How do you approach an unusual or new and difficult task, assignment or challenge – one for which your body of knowledge holds little or no related experience? You want to accomplish the objective, but you don’t know how to get from A to Z.… Read More »The Well-Worn Path
From the time I was a young child, I had a savings account at PSFS – the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society. My mother had opened it for me and said that if I wanted to go to college one day, I would need to pay… Read More »How I Turned a Five Dollar Bill into Four Years of College
Human beings are imperfect, and we are all prone to making bad decisions. The best we can hope for is to learn from the consequences of those choices. Some decisions, though, result in no tomorrow. That almost happened to me. It was 1979, and I… Read More »Going Down for the Third Time
Do the names Gramm-Rudman-Hollings mean anything to you? No, they were not a legendary baseball double play combination, nor were they a power rock trio from the U.K. They were influential United States Senators – Phil Gramm (Texas), Warren Rudman (New Hampshire) and Fritz Hollings… Read More »My Oddest Interview
(This originally appeared in American Libraries, May 1990, back in a much more primitive computing age.) I thought it would be easy to write a book about the use of serials in reference services. I told myself, with all due conceit, that I knew just… Read More »The Agony and the Ecstasy
The first time that I stepped through the doors of Dave’s Deli in Northeast Philly, I was sixteen years old and had no way of knowing that what I would learn there would shape the rest of my work life. It was my first real… Read More »My First Boss
I can’t help but think that someone put a curse on my 2012 Camry. That has to be the explanation. I don’t know who or why, but it would have happened early in 2020 – certainly a cursed year. It was a very dependable vehicle,… Read More »Someone Cursed My Camry
It was about 1986 or 1987 when my older and wiser brother Frank heard that I was planning a trip to New Orleans. To prepare me for my trip, he sent me a cassette tape – Professor Longhair’s Rock ’n’ Roll Gumbo. I wasn’t expecting… Read More »I Was Professor Longhair
It was just after Christmas 2013 when I took a bath with my cat. As you might imagine, there’s a story leading up to that ill-fated washing. Our two almost identical grey tabby cats – brothers Ben and Jerry – were 11 years old. They… Read More »Jerry and the Turkey Drippings