When I was 25 years old, I worked in the reading room of the Harvard Law School Library. I worked the evening shift at the circulation desk and spent an hour every night reshelving the dozens of case reporters* that law students used and then did not put back themselves. As monotonous as the job was, two incidents stick out in my mind as fond memories.
One time a law professor called the front desk of the library and asked me to come to his office to collect the library books he’d been hoarding. He said, “Bring a cart. There are lots of them.” I thought a dozen books would be a lot, but it turned out to be sixty or seventy in number. I piled books atop books, so high that I had to hold the books in place with one hand as I wheeled the cart back to the library. I was slowly working my way through the maze of offices in Langdell Hall when I reached a spot where I needed three hands – one to push the cart, one to steady the books, and one to hold open a massive door at the end of a hallway. I was about to lose the whole thing, when I heard someone yell, “Wait, wait. Let me get the door for you.” I turned around to thank whoever was making the offer, and it was Archibald Cox. The man, third only to Bart Starr and Henry Aaron on my list of heroes, was holding the door for me.
The second incident involved an old woman named Gertie. Gertie was the person who checked IDs when students entered the library. She took her job seriously and required students to show their IDs every time they came in. Unfortunately the bathrooms were just outside the library entrance, so students would sometimes get upset when they left for five minutes to pee and then had to show their IDs all over again. My place at the circulation desk was only ten feet from Gertie’s station, so I became her guardian, reprimanding anyone who gave Gertie an especially hard time.
One day Gertie asked me how much I was paid at the library and then offered me a dollar more per hour to come to her house on Saturdays to do odd jobs. I agreed and, after only my second day at her house, realized that she didn’t care a lick about minor home repairs. She hired me because she was lonely. She would give me a task for the day, then set up a folding chair alongside wherever I was working. My weekends were more valuable to me than the few dollars I was making, but I couldn’t abandon a lonely woman who really didn’t seem to have anyone else. I worked for her from mid-October through most of the winter.
One day my assigned task was to replace sagging wallpaper in her bathroom. I suggested that paint would be a better wall covering in a bathroom than wallpaper, but she’d already purchased a new flowered pattern, and she wanted me to put it up. I’d just started the project, when she asked, “Do you know who Arlo Guthrie is?”
“Sure,” I said. “I have Alice’s Restaurant and Hobo’s Lullaby in my record collection.”
“Arlo’s my nephew,” she said.
It sounds melodramatic to say that I froze, but that is what happened. Standing on a small stepladder, I was midway through peeling off a section of the old paper, when I just stopped. I looked down at Gertie sitting in her chair next to me and asked, “Are you telling me that Woody Guthrie was your brother?”
“Hell, no!” Gertie shouted. “That son of a bitch used to be married to my sister. We thought he was drunk all of the time, but it turns out he was dying.”
It is a big stretch in my thinking, but I feel that because of Harvard Law School, I am personally connected to Archibald Cox and “that son of a bitch” Woody Guthrie. Pretty cool.
* Case reporters are summaries of court decisions. Lawyers use these decisions to find legal precedents to support their arguments. I worked in the library in the early 1980s, so all of the reporters were only in hard copy.
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