Oral History: Jan Keene

Description:

Transcript:

Interview with Jan Keene 

  

Interviewee: Jan Keene 

Interviewer:  Unknown 

Interview date:  

Interview location:  

Transcription Date: 8/10/20 

 

 

Interviewer: Okay, let’s start. Give us a little bit of background information. Where you were born, your family, that type of thing. 

Jan: Glad to. I was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. And I didn’t live there very long. I was my folks’ first child; they only had two. I came in the late thirties. And then it was a long, long time because there was World War II in there in between. And then when that was over, I got a little sister. And so there were two girls in our family. We lived in St. Joseph, Missouri for a while. Then we lived in Concordia, Kansas, which was a lovely little town north of Selina, which is where my dad was really supposed to work, but there weren’t any houses there. So we lived in Concordia, and he commuted back and forth. Then we moved to Tulsa in 1944, and there were no houses for sale in Tulsa, but my dad had work there, so that’s where we were. We lived in the Alvin Hotel, which was right downtown. I didn’t have to go to school, because there weren’t any elementary schools downtown, and it was absolutely wonderful. I rode the elevator all day. There were always soldiers in the coffee shop downstairs, and I could go every afternoon and one of them would buy me ice cream. We had to eat out all our meals, and I used to get dollar pancakes at the little restaurant right next door. And they had hamburgers at the silver dollar across the street. It was wonderful. It was a great childhood. Then we got a house and things went back to normal. So I had to go to school. And I got a little sister. But anyway, my growing up years were really fun. 

Interviewer: How early in life did you aspire to be a librarian? 

Jan: Well very late. I will have to tell you that I did not go to a library when I was a child. The bookmobile came to our neighborhood, so I went to a bookmobile. I do not remember who worked on it. I have no recollection at all or a person on the bookmobile. I just remember that the books came, and I read those books. My grade school librarian was Mrs. Jenkins. I thought she must be at least ninety years old. She had white hair and a craggy face, I guess you would say. The library was in the school cafeteria. We couldn’t take the books home, so we had to put the books back on the shelf with a little marker that wouldn’t make a scene on the shelf, so we could read it the next time we came in. She said ‘shush’ all the time, and I didn’t like that very much. I don’t remember going into the junior high school library ever, for any reason. And when I went to senior high school, there was a librarian in there who said ‘shush,’ never asked if she could help, was totally disinterested in anything that the students were doing, as far as I could tell. So, I thought that would be a horrible job and that horrible people must do that. I never thought to do it at all so…Although, when I got to TU, DeAnn Ray was a friend of mine; we were one the TU swim team together. Her aunt worked for the Tulsa public library. She told me she wanted to be a librarian, had always wanted to be a librarian. There was no question in her mind. And I said, I think that’s just great, but I wouldn’t do that for anything. So, she went off into library school and I got a business degree and went to work for the city in Tulsa. I was in the personnel department, so I did interviews and personnel work. Minutes of civil service commission meetings and interviewing people and calling people and that kind of thing, salary and wage surveys. That was the kind of thing I really loved. I really liked doing that. I’d worked there for about five years, and one of the men that was the budget directors in the city of Tulsa, went to work for the newly formed Tulsa City County Library System, which was in 1962, with the law passed. It was formed at that point. In 1963 he went over there to be their business manager, and he wanted me to come over and do the personnel part. And I liked him and thought, ‘well that sounds fine. Okay, I’ll do that.’ So, I went over there and started working in the basement of the library. I didn’t have much contact with the librarians there. And again, I didn’t ever think about wanting to be a librarian. That just didn’t appeal to me. Anyway, I worked there a long time and I final decided, ‘well if I’m going to work here...’ And then I became the business manager. ‘I might as well go to library school. So, in those days there wasn’t one in Tulsa. So, we drove back and forth to Norman many times, very fast. [She laughs] There were several of us doing this. So, we would carpool and have fun talking on the way down and back. They started having classes in Tulsa in one of our meeting rooms, which made it real easy for me to do while I was working. So that’s how I got my library degree. I never did actually work on the public service desk, except volunteering on Sundays. I wanted to do that and it was great fun. So, although people have always said I was a librarian, because I had a library degree and I worked in a library, I was always on the business side.  

Interviewer: We have to have some of those. 

Jan: That’s right. 

Interviewer: So, when did you get your degree? When did you finish? 

Jan: I got my degree in 1980, I think it was. 

Interviewer: And you started with the Tulsa County System in… 

Jan:’63.  

Interviewer: So, forty-ish 

Jan: I retired in 2003, so I was there for forty years. I didn’t do the same job every day. I traded my personnel hat, got somebody else to do that, and I did more of the accounting budgeting, planning, and legal aspects, worked with architects, did a lot of building planning, everything. We built many libraries in that time. I didn’t count, but probably at least fifteen new buildings. And we remodeled other buildings many times during all those years. We moved into a new central library just when I started. It was finished in 1965, so that was a fun thing to do. I ordered all the furniture for it. I remember doing that. 

Interviewer: What were some of the biggest challenges? 

Jan: Well, in the early days it was probably the catalog for the library system, because we knew it was going to be impossible to have twenty card catalogs, one for each library, for people to look up what was available to us. So we decided, ‘well we have to do something different from that. So in the very early days, like in 1966, we started working on our first united catalog, where all the collections would be in one book, and we’d publish these things quarterly. And it was like eight volumes. We had a title catalog, and a subject catalog, and an author catalog. And every three months we’d have to do it over because it would change. We’d add a collection and so forth. It was a huge project, I mean a lot of work, doing that. And it was difficult, a lot of people typing. Then we got to the key punch, the IBM cards, we did all that information on keypunch cards to get them in. That was a lot of work too. I mean, I didn’t do it, but a lot of people did data input. Lots and lots of people did that for years. And then they came up with microfiche, and they had something where you could take the information you had on these tapes that were used to produce the book catalogs and put them on microfiche. So that made it a lot easier. We had to have fiche readers at every place, but we had to keep doing these things over and over again with these big volumes of books with that catalog. So that was the biggest problem he had. That was our biggest issue, just trying to let everybody know what the library owned. 

Interviewer: Biggest success?  

Jan: And the biggest success? Well probably, all this expansion, the building of new libraries and all the little county towns. It started out with every single county or town wanting to be a part of this. There was an election to see if people wanted to be a part of the county library system. There are a lot of towns in the county besides Tulsa: Sand Springs, and Prattville, Wasso and Collinsville, Broken Arrow, and Bixby, and Jenks. So all of those places had to vote to make this happen, to make it into City County. And not every one of them voted for this. Some were afraid that we’d just swallow them up, the big library in Tulsa, we’d just eat them up and they wouldn’t have any identity anymore. They didn’t like the idea of that. So, we had to kind of sell that idea, but when we would open storefronts that had good collections of books, when before they just had one wall in the water department or city hall with some books in it. We won them over. Everybody loved the idea of having a city county system. It was a big success just getting to that part, where everybody was in favor of it.  

Interviewer: Well, did you have a role model or a mentor?  

Jan: At the library I did. Ally Beth Martin was the director when I went there. And she was just a dynamo, an absolute dynamo. I never saw anybody work so hard as she did. She was married to a physician, and he worked long hours and wasn’t home anyways. So she did too. Her daughter was already out of college and gone, so the library was just her world. She spent every day all day thinking of ways to improve the library, and make it grow, make it easier to use. One of her things she thought was just terrible—she could not leave any print materials unread. She had to read every book, she had to read everything they came across—newspapers—she was just addicted to it. So that took up a lot of her time, but she was really a wonderful person, very encouraging of almost everybody new that came to work at the library. ‘Oh, you can do wonderous things.’ She just encouraged people. She was so special because she tried so hard to help people. 

Interviewer: Did she have a library degree? 

Jan: Yes, she did. She had gone to Columbia. Had her library degree from Columbia University in New York City.  

Interviewer: So, describe a typical day from early on, and from when you retired. 

Jan: Early on and when I retired. Well early on, very early on, we were hiring people. We started out with something like —altogether when the system started were like maybe fifty people? By the time we hired people to work in the branches in all those towns—and there were eight other branches in the city of Tulsa—so by the time we had all those people hired…It took a lot of time, and a lot of energy. So, my typical day was filled with that. Trying to find new people who wanted to work with the library. We learned soon—or I did very soon after I got there—that just because someone came in and said I want to work because I love books, was not the best qualification. What we needed was people that loved people. That was the key to it. We decided early on we wanted people who wanted to help people, the key ingredient in a really good librarian we identified right up front. We wanted somebody that wanted to help people, because that was what being a librarian was all about. So anyway, that was the typical day then. We gave a lot of tests back then, before we hired people to see if they could answer certain questions. I would give tests and we could interview people and send them out to the various locations to see if they would enjoy working in that particular spot. So, a typical day was mostly spent like that. Afterwards I took on a couple things. When Ally Beth died in ’76, Pat Woodram, who had been the assistant director, became the director at that point. And Pat and I started at the library almost at the same time. She graduated from library school and came for a job as a librarian in one of our new branches that we had opened. And then she came downtown to work as an assistant to the person who was in charge of all our branches. She had a space in the business office where I worked, and so we got be really good friends right off. We ate lunch together every day and did things together every day. So, all this time we kind of grew up together. She asked me to be the assistant librarian when she got to be the library director, which was kind of a big step for me at that time. I had taken on all of the business operations; I was a business manager at that point. But then she wanted me to take automation, and that was a huge jump for me because I had not been involved with that much. But I did. I thought, ‘sure, I can do that.’ We did that and that was a huge challenge. But we had a brilliant lady, named Ruth Blake, who was working as our technical services head and she also had been key in doing all these catalogs in the various formats. She put a lot of confidence in me and so I took on various other things. And then we had some bond issues that we passed that gave us money to build freestanding buildings for all these branches and these towns, where earlier we had been a storefront on Main Street. So, we bought land, we hired architects. I did a lot of that kind of thing; meeting with interior decorators; meeting with vendors of all kind, furniture, shelving. Vance Hunt and I have been friends forever because of his good services with his shelving company. A typical day got to be more involved with business and less involved with interviewing librarians. We had hired a really good personnel person and she did a wonderful job for thirty years hiring people for the library. That was another thing that was really fun about working there. We had longevity galore. We had people who had worked there—I wasn’t the only one who had worked there for forty years. There’s still people who have worked there for forty years; and there’s going to be more people who worked there for forty years. We had a great group of people, lots of congeniality. And we worked really well together. We didn’t have to have a lot of meetings because everybody knew what they supposed to do. Everybody knew that they could trust all the other people that were in charge. So things went really well because of all that continuity. Towards the very end we had a new director. Pat had retired to run for state senate. And so, I campaigned for her, and she lost. She was sad about that for about two days, then she went on to do other things. Anyway, a new director came in ’96 and she was very interested in changing everything. That was her thing, she came in the door saying, “well I know you like what you’ve got, and things have been working well. You’ve checked out a lot of books, and the community loves you so you’ve passed every bond issue you’ve asked for. But I think we need to change things. It’s new generation and a new—” So we started changing things. All my time almost was devoted to remodels and making plans for how to keep library services going when we had building under remodeling and all that kind of thing. We redid the central library twice, moved all the books, huge amounts of time spent in trying to organize and coordinate and be sure we had everything ready for the time when we’re going to move because people were going to be so discombobulated with all the changes and trying to find things. So that was the end product, I guess. 

Interviewer: Any major memorable event that stands out, favorite memory? 

Jan: Well one of my favorite memories I guess, was the opening of the new central library in 1965. It had a big plaza out between the library and the court house. So it was in the evening and we were having this huge opening, and we had all these folding chairs sat out on the plaza. Ally Beth was there and she had a hookup with somebody in Washington DC who was very important, but I can’t think of who it was right this minute. But anyway it was some dignitary like the vice president or somebody and they flipped a switch that turned on the lights of the new central library, and everybody applauded. It was really exciting; it was really fun. I remember that really well because it was a lot of fun. I remember open houses and ribbon cuttings at other buildings where the whole community turned out. They were really excited. We did a lot of entertaining. We have lots of big outdoor events on the plaza and had musicians and all that come. I went to lots of story hours just to be part of it. I did a lot of things like that which were not exactly part of my job, but I loved the people. I loved my Sundays on the desk. I will have to tell you my favorite question was, one day I was on the elevator. It was a four-story building and I was on the elevator going up from one to four. There was another lady on there and when we got to four I kind of waited for her to go out because she was sort of in front of me. She turned around and she said, “if I stay on, will it take me to the other end of the building?” [laughs]. I said, “no it just goes up and down.” I’ve always wondered what in the world she had in mind that she thought this elevator could go to the other end of the building. I’ve never gotten over that. It was just the most bizarre question. But there were other questions that people asked me on this desk. There weren’t any funny ones, but people had a reason for whatever they wanted to know. So, I enjoyed trying to field them. 

Interviewer: How early on did you join OLA? 

Jan: Well right at the very beginning. Probably in ’64 or ’65. I remember my first OLA was kind of a disaster because the man I worked for in the business office, and another lady in the business office, and a science librarian, we all decided to go together. And he drove his old Cadillac Car. And we went to Enid and stayed at the Phillips Hotel. And at the end of the OLA conference, which I don’t remember anything about really. I remember that his car broke down and he couldn’t’ take us home. And so, we sat up all night at the lobby of the Philips Hotel waiting for one of these ladies’ husbands to drive from Tulsa to Enid to get us to take us back home, and we got back home about five-thirty in the morning. We were totally exhausted, and I thought, ‘oh my goodness. Is this what OLA is going to be like?’ [laughs] It wasn’t like that ever again. I was not just fully connected and involved for several years after that, but I started going to the conferences the first year.  

Interviewer: And what committees were you involved with along the way? 

Jan: Almost everything except intellectual freedom, I was never on that one. But I did really almost every other committee. I was on the auditing committee two or three times. I was on the conference planning committee two or three times. I was the treasurer for two years. I was on the sights committee several times. I do know that intellectual freedom was one I wasn’t on, but I was around the gamut I guess for all of the other things, that I was on at least once. I enjoyed all of them learned something met new people on every one of them. 

Interviewer: Did you attend the 75th one? 

Jan: I’m sure I did. [laughs] 

Interviewer: Does it stand out? 

Jan: Does it stand out? Hmm. I can’t remember where it was or anything about it. I don’t believe I ever missed one, so I’m sure I was there. I was always part of doing something for it. When we hosted it in Tulsa, which we did a lot, I was either head of the local arrangements or on the local arrangements committee, almost every time. So really involved in putting on the conference. But no, I don’t really remember the 75th. 

Interviewer: It must not have been in Tulsa then. 

Jan: I think it was not in Tulsa. I would have known, we would have had to do artwork for it or something, something special. 

Interviewer: What’s your most memorable OLA memory? 

Jan: My most memorable OLA memory? Oh my goodness. 

Interviewer: Maybe more than one. 

Jan: Well there were some funny ones. Really funny. One of the things I remember, Pat and I were rooming together. We were in Oklahoma City for a conference and it was the year that a book about a horse—was there a mustang? I think it was the name of a book that was written by somebody…and it was the Sequoyah winner anyway. Whatever it was, it was a long time ago and we were giving it an award for this book called Mustang. And Pat and I had to come up with one-hundred-and-eighty plastic horses. We went all over the area in Tulsa trying to find these little plastic horses so we could have one horse on every plate at the conference dinner and all that. We had horses in all over, in the car, everywhere, stacked here and there. And we had to haul them all into the hotel and I think it was raining. It was just such a disaster. We got so tickled we just died laughing. We decided we were never going to do that again. Other memorable things, we had some really good speakers, really outstanding people who have come. I remember one OLA conference in Oklahoma City. I was in a hotel someplace and their keynote speaker for their banquet was George Plimpton. I had read a couple of George Plimpton’s books, the one where he was a baseball pitcher, and the one where he was a football quarterback. He was a guy that tried out a lot of different things to see what it would be like to be this person and he had written books about all of them. And I’d read a couple of them, but I had no idea he was going to be so funny. He told stories about all of these books that he’d written and all these roles that he’d played. And one of them that I particularly remember, everyone was practically on the floor laughing, was when he was a trapeze artist, and he wore pink leotards doing his trapeze thing. He was up flying around, and then he was walking down the street in it. Anywhere I’d never heard speak as cleverly. It was just amazingly funny. My stomach hurt for two days after that, but he was just great. I remember him so well. 

Interviewer: Made up the difference from the Enid trip, huh? 

Jan: It did; it really did. It was much better. 

Interviewer: How long do you think you’ll stay involved with OLA since you retired? 

Jan: Probably not too much longer, don’t you think? I think it’s probably time to not be involved. I feel a little out of the loop, because I’m at home. I’ve got a computer, and what I’ve done in the last here years since I did retire has been on the centennial committee. And I’ve communicated with a lot of people through email and so forth. But I don’t see people regularly, except maybe in a meeting or something at OLA, or sitting at a dinner table with them or something like that. But I’m not involved, except with the centennial committee, like I used to be, with everything that was going on. I knew all the vendors. Things change fast. So I don’t know all the vendors anymore; I still know Vance Hunt. I don’t know the book salespeople I used to see all the time. So I don’t feel as involved with it, so I’m thinking that I probably, next year, after we finish up the centennial loose ends and make some recommendations for the future, might be the end of my OLA career, which will be… 

Interviewer: Let’s hope not. 

Jan: It’ll be alright. There’s whole lots of great people coming along that are going to be doing wonderous things. 

Interviewer: But your knowledge of business and the aspects of it was invaluable 

Jan: It did help. I was amazed—the first time I served on a conference planning committee. My first question was, ‘how much money do we have; what’s the budget; where are our parameters; how are we going to decide whether these people can do all the things they say they want to do?’ And everybody said to me, ‘we don’t have a budget. It always just works out.’ And I thought, ‘well this is a remarkable organization if that’s the case, because I don’t know any other place you can go, that you can plan things and carry them off year after year without a plan of some sort, and especially a financial plan.’ Anyway, I persuaded them to make a budget. I did, I talked to KayI found out the history of revenues from various sources, and how much we’d charged people to go to various events and so forth. So I did, I made a budget. And I said, ‘I think we should plan to make fifteen-thousand dollars on this conference.’ And everybody just looked at me. And I said, ‘well, why not?’ OLA needs somebody to work with and this is the only way they’re making money. We did. We set a goal, and we raised fifteen-thousand dollars from that conference. Well from then on, everybody was really excited about having budgets and goals. That was one of the things I felt good about trying to get started, and I’m sure that they still have budgets, and set goals for fundraisers now, so that’s good  

Interviewer: The treasury report goes back to that too, that we all get.  

Jan: [Laughs] Right?  

Interviewer: Do you have any favorite long-lasting friendships that you formed during your connection to OLA? 

Jan: Well of course, the Tulsans are the easiest to form relationships and contacts with. I actually in recent years hadn’t been as close to DeeAnn Rayes as I had been, but she and I stayed in touch. And when she was working in Clinton and her aunt was still alive, she would come back and forth. We would see each other. So DeeAnn and I were always really good friends. I felt a real friendship with Mary Sherman over the years. She was always at the meetings, and always doing something, and going somewhere, and always had a plan for the evening or a plan for whatever. So she and I became friends. Marty Thompson is another person that I developed a friendship with, as well as Bob Swisher. He and I just hit it off. I think we was president the year before I was, of OLA. And we worked together a lot on plans and programs during those two years. So, he and I have maintained a friendship. And Kay, of course, Kay Boise is a lovely woman. We have enjoyed each other for years and years. We roomed together and we’ve had dinners at ALA conferences. We’ve done things together in Oklahoma City. I try and have lunch with her when we’re meeting in Enid, if she’s available. Kay is a real buddy. 

Interviewer: Was there any words of wisdom you would tell someone new coming in? 

Jan: Coming into librarianship? Well, I think it’s just fabulous. I have recommended it to several people. I’ve recommended it to two nieces and a nephew, none of whom have done it. But I’ve talk to them about it, and you never know. Someday they might still get into it. I recommended it to people. It’s a job that is not overly supervised, most of the time. You have a job. You know what you’re supposed to do, and you do it. You figure out the best way to do it. You learn something every day. You rub up against all kinds of subjects that you never thought you’d know anything about, all kinds of people. I loved the public library because of that. I know lots people that work in academic libraries just wouldn’t do anything else, and they just love that, and I just think it’s a different milieu all together. But the public library, well you get everything from six-month-olds and babies for storytelling, and little children with their first cards and they’re so excited, and students that need desperate hep because their paper is due tomorrow, and all of those kinds of people, as well as the elderly and blind, we had a big library service for the blind, and people in their later years who are just so dependent and so appreciative of the personal contact that they have with people at the library either on the phone or when we go to them in nursing homes or situations like that, and senior centers, and everybody in between. We saw bank presidents in our library every day, as well the homeless, everybody in between, homemakers, businesspeople. We were right across the street from the courthouse, so we had the jurors looking for something to do on their lunch hours every day. It was just a wonderful way to spend your life. I never—well I had other offers— but I never wanted to trade all of that in for what I had when I worked there. I through it was very fulfilling, very satisfying to know that at the end of the day you’d helped somebody or done something to improve their situation. 

Interviewer: Well since you started that far back, were there any bookmobiles?  

Jan: There were, yes. Tulsa had a lot of bookmobiles. They went to schools. They had a lot of bookmobiles in the fifties up ‘till about 1960. When they started having the buildings, they went back down to—they had seven or eight bookmobile earlier—then they went back to a couple, three, bookmobiles. And we still have, the system still has, one bookmobile that goes to isolated housing areas mostly in poorer parts of town where people don’t have cars available to get to a library. So they still have one that goes to those areas. Of course, it’s different from what it was when I was there, because it has computers on it now and internet connections that the kids can use. 

Interviewer: Do you remember when those were first introduced to the library? Since you were involved with automation some, do you remember when the internet came in?  

Jan: Yes. I was very fortunate to serve on the advisory committee for OCLC. I guess because I was in charge of automation and technology at our library, I went to an Amigos meeting one time. I didn’t go to amigo meetings much. I was really not interested, and I wasn’t really involved in that too much. But anyway, at one of their meetings they told me they were going to nominate me for this, and I didn’t know what it was even. I had never heard of anybody that had been nominated to be on the advisory committee for OCLC before. But anyway, I got elected. It was one of the highlights of continuing education for me, although I tried to keep up and stay on top of things, they were way ahead of us. I mean they were just way ahead of what my library was able to do. I was there for six years.  I can’t remember exactly at what point during those six years I heard the word ‘internet’ and saw on a little screen, “http:”. I thought, ‘what is that,’ and this person was standing up there telling us that everybody’s going to be able to communicate like this, and find out information and gather information off of this internet, and this is how it’s going to happen. I came back to my library and I said, ‘if we had a computer on every desk, and we typed in ‘http://…’ and everybody there looked at me like I had lost my mind. And I said, ‘oh I think it’s real. I think it’s really going to happen.” And so I went to the next meeting, and one f of the people that worked at OCLC who was just a genius was telling us all these things. He said, ‘not only this, but then you’re going to be able to do this and this and that….’ And I just got very enthused. So I came back to Tulsa Library and I said, ‘we have to have the internet. I remember Pat said, ‘is this just a fad? Is this real’ I said, ‘yes, it’s real. I just know it is. We have to have it.” So we started making a new plan right away about how we were going to have it, and making policies on who could use it, were we going to keep children from using it, all those things that come up with use of internet in a public library. So it was a whole new set of things for our board to think about and cogitate on. Anyway, we did get into it pretty quick . We were one of the early public libraries in the state to be hooked up to the internet and everyone involved. 

Interviewer: Were you involved with the budget? Do you know about how much that may have cost?  

Jan: How much it cost us? That’s kind of a long time ago. I don’t really remember; it was a lot of money. I know when we went to—the bond issue that we had—we voted bond issues in 78,88, and 98. The one in 88 seemed to me that we had at least six millions dollars for the internet, for the connections, for all of the equipment it was going to take, and for all our hours. We had three-hundred PCs on our network and we had lots of servers. It was a huge outlay. 

Interviewer: And when you left, do you remember how many PCs you had in the system? 

Jan: Oh…five-hundred-and-something. 

Interviewer: Almost doubled 

Jan: Almost double, about that. The looks of it have changed too. Now it’s just this little flat screen thing/ It used to be kind of a big piece of equipment, took up a lot of room. There was a lot of drilling holes in our library, in this library that had been built in 1964, open in 1965. It was poured concrete and steel and it will withstand anything. It the best built building in Tulsa, I’m sure. It was just a marvelous building, never had a crack in it. Wonderful building, but it is riddled with holes now for all those wires we had to run from the basement where the computers are to all these places. It was a challenge, but we’ve managed to do it. 

Interviewer: Is there anything else I need to ask you, Jan? 

Jan: Well I don’t think so. I just felt very fortunate to have worked within the situation that I was in and with the people that were there at the time. That I was there with other people in the state, and in the nation. I was very involved in ALA for thirty-one years. I was on their budget committee for four years and chaired it one year. I felt good about the work that I did for the American Library Association. Also, one of my pet projects for that, I can’t take credit for it singlehandedly, but I was determined that all of the states were going to collect the states statistics so that we could have some comparisons between libraries in one state and libraries in another state. This meant that we had to convince the state librarians in every state to collect and have the same definitions for the information that they collected. So it took several years, but we kept working at it and working at it and one winter I went to Washington DC six times for committee meetings with people at the National Center of Educational Statistics. We finally came up with an approach we thought would work, then we went to the council of state library executives, went to their meetings and finally got some buy-ins from those. It finally happened. So I felt really good about that too that was a real interesting— 

Interviewer: About when was that? 

Jan: Well it must have been in the eighties. Something like that. It was after everybody was automated. It was easier to do that sort of thing then than before when people were writing everything down with paper and pencil.  

Interviewer: Now did you have a travel budget, or did this come out of you own pocket, all your travels for OLA, and ALA, and these others. 

Jan: OLA travel was all on us. Our library didn’t pay for anything in the state. Whatever we did in the state was on us. But they sent people to ALA, and paid I believe part of the expenses. They paid for the airplane and a certain amount on the hotel. Part of my experience were always paid to the national conferences that I went to through the years. Some of it was on me but not too much. 

Interviewer: When history is written about you what do you want it to say? 

Jan: Oh my. 

Interviewer: Tough question? [both laugh] 

Jan: I probably…I persevered is the best thing that you could say and most realistic thing that you could say about what I did in my life. I remember reading a book when I was about five that had little kittens in it. And this little kitten said, ‘purrseverence pays.’ And I asked my mom, what is ‘purrseverence,’ because of course it was purring. So she told me, well its just keeping after something. If you want it, you have to work for it. It’s just keeping after your goals. Setting targets and being relentless in your pursuit of whatever it is. I think that I, from that five-year-old ‘purrseverence pays’ book, that I adopted that as a way of looking at the world and how I wanted to relate to it. So, I think that accounts for the longevity. I just persevered down this path where I saw that could be of use and make some difference. 

Interviewer: What do you see yourself doing in the next five to ten years?  

Jan: Well I’ve just taken on a new role as the Downtown area coordinator for ‘Meals on Wheels’ in Tulsa. It operates and has operated for a long time, out of our church kitchen. So the lady that started Meals on Wheels is now ninety-five and she’s blind. She had to give it up a few years back. And then another friend of mine took it over, and now she’s decided that she really wants to retire. So I told them that I would take it over and do just a small part. Now, Meals on Wheels is all over the county not just our project anymore. Anyway, I’m looking forward to doing that. I think that’s going to be a lot of fun. I have become a volunteer at our Tulsa garden center. And Pat Woodram, my great friend, is well on the way to seeing that botanical gardens for Tulsa—for the state actually— become a reality. I look forward to working out there with her.  

Interviewer: So, no rest yet. 

Jan: Not yet. [Laughs] 

Interviewer: Well, thank you so much. 

Jan: Well, you’re welcome. It’s been my pleasure. 

[Interview Ends]