Richard M. Yon isn’t your typical
tourist. As a Florida university student, pursuing his Ph.D. in
political science, Yon’s visit to Springfield over Memorial
Day weekend was part of his 5,000-mile tour of various presidential
sites.
“I’m such a nerd,” he
laughs.
Over the phone, it’s hard to tell
whether he’s being self-deprecating or brutally honest (then
again, how many red-blooded 27-year-old American males collect
busts . . . of dead presidents?). But I don’t care whether he
wears Coke-bottle glasses and a pocket protector. The chatter among
the librarians at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is that
Yon changed security policies. And that makes him a super-hero to
me.
First, a confession: Years ago, when I worked
at the Dallas Morning News, I learned to loathe security guards. It all
started because I liked to take the most direct route from the
parking lot to my office whenever I was a tad tardy. But because my
parking space was in a remote lot, the shortest route involved
stepping across a rail road track. To me, it was no big deal since
I’ve never worn stilettos. However, a certain security guard
decided it was a major offense because I was “trespassing”
on railroad property.
So whenever he caught me scurrying across the
tracks (I was supposed to go down a long flight of stairs, cross
four lanes of traffic and climb up another long flight of stairs),
he would notify my editor, who would meet me at my desk and say,
“Hey, Dusty, Barney says you gotta stay off the
tracks.”
Clearly this policy had more to do with a
pent-up surplus of testosterone than any sort of common sense.
I’ve not been a fan of security guards ever since.
On the other hand, I adore librarians. Growing
up without TV, it was librarians who ushered me into fantastic
worlds of knowledge from the moment my PF Flyers could take me to
the neighborhood branch. As an adult who has spent my working life
at newspapers and law firms, I can’t even count the times
humble librarians have handed me invaluable information.
So I can’t say that I’m objective
about the tension that exists between the security guards and the
librarians at our spiffy new ALPLM.
I mean, the first time I went there, I had to
surrender my driver’s license to get a locker key so I could
stash my coat and purse — because coats and purses are not allowed in the microfilm
room. Of course, to actually get microfilm, I had to fill out a form
and hand it to a librarian, who retrieved the film from a secure area.
One librarian apologized — before I ever got to the library.
“I was not consulted about security arrangements,” she told
me on the phone.
Librarians, see, have a passion for finding
and sharing information. It’s pretty much why they became
librarians. And these librarians, in particular, know that the
material housed in the spiffy new facility is the same old stuff
that’s been readily available for eons in the bowels of the
Old State Capitol. Did moving to a new, more secure building
suddenly make the stuff more vulnerable? This logic could drive a
librarian to eat paste.
Lately, though, there has been an air of quiet
giddiness among the stacks, because security policies have been
relaxed. When I went to the library earlier this week, I
didn’t have to sign in or surrender my driver’s license
to visit the reading room.
Officially, this policy change came because
the sign-in process created tourist logjams that were deemed a
safety issue. Coincidentally, though, the change occurred four days
after the fruitless visit of Yon.
Having toured eight presidential libraries
— and even interned at the Harry S. Truman facility,
cataloging papers — Yon knows protocol. So he had phoned, days in
advance, and arranged for books to be held for him in the
library’s reading room by “Amy.” But when Yon arrived
on Saturday morning, the guard couldn’t find Amy.
Yon says at other libraries, researchers have
access to librarians and guards stay in the background. “You
definitely see them walking around, but they’re not in your
face right when you walk in the door,” he says. The guards at
the ALPLM were “definitely more of a presence,” he
says. He had to go through them to find Amy.
But as it turned out, the guard who confronted
Yon called the wrong Amy (the Amy who works at the museum, rather
than the Amy who works at the library). By the time this mistake
was discovered — some five hours later — Yon was long
gone.
Still, he left with no bitterness about the
library, mainly because he loved the museum. I’m sure
it’s coincidence that the museum is staffed by friendly folks
in polo shirts, and the security guards stay in the shadows.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2005.
