Interview

Interview with Louise Brown

Rafael Abrahams

 

Louise Brown is a Director Emeritus of the Wayland Free Public Library and a pillar of the Wayland community. Louise worked at the library from 1966 to 2003. Over nearly four decades, WFPL saw tremendous changes: it advanced technologically from hand-typed library cards to an online catalog; expanded its services from loaning books to providing programs for children, English language learners, and poets; and evolved in its role from educational institution to community center. Louise did not only witness these changes, but she also played a large part in effecting them. In December 2022, Louise was kind enough to sit with me to discuss her illustrious history at WFPL.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To watch the video, click here.

~~~

 

Rafael Abrahams: How did you first become interested in working as a librarian?

Louise Brown: I grew up in Malden. Malden had a very famous library: it was a Henry Hobson Richardson building. The building was beautiful, and they had quite an art collection. I was a sickly child. You always had to stay home in bed when you were sick in those days. My best friend brought me Nancy Drew books every week from a branch library that was not far from my house, and I became a real reader.

Later, I was a student at Simmons College in Boston. They’re well known for their library science program. I earned an undergraduate library degree which, in those days, was accredited for professional library jobs by the American Library Association (ALA). Some years later, I completed the MLS program. I started working at the Tufts Medical/Dental Library part-time while I was a student. I got married and continued full-time at Tufts. About three years later, my first child was born, making the work commitment more difficult. There was no such thing as daycare in those days, so I stopped working in Boston. We had bought a house in Wayland, so I started looking in the suburbs for part-time work in public libraries even though I had that elitist feeling of being a medical librarian. This was 1959; I was 22.

 

RA: What was it like being a medical librarian?

LB: It’s a really nice specialty. I did cataloging and reference. Everything was done by hand in those days. They had all kinds of rules, like you couldn’t display any books on sex or reproduction. That was against the blue laws. We could have those books, but we had to hide them, and we couldn’t put any cards in the catalog. You had to keep them in a back room because the police could charge you with violations. 

There was a very famous doctor at Tufts, and he was a hematologist. He specialized in all kinds of blood diseases, and there were so many books that we had in hematology that I actually developed a classification for them. 

 

RA: How did you get your job at WFPL?

LB: I was taking courses at Framingham State to be certified as a school librarian. I wanted to get that certification because I thought being a school librarian would work out better with my family with the summers off. I used to come to WFPL to study because it was quiet. My house was noisy, so one day I asked the librarian [Marjorie Ferris] if she ever hired part-time people. I told her that I was a trained librarian and had worked in libraries as a cataloger and I could do reference and all that. She said, “No, we’re not hiring anyone.” So I asked, “Could I fill out an application in case something opens up?” She let me fill out an application. 

The board fired her shortly afterwards. They wanted somebody with new ideas, and they hired this woman [Anna Louisa Campbell] who worked at a major library, maybe Brooklyn. Her husband had taken a job locally. She was cleaning out the desk and found my application in the back. And she called me up and she said, “I desperately need a cataloger and I found this application, are you available?” I said, “Yeah.” She asked, “Can you come over for an interview?” And I said, “Well, I’d have to make an appointment because I need to get a babysitter.” She said, “Oh, bring them along.” So I brought my two kids, and she hired me. This was 1966. So that was the beginning and I gradually worked more hours.

 

RA: How was working at WFPL different from the Tufts Medical School Library?

LB: At Tufts, I used the Library of Congress Classification. When I went to work in public libraries, they all used the Dewey Decimal System. I remember my first day here in Wayland, the director put a stack of books in front of me and she said, “Why don’t you catalog those?” And I realized their system was Dewey, and I had never used Dewey. I felt like I wanted Rumplestiltskin to appear and do it for me. But I figured it out, and I liked it. I liked the people, I liked dealing with the public, and I loved the time I got at the desk and doing reference and all that.

 

RA: Was it difficult to balance your work with your home life?

LB:  I got involved in starting a daycare center in Wayland. I was on the board of directors. We met in one of the churches. My youngest child had a place to go after school until I finished work at five, and then I’d pick them up. It was unusual for mothers to be working in those days. There weren’t many two-career families. It was very, very rare. Every now and then, I read an obituary of a woman my age who was a doctor or a lawyer or something. But that was unusual.

I wanted to keep active, and my husband traveled a lot on business, and I felt I wanted to use my training. I didn’t want to be taking care of the kids all the time. I wasn’t a great mother, maybe, but my kids turned out fine and are pretty remarkable today. My theory was intelligent neglect.

 

RA: How did your position at WFPL change over time?

LB: I eventually had three kids and as they all got older, I worked more hours. In 1976, the assistant director position opened up. It was full-time, and I didn’t think I could do it, but my husband said, “Well, you’re already working 30 hours a week. What’s another five?” There were a lot of benefits for that position, and there were no benefits for part-time people. So I became the assistant director. Any time there was an intellectual freedom issue, the director let me handle it. Then in 1977 the director left, and the library offered me the directorship.

 

RA: Can you give an example of an intellectual freedom issue?

LB:  Sometimes I had complaints about acquisitions. Patrons would tell us we shouldn’t have particular movies in our collection, like Goodfellas. A man came into my office and said, “I’ve watched the movie and it’s very violent.” I said, “I agree with you that it is extremely violent. However, this movie was nominated for six Academy Awards, and we want the library to appeal to a wide variety of tastes.” That went well, the man was pleased and he didn’t complain. 

I also had complaints about the The Family of Man photography exhibit. It showed a lot of different families– gay people, couples with their children. It’s a beautiful exhibit, and I was so excited that we were able to display it. We displayed the photographs upstairs.

 

RA: What changes did you make as director?

LB: I was involved in a lot of building projects. The building had been very neglected, the roof and the plumbing and the heating and all that. In 1973, there was major legislation to protect people with disabilities, the Rehabilitation Act. I wanted to make the building handicapped accessible. So in 1977, I became director and I think that was the first thing I did. We applied for a grant to put in an elevator and we got it. At a town meeting, someone got up and said, “What do they need an elevator for?” And then that person broke their leg, and then they needed the elevator. Ironic. We had the tremendous blizzard in 1978 when they were installing the elevator and people couldn’t get in the side door and they had to walk around to the front and through the heavy snow. I used to have to write specs, it was crazy. The director now doesn’t have to deal with any of that.

In 1983 we became a founding member of the Minuteman Library Network. I explained the idea to the finance committee, and they gave us $25,000, which was a lot of money in those days. We were able to join MLN and buy computers and do retrospective conversion. Before we computerized circulation, it was so time consuming. You had to count the circulation every day and keep all the statistics by hand. MLN was a way of moving into the future, not by firing people, but having them do more useful work. After a while, we learned to hire people that had good computer skills. That was fairly early for computers.

 

RA: Was that WFPL’s first computer? 

LB: We got our first computer for the children’s room in 1980 or 1981. Our children’s librarian told me to apply for a grant to buy one. Her name was Ann Flowers, she was about ten years older than I am, and she died about two years ago. She was really ahead of her time, she became an international figure in children’s literature. We got a computer, an Apple. They called the computer a green Apple because it was all closed up, no kids could get their hands into anything. The computer was just for the kids to do a special program. We didn’t get money for trainers, we had to train ourselves, and then we had to train the children. Ann Flowers was really superior at that.

When I started working here, the children’s librarian sat at the desk and never moved. She didn’t get up and help people, she didn’t do story hours, she didn’t do anything. Eventually she left and we got a fantastic children’s librarian in Ann Flowers. 

 

RA: Would you say you have a personal philosophy about what a library should do for the community?

LB: I think a library should be service-oriented. Librarians should care about the people that come in, and people should feel comfortable and happy here. I didn’t hire people that were negative at all. I hired people that had a lot of get-up-and-go. 

One of the things I wanted to do when I became director was to have movies for people to borrow. Well, the Trustees didn’t like that idea. They would let us have films if they were classics, or they had to be really educational, not just entertaining. Or they could be movies of operas. But, gradually what happened was the Friends of WFPL said they’d pay for a collection of popular movies, and so then when I told the Trustees that they didn’t have to pay for it, we didn’t have to spend town money on it, they said okay, and we started to have an appealing movie collection. 

 

RA: It sounds to me like the library used to be perceived as more of an educational institution, and it evolved into more of a community space. Was that a trend that you purposely made happen as director? Or was that something that came from the community itself?

LB: I think it’s a little of both. There were these poets that said they would love a place to meet, and I said, “Well, we’ve got this Raytheon room now that the addition was built.” They met every Wednesday. Two o’clock on Wednesday, they were always here. Then they started doing special things like having a famous poet come once a year, and they’d have a big program.

I remember somebody calling me about wanting to learn English. It was an unusual situation. This person was an American, but he had a very poor education. Successful businessman, but he really had a lot of trouble reading and writing. He wanted to know if we had a course. We didn’t do anything like that, but I knew Framingham did. Okay. So I referred him to Framingham. 

But then we started thinking about all the foreign families that live in Wayland. I was given information that Catholic Charities in Worcester had an excellent trainer for English-language learners. So this person, she taught the first class and it was very well attended, and then we had a waiting list. I called Worcester again to send the person back again, but they said “No, we don’t do that.” They told us to go over who attended the first class, which was about 25 people, and see if there’s anyone in that group who might be interested in teaching it and let them teach, and the Catholic Charities would give them the curriculum. That’s what we did, and we had this wonderful woman [Sema Faigen] who did it for twenty years. The beautiful thing about the program was the warm friendships developed between the tutor and the student. Wonderful friendships.

This was probably around 1990. A lot of new programs started around then, because we were finally in the new building addition, and we had more space. Now there’s a group of genealogists that get together and several book discussion groups and other speaker series.

 

RA: Do you have any more memorable stories that you’d like to share?

LB: Once when I was working reference, a woman came in with a plant and she said, “Can you identify this?” This was before computers. I said, “Well, I’ll try. Let’s go up on the balcony.” That’s where the botany books were, and we went through them, and sure enough we find a plant that’s exactly like what she has. It was cannabis, of course. She said, “Ah, that’s what he’s growing in his room!”

 

~~~

 

After speaking with Louise, I got a much better understanding of how WFPL evolved in the second half of the twentieth century and how the library became a community center for residents of all ages, genders, ethnic and language backgrounds, and interests. I appreciate Louise taking the time to speak with me. Present-day WFPL librarians and patrons have also told me they are grateful for all of the important changes that Louise brought to the library during her long tenure working there. Whether we realize it or not, Louise’s influence continues to shape the role that WFPL plays in the lives of Waylanders today.