by Frederick Klein
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CONVOCATION from McGill’s Graduate School was Wednesday at Place-des-Arts; Thursday I was interviewed for a job at McGill; Friday I was hired as evening supervisor in the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library. My supervisor introduced me to Olga, an energetic engaging and very forward woman from an Eastern European background who was in charge of Document Control. I liked Olga but other workers supervised by her saw her as bossy and demeaning. They imitated Olga’s Polish accent and mannerisms behind her back in the lunchroom interspersed with imitations of Colonel Klink and other characters from popular culture. A favourite trope of her minions was to make Olga seem like one of the female villains in the James Bond franchise. This was unfair and done by placing one’s hands together with the fingers forming a church steeple, then saying ‘Document con-TROL’ aloud in a sinister manner allowing the fingers of one hand to grasp at the air.
Among this group was Steve, the stacks manager whom we counted upon for search and discovery of lost volumes among other tasks. Over the years, people hid books in odd places and Steve was adept at finding them in the second rank of shelves behind where the books’ spines faced the public but the fore-edges were out of sight. Another spot was on top of the shelf itself at the very tallest level, balanced on the metal frame or else under the lowest shelf hidden there atop the carpet. People did this to circumvent the library’s regulations, to enable the dreaded ‘switcheroo’ between friends conspiring to save the volume for each other or to prevent people from accessing controversial literature by authors like Salman Rushdie. Steve said people even hid books there from other libraries and sometimes our books were hidden elsewhere on campus then recovered years later. Fill out a search request on a purple slip of paper and Steve could find the book for you in the fullness of time.
One afternoon at the circulation desk, I saw Steve carrying a huge pile of periodicals, for he was ultimately responsible for the shelving of every volume in this six storey building. Bound periodical volumes were very popular for use in the library, especially for photocopying adjacent the sealed room where Sir Ernest Rutherford had done the research and experiments that led to his winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1908.
‘How are ya’ getting on in learning the new job?’ Steve asked and crisscrossed my gaze several times before he disappeared out of sight for several minutes when Olga strode in from Document Con-TROL.
‘Have you seen Steve?’ asked Olga.
‘Why yes I have, he was just here.’ I replied.
‘Please tell him to come see me if you see him again.’ She replied
The next time Steve appeared I passed on the message from Olga and he informed me ‘I wear a pager! I wear a pocket pager! It was her idea I should wear the pager. She can page me any time!’ He showed me the pager and began to recount with this incident the sad story of how he was hen-pecked at work by Olga whose con-TROL extended beyond documents and at home by his wife Kathryn whom I soon learned was also the secretary at our library school.
What a mean piece of work Kathryn had been including to myself. Any request I made to Kathryn was deflected, thwarted or somehow reworked and often accompanied by snide remarks and innuendoes. After a full year of mistreatment by Kathryn, I contacted the overseeing Faculty of Graduate Studies and they were appalled by the goings on and Ad Hoc disregard of rules in the scofflaw Library School. The lady on the phone in Grad Fac quoted to me the rules Kathryn had violated and when I asked for the page number, she offered to fax the pages concerned to me. I was impressed by the high level of service and never visited Kathryn’s office again without the printed fax in hand.
‘My wife’s a bitch, isn’t she?’ Steve asked when we went out for a team drink following our game. Steve’s favourite bar was Pine’s Pub not far from the Middle Field where we played softball nestled between Park avenue, the winter arena, the Neurological Institute and Percival Molson Stadium. Our team, the Library Leaders, were composed of staff and some faculty from all campus libraries. Steve was our pitcher and expected an answer from me to his question from across the table as he seemed to read my mind.
‘Well, she’s your wife, Steve. I can’t say that to you.’
Steve insisted a few more times ‘My wife’s a bitch. I know she is!’
Drinking was not an activity Steve limited to the bar as I found out from our talented circulation assistant Francis, who seemed to have the scoop on the whole staff. Francis was responsible for mending books left on the mending pile after any one of the 3,600 daily visitors to the Science & Engineering Library had used them and Francis sent more complicated cases to the bookbinder. Francis’ imitation of Olga was sweet and so authentic to real life, he kept me laughing in stitches the whole academic year. Francis was like a human thermometer who knew the daily mood of each staff member. As the evening supervisor, I arrived before my 4 PM start time and Francis was there to tell me what went on that day, who to avoid and such. Francis also related that Steve had a darker side and often did not show up for work on Mondays. The worst time for Steve was the day after the Super Bowl, when he was sometimes absent for two or three days.
‘Oh? Is he a great football fan?’ I asked.
‘No, Steve is an alcoholic.’ Francis replied and added ‘It’s not surprising the way his life is sandwiched between stress from Olga at work and his wife Kathryn at home.’ Francis shook his head left to right and back again, and looked forlorn then added ‘It’s terrible’.
The Library Leaders played softball every week in the summer, usually a Friday after work. I joined in the springtime near the end of the academic year and usually played the outfield. The Library Leaders featured one or two lesbrarians, a cataloguer, circulation clerks, an absentee archivist and yet was shunned by an agoraphobic agrarian who declined repeated invitations from many mutual friends on the team. I was able to get many hits by swatting line drives through the hole at shortstop or over the infielder’s heads and my most memorable play that year was the triple, which required much running. Comparisons were made to Roberto Clemente but mercifully, I did not have to slide into third base.
The Library Leaders team was open to any staff member from McGill’s fifteen libraries (by comparison, Harvard had ninety libraries at the time). Our opponents consisted of teams that had nothing to do with libraries, for example the Printing department’s team whose roster was full of powerful hitters with thick arms and biceps made so by lifting boxes of printed material all day long every day. Printing beat us quite often by propelling towering fly balls over the fence toward Doctor Penfield Avenue in impressive displays of physical strength supported from their pile driver legs. Some of their men were also passable athletes.
Another teammate was Elizabeth, a young woman who well emulated the name Library Leaders. She was also a McGill student from a legal family. Elizabeth had great initiative and connections at the time. As I understood the story, when Elizabeth heard that McGill had no electronic classroom, she took upon herself the task of raising money to build McGill’s first electronic classroom, housed in the McLennan Arts & Humanities Library, which people called ‘the main library’. Without a staff or permanent position, Elizabeth fund-raised $2 million for the electronic classroom.
Nearly twenty years later, I was surprised to hear a judge in Quebec tried to suggest the McGill Softball League was a facade for a cult intent on infiltrating the McGill campus including Chancellor Day Hall! A clever alumnus pointed out that Judge Gomery’s daughter was a member of the Library Leaders team in that league and that she had done a great job raising $2 million for the electronic classroom. Judge Gomery was a highly respected judge and peer of Judge Anonymous on the bench. Judge Anonymous, who likely knew Judge Gomery’s daughter since she was a child, seemed horrified and blanched when he heard the counter-evidence and quickly abandoned his baseless claim. It makes me wonder what Judge Anonymous was trying to conceal about the matter at bar.
After I had moved to New York City, I returned to visit Montreal often and on one such trip was informed Steve had gotten very drunk during the Super Bowl, stumbled on his basement stairs at home, hit his head and fell into a coma from which he never recovered. His memorial service was attended by dignitaries from McGill University, the MUNACA union and all who attended felt it was sad since his death could have been prevented. It is sad also for me to know how men are so poorly treated in society, including in the library industry.
Olga died of cancer a few years later. The Physical Sciences and Engineering Library was submerged into the Medical Library in an ongoing effort to reduce spending or costs, budgets or whatever they call this perpetual reduction of quality. McGill University itself has been the target of two powerful offensives in recent years. In one, the Government of Quebec is trying to drive McGill out of business so they can take over the campus and hand it over as a gift to the province’s French-only university system. In the other, McGill has become a training camp for local terrorists after those installed at crosstown rival Sir George Williams noticed McGill has an expansive lawn while Sir George has none. Tent villages were set up and terrorist sympathizers from across North America were invited to squat at McGill while they intimidated Jewish faculty and students and also repeatedly vandalized the campus. While Judge Anonymous made no publicly visible effort to help ‘Queen of the Colleges, dear old McGill’ in either of two crises, society seems to get worse in all respects. Neither did Judge Anonymous help alleviate the problem of cults on McGill campus. Strike three.
RIP Steve. RIP Olga.