I was born on April 29, 1955, at Carle Hospital in Urbana, Illinois. About a year before that, my parents had moved from Indiana to Farmer City, a small town about 30 miles west of Urbana. Actually, they moved to a 220 acre farm just at the edge of town. So, it was on that farm, in that community, that I spent the first eighteen years of my life.
About a year and a half after I was born, my sister Mona joined the family. But that was the end of it: Just the four of us, plus an endless string of animals of various shapes and sizes and names. Until I was about 12, we kept chickens, sheep, cattle, pigs, and various cats and a dog. We sold or ate everything but the cats and the dog. Some of my earliest memories are of the animals. I remember, when I was perhaps three, going with my father to the Wests, who were friends of my parents, to look at a dog and the last of her puppies. I had the choice of the mother dog or the puppy. You can guess which one I chose. They dropped him off a few days later, and we decided to call him Candy, for reasons I no longer recall. He became a beautiful dog, half German shepherd and half collie, who was a loyal and good friend while I grew up. He's been gone probably 25 years now, but I know I could still find where Dad buried him in the pasture behind our house. The most unusual pet I had was a turkey when I was three or four. My sister and I would pretend to ride her and she would sit there patiently letting us play. We often had turkey eggs for breakfast. She wandered off at some point and we never saw her again.
Although we had a lot of livestock, the main business on the farm was grain. As far as I remember, we never did any of the farming ourselves. We had a sharecropping arrangement with one of the farmers in the area. He and his family had several hundred acres of their own, so they provided the equipment and labour, we bought the seed and supplies, and then we all split the crop down the middle. We grew primarily corn and soya beans, although in the early years I remember some wheat being grown. It was truly beautiful. Some people who move to the Midwest never get used to the flat fields stretching endlessly toward the horizon. They say it's featureless and boring. I say it teaches you to pay attention to the subtleties of nature.
Anyway, that's what I remember of my very early years. At the age of six, I started the first grade. We didn't have kindergarten, but my parents practiced school for several months before I started, so I was pretty well prepared. I liked school and did well, so that was really most of my life for the next twelve years. My family didn't travel or do anything very interesting, so aside from the occasional picnic, most of my memories are about school and my friends. Until I was 13 or so. At that point I started to develop a mind and opinions of my own, which were very different from my parents'. So most of my high school years were spent fighting with them. To my disappointment, my relationship with them never improved. Oh, well. My sister Mona and I spent much of our younger years fighting, although we had a lot of fun, too. She has a hard time putting up with me: I think she takes things too seriously, and I suppose she just finds me annoying. She lives in Houston, now, and we only see each other every couple of years. We get along pretty well under those circumstances. Probably because of my early life at home, I realize that family is more than just blood ties; family are those people who love you and respect you and put up with you and for whom you would do anything in return. I've never made friends easily over the years, but those I have are my family.
When I was eighteen, I left home for good and went to the University of Illinois at Urbana. I went with thoughts of going into mathematics or computer science, but I got sidetracked by foreign languages, which I had always enjoyed studying. I started out with Russian, but I soon realized that the department focused on the literature rather than the linguistic aspects of the language. Finally I decided to pursue a degree in linguistics, since that was the best way I could find to study a wide variety of languages. I won't go into all of them, but if you look at my interests, you'll find some of my favorites listed.
College was pretty uneventful. Actually, I have surprisingly little that's worth mentioning about the experience. The last two and a half years I was in college, I worked with a group of quadriplegic students, some of whom became very close friends. There were usually four or five guys each sememster, and usually four of us who worked with them. There were three people who worked during the week: a morning person who got all the guys up and ready for classes, an evening person who got everyone to bed, and a cook who prepared breakfast and dinner. I did all three jobs over the weekend. It was a lot of work, but also very rewarding. I really admired those guys. It took a lot of courage and strength of will for them to do the things that most of us just take for granted. Steve and I both graduated in 1977 and he was going to Harvard law school in the fall. He needed an attendant, so I (with a BA in linguistics and having nothing better to do) decided to go to Cambridge with him. I found that I didn't like living in a big city very much, so I decided to stay only through Steve's first year though by the time I left I had started to like Boston rather well. It was too late to change my mind, and I ended up back in Urbana.
Once back in Urbana, I needed a job, so I took exams for some clerical jobs at the University. Fortunately, the library there had several job openings that summer, and I suspect I got hired just because they didn't have lots of applicants. I was hired to supervise the reserves desk at the Undergraduate Library and stayed there nine years, utimately supervising the circulation department. Most of the time I enjoyed it there, but I finally decided that if I was going to continue working in libraries, I might as well go ahead and get the degree. I was accepted at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, so it was back to college ten years after I had left. Fortunately, I continued working at the University Libraries on a half-time assistantship working as their microcomputer support person. Graduate school was hard work, but also a great experience. And it was pretty uneventful. Uneventful: That's starting to sound like a pattern in my life.
They must have liked what I was doing there pretty well in the Libraries because when I graduated they offered me an appointment as a visiting librarian. Although they tried to get funds to make the position permanent, after a year or so it became apparent that the budget problems were severe enough that no funding was to be found. I started applying for other positions and was ultimately offered the position I currently occupy at the University Libraries of Notre Dame where I've happily been for the last five years.