Stewart: I'm speaking with a long time reference librarian at ODU. I would like to start the interview by asking Mr. Clymer something about his background, that is what he did before he came to Old Dominion. Mr. Clymer, where were you born?

Clymer: I was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 3, 1915. You want that?

Stewart: Yes. And did you spend most of your boyhood and youthful years in Delaware?

Clymer: I was born and brought up in Wilmington. I left there in 1937 to join the army. The army was a real challenge. That was early in July in 1937 after I had graduated from the University of Delaware, June 6,1937. I joined the army because I had the challenge to do it by some of my friends at the University. They used to say to me, "Ben, you are a creampuff. You'll never make it. You're a nice creampuff, but you're a creampuff. Go out some place and learn how to be a man." Much against my parent's wishes .... After all I was at the university during very tough years, the middle of the depression years, 1933-1937. I said no, I'm going to become a man, and I went into the army. The way it was in the service in those days ... is described by James Jones's From Here to Eternity. It was like that. I retired with a war wound and in spite of all the wonderful experiences, two wars and a number of ranks, up to and including major, and assignments all over the world, I came out the same creampuff I had been when I went in.

You did ask me about being brought up in Wilmington. I should say that I did attend public schools in Wilmington and was always an honor student. That was my one capability, getting good grades in school.

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Stewart: That's sort of unusual for someone of that type to go into the military. Did you find many other people like you in the military?

Clymer: Not like me, no. .... It certainly toughened me up. It made me aware about the other people. I had been an only child. For the first time in my life, and I can't say this about my college years because I stayed at home and commuted to North Newark, the university was only about 17 miles. I've never been exposed to the hard-core world of all kinds of people and that was a great education, as great as any of the other educations that I had.

Stewart: When did you decide, and how did you come to decide, to be a librarian?

Clymer: I've always been a good student. I came to love books. I was a good student partly because I loved books and loved their contents, and partly because books were made interesting and even fascinating to me early in my life through a dear woman friend librarian, a friend of my mother's in a public library. I was five or six. She took me to a children's room, one of the first great children's rooms, with wonderful paintings around the walls of the children's room by Howard Pyle -- original illustrations of such things as Treasure Island. That's how I came to my love for books. Mr. Peabody, a director of the library here at ODU from 1966-1976 one time commented that loving books was no criterion for becoming a librarian. I don't concur with him, but that was his opinion. We know what happened to him. I do think that my lifelong love of books, almost instinctive, had a great deal to do with my becoming a librarian. I realized there's a great deal more to being a librarian, even a reference librarian, than just the love and the knowledge of books.

Stewart: How did you find out about Old Dominion? When did you first realize it was a place in existence?

Clymer: It wasn't Old Dominion when I found out about it. I was stationed at Ft. Monroe, right across Hampton Roads. And I came to love this area. Every weekend I would come over to Virginia Beach during the summer time and spend $50 or $60 of my hard earned pay as second lieutenant and stay in one of those tower rooms in the Old Cavalier hotel. Those days it was all year round and you could get a first rate room for $15 to $20 a night. I came to love, not the Peninsula--Hampton, Newport News, but Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I had no idea that I would ever live here. To answer your question, those were the first times, first years of my knowledge of this area. It was love at first sight really.

Stewart: How did the opportunity arise for you to take a position here?

Clymer: While at Chapel Hill working toward my MSLS 1958,

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I met a local girl by the name of Elizabeth Seelinger, now Elizabeth DeBedts, the wife of your former department head, and she was working on her MSLS at the same time at Chapel Hill University of NC and we became very close friends. When she came back here in 1959, short of her degree some few courses, to take care of her mother who was dying of a terminal illness, she came to work at Norfolk College of William and Mary. That's what it was called then. Of course I hadn't seen it when I had come through Norfolk on occasions in years past. And all I remember was the Williamsburg Lawn, what they call the Williamsburg Lawn down here, the wonderful wall and the red brick buildings. That's all that was there besides that tremendous Foreman Field. She continued to write to me when I was finishing with my degree and I visited her up here in the summer of 1959 before I took my degree in January 1960. At that time she said there would be a job opening possibly in the new library. It just opened in the fall of 1958. They were beginning to expand their staff, and she wondered if I would be interested in considering a position here. I told her to let me know when it became available. She did in January of 1960, and the Director of the Library and Mrs. DeBedts came down to Chapel Hill early in January and interviewed and gave me the job.

I came here on March 1, 1960. I took over as reference librarian from her. She had been reference librarian I think for a year. And she went to circulation when I came here as reference librarian.

Stewart: As a reference librarian, what were the kinds of things that you did? Not all of them, but some of them.

Clymer: There's a quotation that I use: "We can do anything always. Always able to do anything." I heard that while I was at Chapel Hill and I forget who it was [who said that]. I think it was a famous doctor, Louis Wilson who died just a year or so ago at 105. We were talking about what reference librarians do, and he said that quote. And I've found that always to be true, absolutely factual. I can give you numerous examples of having to do almost anything. The primary purpose was to serve the university -- faculty, students, and staff -- and getting the information they needed from the materials in the library, in serving their information and reference requirements from the material in the library. That's a fairly narrow parameter. It was more than just answering someone's question. Who started England? What did General MacArthur say to General Wainwright who had taken over for him? What did General

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Eisenhower say to the poor sick man when he was brought to him at lunch? How does the engine of a Cadillac work? What is death? Who wrote the first and the shortest poem, and what is it? An example of having to do all kinds of things was my response to a question of a lady who came in wanting someone to sing a duet with her. She had an audition for something or another in the music department, and she needed someone else, other than in the music department, to sing with her. She came to the reference desk one day and asked me for this. I said, "I'll sing a duet with you. What do you know?" She said, "Oh I have music from Mozart's song Duvaney." I said, "we'll do the duet." It's baritone and soprano. We went into one of the three little rooms in the reference room. She and I sang together, and I can do it today. It's one that I memorized years and years ago.

Stewart: What did she say afterwards?

Clymer: She was very grateful she got the part. She wanted to see how she sounded. Our reference work wasn't nearly just answering somebody's question. It was helping students to learn to use the library, giving tours to students at all levels within the university and later on to any educational system in Tidewater, spending as much time as it took to satisfy their bibliographic and intellectual needs.

Stewart: Did you have any other specific functions besides being a reference librarian?

Clymer: Yes, maybe it's part of the reference function, but it was interlibrary loan. Having observed that as part of my study at Chapel Hill, I thought of that as very important to expanding the reference function of a small college library, because we didn't have much in 1960. We had about 31,000 books. We were beginning to have a young good faculty, well-trained faculty. Many came from Harvard and Yale Universities, UVA and North Carolina who were accustomed to larger collections. Their researchers were stymied because we didn't have the collections to satisfy their needs. Interlibrary loan rescued us.

Stewart: When did that start?

Clymer: It started with me in 1960. I organized the first

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interlibrary loan function in 1960. Mrs. DeBedts didn't have much time to do the extension work of interlibrary loan. In those days we had no Teletype. We had to do it all by letter or by mail. And naive as I was, I sent every request to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale or the Library of Congress and consequently got everything. Those great libraries would send us everything we asked for, including periodicals, and on occasions a semi-rare book. And now, the interlibrary loan function has grown. It's a department of its own, or a subsection of the circulation department. The library transferred it from reference to circulation some years ago. I don't think it would have come to our University if it hadn't been for the reference function picking it up in 1960.

Stewart: Was interlibrary loan nationwide?

Clymer: Interlibrary loan goes all the way back to the turn of the century. A librarian understood the importance of a worldstream of books made available through some kind of loan system to all scholars. In effect that vision became interlibrary loan. There's an interlibrary loan code placed through the Library of Congress to which we had to adhere to very specific rules. They haven't changed very much over the years. There's advance extension of photocopying service in libraries all over. Most libraries don't charge, except for maybe the postage for the materials they sent, or at least the postage for return.

Stewart: Was there much student use or faculty use?

Clymer: I was just starting, and although I read the code, there was a passage in the code which specified you could make your own ground rules provided they did not harm any other library's operation. Very specific rules about getting books back on time and intact when the library specified they should be back. Interlibrary loan increased enormously in the middle 60's and early 70's. The code became more stringent as to whom we could borrow for. In those days I would borrow for anybody who needed a book or periodical or whatever the public library did not have. Interlibrary loan helped our library service enormously because it expanded and it made it possible for anyone to borrow from any library collection in the US

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open for interlibrary loan borrowing, and most are. Of course some of the great collections of rare books and even government documents and some other materials are not available -- never have been, probably never will be.

Stewart: Could you tell about the teacher function of a reference librarian and some of your experiences along that line?

Clymer: I recognize that as one critical element. A teacher function is just as important as my bibliographic functions. Mrs. DeBedts and I gave classes for familiarizing freshmen students with the library and its minimal collections. We did for two years. Every incoming freshmen class was divided up into about 40 or 50 students. We taught in the Assembly room on the second floor of Hughes Library. I wish that I had made a count of the thousands of hours of classes that I gave over the past twenty years. It was formal teaching to class groups. I had classes anywhere from 10 or 15 to 50 or 100. But the basic element of our teaching function was one on one; the librarian to the individual student. You show him how to use, you take him to the Historical Abstracts to get the answer to his particular need. You don't just drop him there. You explain to him if he seems a little receptive. Explain to him something about the Historical Abstracts and how they will help him. How to operate them, how to use the index, what an abstract is perhaps, and how to use other types of abstracts on the same subject area.

Stewart: Give us some of the student responses to this. Were they real excited?

Clymer: It's difficult to express the relationship we had with students. Having been in the military, I found the average university student of the late 50's rather up front. Once I got over that feeling of distance between me as an adult and a professional, I found that working with students was a rewarding, happy experience. But I've had some rough times with them. In the mid 60's to the early 70's, we became very busy working 80 hours a week, just myself and my first assistant. We worked 80 hours a week from 1962 to 1966, 7 days a week. That meant 40 hours per person every other evening, except Fridays and Saturdays and every other weekend, and we did an increasingly large reference volume. We did interlibrary loans. We tried as best we could to throw something into that little room we call Archives. As a consequence, we were run ragged and sometimes we were a bit short with students and sometimes with faculty. I regret to say that in the early 60's I found that I had a reputation of being abrupt --

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capable, responsive, knowledgeable, even excellent in my primary job as a bibliographic assistant to anyone who came to the door. But nevertheless, perhaps abrupt -- many people have said, "You are rude." I'm glad for that, and it took a little while to get over that reputation, I'm sorry to say.

You were asking me about the relationship with students. After I began to acquire a staff, that problem that I just mentioned became dissipated, because I was able to serve all of those hours much more effectively. We had student assistants to help us. For four years remember, there were just two of us. The college was expanding enormously. There was a fantastic growth of expansion.

Stewart: A couple minutes ago you said you could describe the Hughes Library, which is the first one you worked in, and perhaps you could make a comparison between that one and the one that was built later.

Clymer: The Hughes Library was named for Robert Hughes, a prominent Norfolk attorney and graduate of William and Mary. Hughes Library was built in 1958. It was the first step from the old Williamsburg-type campus, the first step in the great growth of the university in the past 22 years. The city gave the land on which that building stands and $100,000 toward the construction of it. It cost a million dollars in 1958. It was built to last. When I went to it in 1960, it had 30,000 volumes after the institution had been here for 30 years. The building was designed by Oliver and Smith, a two story building with a prominent architectural feature known as the solar screen, walled by a solar screen in which there were 13,615 foot square ceramic tile blocks. They still are all there. The reason I know that is because that was a favorite question for the initiation into a fraternity. How many tile blocks are there in the library's solar screen? There are 18,000. The building had 25,000 square feet of space on each floor, first and second floors. When I went there, the second floor of the building was entirely devoted to English Department and History Department offices and the assembly room. The first floor was the library. The whole building was intended to have at its maximum 200,000 volumes. There were only 30,000 in 1960, and that looked years and years away. No one had an idea then that the growth would

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be so great as it became. It was a comfortable, beautiful, pleasant, even delightful place to work in. The solar screen had the function of filtering light so there was no glare. We couldn't get any air, because there were no windows. We only had two doors to get air through when the AC went out. Inside the solar screen were great glass windows from top to bottom which could not be opened. In the new building, we saw to it that that would never happen.

Stewart: For years, I remember one thing. Upstairs, there was an early theatre by Rhodes [Prof. Ernest Rhodes].

Clymer: In the English Department, Rhodes was a specialist who was making a theatre. In fact, there was a book on the study of the theatre in Shakespeare's time. And he had a model of this in his office in the English Department.

I came to the library and became the head of reference. I retired in June last year. I was a department head with the longest tenure. I had no rank at that time. As department head of the reference department I also became department head of the so-called Science Technology collection and the government documents collection. Then as we continued to grow in the late 60's it was my duty to build a staff of professionals to take over those responsibilities. On the second floor was the Science & Technology collection. Periodicals were in what had been the assembly room in 1968 or 1969. By 1970, the entire building belonged just to the library.

Stewart: When did the thought come along that there had to be a new building?

Clymer: It dawned on us all in the middle 60's. It dawned on me in 1965 when we had to move upstairs, and I realized our collection was growing as it was. In Hughes there were only 631 chairs in the building in the downstairs part in 1960-1966. In 1968 we moved upstairs, so it was in the middle 60's that I certainly realized it and I guess the Director did. His successor talked to me about expanding the building. We were beginning to get entitled to money because of the library section of the Education Act of 1965, and because of the money being funded by two of Norfolk's most prominent men with well wishes for ODU. Frank Batten, who had been Rector of the Board for several years at that time, and E.T. Gresham. Both of them started a fund for library books. That fund was about $385,000. We used a little bit of that at a time to supplement the increasing money that was coming to us

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from federal sources and the university, who by that time was realizing how important the library was to its growth. It was mandatory because of the graduate programs that were being introduced by the university. The effort of these two great men continued until EVMS came along, and then that became everybody's baby. It dried up the sources. Before we had university advancement, so called, that started as a function of the university administration in 1972. I was involved with the coming of the George Gay collection. We actually started planning for the new building.

Mr. Peabody, to my mind, had a major accomplishment here: to recognize the need for planning for a new building, not just having it happen, as had been the case in the past. So he appointed me in 1970 as a coordinator for the planning for the new library building and the author of a program statement for the new building. This was on top of all my other duties as well.

Stewart: Talk a little bit about the process you went through to create the new library, the problems you encountered and the results, what you had in mind to correct deficiencies in the earlier library.

Clymer: In 1968 or 1969 the university planners began to talk about the need for a new library building. Dr. Bugg said, "We need a new $6 million library." He was all for a new building and helped enormously. Mr. Peabody hired me to be the staff coordinator and the writer of the program statement for the new building in 1970. My first step was to write to universities all over the US to get the best in standards and copies of their program statements. We got all kinds of information: pictures, program statements, and other stages or phases of development from which I learned a great deal. It was estimated that we needed a library to last into the 21st century based on projections of student population. With the help of several books on the subject of library planning, I started to write the first program statement which was entered late in 1971. By that time I had been told that we would probably meet with the architects in April or May in 1972, that in fact we would know how much money we would have to get. By the end of the session, the legislature was to meet in January or February to let us know.

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Stewart: Had there been anything in your background, your military career, in your library science training which helped in this directly, or was this just something you were given to do and had to learn as you went?

Clymer: I think Mr. Peabody had respect for my planning ability and my ability to carry a job through. I think also he and I dealt very well on the subject of the library. Also, having known something about my background in WWII, early in the war, he knew one of my jobs, particularly overseas, was island hopping. My battalion was involved in loading and unloading ships. I guess all of us did that. During loading and unloading ships, we had to know how many trucks and wagons could you get on it. So how many books, how many shelves or whatever could you get into a library? It was not too terribly different. I don't know, maybe that's not the reason why. Library schools now regularly teach subjects in library architecture. I think most of them are electives, but they do have such courses available. I did not at Chapel Hill. The preparation of programs was a tedious business indeed. I was given a working figure as far as how much money we might get. This was in 1971. And we were told that the average cost of new buildings was $31 per square foot to build. We were hoping for $7 million. Divide that by 31 and you see how many square feet we were supposed to get. We spent months writing this program statement. We worked toward the $7 million library. In 1972 we had Black Friday just a few weeks before we were supposed to meet the architect. The program statement as I had written it had gone through 3 or 4 revisions, and Mr. Peabody had appointed a consultant who was at a university in TX. On Black Friday, I was told the $7 million had been cut. Mr. Peabody and I spent the next 3 days cutting the whole thing in half.

If you look at those statements that I gave you, you'll understand one of those sections had to do with a kind of conceptualization of what we had seen around the country in other libraries and wonderful program statements from other libraries. But what students and faculty of the library staff felt should be in the new building was conceptualization. I think there were some passages of mine in there telling the architects what we hoped this new building would symbolize on campus. The second section,

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maybe more important than the first section, had to do with individual lists of spacing. Every space, whether it was lobby, circulation desk, reference area, acquisitions department, men's room, women's room, meeting rooms, document rooms etc., had to be specified by formula how much space it would take. Bookstacks, the number of books per shelf, linear feet of stacks in a particular room, particular stacking if it was for housing records and scores rather than just books. Spaces for work, spaces for administrative offices, spaces for student seating of various kinds. Circular tables, oblong tables, oblong tables seating 8, oblong tables seating 6, individual carrels, spaces for student books, graduate students and their needs, faculty carrels and their needs.

Stewart: In your process of cutting to meet the budget requirements, did you cut back on the stack space or other things.

Clymer: We kept as much stack space as we could. We cut back on such things as a faculty lounge, an auditorium, a small and important infirmary. We had many people who had everything from vomiting spells to cuts and bruises to heart attacks to insulin shock in the library. And I can think of at least two occasions in the very small infirmary we had on the second floor of the old library -- there was a wash basin, a bed, some first aid materials, a screen, a commode. We cut out about 50 faculty carrels instead of something like 100. We tried to retain student/graduate student spaces and workspaces. Workspaces were never provided for. We had to cut workspaces out of the operation space.

Stewart: Let's talk about the people.

Clymer: Mr. William Pollard was the Librarian, a graduate of the University of NC, I believe, with a masters degree in English. He had come here right out of graduate school and had come to this area in 1954. He had been on his way to take over the Assistant Librarian spot I think at William and Mary in Williamsburg. And when he arrived, the job had been pulled out from under him, because they had given it to someone who had come back. In no way was that a reflection on him and his ability. But at that time they needed someone to take over this library, small as it was in one room over in the old academic building if you recall. And he became head of the job there in I think 1954 or '55, about the time this was becoming a 4-year school. He was good-looking, tall, courtly, gracious, a true southern cavalier. As far as I could see, only one negative and that was that he was very easy going.

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This did not reflect on his ability to get things done, though sometimes he was a bit lofty to face up to hard decisions. Kindly man, generous. I'm not sure that he had enough technical knowledge, since he had not gone to library graduate school. He didn't have a graduate degree in librarianship. During his time at ODU there were at least two other major libraries. One at UVA headed by people who had BA degrees. That has changed, because it's mandatory that these library directors have a Ph.D.

Stewart: What can you say about Mr. Pollard's replacement, Brewster Peabody?

Clymer: It's difficult to say. He's a very pathetic person. He was fired in 1976. The conditions under which he was fired were that there were certain monies, $9,000 as I understand it, that were not accounted for, money that had been turned over to him by the circulation librarian. She had records and receipts. Money collected for book fines and photocopy charges, about $9,000 could not be cased by the comptroller. I understand he had to pay it back. This was discovered in 1975. He was there until August 1976. It's rumored that he paid back $1,000 a month to keep him out of jail. He was out of work for two years before he found a job elsewhere.

Peabody was 33 when he first came here in 1966, when Pollard went to William and Mary. Pollard had selected him at the summer meeting of the American Library Association. He was looking for a job. Peabody had experience behind the scenes, library public services as I understand. He had been a very good acquisitions librarian. Acquiring materials for use for the library: books, records, periodicals....