As part of the diversity exhibit, Libraries employees
were invited to submit brief autobiographical sketches
about their background, memorable life experiences, and
work experience at the University Libraries; and, in a
spirit of whimsicality, photographs of themselves
as young children. Here are some who volunteered:
 
Born in the Bible Belt and raised to be a good Buddhist. Learned to play the piano at an early age. Has been known to play Elvis tunes for wedding ceremonies. Loves the woods and mountains. After living in a library for six months has worked in such ever since. Likes to read.
 
One fine day in approximately mid-July, 1963, my mother-to-be, an attractive woman of 23 (née Wallace-on my mother's side I am descended from the Wallace clan depicted in the film Braveheart), suggested to my father-to-be, also 23, and then a graduate student in fisheries biology at the University of Michigan, that they take a walk. My mother was feeling restless. Unfortunately, by the time they had made the decision to take a stroll, it had begun to rain. The weather notwithstanding, my father went to the bedroom to "put on some shoes and a rain slicker." My mother waited in the kitchen, finishing up the dishes from lunch.
After a few minutes she heard a cheerful voice behind her: "OK, Honey, I'm all set." She turned to see my father, naked except for rain boots and a yellow slicker, grinning, I imagine, impishly. My parents didn't take a walk that day.
Nine months later I arrived.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Redbank and Longbranch, New Jersey; Peace Dale, Rhode Island; and King of Prussia and Boalsburg, Pennsylvania.
These days much of my free time is spent reading, painting, and playing music on both guitar and Chapman Stick, a 12-stringed electronic instrument that looks like a guitar with no body. After a long day at work I like to take my mountain bike for a spin; on weekends I take longer jaunts in the countryside.
I am a chocoholic.
My middle name is Hale.
 
I come from the Northeastern corner of Alabama, a region that is hilly and lush green, with many lakes and rivers. The soil is a deep orange red and the air is hot and humid to the point of suffocation. The house I grew up in is on top of a big hill right on the banks of the Coosa river. At night millions of insects and frogs sing very loudly, reminding humans that there is a lot of life out there beyond the border of their lawns. As a kid I spent most of my time reading and playing the piano and flute. From the first French class I had in 7th grade I fell in love with the French language and culture. I spent a summer in France after my sophomore year in college. I lived with a family in a small village north of Paris for part of the summer, then moved to a chicken farm in the Southeastern part of the country. The French way of being, of eating, of arranging objects, of enjoying aliveness, appealed to me.
I spent several years integrating the French with the Southern in my studies and with my fellow Southern francophiles at Auburn University down on the flat hot plains of southern Alabama. Later in graduate school I studied for a semester in Normandy. I still correspond with friends I made on these trips, and the idea of France is very much a part of my intellectual and spiritual life. My original career plan was to become a French professor. I really enjoyed teaching French, which I did for about five years before deciding to change directions and study library science.
After my graduation from library school at Louisiana State University in 1991, I worked at the Library of Congress as an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) cataloger. In my three years there I cataloged serials, made ISSN assignments, and worked on the standard for abbreviations of title words. I especially enjoyed the contact with the other 60 some odd ISSN centers throughout the world, including the International ISSN Center in Paris. I loved my job at the Library of Congress, but I did not love living in a big city. I had visited a friend in State College and was actually watching the job ads for an opening at Penn State when the serials cataloger position came open. What I like most about this job is that I get to do serial cataloging, explore the new world of electronic resources, and at the same time have the opportunity to select French books and work with the French faculty.
My favorite things now are books, music, cooking, and spending time with my eight-year-old son, Joseph. He is into everything: bugs, books, computers, video games, playing the piano, and doing magic tricks. We like to read to each other and enjoy participating in the many activities at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.
I've worked here for the last 11+ years.
Before that, I worked elsewhere part-time and made oil paintings.
Before that, I was a student.
Before that, an innocent babe.
More recently, my interest in Art has been directed towards ancient Egypt. As a very amateur student, I find the Middle Kingdom a fascinating period of transition in consciousness and cultural development. That too, explains my tattoo.
My interest in painting has been diverted towards renovating and decorating my house. A different application, but not without opportunity for learning and applying painterly skills. Otherwise, me and Marlowe (my cat) indulge ourselves in such things as lamenting the move of the "X-Files" from Friday to Sunday night.
The picture isn't of me as a young child, but being one who is perpetually immature, it is perhaps appropriate to this exhibit nonetheless.
 
I'm Lee, and I work at Pattee Library. One line of my ancestors came from Germany to America in 1690. They came into the port of Baltimore and by the time of the American Revolution had settled in York, Pennsylvania. One of their descendants was a drummer in the Revolutionary War.
Another part of my family was French Huguenots who first arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early nineteenth century. Their descendants eventually ended up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I can still remember some of my relatives from York speaking Pennsylvania Dutch to each other... "Kannscht du Deitsch schwetze?"
 
Let's see. Diversity. Life experiences re: diversity. Experiences of ... being diverse? Can a white, male, anglo, hetero baby-boomer ever really call himself diverse?
Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that while I do, for better or worse, hold membership in that white-male-oppressor identity group, as a lifelong oddball I also seem to have a talent for making a minority of myself wherever I go.
Though I spent all but about a year of my childhood here in State College, I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and my parents came here as southern transplants--my mother grew up right across from the mill gate in a South Carolina textile town and my father spent his youth on a farm in Kentucky. When I hit the school system here I talked differently, and in many ways thought differently from my "yankee" peers, not to mention my "yankee" teachers.
 Things kinda went downhill from there. In junior high, I earned the distinction of being only the third boy in the school to let his hair grow down past his collar. From there I seguéd, in a declension of epithets, from "dork" to "hippie freak" to "theatre freak," this last accompanying the start of a 14-year career in Show Business.
In that career, I had the good fortune to experience other cultures, and they had the misfortune to experience me. I was upbraided several times for my "bloody yank" ways while on tour in England (Hey, how was I supposed to know there was a queue for that stupid little ice cream stand?).
In Mexico City while working on a movie, I rode the wonderful subways often, and could almost always count on being the only non-Mestizo in the car, and usually the only person over 5'8". At 6'2", with flaming red hair, I stuck out more than a little.
I also spent about two weeks on location with a bunch of guys among whom I was both the only Norteño and the only non- (actually ex- ) smoker. Few spoke any English. My Spanish was execrable, but, as an actor and former voice teacher, I was able to apply a very convincing Mexican accent to the few words I did know. This kept getting me in trouble with the locals -- I sounded so fluent that when I (inevitably) used a wrong word or phrase, some listeners would assume I was doing it on purpose.
In Bridgeport, Connecticut, I was one of only three or four male heterosexuals in a production of The Pirates of Penzance, whose cast and crew included some thirty men. A most enlightening experience.
While living in that most diverse of municipalities, New York, in the eighties, I found minority status first as a non-"punk" living on St. Mark's Place, then as a non-Spanish-fluent non-Dominican in Washington Heights, and finally as a non-Yuppie in the west seventies.
 Now, here I am, in my eleventh year on the staff of the University Libraries, "Y" chromosome and all.
Obviously, some minorities are more discriminated against than others, and no minority-status "tourist" can ever fully appreciate the pain of the true victim of bigotry. I know, too, that regardless of how I see myself, it's largely how others see one that determines advantage or disadvantage. And yet, though that straight white male northern European protestant middle-class American "majority" (women technically outnumber us) is out there, after more than forty years of fitting that superficial description, I still wonder what it has to do with me ...
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