executive secretary in the director’s office in the Metropolitan Library System. And, I just did it. I still had my shorthand, which was current. I could type eighty or ninety words a minute. I had always been an avid library user.
BJ: That’s one thing I wanted to ask you, is: did you already have a relationship with the library before that?
ED: Oh yes. I used to ride down on the bus when I was a child to the downtown library. And—
BJ: That would be the Carnegie, or was it the…? I’m not asking how old you are, I just…
ED: I’m just young enough to have missed the Carnegie; I don’t even remember what it looked like. But I do remember the interim time; when they tore down the Carnegie, they split the services in the collections into two separate locations. One was at the old Capitol Hill Library. And one was at Roosevelt Junior High, which is now the Board of Education. And to this day, I can remember standing in front of a tall shelf of fairytale books at Roosevelt, and thinking, “I’m never gonna get tired reading of fairytales.”
BJ: And did you? Did you get tired of them?
ED: Well, I switched it. I haven’t gotten tired yet of quality fantasy. It has to be quality. First sign of bad writing is too many adjectives. Too much emotion. Too many clichés. Too many stereotypes. When you can find a well-written piece of science fiction or fantasy, it’s like finding—I hate to say it—the Garden of Eden. And fortunately, we have some writers like that, although not nearly enough. I will give a book about two pages to test my interest, and if it doesn’t do it, I will put it down.
BJ: So you got the job, I guess.
ED: Amazingly, there was only one other contender for the job, and she was a librarian. And she was—I hate to say this—not very pretty, and not very competent, and she was a librarian; she wasn’t a secretary, and I had been a secretary, or at least a glorified clerk, in the past, and she didn’t have the skills. And when I first interviewed with Lee Brauner, it’s like something went click in my head. He had an afro then, and I thought, “I can work with this man,” and later when we got to know each other better, he said he felt the same thing, “I can work with this person.” And when I interviewed with Dwayne Meyer, who was our long time… I’m not sure what you would call his job title. He was second in command, but he was also responsible for all the publications. I said, “Dwayne, why did you hire me? My background is in social work.” He said, “I hired you because I knew good horse flesh when I saw it.”
BJ: Okay. I don’t know if you could say that today.
ED: Well I don’t know if you could or not.
BJ: So you were Lee’s…Can you tell us when this is? What year?
ED: Yes. I went to work with Lee for the library in May 1980.
BJ: Okay. So you worked with Dwayne also. And who else did you routinely encounter?
ED: The downtown staff.
BJ: Okay, and what kind of clientele did they have then? Was it busy?
ED: It was busy and…we had far more…businesspeople in at that time because more of the action was still downtown. The legal community, the medical community was not that far off, all kinds of banks, real estate offices, abstract companies. We saw a lot of suits, we saw very few children, and we saw a lot of street people.
BJ: Okay so what kind of things did you do? What kind of things did Lee have you do?
ED: I can best define my position…he later kicked it up to administrative assistant… I can define it in one word: whatever. Whatever it took to get the job done. This could either be a routine, like taking letters in shorthand, transcribing them. This was before we had computers, and both Lee and Dwayne had old manual typewriters. And they were pretty good typists, and I can still hear them both clacking away madly.
BJ: Did they share an office? Or area I mean?
ED: We shared a suite of offices.
BJ: And where was this in the building?
ED: It was on the third floor. And it was really like a luxury. We had a bathroom, and several offices, and a conference room.
BJ: Okay. What else was on the third floor?
ED: Well at first, we had part of the collection on the third floor, until they decided to consolidate, which was a decision made in hell because it pushed everything together cheek by jowl. And then we just left it vacant because we knew that sooner or later if we could get the money, that we could build a new library because this one was becoming dangerously outdated. But across the wide, expansive floor, the business office was on one side, and the interlibrary loan office was on the other.
BJ: Okay. So who were some of your, you said you interacted with the downtown staff and stuff like that, but who were some of your friends? Did you make friends easily there?
ED: I did. I did. Long time ILL technician Pamela Kosted and I discovered that I had gone to kindergarten with her husband Paul, and he remembered me, so we became fast friends for the past twenty-seven years. One important group I forgot to mention when you asked who I worked with, was the library system’s governing board, the Metropolitan Library Commission.
BJ: Okay. And we were already a Metropolitan system by then. I think it was by ’62, so… or ’60-something.
ED: We were. But again in 1982, after we had another election, they raised the number of commissioners from eight or nine to, I believe, eighteen or nineteen and if population of the municipality of Oklahoma City county was over a certain figure, they were entitled to their own representative.
BJ: Okay.
ED: In other words, Choctaw eventually had a representative, but Harrah didn’t.
BJ: So this is whether they had a building or not. Or they had a physical location.
ED: Yeah.
BJ: If the town itself was a certain size, they got a whole representative.
ED: Because we, we swiveled countywide, really not just citywide.
BJ: Right. Okay. So you made friends with Pamela. Were there any other friends that are either here, or that have gone ever since that you remember?
ED: There are too many to mention.
BJ: Okay.
ED: I remember David Bolson, our legendary classics librarian who was tall, shaggy, incredibly erudite. A Tai Chi student, and he lived in an ivory tower. David never saw anything coming.
BJ: Okay. Was he a librarian? Or?
ED: Yes, and the patrons loved him. They would call and ask for David. He is almost the only person I’ve ever met in my life who knew what the Albigensian crusade was.
BJ: Okay. Well I know.
ED: Well, I am honored to be interviewed by you.
BJ: I was just carrying on David’s mantle, you know. Okay let’s see. All these times you have worked with the system. You had hobbies and interests as well at home. You’ve already mentioned that you would like to draw. You are really keeping up your drawing or anything there? What became your interests?
ED: I got very very interested in photography. I was seeing someone at a time, who was a gifted amature photographer. And he’s got me started right. None of these Kodak point and shoot that did have various little hinky dinky cameras. But he started me off on a Leica and he sold me a Minolta, which I used till I wore it out. And it took to superb pictures, but everything was manual, so I learned to do it the hard way. And for years, I was the library system’s unofficial photographer. Often our public information officer didn’t enjoy taking pictures, or didn’t want to go there, wherever it was that, say, down in the Wright library in Stockyard City, which is the euphemism for packing town. So, I would go down there. And I enjoyed that very, very much. Another thing I got to do together with my sister and my brother-in-law was to get deeply involved in hot air ballooning. And for years, maybe even decades, we would go out to Albuquerque, which is the hot air balloon capital in the world. And they owned not one, but two balloons. And I had many strange and wonderous experiences in hot air balloon mates above the ground and on the ground.
BJ: Anything dangerous?
ED: Yes.
BJ: So you had, did you crash?
ED: Yes. I didn’t crash enough to break anything, although I thought. I crashed hard enough to break my glasses.
BJ: Wow.
ED: Other times since flying is kind of unpredictable, it would be like coming down just on a down mattress.
BJ: Wow. I’ve always figured it would be rough.
ED: Yeah, it could be rough, and I hate to say this, but especially, in later years, there were fatalities.
BJ: Okay. Yeah, I think you wrote that in the paper every so often.
ED: You do.
BJ: Yes. So, you took pictures of the libraries, facilities and something like that. You probably took pictures of puppy dogs and children in the parks. That kind of thing?
ED: Everything.
BJ: Okay.
ED: One of assignments Lee gave me that I enjoyed the most and we used as the resource for years. He said, “Go out and take every building in the facility, including the book mobiles and the maintenance center. Take several shots of them from different angles so we’ll have something to use when we need a picture of the facility. And I did. And for years, people would come to me and say, “Can I look at the facility’s notebook?” because I blew them all up, four by six, which at the time a little larger than it’s considered now. And I was always flattered and pleased for my photography made into our library publication or—
BJ: —Newspaper.
ED: Yeah
BJ: Cool. Okay. And I know that you like music a lot. When did you obtain that? You mentioned that your uncle helped you with a love of music. But how did that develop?
ED: It developed my mother’s knee.
BJ: Okay.
ED: Her grandfather was a voice and piano teacher. And he trained her, and she had a lovely, clear soprano. He taught her to play the piano. And when my mother played the piano, even though she might miss a note here or there, she played with such an authority that I could turn around and look at people and see their jaws draw. And on my father’s side of the family, I had an uncle whose name was Virgil. And that man could play a piano. The Baptists threw him out, the Pentecostals took him in. He could play a church Hammond and make it a sound like the back room of the saloon. And I’ve often wished I can play like that. Of course, I couldn’t.
BJ: Well. I know you still purchase a lot of records, things like that.
ED: Alas, I do.
BJ: Do you have a pretty good record collection?
ED: It is archival.
BJ: So, let’s see. You probably grew up during the folk era. Is that one of your main focuses?
ED: Yes, it was. I love folk music the first time I heard it.
BJ: What kind of things did you like? I mean other than folk, what kind of, did you like Dillan pre or post electric? Or did you like, who else did you like to collect?
ED: I like almost everything but Broadway and show tunes and light classical. They made my teeth hurt. I don’t ever want to hear them. I hate musicals. But just about anything, I love the
Blues. I like gospels, black or white. I went to a protractive new age period and I still— Lee used to tease me about putting a new age tape on my car deck and cruising on rainy nights and listening to the music.
BJ: Okay.
ED: And I used to drive through perfectly wretched, run-down the neighborhood and listen to Vivaldi.
BJ: hm.
ED: It was very pleasant.
BJ: Oh yeah, it sounds like it would be.
ED: It was.
BJ: So what are some of the challenges that you had at work? What parts of your job were difficult?
ED: I would say it wasn’t at all that difficult with dealing with the public because I have been used to it in the welfare department. What was the most difficult of all were censorship issues and we had them periodically seemed to go on cycles. When I had first come, when Lee first came as the director of the library, they were involved with the religious segment of Oklahoma City with a book called “What Is A Boy? What Is A Girl?” And opposition from the fundamentalist patrons was so fierce that Lee received death threats at home, and they demanded that we take off the shelves. Lee refused. Lee became nationally known as someone who is willing to fight censorship, to fight for intellectual freedom. And he was very involved in issues like that. He was not afraid to say, “Libraries are for everyone. Open access to whatever book you choose to read is the right of every taxpaying citizen.” So, we periodically had to dust ups several things like the anarchist cookbook and to be candidate may be nervous. We made a lot of people nervous to have that on the shelves. But as the upholder of the First Amendment rights, it belongs down the shelves and it was one of the most checked out books.
BJ: Do you want to give us your reflections on the famous case?
ED: The Tin Drum? Oh dear God. It went on for a long time. It followed on the heels on the bombing of the federal building. And it started off slowly and tactfully and gently with this dear little lady whose husband is now a state representative, who charmingly clasped her hands and said, “We feel this book is not appropriate for the children. And that no family should expose their children to it. And we wonder if you would please take it off your shelves?” At that time, we had a very strong, I would not say liberal, but rational and politically grounded commission. And they indicated that no, they would not take it off the shelves. And matters progress from one thing to another. Police went out in a fit of self-righteous vigilance. By the time we got to the Tin Drum, and confiscated all the copies, including the one that the library owned, which is a VHS tape, I don’t think I took the paperback we had. Unfortunately, they went to a couple of video stores, confiscated those without the benefit of search warrants, demanded employees’ addresses who had it, went to their homes, confiscated them. And the most marvelous irony, they went to the home of one of paid employees of the ACLU. And he called me the next morning, choking with laughter and said, “Evelyn I visited last night from the local jean d’armes, they have my tape of The Tin Drum.” And then both sides really began to slug it out. We formed a grass-roots organization, which was committed to preserving the freedom of read. And the other side was a well-run, well-financed group called OCAF. And one of our victories was to get the lawsuit bumped from the district court to federal court, which meant that the judge did not try it l before a jury. He was a federal judge, having a brain that God gave, let us. He issued a summary judgement that this material was not obscene. And we did extensive research to support our side of case. We interviewed the director of the film, the author of the book, the actors who acted in it and incidentally won the academy award for best foreign film many years ago.
BJ: Which is why we had him in the show.
ED: Yes. And we won the summary judgement. ACLU’s person filed suit in district court, and he was awarded... He won the case, but he lost it. The jury’s sympathy was on the side of the cops. But he won in monetary judgement because his civil rights had been violated.
BJ: What was going on in the office then? I mean, we know the case and all that so, I don’t mean to cut you short. What was the mood? What did Lee? When he walk in in the morning, did he throw stuff around or laugh? What was he?
ED: No. Lee had the ability to exhibit grace under pressure. And it was one of both camaraderie and grim determination. I made trip after trip after trip to hand deliver current information to the library commission members, which literally meant driving clear from Edmond to Bethany to Southern Oaks to Harrah. And I put a lot of miles on my car. We got a lot of support from both officials and private citizens, saying you are doing the right thing, do not back down. It was an immense strain on all of us. We were very, very tired.
BJ: Well, we are almost to the end, I think. And I wanted to know if you wanted to give us also your reflections about the other big events with the Murray Building, if you’re willing. Just to tell us your experience because the downtown library was almost at ground zero. So, if you’re prepared or if you don’t have any reservations about that.
ED: It happened at a time in our office when our secretary had walked across the room to stick ahead and to Lee’s office to tell him something just before he went to the conference with another administrator. And we heard this dull, growling, vibrational… sound. And I can still clearly remember seeing the glass blowing in and being stopped by the Venetian blinds. It knocked Lee down. And he got up shaking and said, “What was that?” And our secretary got back to her office and said, “Oh, my God! There is glass all over my chair.” There was glass in my address book. Everything was dangling by cords, but everything still worked. The omputers, the phones, and the lights. But when Lee got up from being shaky, he hit the ground running and he never stopped. That incident with the federal building bombing and The Tin Drum incident were his two finest moments as director. And I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to be right in the middle of it, so I stayed. He sent everybody home, of course. And he assembled us the next morning at Belle Isle Library and brought in a respected psychologist to talk to us. Staff went through various stages of trauma. Some were much calmer than others. I was abnormally calm, and I had been for the last... I only got broke and cried one time and I never did it again. However, I photographed it compulsively night after night I was down there.
BJ: So how long? You said you stuck around. Didn’t they close the library some point?
ED: Yes.
BJ: Obviously, it closed. Did they make it unfit for human habitation?
ED: Oh, yes.
BJ: Well, for how long?
ED: For a few minutes, they let us back to the building to get our belongings.
BJ: Okay.
ED: And then we set up an emergency outpost at maintenance center on the northeast side of the city on Northeast Third about a mile away. And I road with Lee over there and I stayed over there. We divided staff into Belle Isle and Capitol Hill. We were closed to the public for at least six weeks. And we had a federal disaster team cleaned it from top to bottom and it was an incredibly minute, exhausting task. We lost ninety percent of the windows but not one book in the collection even fell over.
BJ: So, like a tornado story almost.
ED: It is.
BJ: So, your temporary office was in the maintenance center? That’s where you worked during the time it closed?
ED: I was at the very, very first and then I was at Belle Isle.
BJ: Okay. So now the final chapter in your career here is you then left. When Lee left, you left that position. What did you do in the rest of your career?
ED: Basically, I was headquartered in the Oklahoma collection room, which I have begun doing before we changed buildings. And I interact with the public, tell them about the room. I have several tasks connected with room. And I have enjoyed that part of my stay very, very much. The room is a lovely architectural achievement, and it’s a literary achievement. And I hope it can always remain open to the public.
BJ: Okay. And how would that boss you had in there compare to Lee?
ED: There was only one Lee.
BJ: Okay. So, this new boss you had in the Oklahoma room, was it a pretty tough person to work with?
ED: Actually, he was disturbingly modest. I could, it was very hard to praise him, although he did a number of good works, even published a book. And I bought the first one he published. No, he was easy to work for.
BJ: Okay.
ED: Okay!
BJ: Well, that brings us up to today. So, would you like to share anything that we overlooked? That I overlooked and asking you? Or something you would want to talk about your career or anything you like to?
ED: Only to say that all these years it has been such a pleasure to have almost instant access to so much information and it was such a pleasure to work around literate, well read, intelligent, and often slightly eccentric, people.
BJ: Okay. I’ll count myself as one of those
ED: Please do.
BJ: Okay. Well thank you very much and we’ve enjoyed it.
ED: My pleasure.
BJ: Thank you.