An interview with Donald Engley ’39, who served as the librarian at Norwich University Library, Associate Librarian at among other positions, by former Amherst College librarian Willis E. Bridegam.
[0:00] Willis E. Bridegam: I am very pleased to have the opportunity to interview Donald B. Engley today. Don is a graduate of Amherst College, class of 1939 and a long-time friend of the Amherst College Library. Don was the librarian of Trinity College from 1951 till 1972, and then he became the Associate University Librarian of Yale University, from 1972 until his retirement in 1982. He and his wife, Hope, live in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Don, I note that you have chosen to give the title of this interview as “A Lifetime of Libraries, Thanks to Amherst College”. I assume that the reasons for that title will become apparent as we proceed with this interview. I believe that your interest in libraries dates back–way back–to the Depression years. Could you tell us what fascinated you about libraries then?
[1:05] Donald Engley: I was a Depression-era child; this was the period before television and all the other accoutrements, radio was limited to the World Series, and the weather and a few other things. I found my way to the small town public library, and I devoured the children’s section–it had no classification system, just grouped by types of books. When the stereotypical head librarian of the public library went to the bathroom one day, I went over the little fence to explore in the adult section and discovered the Dewey Decimal System. She came out and found the bad boy there, and she called my mother, who–we lived on the same street with the librarian–and my mother, a school teacher, said: “I don’t think it will harm the boy” [[laughter]] “Why don’t you let him continue?” So I was a kind of a favored one I gather, grudgingly, by Mabel Meyers.
[2:27] Well, um, the next thing, next door to us in the wintertime was the head of the Yale Forestry School’s forest in Union, Connecticut. His idea of Sunday school teacher was to bring all of the young boys to the Yale forest on Sunday afternoon and commune with nature. Beaver dams, and all [[inaudible]] got the picture?
[2:50] Bridegam: Sure.
[2:52] Engley: Along the way, he said to me, one day, “How would you like to go to Mount Hermon School?” And I naturally said, “That sounds nice, but–” (wherewithal), and he says, “Don’t worry, a classmate of mine at Princeton is now the new young headmaster of Mount Hermon and he’s doing wonders and he has some scholarship money, I think we can get you aboard.” So, there I went. [3:17] And I am quite sure that, if it hadn’t been for Mount Hermon, I wouldn’t have made it into Amherst. I learned how to study; in the little mill town high school, I could get A’s without doing anything, or so it seemed, so I learned how to study. I also found out that, except for Study Hall periods, the only place you could go was to get a slip from the dorm master to go to the library if you wanted to work on a term paper or something, and I used to invent reasons to go to the very good preparatory school library. And so, there I was, already indoctrinated by libraries. [4:04] So it comes Spring of 1935, I had been accepted at Amherst because of a friend who was in the class of ‘37 here, and had had my interview with Scott Porter, the one and only Dean of Admissions and everything else then, and my father called me one day, he had been modestly into Republican politics and the congressman from the Eastern part of Connecticut said he had an appointment opening for West Point, would I be interested? Well, knowing what tuitions were and knowing it was a free ride at Amherst, I mean–
[4:45] Bridegam: At West Point?
[4:45] Engley: I mean, at West Point, I took it. And I took all the oral and written exams in New York City in June of ‘35, already admitted to Amherst, uh, physical exam, and when the returns came in I was–I had passed everything except the physical exam, that um–and I quote from the report: “will not be able to wear a military shoe successfully.”
[5:18] Bridegam: ‘Course, that was proven wrong later on [[laughing]]
[5:20] Engley: I wore them for five years later on, but West Point did me a great favor, because even though I was [with] the infantry division on the Utah Beach and in Normandy, I was an anti-aircraft battery commander, which I’ll come back to, and I saw what could’ve been some of my West Point classmates leading the charge in the infantry, call, “Follow me!” and they ended up in body bags.
[5:50] Bridegam: Right.
[5:50] Engley: And so, West Point did me a great favor by not taking me back then, and so I did come to Amherst.
[5:59] Bridegam: Now, you entered Amherst in the early 30s–no, mid-30s, I guess it would be–
[6:04] Engley: It was 19–September, 1935.
[6:07] Bridegam: ‘35.
[6:07] Engley: That was when colleges opened, mid-September, not late August.
[6:12] Bridegam: I wonder if you could tell us about the college at that time and also your freshman English teacher, Newton F. McKeon?
[6:22] Engley: I would be delighted to. As you gather, I had an eye for libraries. I found Converse to be, quite frankly, a barn of a place. [[laughter]] I was dismayed to find that there was only one narrow door to get into the great big book stacks. I found that there was a major reading room with cork floors that squeaked, the–all the reserve book readings were there, but dominating the room in the north alcove was a white marble bust of Calvin Coolidge. He seemed to be presiding over everything [[laughter]].
[7:05] Bridegam: Was he chairman of the board then?
[7:07] Engley: Uh, no.
[7:08] Bridegam: No.
[7:08] Engley: No. Uh, Dwight Morrow had–
[7:11] Bridegam: Dwight Morrow.
[7:11] Engley: Anyway, you had to read in that room and it was crowded. I tried to take refuge in the periodical room one the side of the main entrance, and that was too full, jammed with scholarly periodicals but only the ones in the humanities and the arts, not the science ones, which were off some other place. The other room was jammed with newspapers on rods. But I discovered quickly that the upper floors were full of seminar rooms, and there were no windows there, and you would peek in to see how many other students were hiding in there doing their reserve book reading. I also discovered that there were faculty offices there, but that they had–they weren’t populated usually. Faculty weren’t using them that way and the library discouraged faculty putting books into the seminar rooms on the bookshelves, and the faculty apparently didn’t want them there either, which leads me to say a word or two about the planning of college libraries then, and perhaps even now it applies, that they’re being planned for the present and, they think, for the future, but they’re responding to what the constituencies want and expect. I later learned about William I. Fletcher, known as Pa Fletcher–
[8:44] Bridegam: Who was the librarian of the college–
[8:46] Engley: –of the college–
[8:46] Bridegam: When Converse was planned, right?
[8:48] Engley: That’s right, he retired in 1912 and his son Robert took over, but–and that’s another story–but Pa was still around, and this was designed in close contact with the faculty, he thought. This was the German PhD principle of a teacher with his prime students huddling around in a seminar room with books all around them, but it wasn’t working in 1935, but it made very good hideouts for students [[Bridegam laughs]] who were–almost all students–were burdened with required reading. Every Amherst freshman had to take a section of Freshman English. It was a very loose arrangement in those days, the teacher who had it could do whatever he wanted, it had turned out, Ted Baird could do his thing. Fortunately for me, and it turned out Cal Plimpton, who will come up later, were in a group of 25 or so with a young English assistant professor Newton McKeon, who sat with his legs hanging over the desk the first day and asked us: “How would you like to read the English novel?” Well, what were we gonna do? Of course, we all nodded, “That’ll be fine”. This was the opening of a whole year of reading the English novel from beginnings, Thomas Deloney and Thomas Nash, all the way through, and he was taking the off-beat titles of some of these people, not the standards, and we came all the way through the year until we ended up with Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. And this was an exciting, fascinating experience because he related the novel to what was happening in England at the time, the mores, the customs, the history, the whole bit. Take Charles Dickens, for example.
[10:52] Bridegam: He was not the librarian then, though.
[10:54] Engley: No. No, no.
[10:55] Bridegam: He was simply an English professor.
[10:58] Engley: He was an English instructor. I found out, though, when I came back for my sophomore year, that he was one of Stanley King’s favorites. Stanley was the then-president, and he had named Newton, in his early 30s, the acting dean of the college while Scott Porter was on sabbatical. So, Newton was there for a whole year, as I remember it. I mentioned we didn’t have advisors in those days, it was catch as catch can, and the next thing I knew, Newton was calling me into the Dean’s office–I don’t think I was shaking, particularly–but he wanted to know how I was doing. And–this is typical of Newton. I allowed as how I was doing okay, but financially it was a little tight. I had a job in the college dining hall, in Morrow–I had asked for a job in the library, but was told that there weren’t any openings for freshmen at that point. The Armour Craigs of the world were sitting, reading, in a dormitory library, for example, so I found myself on the dishwashing machine, but soon I found myself on the steam table, because the football players-types, in white coats, couldn’t quite get to the steam table on time to cut meat or whatever, but there I was on the dishwashing machine and pushed onto the steam table. And I was enjoying this, and this led to working in summer hotels for two summers. [12:37] I said to Newton: I was strained a little, financially, and he said, “Do you think you can cope with a few hours in the library?” [[laughter]] And I allowed as how that’s what I wanted as a freshman, I said, “I would very much like to”, so I went to work in Converse, shelving books–
[12:56] Bridegam: Shelving books.
[12:56] Engley: –in the deep dark stacks.
[12:58] Bridgeam: Funny, most of us got our start shelving books, didn’t we? [[laughter]]
[13:00] Engley: I was a runner to the dormitory libraries, taking books there, arranging the shelves, which the Armour Craigs sitting reading should’ve been doing. I had one lovely remembrance of the Morrow library–there were four of them, North College, South College, Pratt–
[13:20] Bridegam: And Morrow.
[13:22] Engley: And Morrow. Those were the four dormitories, other students were all in the fraternity houses then. The library always made a point of getting the word from Smith when Mrs. Morrow was going to be in Northampton for trustees meetings. She’d been a long-time trustee, and she was actually acting President at one point: the reason was, she always came over to see how the Dwight Morrow Library was doing in the Dwight Morrow Library, and so we had to have the word out that weekend: no feet on the furniture [[laughter]], um, shelves nicely arranged, because many of the books had come from Dwight Morrow’s own personal library. So, anyway, there I was a sophomore in the library, where I wanted to be. I discovered quickly another feature of the Converse which was undesirable: the stone tile floor. People with heels and the balconies there and all the noise reverberating up above there was not designed with sound control. [[Bridegam laughter]]
[14:38] Bridegam: In ‘38, the Converse Library was expanded. And you had a part in that move, didn’t you?
[14:46] Engley: Ah, yes. Newton’s rescued me from hotel kitchen library work in the summer and asked me if I would like to work with a classmate of mine, Bob Burns, who was a Russian HIstory major and went on to a great career in Russian history, if the two of us would be willing to work on moving the books into the new addition, which was to the East going toward Pratt dormitory. That wing was a prime example of wrong planning, too, because there was not enough space between the two buildings to do very much, so this sorta half-baked wing, only a couple stories up, was put there to relieve the pressures because Converse was supposed to last 25 or 30 or more years, but it made it only from 1917 to 1935 for the planning purposes, and occupation in 1938. Well, anyway, Bob and I, from June–early June, until mid-September, opening of the college, moved into the new building. And I tell you, we moved every single book in Amherst College that summer because after we moved everything that should go into the new place, then we had to space out the rest of the collection over the space which had been–you know.
[16:21] Bridegam: Not an easy task, is it.
[16:23] Engley: So I got to know the book collections.
[16:28] Bridegam: I didn’t realize until recently that there was a freshman reading room in Williston Hall, and you told me that you were in charge of that. [[laughter, affirmation]] Could you– why was there a freshman reading hall?
[16:40] Engley: Oh my. For my good service, I guess, of having moved every–touched every book in the library in the summertime, Newton, in September, asked me if I would like to be in charge of the new freshman reading room up on the top of Williston, and he took me up there to see it. I had heard overtones of this. The problem was the congestion, shall we say “constipation” in the reading reference room, of all of the reserve books and reference books and there was going to be something called “The Pit” there for students with reserve book reading, but it wasn’t going to do the whole thing, so the idea was to–we could segregate, put all the freshmen with their required reading up on the top floor–a whole floor full of tables and lamps and a circulation desk. History 1 readings went there, something new called “Man and his Environment”
[17:52] Bridegam: Oh, yes.
[17:54] Engley: “M and E”. It had its birth up in the Williston tower. And I and probably 7 or 8 other students–student assistants– ran it. I ran the schedules, I was the contact with the main library. Murray Peppard, one of my classmates, another rising senior, was one of my charges. He came back to Amherst as German professor at one point. So, my senior year was spent presiding over the freshman reading room. It had its plusses and minuses, the freshman had everything they needed there for their coursework, but they were divorced from Converse Library, which is not what a liberal arts education should provide.
[18:45] Bridegam: Go back to the pit for a minute, if you will, I’ve heard so much about the pit from many alums. Would you describe it? Would you describe what it was like?
[18:56] Engley: Well, I was spared it because I was presiding over the Freshman reading room, but it was an addition to the reading room, the old reading room was pushed out and the idea was to have it open longer hours. and I was able to avoid it but I gather that it got its name for the very reason that it was a bit of a jungle there. [[laughter]]
[19:24] Bridegam: In the spring of 1939, you were graduating from Amherst College and with war in Europe just beginning, the United States had not been brought into it at that point, you had some options that were open to you but I think you must have realized in the back of your mind that inevitably you were going to be drawn into the service at that point.
[19:48] Engley: That specter was there in ‘39.
[19:52] Bridegam: What did you do in that period just before the war?
[19:54] Engley: Well, I graduated in ‘39 but in the spring of that year, seniors were going ahead taking job interviews. I was from Hartford area and I read on the board that the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company was holding interviews and that an alumnus, Robert Metcalf from the class of ‘26, was interviewing students for internships in insurance. And so I went and had an interview and in the process I told him about my library work and he said “you work for Newton McKeon, my classmate, class of ‘26?” Now this is destiny beginning to take over. I’m not a fatalist but as I look back it was a destiny here. He said, “well, may I use him as a reference?” I knew he was going to anyway, and so the very next morning Newton called me in and asked me “What the hell is this about going into insurance?” And I said, “well, it’s a living and I’m from Hartford and Harford’s the insurance city.” And he said, “Bob Metcalf talked to me.” And he said, “and I was just about getting ready to ask you if you wanted to stay here in Converse this coming year as a general assistant and make enough money to go to library school, Columbia library school.” And I said, “ok, I’ll do it.” And he said, “now wait a minute, I haven’t even told you how little you’re going to get paid.” And I said, “doesn’t matter, I’ll do it.” And so I did. And starting in the first of September I landed out at the circulation desk with Porter Dickinson and E. Kimball Morsman. There was a very small library staff in those days, they didn’t even have titles. I guess–
[22:07] Bridegam: Oh, Porter wasn’t Head of Reference then?
[22:09] Engley: Well, if he was nobody really knew it because he was peripatetic, he was all over the place, everybody knew him, he knew everybody and if anybody wanted to know about a book and its contents they came to Porter. If anybody wanted to know about the order of things, the system, it was to Kim Morsman and they were a real odd couple. [[laughter]] Kim, class of ‘24, was, um– well, how shall I describe him? Mr. Prim and Mr. Proper. He was out of Chicago, west side, Evanston elite. He drove a Lincoln Continental convertible because he said it was the only car that was comfortable for his back pains. [[laughter]] Porter was a graduate of Amherst High School, related somehow to the other Dickinsons. He was a nature lover, he had read everything about the transcendentalists. The faculty knew him and he knew them and their foibles and interests. He sought out students who looked sad or unhappy to counsel them and they knew to come to him. So it was a terrific year with those two. I got to know all the faculty then, at least those who used the library. One choice view of Ted Baird, and we all– you’ve heard about Ted Baird?
[23:40] Bridegam: Oh, I have indeed.
[23:41] Engley: Mr. Curmudgeon
[23:42] Bridegam: I used to know him
[23:43] Engley: I had taken the Shakespeare year-long English course with him just out of curiosity. I had heard it was full of pitfalls but also of high values. He came in one day–he wiped out the new book shelf everyday and put them in his book bag and he brought many of them back the next morning–this one particular day he threw this book down loudly on the circulation desk and exclaimed “the worst goddamned book I’ve seen in a long time.” [[laughter]] So I picked it up to see what it was and lo and behold it was a book which the page slitters in the processing department hadn’t cut for a few pages, indeed he must have cut a few, he couldn’t have read the book overnight but he had read enough in the first couple pages to convince him this was to come back the next day.
[24:30] Come June, I found myself with enough money to go to Columbia library school and I was armed with a letter from Newton McKeon’s– another of Newton McKeon’s classmate, Charlie Adams, this is the Amherst network working. [[cross talk]] He was in charge of rare books in the library at Columbia and this was to introduce me to Charlie and to ask him to help me find the right niche as a student assistant at Columbia. And he sent me across the way to the new Butler Library to David Klift who was the Personnel Officer. He became the Executive Secretary of the American Library Association later. He looked at me and asked me if I thought I was courageous. And I said, well, modestly, I said, about as courageous as the next fellow, why? Well, I’ve sent several young ladies up to Abigail Hausdorfer, the librarian of the library school library, and she hasn’t liked any of them, I think I have to send a man this time. And I said, well, since I’m going to be a student in the library school I might as well be working in that library. Well, it did turn out, as far as Abigail was concerned that anyone in trousers could do no wrong, but the ladies couldn’t do anything right. Which didn’t ingratiate me with my peers who were also in library school.
[26:07] In the process of that year, I met Hope Lummis who was a recent Mt. Holyoke graduate and in library school. She’d been at West Hartford public library as a clerical worker and decided to make librarianship her career and we got to know each other quite well. As a matter of fact, by springtime Newton called me to say that he was coming down to read college entrance exams over at Barnard College and could we have dinner one night. And I said yes, assuming it was just social, in the meantime on the board was a job opening at the Amherst College cataloging department to be interviewed by Newton McKeon. Hope read this and she came to me and asked me what I thought, should she apply for this job and I said, you have to, because the head of the cataloging department is a wonderful lady named Katherine Cowles, Mt. Holyoke class of 1917, I think you’d make it together. So I go and I have– Hope had the interview with Newton and I went over and I had dinner with Newton and after dinner he pulled out an envelope and it had five names written on it and he says, “you’re in the library school library, do you know all these five women?” And I said I did. And he said, “I interviewed all of them today, would you be willing since you know them to rank them and how you think they might fit in the Converse Library?” So I studied this list and I wrote numbers beside them and needless to say I put Hope up at the top and I could in good conscience.
[28:16] Bridegam: yes
[28:18] Engley: So Hope got a letter from Newton saying that she was invited to come for an interview, second interview, this one with Miss Cowles in the catalog department and off she went and she got the job.
[28:32] Bridegam: And how long did she serve as a cataloger?
[28:34] Engley: Well, I’ll come to that. [[crosstalk, inaudible]] I was taking job interviews but I already had a draft number, a low one, and I was draft [[??]] deferred until July 1st this was say April. The only place that would touch people was the New York Public Library and they took about 8 of us as interns, all of us with low draft numbers. And so I went to the New York Public Library for three weeks and I went to Fort Devins. Hope started to work at the Amherst library in August of that year.I went to infantry basic training and then on the Carolina maneuvers, all over South Carolina in the heat. And then to Fort Jackson to the 8th infantry division and it was there that I ran into my next library encounter.
[29:27] We were off maneuvers, a buddy and I were walking by a new service club, went in, had a coke, sign said library upstairs with an arrow. I went up and here was a USO gal, a beautiful gal in a uniform with a patch surrounded by books and cartons and empty bookshelves and I asked, “is this the library?” and she says, “it’s supposed to be.” I allowed as how I had graduated from Columbia University library school and I’d love to come over after chow and help her put it into shape. And she said, “well I can’t accept this but I’ll talk to lieutenant so-and-so in charge of services, social services.” And so I’m minding my business the next morning, a couple mornings later, at revelry in the dark, we had a kindly old 6’5” first sergeant with snow white hair who’d been in World War I, who called everyone “son” and “lad” and to my horror after the roll-call and morning announcements he wanted to see me in the orderly room before breakfast. And I went, I thought he had the wrong name, he didn’t even know me, and he looked at me and he said “son, there’s no room in this man’s army for a goldbrick” [[gasp, laughter]] “what have I done, what do you mean?” and he said, “you volunteered to work in the service club library.” And he said, “Lieutenant so-and-so has requisitioned you for full time work in the library to get the library going.” And he said, “son, you’re here as a rifleman and your only job is on the business end of a rifle. You’re not going to the service club.” And I learned the hard way, don’t volunteer. I hold that in abeyance, because the army comes to librarianship later on.
[31:32] So, the next thing I knew, my friend and I were being, my good buddy and I were being talked into applying for officer candidate school infantry, which we knew. And the next thing we knew, there were signs on the board: field artillery, officer candidate school, armored and so everybody was saying apply to any of these to make sure that you’ll get taken in a quota. And so, come July, we hadn’t gone anywhere but I was assembled at 3 in the morning on a Sunday morning at Fort Jackson with 8 others and we were told by the personnel office to go back and get our barracks bags and be back there by 6 because at 8 o’clock we were going to the Columbia railroad stations, we were going to Camp Davis anti-aircraft candidate school. And the 8 of us exclaimed, “we don't want to go there, we don’t know anything about anti-aircraft.” And he said, in desperation, “don’t worry all the weapons are automatic.” Stupid comment. And he said, “and furthermore the 8th division has a quota of 12 with college mathematics and we can find only 8 of you who’ve qualified. So that moment I found out why I had suffered through Bailey Brown’s 8 o’clock college math at Amherst. It had rescued me from infantry OCS [Officer Candidate School], it had rescued me from armored OCS where I would have gotten cooked in a tank. And I saw some of that later. So 13 weeks later, I am a second lieutenant in anti-aircraft on my way to the California desert to create a new anti-aircraft battalion. Hope and I decided to get married on my ten day leave. She had never mentioned my name at Converse except to say, yes, she knew me.
[34:16] Bridegam: Miss Cowles must have been very surprised. [[laughter]]
[34:20] Engley: Well, she went in to ask Newton for a 10 day leave. 10 days to match my 10 days before I went to California and she explained everything except that Newton asked her, “you’ve explained everything except who the lucky young man is.” And Hope said to him, “well that’s the problem, it’s Don Engley.” And so come January, I found that I was going to be in the desert near Riverside, California for a whole year and other people’s wives were out there, so she resigned and came out to be there until I went overseas.
[34:41] Bridegam: and when you went overseas was it directly to England? No
[34:48] Engley: to Scotland
[34:48] Bridegam: Scotland
[34:50] Engley: and then down to England it was a full infantry division. We had maneuvered all over the desert with other divisions that were slated for the invasion and we kept moving south all the way toward the channel. Turned out that this division was in the second wave which was a hell of a lot better than the first wave: the 1st and the 29th and the 9th. But we became the middle division of three that took Cherbourg and turned around and went south and we relieved the decimated 82nd airborne division which had been one of the two airbornes dropped in Normandy. They were down to 50% strength by then and they went back to England to refit and we went into the lines and took their place. So, from June until late October, 5th division was in constant contact with the enemy with no breaks whatsoever. I was saved because I was manning anti-aircraft positions on ammunition dumps or bridge crossings and protecting the heavy artillery which the German planes were after. And was fortunate enough to earn a bronze star because my battery was at the first crossing of the Seine across from North of Paris and all of our airforce was busy chewing up the German troops, divisions caught in the Falaise gap and so the only, the last German planes out of Soissons were trying to knock out the bridge and in two days we got 35 ME109s, they all had the one mission and they were all pilots in civilian clothes, because they knew it was going to be their last mission, they were fatalists, and they melted into the countryside if they survived. So, anyway, the division went on, we were spared the Bulge because we were down south and we went into Alsace and then we were, because we were a trained division we were ticketed and we came all the way up to the Ruhr, across from the Ruhr, and became one of the invasion divisions into the Ruhr pocket and we ended up in Czechoslovakia in May and June.
[37:43] Bridegam: And from there you went to a very special mission, as I recall.
[37:47] Engley: Yeah, it was– this is where the army finally paid off for me, in life
[37:54] Bridegam: and librarianship
[37:55] Engley: That's right, I had 170 men, I had 12,000 displaced persons and POWs behind barbed wire, we were trying to feed them, find out about their health, figure out which ones had to go by truck to the west, to Belgium or wherever. Which were to go to Poland and which– we got the others, the Easterners coming into camp and we had to have a daily census. We had the Ruskies looking over our shoulders trying to make sure that we were taking care of their people and they were claiming everybody.
[38:34] Well, my radio operator at night woke me up, he had a message taken off the air from battalion that I was supposed to report immediately, repeat immediately, to SHAEF headquarters in Paris, Information and Education Division, and it was signed, Eisenhauer. Well, anything out of SHAEF had to have Eisenhauer’s name on it. I woke up the adjutant of the battalion and showed this message to him and he said, “well I guess you have to go.” Figuring it said immediately twice. And so between– with him, we found out where the nearest airforce base was, it was across the line in Germany. By 9 o’clock I was in the bucket seat of a DC3 C47 in military terms, by 11 I was in Orley field in paris, at noon time I was in the hotel where the Information and Education Division was. As a captain I reported into a major, personnel officer, and he looked at me and said, “we’ve been looking all over for you, where the hell have you been, we’ve been looking for three weeks.” I said, “Well, I think I’m doing pretty well, I was in my sleeping bag this morning in Czechoslovakia at 3 am.” I said, “what am I here for?” He clapped his forehead and he said to me “every SOB in this headquarters in Paris is trying to get to Biarritz and you walk in here and you don’t know.” “No, I don’t know.” He said, “You’re to be the librarian of the American Army University in Biarritz, you better get across the hall to see General McCroskey he’s the new commandant. We have got 350 faculty coming on the Queen Elizabeth, we have some books coming from the Library of Congress but we don’t have any librarian.” I went over and this Westpointer said to me, “I’m delighted to see you here.” He said, “Don’t you think you ought to stay around Paris and look for books.” Well this was the first Bastille Day after liberation, so naturally I said, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to.” Well anyway, the rest is history.
[41:01] After a week or so in Paris, enjoying Bastille Day, down I went on a night train to Madrid that stopped at Biarritz and I found that the skeleton staff that was already there was fleshing out the place and I was told that I could have anything that I wanted for the library. There was nothing more important, so I went downtown and I found the Bon Marche department store, right in the middle of all the hotels that were going to be the dormitories. The townspeople were all standing around watching what was happening because this had been R&R, recreation and rest, for German officers. It was a minor Nice/Riviera kind of thing, as you probably can appreciate. I saw the Bonmarche, it had loads of tables, wonderful lighting, all kinds of space and it was right down by the hotels. I went back to the full colonel and said, “I have it, it’s the Bon Marche” and he said, “Oh, captain, I forgot to tell you, that’s going to be for special services” which meant coke machines, ping pong tables, and all this kind of thing. So he said, “go take another look.” Well, he did me a favor because I went a little further down to the beach and here was the municipal casino, the Casino Municipal, right there, beautiful lighting, huge chandeliers, wonderful windows out over the beach.
[42:28] Bridegam: What did you do with the roulette table?
[42:30] Engley: Well, the staff was around waiting to see what was going to happen. The town wanted the casino to open up again to gamble, you see, which was its livelihood. But the U.S. Army was saying no. So the first thing I said was the tables have to go. And I said to the full colonel, I need bookshelves and reading tables and chairs. Where are they coming from? And he said, “well, I'll send the engineer company around.” Along came the engineer company with loads of lumber, beautiful lumber, and they had 10 or 12 German POW's who were all, if they weren't cabinet makers, they were good carpenters. And in a day or two they outfitted shelving everywhere I wanted, reading tables, everything. And so we opened with books, reference books from the Library of Congress, publishers were sending things like, Modern Library sent the whole kit - the Modern Library. The only problem was that the transportation officer back in New York, who was shepherding the full professors and deans so that everybody would get credit for good courses, had told them to leave their footnotes– their foot lockers with notes and books right there on the platform on the dock because their bag was going to have to have their uniforms and so on. When they got to the, to Biarritz, the transportation corps had left the foot lockers on the docks in New York.
[44:10] Bridegam: Oh
[44:10] Engley: Yeah. And they were told to come see the librarian. Well, what could I do? That was when I had to go looking for things.
[44:22] Bridegam: I want to skip ahead now. You've been, you were discharged from the army. And you decided after that, that you would go to graduate school at the University of Chicago.
[44:33] Engley: Yeah.
[44:34] Bridegam: And you were working on an MA thesis, as I recall, which was a history of the Amherst College Library from its beginning, 1821 until 1911.
[44:48] Engley: Yeah.
[44:50] Bridegam: In order to research that thesis, you had to work, I'm sure, in the archives in the college. I wonder if you could describe the archives and how you found them in those days.
[45:01] Engley: Alright, as a, as a post-, as a preamble to that one word about how I happened to get to the University of Chicago. Why after four and a half, five years in the army. The dean of the University of Chicago was the academic advisor to the general at Biarritz. And he sold me, as I talked with him about what I wanted to do next after that, having been so immersed in the army, he sold me on going to the graduate library school, which had as many faculty as students, and it was a higher level graduate school. And I went there and it was everything imagine- I could imagine. But I found out that you had to do a thesis that was virtually a dissertation, except for passing a German. And I said, I, I want to do a history of the Amherst College Library and they said, We don't allow that, institutional histories are pedestrian. So I wouldn't be denied. I said, look, Melville Dewey. Look, William I. Fletcher. I was known to them. I said, look at the standing of Amherst College. And I said, I'm prepared to finish the coursework and say the hell with the thesis, because I have about decided I am going back into library work and I want, I want academic library work. So they relented, and and I'd already been to the archives at Chicago and had found the correspondence between Melvil Dewey, the state librarian of New York, and William Rainey Harper, the founder of this University of Chicago. In building his faculty, he had tried to get Dewey to come to be the first librarian of this fledgling university and Dewey was holding him up for everything imaginable. And finally, Mr. Harper said, “I'm sorry, Mr. Dewey but I don't think we have a match here.” And so anyway, so I, I got hold of Newton. And I said to him, “I have a little victory here. They'll let me do a history of the Amherst College Library, at least the beginnings of it.” And so I went to see him in the summer, between the second and third quarter of work, he- there wasn't any archives in the library then, it was all over in Morgan [[crosstalk]] Peg- Peg- Peggy Hitchcock presided over that. I had met her when I was working in Converse, so I was not unknown to her. Newton made Amherst- the library records open to me. And so between September and December, I put the finishing touches on this, even interviewed people like Robert Fletcher, who then was retired, had, had retired early because of health. And so, all kinds of records for me to use in what was then the memorabilia room, I think it was called. So that worked out really well. And I had a very gentle oral exam on it, because even though they didn't want me to do it, they were satisfied that it was a worthwhile topic. So while finishing the thesis, then I began job hunting, in earnest.
[48:42] Bridegam: At that time, as you were becoming a professional librarian, having just received a degree. You had a number of options that you could consider.
[48:56] Engley: Right.
[48:58] Bridegam: I wonder if you would talk about some of the job possibilities you were thinking about then?
[49:03] Engley: Well, for example, I worked three weeks with the New York Public Library as an intern. And I went on leave technically, but I didn't even think about the New York Public Library because it was so huge. They're on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. We'd been passed around all the departments, and, in my three weeks, to see the whole scene, when Hope and I came back from the war in 19- New York in 1946, we visited the New York Public Library, and to my amazement, there was this big plaque inside the front door of all those who had gone to war from the New York Public Library, and for my three weeks, I was in bronze, full name and Hope- I said to Hope, “I find this very embarrassing, three weeks work.” And she said to me, “think how I would feel if there was a gold star beside your name.”
[49:58] Bridegam: That's true. Wow.
[50:00] Engley: What I'm getting at is I knew I didn't want a monster, New York Public Library, except in the mid- in the late- mid-1970s, they came to me and asked me if I would be a candidate for the head of the whole thing, not the president,
[50:19] Bridegam: not the president, but the director of the [crosstalk]
[50:23] Engley: The director of the Fifth Avenue 42nd Street. And of course, by then time had run its course. Well anyway, I knew I didn't want public library work, didn't even think about a military leave to pick up. I decided I wanted college library work, not university library work. And I had gotten to know Amherst from, from the inside as well as the outside. And I quite frankly, wanted to do the kind of thing that Newton McKeon was doing. Yeah, he was a great role model for me.
[50:55] Bridegam: And so having crossed off the New York Public Library, what else did you consider?
[51:00] Engley: Well, I know I didn't want any other ki- I didn't want a special library, a business library or anything like that. I just wanted to be around books and students and faculty. I can't get into the indoctrination of the University of Chicago. That was tremendous. That was ferment if- one little example, Ralph Beals was the dean of the library school, and also the director of libraries, and I was among, with five, taking a course called the administration and finance of university library, university libraries. We didn't know, the five of us men around his desk, that the chancellor, Robert Hutchins, the great one himself, had his office downstairs. There was a knock on the door the first day and, this was a brand new course, and Beals looked up and said, “yes.” Mouths open, here was Hutchins himself, and Beals said, “yes.” And Hutchins said, “I've been reading about this new course in the catalog. I thought I'd dropped in to see how you're going to teach it.” Anybody else would have been floored but Ralph Beals, who went on to be the head of the New York Public Library, said, “it’s very simple, this first session I'm explaining how I'm going to teach the course. The rest of the quarter, I'm going to prove it can't be done.” And Hutchins said, “thank you very much” and left. [[laughter]]
[52:29] Well, that was the kind of ferment there. We had high school sophomores who were doing college work there, as you know, that program, the great books and all. So anyway, I knew I wanted college or a place like Chicago. And so Newton was helping me to find work. I was applying to places and he was advising me on how to do it. Colby College comes up. President Bixler, Amherst graduate, was the president there. But he had been professor of religion at Harvard and he was imbued with the Harvard picture. Hope and I went for an interview up there. He knew I was an Amherst graduate. I didn't think that would do it, and it didn't do it. But he was- he held Harvard in high esteem, having been there, and Keyes Metcalf, the Harvard librarian, sold him on one of his acolytes. So I was the disappointed person. But 10 years later, when I turned down the job of Metropolitan Museum of Art librarian to plan a new library there in Central Park. The director of the Metropolitan Museum got very huffy with me and said the least you can do is to find somebody who will take the job. Well, I knew Jim Humphrey up at Colby wanted to get out of there. And so I gave him Humphrey’s name. Jim called me and asked me why I didn't take the job. And I said, “my own personal reasons, but it's for you” and he went down and got it [[crosstalk]] Newton saw Seelye Bixler at a trustee meeting here and pointed me out and said, “Seeley, he's the one you didn't take for Colby, but he's the one who sent Jim Humphrey away from there to the Metropolitan Museum.” So that was that little enclave of libraries. But I went to Norwich University, a military engineering college, I could wear out my army uniforms. In fact, my then rank of major fitted with what the rank was up there. And so for two or three years, I did what I could for a military engineering school. And, uh,
[54:43] Bridegam: and then on to Trinity
[54:45] Engley: went to Trinity, as the associate college librarian. The then librarian was a professor of Anglo Saxon and early English who had been somewhat of a failure, and they’d made him the librarian, which is a common thing in College Libraries.
[55:07] Bridegam: Unfortunately
[55:08] Engley: Yeah. And I was hired by the new young president to plan the new library to house both the Trinity and the Watkinson libraries. I knew all about the Watkinson library because Pa Fletcher had cut his teeth in the Watkinson library back in the 1870s. And so here I am, Trinity, close by Amherst. And next thing I know I'm on the Amherst Advisory Committee for the library. Newton parked me there
[55:44] Bridegam: not surprised
[55:45] Engley: with other Amherst alumni benefactors of the library and key Amherst faculty like George Whicher. The agenda, if you'd like to know about it, included the burgeoning HILC [Hampshire Inter-Library Center], the budding HILC program
[56:05] Bridegam: we'll come to that
[56:06] Engley: it includes, should there be a Friends of the Library? Which Newton seemed to be resisting because he had space problems in Converse, even though that wing had been built 15 years earlier.
[56:26] We dealt with numerous problems. One of Newton's pet projects was to create a rare book collection, he was worried about things scattered around. And the new Converse library wing had provided for a treasure room, so called, and we talked about treasures, indeed, we talked about how organized friends might promote, produce more treasures.
[56:52] Bridegam: When you were beginning your career as an academic librarian, there were very few computers. I wonder if you would tell us what it was like to be a librarian before computers were used in academic libraries.
[57:07] Engley: Well, computers were non-existent as an application for libraries. We had to put up with people like Fremont Rider, who was interested in applying microfilm to everything. And indeed, he had patented something called micro cards, where in the card catalog on the verso, you had very micro reduced microfilm of the book itself. And another card if you ran out of space on the back of the card so that we were into chips and this kind of thing, but not the kind involved with computers. In fact, it wasn't until late in my career at Trinity that New England Library Network came along, NELINET for short, and indeed, we toyed with- agreed to be a charter member of this and paid some dues to keep NELINET going. But there was no application of this yet. So this was just a dream. And it wasn't until I got to Yale, which I'll tell about with the research libraries group, that we had an application of that in all seriousness, so we existed without computerization. And in the late 60s, we were still worrying about space problems.
[58:43] Bridegam: As a friend of Newton McKeon, as a member of the Advisory Committee, you were undoubtedly involved in helping to plan for this library, in some of the issues that concern the library in the day. You mentioned HILC earlier, I wonder if you could tell us about HILC a bit more, why it was considered an important development. And then could you also talk about the planning for the new Robert Frost Library and when you come to it, the groundbreaking.
[59:23] Engley: Okay, well let's let's deal with HILC to begin with because this evokes two or three thoughts for me. It should be noted right up front, that HILC should get credit for the creation of the five college exchange. This was the first semblance of communications among the five colleges, indeed, that there were only four to begin with, Hampshire wasn't there yet, wasn't involved in the original HILC. But the prime mover in HILC was that dynamo at South Hadley, Flora Belle Ludington.
[1:00:04] And indeed, she was the one who was a prime mover in helping Newton to become a professional, truly professional librarian at least visualized by the world as somebody more than an English professor. In fact, she had pushed him to give the paper at a university Chicago conference on book selection and he gave a masterpiece I went with him so to hold his hand but I knew all the Chicago people of course, and and if you haven't read it recently, you should read the nature of a college library book collection. It was a masterpiece. And so anyway, Flora Bell was the prime mover in this but Newton was hand in glove with her in this talking to their own colleges and to their college presidents and Dean's as a group about the virtues of some cooperation. As you know, libraries in the past were great in talking cooperation, but when they got down to the nitty gritty, just couldn't quite pull it off. And in part it was due because they didn't have access to some money bags to spend some money to save money. So HILC was batted around in the Advisory Committee.
[1:01:37] And Newton was ambivalent about it because he had so many other space problems which was to lead eventually to the Robert Frost library being created. In effect, it was a favor that the college had decided to build Congress where it did, because would they one wing that was put there they shut off any future expansion, any sensible expansion because therewith Pratt dormitory sitting there staring right back at it. And so it had to be done from the first. So I was involved in the planning because I had been involved with the Trinity library planning and had been a consultant some other places. And indeed, the architects for the Trinity and Colgate and Princeton, were considered by Amherst, and were selected by Amherst largely on what they'd seen in the expansion of the main library at Smith. In fact, I was in on the choice of the site. I was happy to see Walker Hall go (???) where I had suffered through college mathematics.
[1:02:55] Bridegam: Not everyone was happy to see it.
[1:02:57] Engley: Oh, no, that was a very controversial but it put the library where it belonged in the center on the quadrangle, but more importantly, it put it on a bank where you could have underground floors that were open on the back, and where you could expand right down through that circle, if you ever wanted to, whether you should just another matter and but here, again was a matter of a library being planned for the present and for the foreseeable future, but the unforeseeable future, obviously can't be seen. And so the problems of frost, computerization and cooperation with other libraries is there.
[1:04:26] And so, the frost turned out to be a very good result, except that there were a few problems in the naming of it and in the planning. O’Connor and Kilham did it. O’Connor did the Firestone library. Mr O’Connor was a very good friend of mine, a graduate of Trinity and the Princeton architecture school. If I'd had my say my way, Bob O'Connor should have been the partner in charge of the Amherst job. But [Doc] Kilham, who was a different kind of guy, he had supervised, shepherded the Smith operation, and he was ticketed to be the person here. For some reason Newton and Walter [Doc] Kilham didn't hit it off very well.
[1:04:52] [Doc] Kilham got the idea that the anonymous donors were really the people to be satisfied in this and Cal Plimpton afraid had given [Doc] Kilham that idea, and then he, Cal, was working with the anonymous donors,
[1:05:09] Bridegam: There were two of them in Philadelphia. Is that right?
[1:05:11] Engley: Brothers.
[1:05:12] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:05:12] Engley: Who turned out later to be John and somebody else Haas. John had been in college with me and they were in the chemical industry as you probably know. Well anyway, I don't think Newton even knew who the donors were such a guarded secret. And along the way Cal decided the library should be named for Robert Frost. While there are lots of other claimants for the Robert Frost, Harvard and University of Michigan had had him as a visiting
[1:05:41] Bridegam: Middlebury.
[1:05:41] Engley: Yeah, that's right. So anyway, it went through. Newton resisted that even though he had been, as an English instructor, one of those who had taken care of Robert, when he was in the Lord Jeff Inn and Mary Maury had served dinners to him. Newton said to me, I suppose he said to Cal, too, “It's crazy to name this library for Robert Frost. He disliked libraries.” He always said–
[1:06:15] Bridegam: [Laughs.] He disliked libraries?
[1:06:16] Engley: He disliked libraries. They were too damn organized. What he meant, of course, was that you had to bring books back.
[1:06:24] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:06:25] Engley: Yeah. And, so, and, and Newton was saying, you know, “This is senseless, Robert doesn't want this, doesn't need it.” And, and then he said, I think quite straightforward to Cal, “This 70,000 or 100,000, which is reserved for a work of sculpture on the front to relate to Robert Frost and his career is crazy. What piece of granite or marble are you going to put there that would a) satisfy Robert and b) would tell what Robert Frost was all about?” [Both laugh.] Well, you don't see any big piece of sculpture out there, do you?
[1:07:15] Bridegam: No.
[1:07:15] Engley: No. So I think that’s one that Newton won. And I–Newton was saying, “We need this hundred thousand,” or whatever it was, “on the inside, more than we need it outside.” So does that tell you enough–
[1:07:28] Bridegam: It does, but–
[1:07:28] Engley: –about the planning of the library?
[1:07:30] Bridegam: The planning. Now would you move on to the groundbreaking for the library? That was a very important occasion for Amherst College.
[1:07:37] Engley: Yes.
[1:07:38] Bridegam: And you were there?
[1:07:39] Engley: Oh yes. This was done right on the site of Walker Hall. There was a large platform there. Robert was there, I think. Or was he not– he couldn't make it for, because of health?
[1:07:56] Bridegam: I don’t remember his being–
[1:07:57] Engley: This was October, and, uh, was it 1963?
[1:08:04] Bridegam: ‘63, correct, yes.
[1:08:05] Engley: Yeah. And he was going to die in January.
[1:08:08] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:08:09] Engley: This was the dedication.
[1:08:11] Bridegam: Yes. The–
Bridegam and Engley: [Overlapping] Groundbreaking.
[1:08:13] Engley: Yeah, this was– JFK spoke in the field house. It was delayed an hour or more because JFK was flying into Westover Airfield and was then going to come by helicopter to Amherst. He was going to land on the football field or somewhere, but the valley was fogged in. And as a matter of fact, I think the plane may have had to go to Bradley Field. In any event we sat for an hour, an hour and a half, waiting for JFK to arrive. And then he did take part in the groundbreaking to give a very good talk about the library and of course, Frost had taken part in JFK’s inauguration–
[1:09:04] Bridegam: Yes, yes.
[1:09:04] Engely: –and gave that famous attempt to read his, read his notes, but it was such a bright sunshine from the snow that he had to wing it–
[1:09:14] Bridegam: Right.
[1:09:14] Engely: –and produce the poem as he remembered it.
[1:09:19] Bridegam: Your classmate Calvin Plimpton was a key figure for many years here.
Engley: Mm-hmm.
[1:09:27] Bridegam: In fact, we've interviewed him recently.
[1:09:30] Engley: Have you? Who–Who interviewed him?
[1:09:33] Bridegam: Chuck Longsworth.
[1:09:34] Engley: Oh, sure.
[1:09:35] Bridegam: In the same year he became president, you were awarded an honorary degree.
[1:09:43] Engley: This was one of Charlie Cole’s last acts as president. In 1952, we had an acting president at Trinity, who went off to be–an acting president who was the dean, the president had gone off to be president of the New York Stock Exchange. I went to the acting president, the dean, and said, “Don't you think we ought to have a library dedication in the fall of ‘52?” And he said, “Well, I suppose we have to have one. Why don't you go ahead and plan it?” So, left to my own devices, I decided to invite my old economics professor Charlie Cole, the president of Amherst, to give the speech, and, which he did. And we had Paul Mellon there who was the donor of the Am–of the Trinity library, Old Dominion Foundation, big money bags. I'm sure Charlie was suitably impressed.
[1:10:42] In 1959, I found myself being awarded an honorary degree as a member of the class of–the 20th reunion class. And on that platform the same day was Governor Ribicoff, whose son Peter was graduating and he gave the speech, the commencement address. He heard my citation. We were taking off our caps and gowns after the program in the alumni gymnasium, and he came over to me and said, “Now tell me, why didn't you take the position of Connecticut State Librarian in 1954 when we offered it to you?” And I was not unprepared for this. I said to him–well, I’ll tell you–I thought to myself, “He's asked this question. I'm going to give him the only honest answer.” I said, “The chairman of the committee, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, kept trying to get the answers to my questions from your office, and he couldn't come up with them.” And I said, “They were critical to me.” And I finally said to him, “I can't take the job.” And I said to Governor Ribicoff, I said, “You know, I had the feeling that if I couldn't get the answers before I took the job, I doubted if I could get the answers afterward.” I bit my tongue and he looked at me and said, “That's a fair, honest answer.” And the next year, he put me on the state library board–
[1:12:24] Bridegam: Wow.
[1:12:24] Engley: –for five years. [Both laugh.] To be honest–
[1:12:28] Bridegam: There’s a compliment.
[1:12:29] Engley: Yeah. Ella Grasso, who was his secretary of state, Mount Holyoke graduate, had a finger in this too. So anyway, Charlie Cole gave this wonderful speech. And then Cal became president. And we talked. After Newton was retired at age 65 we talked, but even before then, Cal insinuated himself into the Friends of the Library celebration farewell for Newton.
[1:13:11] Bridegam: Which was a bittersweet occasion.
[1:13:13] Engley: And, and this was kind of sad in a couple of ways because Newton had agreed to be, to have a Friends of the Library group; Cal had leaned on him for this. And I had been among the group like Jack Hagstrom and Bill Stitt.
[1:13:30] Bridegam: There were eight founders, and you were–
[1:13:32] Engley: One of them.
[1:13:33] Bridegam: –one of those eight.
[1:13:36] Engley: And, uh, Cal had used the point of the Harvard Friends of the Library, doing great things for Harvard and used the Dartmouth pattern, the Yale pattern, and so, somewhat reluctantly, Newton agreed to this. The thing he didn't want to be was a huckster. [Laughs.]
[1:13:58] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:13:59] Engley: And he was a professor at heart as well as being a librarian, but we went ahead and, and did this. But then by the time, by 1970– 1970 Newton had been retired at age 65 which was the president's prerogative, but then Cal insisted on being part of the Friends of the Library celebration for Newton. We decided to go ahead and allow President Plimpton to be in charge of this whole thing even though it was a Friends of the Library party, but I must tell you one last little episode about– and how things come around in a circle.
[1:14:56] Engley: Newton did not want to be at the head table. He decided to go to the bathroom, over in the science building, and he wasn't– he wasn't inside until just before the president was to introduce him and pay tribute to him. And I noticed from the head table Newton was down back in the shade, shadows. I had given my plaudits for Newton, including freshman English. I had forgotten Cal was in the class, and Cal said that–introducing Newton, he talked about having been in freshman English with me and Newton and he said, “Don remembers some of the readings. I don't remember much about it. He was a better student than I was.” And so when, when Cal called Newton forward, Cal, Newton said, “Well, first off, let me describe how I happened to have Cal Plimpton in my section.” He said, “George Whicher in the department said, ‘I don't want the chairman of the board’s son in my section.’ And Ted Baird said, ‘Somebody else can have young Plimpton. I don't want him,’” and he said it went through the whole department until it got down to the junior member of the department. And they said, “Young Plimpton is yours.” [Bridegam laughs.] So then– So then, Newton said, “So I got the young calf.” [Both laugh.]
[1:16:36] Bridegam: That's the way he started his acceptance of the recognition.
[1:16:39] Engley: He was having a final word about the–
[1:16:41] Bridegam: I guess so.
[1:16:42] Engley: Anyway.
[1:16:43] Bridegam: So let me go back to the Friends, the establishment of the Friends for just a minute. Friends were established in 1968, and as we said, you were one of the founding members.
[1:16:52] Engley: Yeah.
[1:16:54] Bridegam: The beginning of the Friends organization was a little bit rocky. Bill Stitt was the first president–
[1:17:01] Engley: Yeah.
[1:17:02] Bridegam: –but he–
[1:17:02] Engley: Was killed in an auto accident.
[1:17:03] Bridegam: –was killed very early, wasn’t he?
[1:17:04] Engley: Yeah, yeah.
[1:17:05] Bridegam: Could you describe the beginnings of the Friends?
[1:17:06] Engley: Well, we were at a great loss. That was the very first year. He was the leader in this and been handpicked by Newton as a senior alumnus who had been a great informal friend of the library. Newton had said to the advisory committee in previous years, “We don't need an organized Friends because we've got, we have such a wonderful group of informal friends. Why organize them?” But Bill Stitt had agreed to do this willingly. So Dick Zeisler who eventually became chair of the arts, friends, Friends of the Art, and I think we were the first ones to be a “friends of” group, the library. Dick, Dick Zeisler took hold of it.
[1:17:51] Bridegam: He was the vice chair–
[1:17:51] Engley: Vice chair.
[1:17:52] Bridegam: so he, he took over–
[1:17:53] Engley: He automatically became that. And then of course, Jack Hagstrom, a practicing physician and medical professor, had come on as one of the more junior members. And this was emblematic of the fact that throughout the history of Friends of the Library groups, physicians and surgeons, for some reason or other, have been devoted book collectors. And all I can say is it must be some kind of release, escape from the day to day torments of medicine and surgery.
[1:18:29] Bridegam: Interesting.
[1:18:29] Engley: So Jack became a very valued and vocal member of the Friends.
[1:18:34] Bridegam: And later a very fine chairman–
[1:18:35] Engley: President, that’s right.
[1:18:36] Bridegam: President of the Friends, yes. And then, just to finish the friends chapter, 25 years later, you wrote The History of the Friends, which I think–
[1:18:48] Engley: “Wrote” is ascribing more to it than that. The Friends had enlisted the participants to put together their remembrances of the founding and personalities in it and the kinds of things that were collected and how it had worked out. And, and I had shared some, a minor essay about the history of it. And Sam Ellendorf–
[1:19:27] Bridegam: Ellenport.
[1:19:29] Engley: Ellen-, Ellenport, of course, I know it better than my own name, perhaps. Sam came to me and said, “We're not going to get this history out. It's a little overdue already unless somebody takes care of–edits the damn thing.” So I foolishly said I'd be willing to do it. And I took it in the summertime to my place on Cape Cod and put it together. You remember that.
[1:19:57] Bridegam: I do indeed, yes.
[1:19:58] Engley: And then we were about to celebrate the 25th anniversary or had just celebrated it. In any event, we had to get this thing out while it was still something in people's minds. So yes, I did produce a 25th anniversary document.
[1:20:16] Bridegam: You and I may be among the very few connected with Amherst, and in fact the Pioneer Valley academic libraries, who remember an organization called ConVal.
[1:20:26] Engley: Yes.
[1:20:27] Bridegam: I don't even know the full name. You'll probably remember it.
[1:20:30] Engley: Connecticut Valley Libraries.
[1:20:32] Bridegam: All right
[1:20:33] Engley: It had a weird little history.
[1:20:35] Bridegam: I wonder if you’d tell us about that.
[1:20:37] Engley: I was asked to be the executive secretary of this for one peculiar reason. There was some Ford Foundation money, a modest amount, to study the idea of creating a group up and down the Connecticut Valley. Well, if I had been a party to this grant, I would have thrown cold water all over it because HILC had tried before World War II to go down the Connecticut Valley to Trinity and Wesleyan and Connecticut College.
[1:21:13] But I was asked to be the executive secretary because most of the other college libraries involved in this had had grants from the Ford Foundation, but Trinity hadn't had one. So I was asked as executive secretary to apply for the grant even though the group [laughing] had been promised the grant already. That's how things work, you see?
[1:21:38] So the money came into Trinity and I found myself as the almost unwilling shepherd of this thing. And it was almost uncontrollable, because Ed Lathem at Dartmouth wanted to be in it. What's his name at Williams? Larry…?
[1:21:57] Bridegam: Larry… Wikander.
[1:21:59] Engley: Wikander! Formerly at the Forbes library but now back at his college as librarian, wanted to be in it. Wesleyan wanted to be in it. So did Connecticut College? And so we were up and down the Valley with some slopping over beyond the valley. [Both laugh.]
[1:22:17] Well, it was an unmanage, unmanageable group. You know, it's bad enough to have a five-college exchange talking about things. But we were into computerization and shouldn’t, should it be null or net or should we go our own way? And how much would it cost? And college presidents were apprised of this, but the college presidents were, around here were more content to be involved with HILC and the Five Colleges, so it never got off the ground. And fortunately for me–I’ve forgotten how the money was spent–but fortunately for me, I had this Yale job offering, went off to Yale and left ConVal to its own devices. [Laughs.]
[1:23:04] Bridegam: So, by the time I arrived in ‘75, ConVal had disappeared.
[1:23:09] Engley: Dead. Dead.
[1:23:10] Bridegam: All right. [Both laugh.] Following Newton's retirement which you've described there was a reorganization of the library.
[1:23:21] Engley: Yes, yes. Cal–
[1:23:23] Bridegam: Those, that reorganization was done by Cal Plimpton, wasn't it?
[1:23:27] Engley: Yes.
[1:23:28] Bridegam: Would you talk about that? That's a little-known period in the history of the library.
[1:23:33] Engley: Cal came to me. We were classmates, class of ‘39. And he asked me what I thought about his idea for the restructuring of the library. When he told me, it didn't surprise me because it was on the large Harvard model, where a provost or a grand dean has the title of librarian of Harvard College. Harvard had gone this route after Keyes Metcalf because the deans and provost of Harvard with all their separate fiefdoms had complained about Keyes Metcalf presiding over the library, not in dictatorial fashion, but in somewhat emperor style. And they wanted one of their own to preside over this major title of Har– librarian of Harvard College.
[1:24:32] So Cal was saying to me, “I would like to name a faculty member as the librarian of the College,” as Harvard, Harvard librarian of the college, “and then Charles Laugher, who is the associate librarian under Newton, to be the director of the library.” And he wanted to know what I thought. And I say, “Well, Cal, I don't think you can translate this, transfer it over to Amherst so easily.” And I said, “Because it's a matter of scale and everything else.” I said, “And furthermore, it just because Harvard had the nomenclature this way, I think you have it out of line for Amherst.” I said that “If a professor is going to be in charge of the library, and still be a member of the faculty, then he ought to have the title ‘director of the library,’ so it'll be fairly clear who's in charge of this thing.” I said, “But then if you're going to go the rest of the route, and call the person running the library, director of the library, then you’d– he had better be called the librarian of the College” because he, Laugher, was going to be running the library. Well, apparently, Cal didn't adopt that solution, so it ran uncomfortably with, uh–
[1:26:12] Bridegam: Well, it was Dick Cody–
[1:26:13] Engley: Dick Cody, professor of English–
[1:26:14] Bridegam: –as librarian of the College. And Charles Laugher as director of libraries for a period of about four or five years.
[1:26:20] Engley: So rather uncomfortable arrangement because Cody kept saying, “I'm not a librarian.” And here was Laugher directing the library, but he was really the li– the librarian. So it was an unhappy situation. And, uh–
[1:26:36] Bridegam: But then you had a role in planning beyond that when Bill Ward came?
[1:26:42] Engley: Yeah, well–
[1:26:43] Bridegam: As president of the College?
[1:26:44] Engley: Yeah, well, in the meantime, at the time this reorganization was going on, some people had– some of my classmates had said to classmate Cal, didn't he think that Don should be the librarian of the College? And his answer, I understand, was, “He's too old.” [Bridegam laughs.] Same age as Cal.
[1:27:09] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:27:09] Engley: Of course, Cal was getting ready to retire.
[1:27:11] Bridegam: Oh, I see.
[1:27:11] Engley: So, anyway. And Cal did retire just after he had retired Newton, which was too bad. Just before I went off to Yale, people at Trinity came to me and said they had a new endowed lectureship named for the late chairman of the board of Pennsylvania Railroad. And they wanted to have a [sic] outstanding lecturer the first time and they understood that the Amherst– new Amherst president, Bill Ward, was, was very good, and that he was an American historian. Indeed, he had done something on transportation.
[1:27:49] And I said, “I know him. I met him at a Cape Cod picnic.” First time around. I said, “Yes, I'd be happy to call him and ask him.” And I described it to Bill and I said, “This is to honor the retired chairman of the Pennsylvania Railroad.” And I said “transportation” and he says, “Ahaha, I've done things on railroads. I'd be happy to do it. It won't take a lot of prepatation [sic]– preparation.” So down he came.
[1:28:21] We had a jovial evening. He gave a terrific lecture on people like Martin Clement running a railroad with a private, private railroad car and everything else. And so that's how I got to know Bill Ward. That was the spring of ‘72. In the September of ‘72, my good friend Rudy Rogers talked me into coming down to be his number two.
[1:28:50] Bridegam: At Yale.
[1:28:51] Engley: At Yale. I had been a party for the advisory committee there to getting him to come. And, so, let’s see. In 1975– ‘74–
[1:29:07] Bridegam: ‘74.
[1:29:08] Engley: –he called me from Amherst one day and said, “I'm coming down to visit my son, who’s in the graduate school at Yale. I want to see how he's doing. And I like to drop and see you in your new digs.” And I said, “Fine.” So in he came, and he said, “I have a request to make of you. “Would you be willing to serve on the search committee for the new Amherst librarian? I'm changing the arrangement that’s been there with Cody and Laugher. So I said, “The answer is yes, if I can get my leader, number one here, to let me take the time. And I know he'll say yes.” So I said, “I'll, I'll do this.” So starting in November, into February, I went up every two or three weeks.
[1:30:07] I had already heard the story about how Bill Ward had become president of Amherst. He'd gone home to his wife at dinner one night–he was on the search committee–and he said, “I'm going to have to get off this search committee because the student members keep comparing candidates to faculty members here, including one or two of us sitting on the committee.” And his wife said to him, “Dear, don't you want to be president of Amherst College?” And he looked at her and said, “I thought the last thing you wanted to be was a president's wife,” and she said, “Anything you want to do.” So he took himself off the committee.
[1:30:49] Engley: Well, I had this in the back of my mind all the time I came up to Amherst and met in Johnson Chapel with Bill Kennick and two or three others. Hugh Hawkins–
[1:31:01] Bridegam: Joel Gordon, was he one?
[1:31:03] Engley: I don't remember him. But in any event, this went on into February. And we discussed the whole array of people who had applied through the Chronicle of Higher Education in the New York Times. And I won't get into some of the other names. [Both laugh.]
[1:31:22] And he called me one day, February, and he said, “I'm coming down to see my son again. I like to stop and to see you.” And he walked into my office. Rudy was away, I was in Rudy's office. And he said, “Okay, let's cut out the BS. I'm not here to see my son. I'm here to offer you the job of Librarian of Amherst. The committee wants you.” And I said to him, “Too late. Sorry.”
[1:31:52] Bridegam: You had just accepted at Yale.
[1:31:54] Engley: Well, I– two years into Yale–
[1:31:56] Bridegam: Two years into Yale.
[1:31:57] Engley: But Rudy and I were doing a job forming a research libraries group with Rudy being the chief later in this.
[1:32:05] Bridegam: Right.
[1:32:06] Engley: He had gone off on a sabbatical one year. He brought it with him from Stanford. And I ran a library by myself without him for a year. I was deep into– And, and in a sense, it was too late. I was too old. I was too old then. But I said, “I will think about it.” And I came up here, and I talked with Newton about it. We met off-campus. He wanted me to do it. But he didn't want me to do it. And at my stage and things. And so, uh, to end the story, I said to Bill, “Sorry, but in good conscience, I can't walk out on Yale. We're doing things together.” So Bill went back to the drawing board.
[1:33:01] Bridegam: There was a second search. Is that right? Or a renewed search.
[1:33:04] Engley: Renewed search. We– they probably went through some of the other candidates. You were in the pool.
[1:33:13] Bridegam: Well, I remember receiving a call from Lou Martin who was helping wi– helping Bill with the search as well.
[1:33:20] Engley: Well, then that was the second ti–
[1:33:21] Bridegam: Asking me if I would be interested in applying.
[1:33:22] Engley: Yeah, yeah, okay, alright. Yeah, I think they went back to, to the drawing board, I guess. Because the next thing I knew, Bill Ward was inviting me to come up to meet you.
[1:33:34] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:33:34] Engley: And this was not a very onerous or deep– [Bridegam laughs] I guess I was being asked to ask what I thought you look like.
[1:33:44] Bridegam: And that was the beginning of our friendship.
[1:33:46] Engley: Absolutely.
[1:33:47] Bridegam: And then, Don, shortly after I arrived, Bill gave me the duty of examining HILC–
[1:33:53] Engley: Right.
[1:33:54] Bridegam: –with my colleagues from the other four colleges. And he said, “I really want your professional opinion as to whether it should be continued or not.”
[1:34:01] Engley: Yeah, yeah.
[1:34:02] Bridegam: “It doesn't seem to be functioning as well as it should be.” And so, once again, we came to you. Not alone, but we asked Lou Martin and you and David Kaser who was, uh, Indiana–
[1:34:16] Engley: University of– Indiana University.
[1:34:18] Bridegam: –University. And we asked Richard DeGennaro from the University of Pennsylvania to come and advise us whether the Hampshire Inter-Library Center should be continued or not now. Do you want to say a few words about that?
[1:34:31] Engley: Yes. We met in great seriousness, we really did, and we were provided with huge documentation. I didn't need very much of it, of course, but I was there to kind of explain the history to the others. And we met in some seriousness once with all the presidents over at South Hadley: Jill Ker Conway, Dave Truman, who was an Amherst graduate, class of ‘35, president of Mount Holyoke. I– Was Chuck Longsworth–?
[1:35:05] Bridegam: Was probably Chuck Longsworth–
[1:35:06] Engley: President of Hampshire.
[1:35:07] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:35:08] Engley: And a very nice Black man was the new provost of University of Massachusetts. I forget his name, but he was a real doer up there. Well, in any event. They, they took the–
[1:35:23] Bridegam: Bromery.
[1:35:24] Engley: Yep, named Bromery. We– They took this all very seriously. And we studied the whole thing in great seriousness and we met in New York a couple of times. We always met at the Yale Club, right by Grand Central because I had the membership in it. And it was easy for people to come from Philadelphia. Kaser could fly in from Indiana.
[1:35:52] Bridegam: Right.
[1:35:54] Engley: Cornell come down there, and then our sage opinion at the end was that there wasn't a great deal of future and it.
[1:36:09] And we sat in the library of the Yale Club one day and wrote the report in New York City, [both laugh] and then had lunch and discussed it at lunch and thought it over again at lunch after we'd written. We read parts back and forth to each other. We were really concerned, you know: What were we doing in this? Helping decide some other people's fate. [Laughs.]
[1:36:37] Bridegam: Mm. It’s an important decision.
[1:36:39] Engley: Yeah.
[1:36:39] Bridegam: What you were saying is, if I remember correctly, the university library had changed nature because it was now a major research library, not just a small state library.
[1:36:49] Engley: That’s right, yeah.
[1:36:49] Bridegam: And you were saying that, perhaps, that perhaps we didn't need to develop a sixth library in the Valley. We had about 60,000 volumes in HILC at that time. And so as a result of your, your recommendations, we distributed those 60,000 volumes as microfilms–
[1:37:09] Engley: That's right.
[1:37:10] Bridegam: –among five libraries–
[1:37:10] Engley: Dispersed, yeah. Yeah.
[1:37:12] Bridegam: And I think it was a sound decision. Yet it's, it's interesting that today because of lack of space in the five libraries and continuing growth of the collections, we are now back to [the] HILC concept.
[1:37:24] Engley: That’s right.
[1:37:25] Bridegam: Developing a Five College library depository.
[1:37:27] Engley: These things come around again.
[1:37:28] Bridegam: They do.
[1:37:30] Engley: Slightly different format, but there they come.
[1:37:32] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:37:33] Engley: Yeah.
[1:37:34] Bridegam: You retired from Yale, from your position at Yale in 1982, if I remember correctly.
[1:37:42] Engley: Mm-hmm. To a part-time position.
[1:37:43] Bridegam: To a part-time position.
[1:37:45] Engley: Mm-hmm.
[1:37:45] Bridegam: Would you like to say a few words about that? That was an interesting position.
[1:37:48] Engley: It was, yeah, and I wouldn't have done it except for the offbeat nature of it. The world-famous collector of Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill Press had created this private personal library, research library in Farmington, Connecticut. He was a Yale alumnus, had married a lot of money, [[inaudible]] money. He spent a lifetime collecting everything about Horace Walpole. And he also hired a staff, that, to edit the huge 48-volume correspondence of Horace Walpole that was housed in the Yale library. He had been a founder of the Friends of the Library at Trinity for me, because he was a trustee of the Watkinson Library, which we'd already mentioned.
[1:38:40] Indeed, he couldn't make up his mind when I went to lunch with him whether I should stay at Trinity or go to Yale, except that when he was helping me out with my coat, he took me back into the library and made me sign the guestbook that day with “Trinity College” beside it, because he said to me, “That's absolutely the last time you're going to be able to write Trinity.”
[1:39:04] After he had told me for an hour and a half he couldn't help me to make the decision. Anyway. I was– when I got to Yale I found out that as number two, I was in charge of all school and department libraries. 40 libraries in 35 buildings. And included in this was the Lewis Walpole library even though Mr. Lewis was still alive in Farmington. And Rudy said, “From now on, you take his morning phone calls,” and I went to Farmington to hold his hand, too. And when the will was read, Yale owned it all, as we know, and we had with a third executor, third Yale alumnus executor, we'd gotten the will softened some so Yale library could administer it properly. And so as I retired in ‘82– Well, even before I retired, Rudy had me going up to Farmington to educate the staff to the fact they were now part of the Yale library.
[1:40:11] And then when I retired in ‘82, I was on a retainer to go up there once a week or so, from West Hartford over, and then come down to Yale to plug in to make sure the show was staying on the road. So that was delightful until 1987, five years of it, when we had it really merged into the Yale library system and they–speaking of computers–they got their own computer, and they were part of the Yale library even though they were 45 miles away.
[1:40:48] Bridegam: But I remember you invited me to–for a tour of the house and what is delightful place it was.
[1:40:55] Engley: In a print room with thousands and thousands of 18th century prints. Our biggest problem was with, was with the Farmington community. It sat there in the, the library sat there in the historic district. And every few months, townspeople would float rumor that Yale was going to move it all to New Haven. [Bridegam laughs.] And I think they had visions of huge helicopters coming in and lifting it at night and taking it off before anything can be done.
[1:41:30] Bridegam: [Laughs.] One final chapter in your long, long career as a librarian: you developed a small library at the Duncaster–
[1:41:38] Engley: Oh, yes.
[1:41:39] Bridegam: –where you live now.
[1:41:42] Engley: Yes, yes. In fact, we just buried the librarian two weeks ago–
[1:41:46] Bridegam: Oh, dear.
[1:41:46] Engley: –a resident. A longtime friend of mine came to me, a Yale graduate and benefactor of the library, in the Columbiad Graphic Arts Club with me, president of Connecticut Printers, famous book printers. He said, “I'm creating a resid– a resident retirement community. And it's going to have a good library, as far as I'm concerned. I want you to see these floor plans and help me to get a library in it; make sure it's right.” So I did. And I met with the– this was long before it was built.
[1:42:27] Bridegam: Yes.
[1:42:29] Engley: Three or four years before it was built. I was still at Yale slightly at the very beginning. And I met with eight or nine charter residents, all book-collecting types, and they wanted their books to go into the library, and I was the referee to determine whether they should or not, and I helped get the cataloger to come because Jack Davis wanted the books on the shelves when the new residents moved in, so it looked like a resident. And a lovely retired school librarian came in among the pioneers. And she said, “I'm in charge of this library,” and Jack and I said, “Good.”
[1:43:11] In 1988– in nineteen-eighty-ei– yes, four years after the place opened, Hope and I moved in, sold our West Hartford house, kept the cape house. Before we went to the cape, I went to an open house to visit, see what was going on there. And here in the meeting room were all these tables with things that residents did. Knitting, painting, flowers.
[1:43:42] One table among a dozen which said “Mrs. Vaughn is receiving in the library.” So I went over and she was sitting primly at the desk, and I introduced myself and I said, Mrs. Vaughn. I'm Donald Engley. And she looked at me and said, “I've been dreading this day.” [Bridegam laughs.] I said, “Why?” And she said, “You're going to find everything wrong here.”
[1:44:08] I said, “Mrs. Vaughn, I don't want to be the librarian. I don't want to be on your library committee, even. You don't have to worry about me.” Well, we established a beautiful relationship about library problems, and I helped her solve them. And I gave the tribute to her at the, her memorial service.
[1:44:34] Bridegam: Two weeks ago.
[1:44:35] Engley: Yeah. So anyway, I guess this is a long way around to say that libraries have been my life. In the war, I was a fatalist during all that time through several countries. I said to myself, “It's, if it's going to happen to me, it's going to happen to me. It's fate.” And it didn't. But at the end, looking back, invited by the Connecticut Historical Society to do an oral history and invited for, by the Trinity Library to do it on the 50th anniversary of the new library at Trinity, and here: three oral histories. I think there's a message there that they better get to him while he’s still around. [Both laugh.]
[1:45:28] Bridegam: Well, Don–
[1:45:28] Engley: And so it’s been, it's destiny to talk about libraries. That's it.
[1:45:35] Bridegam: I'm delighted we had this opportunity to talk today. You know so much about Amherst and about its library. You've been so close to it. You’ve helped it so much through your advice to Newton McKeon, through the Friends of the Library, through your mentoring of me. It's, it's really been remarkable how much you've influenced the development of this library. And I think it's important that we recorded that oral history today.
[1:46:05] Engley: It’s been my pleasure, and I feel that I have repaid my debt to Amherst by saying things like this, and going through this routine with you has been a real pleasure to me.
[1:46:18] Bridegam: Thank you, Don.
Donald B. Engley, Amherst class of 1939, earned degrees in librarianship from Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He served as the librarian at Norwich University Library and as Associate Librarian at Trinity College in Connecticut. He was the Associate University Librarian at Yale University from 1972 until his retirement in 1982.
Willis E. Bridegam served as the librarian of the college at Amherst from 1975 until his retirement in 2004.
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