A Ride in the Library

My mother and father met while earning degrees in library science.

I don’t know when or why it was first called a “science”.

I’ll grant that the academic discipline focusing on sorting documents into categories, and then making those documents accessible to folks wanting their information, overlaps the sciences; and that’s another topic. Topics.

At any rate, my father got a job as head librarian at Moorhead State Teachers College around 1950. At that time the library was in the east end of MacLean Hall, more-or-less where the bookstore is now.

Snead Shelving and Perceptions of Age

Back then, the library stacks extended at least one level above the building’s ground floor. My memories of them look like Snead shelves: modular tiered metal shelving with self-contained stairs.¹

My father’s idea of a head librarian’s duties involved his going back to work after normal working hours. Sometimes he’d take me along.

That very likely explains why I remember so much about the multi-story stacks inside a larger building — heady stuff for this child or pre-teen.

Some folks apparently are aware of exactly how old they are at every point in their lives. My perception is like many of my father’s kin. We knew how old we were: either “of age” or “not of age”, child or adult.

To this day, if I’m asked for my age, I have to recall when I was born and the current date, then do a little arithmetic to work out ‘how old’ I am. I was born during the Truman administration, and have been “of age” for decades.

The point of that digression is that I did some figuring, and found that I was about nine years old when construction began on the building that replaced the library’s MacLean Hall location.

A Very Happy Moment

I was probably much younger when my father gave me a ride in the library.

He sat me in an office chair, the sort with arms. These days it would have been made of metal and plastic, with five legs. This one was made of wood, and most likely had four legs.

It certainly was on casters.

Sitting with my back against the chair’s back and gripping the arms, I seem to remember my calves resting on the seat. My father must have been in a good mood. He took hold of the chair’s back and rushed us around the library, occasionally spinning the chair.

I wanted the moment to last longer, and said so. But eventually my father indicated that the ride was over.

Almost seven decades later, that is still among my very best memories.

I’ve mentioned the Moorhead State library before:

• “Two Mice” (May 24, 2025)
  • Encounter in the Library
• “My Oak Tree and Its Travels” (March 1, 2025)
  • A Tree Grows on Campus

¹ Snead shelving, I didn’t find much about it online:

• Wikipedia
  • Angus Snead Macdonald (“This article needs additional citations for verification….”)
• “Bookstacks & Stack Room Equipment”
  Snead & Company, Jersey City, New Jersey (1931) via Internet Archive
• “Bookstacks & Stack Room Equipment”
  Snead & Company, Jersey City, New Jersey (1931) via Current Special Collections Exhibits, Lehigh University Library
• “How One Company Designed the Bookshelves that Made America’s Biggest Libraries Possible”
  Lydia Pyne, Slate (February 1, 2016) [many photos, says Snead & Co. was in Kentucky]