When we dressed up for work

My first professional job after getting my MLS at the University of Illinois was as a Slavic cataloger in the same building and same floor where I went to my classes. We had no computers and it was a long walk in high heels to the shelf list and main catalog. So we got a lot more exercise than today's librarians. But it was an elegant building (once you left the cataloging room). We used LC paper copy and NUC bound volumes to speed up our work. (That's librarian talk, and the young ones don't even know what that means.) We would remove cards from the catalog and replace them with little pink slips, and then carefully put them back when we were finished.

In those days, we librarians dressed up to go to work. This pattern was made in a lovely wool in a hounds tooth check in teal and brown, and brown leather buttons on the jacket. I bought a teal sleeveless turtleneck to go with it.

View 2 looks pretty close
I could only find one photo of me wearing this suit, and it looks like I took off the jacket. I'm in the back on the right. This is a photo of Christmas dinner 1966 in my parents' basement on Lincoln Street. Mother would place the table cloths over the pool table so we had room for everyone. This house had no dining room. My grandfather, 92, who is sitting on the left next to Mother, lived next door. Grandma had died in 1963. My husband is not in the picture, so he's probably holding the camera.


That is certainly an interesting collection of chairs around the pool table! On the left I see two of my sisters' dining room chairs. At one time they had been my parents when we lived in Forreston. Sort of hand me down chairs, I guess. Down at the end next to my father is the chair I was sitting in for the entry on my favorite dress. My niece Amy is sitting in the wooden high chair, and Greg is in the youth chair. The brown folding chairs are from the old Brethren Church on Seminary Avenue, which were probably sold after the new church was built.