John Krivak Interview Part 1

Project:  PGCMLS Oral History Project
Chapter: John Krivak Interview
Date: Apr 10, 2024
Participants: 
Interviewer: Paul Moreno. 
Interviewee: John Krivak   

• 00:02 Paul: Today is April 10, 2024, at the Hyattsville Branch Library of the Prince George's County Memorial Library. My name is Paul Moreno, Librarian I, and I'm here with John Krivak, former employee of the PGCMLS. We are recording an interview with him as part of the PGCMLS Oral History Project. Hi, John. How are you?

• 00:24 John: Hi, I'm well. Thank you.

• 00:27 Paul: Okay. We can start with, could you introduce yourself? Can you tell us about what your hobbies are, your preferred readings, whatever you want to say to this minute?

• 00:37 John: Sure. I'm John Krivak. I worked for PGCMLS from 1971 as an hourly, 1973 as a salaried employee until I retired in November of 2021. The proverbial Martian observer would say my hobby right now is subjecting myself to medical testing, but I'll tell the Martians it's not as much fun as it looks. Things I actually enjoy include singing and, of course, reading, and my preferred readings are relatively eclectic, although somewhat more limited than when I worked as a librarian because I no longer read things with the motive that other people are interested in them. You have to do that a lot if you're a librarian. If you want to be a good librarian, you have to read stuff you have no interest in the world in because you know that people who come to your desk are reading that and are going to be talking about it and are going to expect it. But I read literary fiction, genre fiction, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror. I read history, political science, biographies, popularized scientific material. I rarely, but occasionally delve into real scientific literature where you have to spend a lot of time on each page trying to understand what they're doing if you're from my non-scientific background.

• 02:37 Paul: Okay, good. Yeah. A long time to read things and working as a librarian is an activity that you have to delve into. Okay, so tell us about what your early experience working in libraries. What positions or positions have you held in the system or in other library systems? Can you tell us about your career path?

• 03:00 John Sure. With your indulgence, I'm actually going to start before I worked in the library because I was a user of the Hyattsville Library before I ever worked in any of the Prince George's libraries. I moved from rural Pennsylvania to Prince George's County at the age of 15 in 1967. In Pennsylvania, it's a low tax state, which means it's a low public services state because you get what you pay for. In Maryland, where taxes have always been somewhat, even in the 60s, were somewhat higher, libraries were much more impressive. So in Pennsylvania, the public library, so to speak, used 100% donated bookstock and volunteer librarians, had no paid librarian and no budget to buy their own books. Uneven is the kind way to describe what I was used to from a library. And I loved it. But then, coming down here, and my sister, my older sister actually found the Hyattsville Library before I did, and she said, John, there's a library. But we're never going to read all the books in it. So the library became a sacred space for me in the sense that it allowed someone with an Appalachian background, parts of Pennsylvania are clearly in Appalachia, to read everything all the rich kids in the prep schools had access to, enabled me to be second in my class at Georgetown. Probably would have enabled me to be first if I wasn't working so hard outside the classroom. And one of the jobs I had outside the classroom was my first PGCMLS job. That was as a page at the New Carrollton branch when it first opened back in 1971. And being a page, mostly you shelve books, but they let me do a couple other things. They let me run the projector for film programming because films then were shown using reel-to-reel movie projectors.

• 05:50 Paul: Was that 16 millimeter projector?

• 05:52 John: Oh, 16 millimeter projectors. And if it was a feature film, multiple reels, and you had to be adept at getting that second or third reel on there smoothly as the first reel, and there were fancy projectors with two reels possible to be loaded so that you could go right from one end to the other. And I knew how to do that. So that was extra-page stuff. I also was the…

• 06:23 Paul: That was black and white movies?

• 06:25 John: Oh, well, there was color. I'm not that old. There was color. But a lot of the movies were black and white. I remember at New Carrollton, the one that I really enjoyed the most because I also turned the sound up as high as it went was the original Woodstock documentary, 

• 00:06:45 Paul: The Woodstock festival, ohh wow 
• 06:46 John: Which was the festival, the 69 Festival, and we shared that movie somewhere between 71 and 73.

• 06:57 Paul: Wow, there was no censorship about that at that time.

• 07:01 John: No, no The library has always, and I'll get more into this as I talk more about the library, has always been for its place and time a progressive institution. The Prince George's County Library has always been for its place and time a progressive institution.

• 07:22 Paul: Good. Good to know.

• 07:24 John: That’s, I'll go into that again later, but I also was the king of the old microfilm readers because the pages not only shelved books, but also as students or others needed to look at magazines and newspapers on microfilm and to make copies of the articles that they found there. Someone had to be able to assist in that, to know how to save people time by loading the films onto the machines for them rather than have them surrounded with them.

• 08:01 Paul: Yeah, How to print out because it's a special printer.

• 08:06 John: And usable prints! The oldest of the microfilm readers, the ones we had at New Carrollton in 71, were wet print. So they had a wet print process, and in between running prints, the system would dry out and not be ready to make another print. So you started by opening up the top of the machine, squeezing this squeeze bottle
• 8:32 Paul: Oh, the ink?
• 8:33 John: to get the liquid substance to spread over the portion of the machine that it was supposed to spread over.

• 08:44 Paul: So they have a special paper for that?

• 00:08:47 John: They had special paper, and then when you ran the print, you would tear it off without tearing the page, so that was an art in itself. And you would kind of hold it up in the air and flap your wings with it, to dry it.

• 09:04 Paul: Like a Polaroid photograph
• 09:06 John: Like old cameras, like we used to do with the old Polaroids back in the day. So that was fun.

• 09:15 Paul:  So that was back in the 70s?

• 09:18 John: That was back in the 70s. That was while I was at college. It wasn't the job that paid for college. That was my 11pm to 7am shifts at the old post office, post office, what do they call it, SCF, sectional center facility, right there off of U.S. 1 in Riverdale next to the National Guard property in Riverdale. That was warehouse overnight, heftin’ 100-pound bags of commercial mail and throwing it into canvas baskets by zipcode. Boy, that was fitness. That was a fitness job, one I've not had since. But my library hours did things like let me buy lunch. The post office paid for tuition. This was back before one had to incur student loans. All you had to do was work yourself to death and keep up with your schoolwork. That was my first library job. After I graduated, or when I graduated, almost as soon as I graduated from college, a position opened in the old bookmobile division. I had learned while working as a page at New Carrollton that I liked the idea of what libraries, what public libraries do, that you help people on their terms. Not because you're trying to make money off them. Not because you're trying to get them to do something they don't want to do. But because you're trying to help them do whatever it is that they do want to do. That fit in well with the ethic of service that was drilled into my head by the Jesuits at Georgetown. Those two things together, it's like, yeah, let's try the bookmobile once and do some public service at least at the beginning and then we'll see. Maybe I'll go to law school. I loved it. I loved it then. When I started on the bookmobile, of course, I was the young guy, but I was also the local guy. They said to me, John, you're the low one on the totem pole. I'm afraid we have to put you on the ghetto runs. They were progressive, but it was progressive for its time and place. They still called the runs that went through the residentially African American areas of the county, the ghetto runs. For me, it's like, hey, I'm three years out of Duval High School. I went to school with these kids’ older brothers and sisters. I'm fine with that. If you hadn't offered me Palmer Park and Dodge Park and Carmody Hills, I would have asked for them So we, I had a good time for a couple of years primarily working with children because that’s bookmobiles –there were some adults that came on, I remember there was a guy that lived down in the Prince Place apartments, which are right near where the current Largo-Kettering branch is, that turned me on to Eric Dolphy. We traded, the library had one Mothers of Invention album, so we traded musical tastes and both learned something new. But for the most part, it was kids rather than adults that came on.

• 13:30 Paul: Most of the collection that was held in the bookmobile books for children.

• 13:34 John: Books for children and bestsellers. We had the bestsellers for adults. Adults could also…

• 13:43 Paul: Paperbacks.

• 13:43 John: Paperbacks or hardbacks. I mean we had the new hardback bestsellers when they were still new, just like the libraries, you know,  We worked out of the lower level of the old Hyattsville branch and out of the Oxon Hill Library. Bookmobiles were stationed at both of those places. I worked four days a week out of Hyattsville and once a week doing one of the South County Runs. The stock was primarily children's books, though. The users were primarily kids and kids that, in many cases, couldn't easily get to a branch library. At that time, there were not nearly 19 branches.

• 14:32  Paul: So the kids just…

• 14:33 John: There was no library, for example, in Largo Kettering. So some of our busiest stops, and that helped the library system decide where to put new branches, was the statistics from the bookmobile stops. Largo Kettering was a no-brainer. Those were the busiest hours of your life.

• 14:52 Paul: Were checkouts on the bookmobiles or just…

• 14:55 John: Yeah, Checkouts were done using the same system they used upstairs, which was a photographic system. You took a photograph of the person's library card and a photograph of the cards out of the pockets in the books.

• 15:12 Paul: Oh, the catalog card.

• 15:13 John: Yeah, the catalog card. And I'll talk more about that later, too, somewhere down the road.

• 15:22 Paul: And how many books did you hold on the bookmobile?

• 15:25 John: About 3,000. About 3,000. By the time I worked on the bookmobiles, they were big ones. The original bookmobiles were quite small, the 1950 bookmobiles we call them, because I think that's when the library system first introduced bookmobile service. And kids had to wait in line outside the bookmobile in the early days, because only three or four kids could fit in the bookmobile at one time. 
• 15:51 Paul: Yes, obviously
• 15:51 John: By the time I came along, we were using next-generation bookmobiles that were easily the length of school buses, a little bit longer. So you can imagine you could have 15 people, users, inside the bookmobile at one time. Were there's still lines outside? There were in Largo. There weren't at a lot of other stops, you know, but that's one of the things. If you got lines outside the bookmobile, maybe that's an indication that feeds into that. Where are we going to put our next new branch when we have the money to build it? And so, at that time, I don't have an accurate memory of, there are, I think, 19 branches now. I could be wrong about that. I think there were 12 at that time. So there were quite a few places, Clinton never had a building, a Surratts-Clinton now, it did not exist back then, Spauldings did not exist back then.

• 16:48 Paul: So it was mostly Oxon Hill and Hyattsville?

• 16:52 John: Oxon Hill and Hyattsville were the two big libraries. New Carrollton existed, obviously, since I had worked there as a page, but it was brand new. Bowie existed, Laurel existed, Greenbelt, and there were smaller branches in a number of places.

• 17:08 Paul: And let me ask you something. So did the system were pioneering this program, or do you have notice of other counties that have the same?

• 17:08 John: As far as having bookmobiles, the real pioneer for the existence of bookmobile service was actually an urban library, it was the Pratt Library in Baltimore. 
• 17:28 Paul: Oh
• 17:29 John: They were the first, and that was to go to neighborhoods within the city that did not have a library.

• 17:40 Paul: Library access.

• 17:41 John: Prince George's was certainly an early adapter, but I can’t say – the Pratt Library had bookmobiles for at least 10 years before Prince George's did. So they were the true pioneers. 
• 18:00 Paul: Oh ok
• 18:01 John: One of the things that Prince George's was a pioneer at in a southern state, we're south of the Mason-Dixon line, so the old traditional division between north and south, we're on the south side of that. And when I went to high school in Prince George's County, starting in 67, the high school had been integrated the year before I got there. 
• 18:34 Paul: Oh wow
• 18:35 John: 66. But the library system, which was formed just after the Second World War, that's why it's called the Prince George's County Memorial Library System. It was dedicated to the memory of the fallen war dead, was never segregated. 
• 18:55 Paul: Good
• 18:56 John: On its earliest day, it had an African-American on the library board, and every branch and every service was open to African-Americans. Were all the staff enlightened? Heck no. This was. This was time and place, but at that time in the late 1940s, in that place in a county that had way more Confederate soldiers than it had Union soldiers, even though Maryland never seceded from the Union, it was progressive.

• 19:40  Paul: Wow. Interesting.

• 19:42 John: Yeah. I went to library school at the University of Maryland while I was working on the bookmobile that was… because I was still into the work all day and study all night mode that got me through university in three years.

• 19:59 Paul: So what was your title by then?

• 20:02 John: Library Assistant I. They later changed that to Library Associate, but at that time it was a Library Assistant because before I had my MLS, I could not call myself a Librarian, and that's a ridiculous distinction because Library Assistants, Library Associates, they do the same job.

• 20:24 Paul: Yeah. And it's no difference for the people.

• 20:26 John: And it's no difference to the people, anyone who works in a library is a librarian. When I was a page shelving books, someone would come up to me and ask me a question. 
• 20:36 Paul: Yeah.
• 20:37 John: Now, I'll be honest, sometimes I got a little bit in trouble with the management of the New Carrollton library because if I knew the answer and was confident that I knew the answer, I didn't say to the person, oh, I'm just a page. You'll have to go ask a librarian. But I gave them the answer. It's one of these things that you don't want the under qualified to say something they don't know. So there's a reason for those rules. But is it better service to redirect a question that you do know the answer to? There's an exception to those rules as well. Most rules are like that. There's some reason behind them. And there are all kinds of reasons sometimes to make exceptions to.

• 21:29 Paul: So did you graduate from your master's degree and then you moved to a position?

• 21:36 John: I graduated from Maryland library school with a master's degree and there was a Librarian I position at the Oxon Hill branch. So I applied for that and was selected. And that was a different type of librarianship because it was a Librarian I in the Adult Services department. So I was no longer primarily working with kids but working with adults. And one of the things I realized were the gaps in my knowledge. I was a smart guy. I was second in my class at Georgetown. I never took a business class at Georgetown. I took economics but not business. People would come in and they'd have questions about running a business. I said I didn't know what I didn't know. But I was smart enough to say well I better try to become an expert on what people actually are asking. Business questions being one of them that was outside of my field. If someone came in and asked me a question about the transition from the Merovingians to the Carolinians in French history. I was on top of that but that didn't happen. People came in and said you know I want to figure out what I'm doing wrong with the business I'm running. Where can I find information on how a well run business is run. And so you have to not only know oh that's in the 650s, that's the easy part. The hard part is knowing what's inside the books. Which of them are the better ones. Reputationally. Which of them are ephemeral. Steering people to the best sources. And so one begins to read for others. Rather than strictly for oneself. And I realized that right away at Oxon Hill. And did a couple of things by way of developing expertise. One is learning what the library had. Especially in its reference collection. How it can be used. Two was going out to the Rotary Clubs and the Kiwanis Clubs that met in the Oxon Hill city. And telling them what we had. Being ready to take questions that were scary because I was just gaining knowledge. But someone, you know, that's how you, that's how you succeed is by trying things you've never tried before. Second thing there was a map and print based real estate service. Originally called Lusks. And then it merged with another company and they called it ready. Real estate data incorporated R-E-D-I.

• 24:56 Paul: And it was system wide?
• 24:57 John: It was two kinds of this was at Oxon Hill, and Hyattsville. And it was expensive. It was expensive. We had it at two locations, Oxon Hill and Hyattsville,  South and North. It had two different kinds of maps. Large maps of quadrants of the county. Individual maps of subdivisions. So you had to know how to translate where a property is on one map to the other. And then to find out. Find it in the print materials where you would learn additional information about it. Who owned it. How long they'd owned it. When they bought it. What they bought it for. How is it assessed. When was it last assessed. All this stuff. It came to the library with no instructions. Most people would look at it and scratch their heads and say I don't know what to do with this. So what I did…

• 25:54 Paul: So you know how to read that map.

• 25:57 John: What I did is I wrote instructions for it. These are the kinds of questions you can answer. Here's how you go about answering this one. Here's how you go about answering that one. Here's how you go about answering etc. And I sent a copy of that up here at Hyattsville. Because they were the other branch that had the service. So about two years into working as a Librarian I at Oxon Hill. There was a promotional opportunity at Hyattsville to become the Maryland Room Librarian. And in this kind of weird thing that's still more or less exists in the library system, you were also to be a supervisor of part of the adult department. Even though there was an adult department head that was your supervisor and really set the goals for the entire unit. You made sure that certain employees within the unit work towards those goals. And you still have that today although you no longer have a department head. We'll get around to that.

• 27:15 Paul: Let me ask you something, so did you get any work of Sojourner Truth in Oxon Hill by that time, or was another librarian?
• 27:23 John: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the Sojourner Truth Room did exist at the Oxon Hill, I’ll come back to that because that is special collections, 
• 27:29 Paul: Ok 
• 27:30 John: I've got to look at the question. I'll come back to that.
• 27:33 Paul: So did you move here to
• 27:36 John: But I came up to Hyattsville as a very young supervisor and person who was just absolutely ready to learn local history. I mean history was, was in my wheelhouse. And to me the history of. Hyattsville or Bladensburg is every bit as interesting as the Merovingian or the Carolinian dynasties in France. Even more so because I could see the places where these things happen. So I came up to Hyattsville as a Librarian II in charge of the special collection. I was put in charge of the - immediately- of the entire reference collection which gratified me no end. And then I supervised some of the people. It was weird being a 20 something supervisor because I was supervising people with much more experience than I had. And I approached it by figuring out what each of them could teach me. And having a private conversation saying you know I know you know a lot about local history. I'm going to rely on you to look as I'm just learning. I know you know a lot about mystery novels. I'm going to rely on you because I'm just learning it. So, when a young supervisor comes in and does not act like he's superior to the people he's better, nominally reporting to him but admits that he needs to learn from them. It's much easier when it comes time for the whole unit to focus on the real supervisor's goals. Which tie into system goals. To get, to get everybody on board. And then I was that Librarian II for about 15 years. And so I went through to the point where I was supervising people my own age. And I had as much experience as they did. And then, Rita Muggli was the Librarian III the second ever, Adult Services department head at the Hyattsville branch someone else had been the department head from when the branch opened in 62. Until Rita came along about 67 or 68. She was the Librarian III in Adult Services from that point to 1992 and then she retired. And at that point I applied for and was selected to be her successor as the Librarian III in charge of Adult Services at the Hyattsville branch. So there have been to date a total of three of us that ever had that position. When I left they eliminated the position.

• 30:57  Paul: Yeah, because right now with this new branch is.

• 30:59 John: Some people are just a hard act to follow.

• 31:00 Paul: Yeah. Yeah, right now there is a branch manager.

• 31:04 John: Yeah, the whole, the whole scheme was, was they took advantage of my finally packing it in to make some changes administratively. But, so I was the head of the Adult Services Department from 1992 until November of 2021. And that was all pretty much as high as I went. Actually in the late nineties I applied for two smaller branch manager jobs and did not get them. And then I thanked the Lord or whoever one thanks that I didn't because I was really happier being a department head than I would have been as a branch manager. Why? Because as a department head you still do a lot of information desk work.
• 32:00 Paul: And programming
• 32:01 John: And that's where the real rewards are getting stuff done personally. Seeing the people who benefit from it personally. I know there are higher level rewards for higher managers of organizing it all.

• 32:15 Paul: Yeah, it is more administrative duties

• 32:17 John: But it’s different if you don't see it. The other thing that I liked very, very much was teaching new people how to do the job. I think I was good at it. Some people would say yes, some people would say he was a jerk. Such is life. But, but I got a reward out of it. I found it personally rewarding to show people new to a job how to do the job my way. Of course, arrogantly thinking my way was the best way. But. If you're not arrogant, man. You're a better person than I am.

• 33:01 Paul: Yeah, was working more directly with the collection. So. than more,  less management.

• 33:08 John: Yeah. And yeah. So that was that was my career path. And it ended. There was a six month period when I was the de facto manager of the Hyattsville  branch because the. The branch manager had an operation on her back and was out for six months. And. I hated it. Everyday people would come to me with, with problems I couldn't solve. That I had neither the resources nor the power to make the world different than it was. If you're a branch manager, people are going to come to you and they're really upset about something over which often you have no control. That's frustrating. I found it frustrating anyway. Other people than I have have found that a challenge to accept and to get beyond.

• 34:03 Paul: Okay, let's move to the third question. What was the most challenging aspect of working in Adult Service because most of your career was in Adult Services.

• 34:12 John: Was in adult services  and I've already alluded to this. You have to reset your mind from I'm doing this because I like to do it to I'm doing this because someone needs it. And what they need is not up to me. It's up to them. So saying, well, I'm not just going to help the people that like what I like. I'm going to help everyone that comes in the door. And if that means I have to learn something new, I better learn it well. If that means, I don't agree with them politically, I still better get them the best information that. feeds into their interest. If that means they may be ungrateful or they may be grateful to the wrong person. How many times did I help someone, sweat bullets to find them the information they want and they say, oh, thank you, God. It's like, hey, God wasn’t working in the information desk. I was but.

• 35:29  Paul: Or thank you directors of the offices and facing the public 

• 35:34 John: Not so much. Not so much that. But I understand that people are religious and attribute the good things and find solace from the bad things that happen to them to their deities. I didn't really get upset about that. They can thank God. Maybe I was his instrument. In that regard. Better than Satan's instrument. Maybe. Probably. I'm sure there were people that saw me that way too. But no, it's, it's the same challenge. Now in children's services, you're working for the kids. But the kids don't know what they need, that's the difference between Children’s Services and Adult Services you’re  more deciding what the kids need or their teachers in school are deciding and giving them an assignment to find something out. And kids themselves are more creative than we give them credit for. And sometimes we'll start to become independent thinkers as early as preschool. But there's still more of these are the things that you need to know. And these are the things we're going to teach you and we're going to decide what programs there are. We're going to decide that we have story programs and we have this kind of programs in adult services. Your programming darn well better be, we're listening for needs that we hear or that we think we hear and we're designing programs that cater to what we perceive the public as wanting.

• 37:13 Paul: Yeah. You need to take care of that.

• 37:16 John: You got to try different things. And are you always right about that perception? Maybe one particular transaction where a person really, really, really needed Something. Led you to devise a program that there are only two other people that wanted. And so you try and you fail and you learn from that. Other things you try and you succeed and those become ongoing programs that exist for years and years and years. So that's part of that challenge of Adult Services is the adult learner already knows a lot of stuff. A lot more than kids know. Even smart kids. There's still a lot for them to learn. The adult learner already knows a lot of stuff. Including knowing what they want to know next. And that's what you got to hop on. What they want. Not what a textbook tells you they should want. Not what your own personality tells you they should want. But what they want.

• 38:24  Paul: Yeah. And the adults are more demanding than the kids.

• 38:27 John: They can be. They can be. They can. Definitely. Well, yeah, you certainly hear. And you know, sometimes you were tempted. I was tempted back in the day. Well, I won't say I never said it to a customer, but you certainly hear, Oh and I pay taxes. Okay. So a penny out of every dollar you pay. Actually only .86 cents out of every dollar you pay goes to the library. So you got your money's worth already. Just by our opening the door to you. Everything else is on the house.

• 39:06 Paul: Okay. If someone is interested in working in libraries or adult services, what will you say to encourage them to start their career?

• 39:15 John: Well, that's, that question has a premise that I would say something to every single person that's interested in working in libraries or adult services to encourage them. I would want to talk to the person and find out why they're interested. Because sometimes it's the right place to be and sometimes it's not. If they're interested because they like to read and it seems like it would be a nice quiet job. And it wouldn't, it would pay okay, but not be too taxing. I'm not going to encourage them to go into it because what you're supposed to be reading stuff you never read before and never would on your own, is not a quiet job. It's a noisy job. It's a busy job..

• 40:09 Paul:  Yeah. And probably you have to read  
• 40:11 John: It better be taxing. If it's not taxing enough, you better be creating new projects to make it taxing to learn how to do things. So I would want to find out that the person was right for libraries because some people who think that they're right for libraries have a misperception in that regard. They might be better off and it's a very closely related field - in fact, my daughter is in it -they might be better off becoming archivists where they work with a set of materials that were left by, you know, Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, et cetera. They have some user interaction, but it's, it's more organizational ability, the ability to anticipate what subject descriptors people will be using to find that information  a 100 years from now, et cetera. I might suggest to a person that really was, liked looking at books, discovering what's inside them, but was not that much of a person to talk to people and share. I might, I might encourage them to work for the library, but I might encourage them to go into a cataloging department. And some of the best people we've ever had in PGCMLS have worked in our cataloging departments.

• 41:54 Paul: And also you have to be a good listener
• 41:57 John: So, yeah. So you have to be a good listener. So yeah, you have to be a good listener. And, and then, yeah, I would say, well, the other thing is you can't want to get rich. Now you might, you might be relatively rich if you rise to the level of library director. And I've had half a dozen people over the years that worked for me that became library directors eventually. But you got to settle for, you got to, you got to settle for a good solid middle class existence is enough. 
• 42:31 Paul: Yeah
• 42:32 John: That's all that's what you're going to get paid. But if you work at it for 50 years in a library that eventually became unionized, when you retire, you're going to have a darn good defined benefit pension, and you're not going to worry about the rest of your life. But you're not rich. 
• 42:49 Paul: Yeah, this is not
•  42:50 John: You’re not part of the 1%. You're not part of the 10%.

• 42:54  Paul: Yeah, this is not the path forward for the richness. Yeah.

• 42:57 John: So you have to have, I think, the ethic of service, to, to work in, in the public facing parts of the library and in adult services and in children's services for that matter in the public facing parts of the library. You have to have that ethic of service. I'm doing this for other people more than I'm doing it for myself. Does anyone have that as their only pure motive? No, I never did. I'm doing that more as my motive than the selfish motives that I that I find anytime I look beneath that.

• 43:38 Paul: Okay, good. Okay, some public libraries have special collections. What do you think is the role of a special collection into a public library?

• 43:47 John: Yeah. What a special collection does is it declares that this library has a particular area of knowledge that they want to honor that they think is important. And there are all kinds of areas of knowledge. But a special collection gives particular honor to a particular area of knowledge. We briefly mentioned the Sojourner Truth Room at Oxon Hill. That special collection says and said, I think Oxon Hill opened in 67. I could be wrong about that. But said in 1967, the year after the Prince George's public schools, high schools were desegregated. And I think the value of knowledge about Black history is a value that we value extra. But we're going to put extra resources into that. We're going to put extra expertise into that. We're going to put extra programming into that. That's a value. Were there in 1967 people that said where's the white people's collection? Course there were. Just like there would be today. But the library system promoted a value. Most library systems have an equivalent in some way of what I still call the Maryland Room. Because I still, I disagreed when it was cut down to just the Prince George's Room. The local history is an obvious value because there's so much community building around understanding the history of a community. And it can be just idle curiosity. Why do they call that road that road? What does it have that name? Who was John Hanson, that the John Hanson highway is named after? Well, he was the first president of the United States under the Articles of Confederation before the Constitution in Washington. He happened to live in the Oxon Hill area. Why do I see these things up in the night sky above a certain portion of Riverdale? They call that Beacon Heights. Those were installed in the 40s to guide airplanes that were going to National Airport. So that they were part of the guidance of the flight paths into National from the North. Then you get the more loaded questions, a couple of things that I worked on with the Maryland Room. The Piscataway Conoy tribe of Indians wanted recognition as an official tribe. They were always there, but they were not recognized as an official tribe and still are not at the national level, but there's their state recognition. State recognition means something to a people because it means at least the state where we're from recognizes that we are a historically important group. That we exist. When I first started working in the library, the same people used to be called Wesorts, we sorts of people. That was partly making fun of the way they talked, but there were articles in the journals and the articles in the journals didn't call them Wesorts. They called them tri-racial isolates.
• 48:13 Paul: ??
•  48:14 John: It means they were Black and white and red and they lived in their own communities a little bit away from other communities. Of course, there were Blacks and whites in by the 20th century, early 20th century in that were members of the communities that were really the remnants of the First Nations tribes. So one of the processes of getting state recognition depended a lot of documentation of when and how and where and for how long and how you know this group of people was a recognizable group of people. Where did they live? Where did they hunt? Where did they make their pottery? Land ownership has always been a Western concept, a European concept. So a lot of First Nations people didn't think of themselves as owning the land. They lived in the land. They didn't live there, but a certain part of the year they hunted there, where they fished there when the fishing was right. Or they made their pottery, but that was awfully messy. So they made it slightly away from where they lived. So these are the places, these are the lands we were part of. And we don't have deeds to any of them because deeds came along with 

• 49:53 Paul: The Western civilization.
• 49:54 John: The Western civilization, so the whole concept of this is my land and it extends from this property marker to that one. And I've had a surveyor survey it. And originally the Lord Calvert granted it to me in Maryland. It wasn't the king. It was the Calvert barons that actually granted the lands. There's a county in Virginia called Prince George County. And every now and then we get a document sent to us through the mail usually… I'm trying to figure out what this document is about. And one of the clues that they were in the wrong state with Prince George's County instead of Prince George County, Virginia, was that a lot of the old Virginia documents would start out by appealing to the authority of the crown. Whereas Maryland documents from that same age would start out by appealing to the authority of the Calvert family. So you learn little things about, interesting things about history that way. Later, and this was after, well after I was no longer technically the Maryland Room Librarian. In fact, during that hiatus between Dan leaving the position and the position being filled after this new building opened, there was no Maryland Room Librarian, but that didn't mean there weren't Maryland questions. We were contacted by people from the statewide group that's documenting the history of lynching in Maryland. And that project asked us what we could tell them about certain incidents that they had vague documentation for. And I remember even though at that point the bulk of the special collection materials had been put in storage, because we're only going to be two years in between the old building and the new – well it ended up being five.

• 52:07 Paul: Nobody counts with the pandemic
• 52:09 John: But that's how construction projects go. But we had snuck a little bit of the Maryland Room collection into our temporary storefront over here in the University Town Center. And one of the questions I was able to document from the vertical files was exactly where in old Upper Marlboro, in 1920s Upper Marlboro, the jail was. And exactly what path would be taken by people if they wanted to haul some fella out of the jail and hang him at the bridge. 
• 52:47 Paul: Wow.
•  52:48 John: So I found a map that showed this is where the, it wasn't where the jail is now. It was right downtown. This is where the jail was. And this, and you can see they would have gone down this street and then down this road. And the fella probably would have been from one or three or four families that were really picked on by the authorities in Prince George's County.

• 53:19 Paul: Wow. Interesting.

• 53:23 John: So communities are built in different ways. But knowing the history of being able to research the history of the community in which you live is one of those ways that helps build communities.

• 53:38 Paul: Yeah, this is one of the main roles of the special collection to try to get documentation about the, the history of the

• 53:48 John: And there have been, there have been a couple other special collections in the county. I don't know if the, I think the original Tugwell room, named after New Deal Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell, who helped plan the existence of Greenbelt is now just a little tiny Greenbelt history room.

• 54:11 Paul: Yeah. it is more about plans, blueprints

• 54:15  John: It was originally started as an urban planning special collection. So the original value was the same value that led to the existence of Greenbelt, of, we can plan a better place. But there's all that literature that had nothing to do with Greenbelt that wasn't specifically Greenbelt history. The spending on that fell off over the years. I guess the commitment to the original vision for the room lessened. There was also a special collection at the Bowie Branch, which was called the Selima Room. Selima was a famous race horse way back in the days, back in the 1770s. And Bowie, specifically the Bel Air farms was one of the early centers of the horse racing industry in the United States. And so they had a collection that was again, it was partly a local history collection, but it was well beyond. I mean, they still got the Racing Form every day. But there was a track in Bowie that closed a little bit after somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s, probably. There's still a track in Laurel that's technically not in Prince George's County because Laurel goes into Anne Arundel and Howard. I think the track is in Anne Arundel County. But that's one of the last vestiges of horse racing in Maryland, that and Pimlico in Baltimore. And that collection was sold off at a certain point.

• 55:55 Paul: Wow. Yeah. Right now it's a need to keep that kind of documents probably in another format as a digitized documents or something like that because the management of that kind of rooms is very demanded. Because that need a person that knows the collection, have knowledge about how to answer patrons' questions, relate to the local histories and relate to our records and our collections. So it's really a very special position that is now for every librarian or people that.

• 56:40 John: No, no, it's kind of one of those areas where public librarianship comes closer to being academic librarianship.

• 56:53 Paul: Academic and archivist.

• 56:59 John:And archives. When I was a supervisor, one of the things I would do when someone first came to work with me is find out what do you really want. I know you took a job in a public library now and sometimes job markets were loose and sometimes they were tight. Do you want to work in the public library for your entire career? Yes or no. It could be yes or no, it doesn't matter. I'm going to support you to learn whatever you need to learn. So if a person told me, well, no, I'm hoping eventually to find a job in an academic library, I would structure their experiences towards the more academic side of what public librarians do. If they said, yeah, I want to run a public library, I would structure their experiences towards understanding the management, the budget, the personnel sides of what libraries do. Even though it wasn't their job as librarian Is to know any of that or to know more of that than affected themselves. I promised when I negotiated over, I'm telling tales at school, I promised of when I negotiated over what these questions would be that way back up under number two and we're well past that. I would allude to the very brief time period during which the bookmobiles were assigned to branches because there was a question about the Hyattsville bookmobile that we took out of the list. The bookmobile division was when I worked in it, and for almost all of its existence, a separate division that was part of what was called Extension Services. You're extending services beyond the library building to serve people who are in places that can't easily get, especially kids, can't easily get to library buildings. And as there became more library buildings, there were fewer of those places in existence. But there's still, I mean, some of the places that we went from Hyattsville, if you think the kids that live in the apartments down off New Hampshire Avenue near the district line have an easy time getting their parents to bring them up here, you're wrong. If you think the Spanish kids that live up in the apartments where Erie Avenue hits New Hampshire Avenue up above, have an easy time getting their parents to bring them down here, think again. And that was one of the early diversities. When I was working on the bookmobile, the Erie Avenue apartments were mostly Spanish speaking families.

• 59:44 Paul: Yeah, the whole population in Langley Park.

• 59:46 John: Now a majority of the population in the Langley Park zipcodes speaks Spanish at home. But there was a time as the bookmobiles were phased out when there was also a budget crisis, you know, public budgets come and go and you do what you can with however much money you have at the time. And so the public budgets for the county got tight and they eliminated the bookmobile division. There were five vehicles, one of which was on its last legs. That was Old Number One, old number one died. Now there's two, three, four and five were assigned to the then four area branches of Hyattsville, Oxon Hill, New Carrollton and Bowie. And the four of the five bookmobile librarians were assigned one each to those branches and the fifth one retired. All of the bookmobile drivers were signed to the branches and Hyattsville got two. They went into the circulation departments. And so, but at the same time, the bookmobiles transitioned from being used to do neighborhood stops to being used as school outreach vehicles by the children's departments. That's why I was reluctant to talk a whole lot about the Hyattsville library bookmobile as such because that was a different department that operated it well past my bookmobile years. That's, the person who I made the promise to put that in will know.

• 01:01:42 Paul: Okay. Okay, so let me move on. So probably during your career as a librarian, you met special patrons that make the library work appreciated. Can you tell us about one of these interactions that you remember?

• 01:01:56 John: One, gosh  Can I  tell you about one. Yeah, I can, but there's so many and I, I always wanted to approach librarianship as saying the people I happen to have an affinity for or like more aren't necessarily better and are certainly not necessarily better and are entitled to receive my best efforts as everyone else that walks in the door. I come back now to pick up books and drop books off because I'm still a reader, read more now than I did when I was working because I have more time to do it. And the guys I see that always say hello to me are Stanley and James ____* who come here with the ARC van that brings the Association of Retarded Citizens to use an outdated term but outdated terms live on an institutional name sometimes. They're the ones to say hey favorite favorite customers or one example. I think of a girl named Shea (spelling of name unknown) who was a bright high school student and I always loved working with bright high school students. She had a leg up on getting a good education because her mom was a teacher in the Prince George public schools and mom may still be a teacher or she may or retired by now too but she came in and said you know I need some help with the history project that I'm working on. And I used to sometimes say to the kids before we even got started okay we'll work on this but I need to find out how much work we're going to do together on this. What do you want to get? You want to get A, B or C.

• 01:04:12 Paul: Or do you just want to make it 

• 01:04:15 John: And you know kids would laugh because I know that was a realistic question. I'll settle for a B. Okay well we'll do a B level B amount of work on it because you can work hard on history projects. Shay was like no I want to be a history professor. Okay. So over time I was able to work with her on many projects and to teach her how historians approach material that they use as evidence for the historical arguments they're making. How they, when they read from another historian a particular claim that they think is striking. Don't just accept it but say okay but how did you know that. Let me look at the footnotes to that chapter. What was that guy looking at? Let me read what he read. Oh was something from a different historian, what was she thinking? Let me track those down till I get to actual documents. And then decide, oh those claims were all correct or those claims weren't bad attempts to explain what they saw but I got another idea. That's where you become history professor. She teaches at William & Mary. Sometimes you feel really successful.

• 01:06:05 Paul: Yeah, well that is part of the job so we met with special people every day and sometimes. Okay let me move to the next question. Can you tell us about any special memory or anecdote in your work, some fond memory that you have.

• 01:06:23 John: Well I'll tell you something that I hope people find interesting. Well remember I started in the library system in the very early 70s. There were no librarian uses of the computer. And at the front end and no customer uses of the computer at the front end. Because it was 1971 or 1973. Now Prince George's County had always been a pioneer in back end uses of the computer. We were, I think and we certainly had the reputation of being one of the more advanced library systems and using computers for back end work. I think we were the first public library in the US that produced their catalog using computers to manipulate the data. Now those catalogs were printed paperback books. So the public used printed paperback books instead of the card catalog. But it was, computers were used in the back end operations to create the catalog to organize the data in the catalog. And our wizard was a guy named Walter Shih* ,S.H.I.H, Chinese name. He was the computer wizard that, that created that first in the country. Computer generated public catalog. Walter was before that, he was a pipe smoker. You go into his office and the administrative offices that always smelled so good because he smoked a pipe in there. But before that he had been a legend in the bookmobile division because everyone said you know when Walter Shih was here. He kept the easy books on the bookmobile in shelf list order at all times.

• 01:08:23 Paul: Wow.

• 01:08:23 John: None of us even tried shelf list order means they're exactly how they appear in the catalog. Perfect order even though kids are going to come in and grab and rummage and put them all over the place and then he would rearrange them in between stops. There's a little OCD can be a good thing as well as, as well as a challenge. But so back in there. I mentioned when we were talking about the bookmobile we took the we did the circulation by taking a photograph of the person's library card and the cards that were in the pockets of the books. But how we figured out whether things were overdue was computerized. So those photographs went into a unit that used computers to match to check to see whether the items were returned or not. So that was another back end operation that was computerized before computers came to the public. But then eventually, first the librarians got computers to use at the desk. And then we began to have public computer use, the very first public computers. We had one public computer at the Hyattsville branch and it sat on the back counter of the information desk facing out and each member of the public was allowed a 20 minute session. If others were waiting and others were always waiting. These were computers that did not have any graphics. They were what's called a Lynx environment. L Y N X even though that was a pun on L I N K S. Where it was all text based. And you use Gophers because it was developed at the University of Minnesota where they like gophers. Golden Gophers, go go gophers to, to find information in that Lynx environment. And that didn't last very long. Soon enough we realized no this is, this is something they used to give out free Internet accounts to people so that people could decide whether or not they ever wanted to use the Internet again. I don't think very many people decided not. But but then along came GUIs graphic user interfaces and the web as we know it with all the pictures, icons, etc. And we began to have those not only at the desk but also for the public to use and our catalog migrated to that actually computerized and presented by a computer catalog instead of what it had been. And I was the first, I will make this claim, the first person in Prince George's County libraries who said, let's have a computer class. Because I could hear, especially people older than I and this was long enough ago that there were people older than I, uh, older than me. Or didn't know how to use a computer, weren't comfortable using the library catalog because they weren't comfortable using a computer. And so we set up classes. We had them on Saturday mornings. And we, we let people say - we had two classes - I taught one and a colleague taught another. They could say, we want to learn how to use the library catalog on a computer. Or they could say we want to learn how to use the Internet on a computer. They could take both classes

• 01:12:48 Paul: It was back on the 70s something like that, that was back on the 70s
• 01:12:53 John: Ohh 80s. Yeah, no, it was 80s. The, the other guy that used to teach and we would trade off, he would do catalog one week, I would do Internet and then we trade off. He he taught himself enough to become our best ever IT guy. His name was Karl McFarland. He designed the library's webpage. I worked with him a little bit on that because he had worked for me. So when he became the IT guy and was designing the library's webpage, I was already used to working with him. But, but we did the first computer classes.

• 01:13:37 Paul: So the first computer class was about how to use the catalog or 

• 01:13:40 John: How to use the Internet and it and it was about how to physically use a computer because they're mostly older people. People my age, if they worked in many, many kinds of fields, not in every field, but not if they swung a pickaxe or whatever, but learn how to use computers on the job because we had to. And we learned fast because if we had to. People older than me were often no longer on the job and didn't really have to use a computer except the world was going that way. So those classes lasted for a while. And those people were educated old school and I was like among the last people educated old school in this area in the United States where, where you went to grammar schools. Because I had this joke that I would tell the people about the computer, this, this part of what you're doing is case sensitive. And I would explain that that actually doesn't mean what you might think it means if you're educated in the grammar school. It means it depends it matters whether you're using a capital letter or a small letter. I said when I first heard that term case sensitive I went back to my school days and I thought, oh, maybe the computer needs to be addressed in the vocative case: Oh, computer! And these people were old enough that that was funny. The, or familiarly funny. And that lasted for a while and that spread from Hyattsville to, to most of the branches started to do some variation on that. But eventually we saturated that market now we never saturated the market for ESL learners learning the computer. And we kept doing Maria Escobedo primarily and others did Spanish language and Maria could do Spanish and French because she was that talented, computer classes specifically for ESL learners. And that, that lasted, that need lasted longer. But what we found with the regular computer classes is we hit this point where they were counterproductive. And when that came home to me, there was a woman that called, I need to be in a computer class tomorrow. And I'm like the classes already started the next one starts and I need it tomorrow. I'm sorry, you know, that's not how it works. So she calls the director and the director's office says put this  woman in the class tomorrow. Okay, she went to the class the next day. She said I got a complaint. I didn't come here for this. I need to make a reservation at a hotel in Antigua. And I need to do it today. That's why I came for the computer class. Oh, okay, well

• 01:16:55 Paul: So she needs to make a reservation using internet ?
• 01:16:58 John: It’s closing time. But can you come back first thing in the morning and we'll get it done. Yes. Yeah, if I have to, you know, yeah, we'll get it done. We'll get it done by we open at 10 we'll have it done by by 11 o'clock. Is that is, you know, that's the best I can do because I just can't make people stay past nine o'clock today. Okay, yeah. So, but ideas start generating in your mind if you're thinking about what the, yeah, the audiences have fallen off it used to be that we were always full. Now we weren't full, we were just halfway through the class when this lady called. But what if we tried what we're going to call personalized instruction by appointment. So, instead of us saying well we have this computer class, and it starts with mouse aerobics in case you never used a mouse before and then it goes into this and that goes into that. And then the fourth thing in the syllabus is this and what if we said, tell us what you want to learn, we'll figure out who among us is best equipped to do that with you. And we'll, we'll negotiate a mutually agreeable time so that no longer is it going to be what we have a class on Saturday morning and we have a class on Wednesday night. It's going to be what time is good for you. Do I have a person, do I,  can I get the person off the desk at that time and,, and make this work for you. And we set it up it was primarily adults because it was, it was going to that adult learners model. The learner tells you what they want to learn. And some people took advantage of it and did like 15 appointments and we eventually put a limit on it, I think of six, you can come back six times and then we've got to spend our resources on some other time with somebody else. But that was a change in how we approached that particular type of programming based on what, how the times had changed how many, many of the old people that wanted to learn had been through the class, at least the ones that lived in our neighborhood. And now people were more likely to have a very specific learning objective that a one sizes fits all class does not fit. So we did personalized instruction by appointment and we made it available to all language, all age groups and and to all languages, you could do personalized instruction in Spanish. Not all languages, in languages that we have staff
• 1:19:40 Paul: That we have staff
• 1:19:41 John: You can do personalized instruction in Spanish or you could be a parent that said well this is something my kids have trouble with in school. I want a personalized session for her to to just practice this and someone from the Children's Department would take that. And that was very, I thought, very brilliant idea. It eventually became part of the library systems offerings and was organized through the web page by someone smarter than me on how to do that sort of thing that sort of, called my PGCMLS Librarian. And that existed right up until the pandemic, the pandemic shut that down because during the pandemic we weren't meeting people one on one across from you know across from a computer even with both of us masked we were observing six feet distance and stuff like that. And I don't know that it's come back since the pandemic because I haven't. I barely came back from the pandemic before I retired.

• 01:20:56 Paul: Yeah. The program is still continuing. 
• 1:20:58 John It has resumed? It has resumed?
• 1:20:59 Paul Yeah. It's most of people that need a, some assistant to try to find a job or try to understand a what…

• 01:21:08 John:  Yeah. And that can help you too. I mean I'm glad you mentioned those trying to find a job because that helped us know that we should that there might be enough people to do a Job Seekers Club which we did at Hyattsville. I don't know if you do that now or not. I know James Taylor has one down at Mount Rainier where people can come at the same time every week. And develop some camaraderie with fellow job seekers and learn from the person who conducts the club who works for the library learn how to do job searches, how to do resumes, how to prepare for interviews etc. And so if you get enough person clusters of personalized instruction or my PGCMLS  personalized instructions you can develop another program out of those. So it's the person, the people who are planning programs and that's, it's the direct responsibility of the department head. But any department head worth or his or her salt is listening to everyone that works in the department for what they heard, what they think might be, might go. We were the first library in the county to do resumé classes and they weren't ready for it. The public wasn't ready for it. So they, they, that kind of bombed and then it came back as part of Job Seekers classes and workforce development efforts that are much more enhanced after the latest strategic plan.

• 01:22:56 Paul: Yeah. No right now it's a very popular program because

• 01:23:00 John: Yeah and it's interesting and sad in a way. It's a very popular program. And the nation is more or less at full employment. Full, full employment still leaves people out. Or it wouldn't be a popular program if full employment really meant everyone that needs a job had a job. There wouldn't be a demand for this.

• 01:23:27 Paul: Yeah. Nice because

• 01:23:29 John: But I mean we're at the we're at the we have the best rate of employment we've had since I was a little kid.

• 01:23:38 Paul: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the people comes because they need help to not just to create a resume. So, to upload some documents because right now everything is online.

• 01:23:52 John: Everything. So you can't work at a Burger King without going to your website. 
• 1:23:56 Paul: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah
•  1:23:57 John: Actually the one up on University Boulevard - I don't know if that's still open - was one of the last where you could go in and fill out a paper application and give it to the manager. 
• 1:24:06 Paul: Yeah. So. 
• 1:24:07 John: But it was both almost 100% Latino employees and managers and 85% Latino customers. So it was doing things the Central American way. 
• 1:24:23 Paul: Yeah. 
• 1:24:24 John: After everyone else again I'm sure the overall Burger King organization was always on that manager's case. Why aren't you making people do this through the computer?

• 01:24:34 Paul: No. If you go to any, any store.

• 01:24:37 John: Yeah.
• 01:24:38 Paul: People send in from the store. They send the people to the library that say  ah, that you don't know how to do it. Go to the library.

• 01:24:47 John: Right. Right.

• 01:24:49 Paul: They are people there that can help you to make 
• 01:24:51 John: You want to be a bus driver in the public schools, go to the library
• 01:24:54 Paul: Yeah. Yeah. And probably some websites are very tricky to use.

• 01:24:58 John: Oh, absolutely.

• 01:25:00 Paul: To submit documents or to try to check my, about your experience or if you have some legal status things like that are very, very. It's not clear for everybody. That's, that's we are supposed to think that.

• 01:25:15 John: Yeah. And there are other barriers to employment that if you develop the right kind of relationship where the person knows you're not just giving them attitude.

• 01:25:32 Paul:Yeah.
• 01:25:32 John: There was a guy that used to come over and over to the Job Seekers and he never had any luck. But he had these horribly twisted teeth and his speech was virtually indecipherable.

• 01:25:49 Paul: Oh my goodness.
• 01:25:50 John: So anytime he got to the point where he actually was speaking to a potential employer, they couldn't understand a word he said.

• 01:25:58 Paul: Yeah, because most

• 01:25:58 John: I mean, I, you know, I only understood a word he said because I had interacted with him 15 times for an hour at a time.

• 01:26:08 Paul: Yes.

• 01:26:09 John: During that time, it got to the point where I could say, well, you know, 

• 01:26:12 Paul: Yeah, because
• 01:26:12 John: part of part of the problem is. You need some dental work so that people will understand your speech better because you're a smart guy. And you tell people the right things, but they don't get what you're saying because the teeth.

• 01:26:28 Paul: Yeah.

• 01:26:28 John: Make it come out. They're not used to listening to your speech pattern.

• 01:26:33 Paul: Yeah, sometimes the

• 01:26:34 John: Maybe a little while to get up with, to get up with it. And, but, and you only have a little while with these people. You don't have the luxury of going to job, the job interview with the same person 15 times so that they know I'm smart. And he's like, I can't afford it. 
• 1:26:50 Paul: Yeah. 
• 1:26:51 John: That's what we do. We figure out where you can get free dental work.

• 01:26:57 Paul: Yeah. The first filter in some interview jobs is a call.

• 01:27:02 John: There's a way. There's a way. There were ways to get free dental work done. And including the sophisticated dental work, not, not just checking for cavities. That's easy. But to get high level dental work done, which was what he basically needed some reconstruction. But that was part of his job seeking that we were able to eventually help with by not being afraid to have him, think god, this guy's an asshole for asking me that, for telling me that, for saying that to me. But to get to the point where he said, Oh, I know this guy's heart is in the right place. So I'm listening to what he says.

• 01:27:48 Paul: Yeah. Okay.

* Last name was omitted to keep the person's information private.