thinking about an active retirement

I was making coffee this morning, yrgacheffe, and started thinking about librarians that I know (or have known). Rolling through the list, which is a decent length, I began to realize that many of these folks kept working in libraries after retirement. It was not always the library that they retired from, though often it was. But many spent good, long years after the age of 65 (or whatever) right where they had been for the last thirty-five or forty years.

Let me briefly introduce three such librarians that I have known. Bill Miller had been retired from the PENN libraries for years by the time I knew him (probably decades). He was a kind, frail old man who doddered around the stacks. I don’t remember what he did, if I ever knew, but we would chat politely, and I used to think, “Well, there’s someone who will work until he dies,” and he pretty much did.

Rudolf Hirsch was also retired many years when I met him. A former assistant director for the PENN libraries, Rudy was one of the smartest men I ever met. Of German extraction, he escaped the Nazis and made a life in Philadelphia. Europe’s loss was definitely America’s gain. As far as I could tell, Rudy knew just about everything. Seemingly gruff, with a very heavy accent, he came into the library once a week and pushed forward on his own research projects (he was deeply learned in the publishing history of incunabula). Once, I had the guts to ask him why he had published relatively little (believe me, he had published quite a bit, but he was so damned knowledgeable). He answered that he never published on a topic unless he could prove the supporting details in at least three ways. “How many things can you prove just two ways?” I asked. “Many,” he answered. “How many just one way?” He just shook his head in a way that gave me chills. Several scholars could have made significant careers with the things Rudy knew just one way. He was old school — modern academics might publish with thin evidence — but not him. He also worked till near the end.

Willman Spawn, who died in 2010, was my research partner. I met him within a year of his retirement from the American Philosophical Society where he had been conservator for 38 years. Willman went from the APS to the PENN and Bryn Mawr libraries (he was Honorary Curator of Bindings at the latter). For nearly thirty years after his retirement he worked harder than most professionals I know, chasing down the history of bookbinding throughout the world, but with Philadelphia as his special focus. He worked up until the last month of his life (just shy of 90 years).

Why am I thinking about this? Because these three men (and other men and women who I know still living) seem to have found a profession that they are willing to spend their entire adult life pursuing. Pretty cool in an age when Americans are told they are likely to have multiple jobs and professions. Makes me want to be a librarian.