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Article Excerpt
Strange as it may seem, Ruth Watanabe struggled with her career decision until age thirty-one, when "Uncle Howard" made it for her. During high school she considered social work to help the struggling Spanish-speaking people in Southern California. Then, in her early years at Rochester, when she was head resident of the women's dormitories, she investigated the counseling curriculum at Columbia University. In 1947, she decided upon a teaching career at the Eastman School of Music and met with Director Hanson to discuss it. The upshot of that encounter was Ruth's appointment as librarian of Eastman's Sibley Music Library. More about that later.
Ruth Taiko Watanabe was born in Los Angeles on 12 May 1916. Her father, Kohei, was an importer of Asian art materials. Her mother, Iwa (Watanabe) Watanabe (1) was a graduate of the Toyko conservatory now called the National Institute for the Arts. Because of her mother's frail health--she had a tubercular infection on her spine--the family moved frequently in search of a house with lots of sunshine, good air, and a garden in which her mother could work. By favorable living conditions, her mother almost doubled her life expectancy. The frequent moves meant school changes for Ruth who was always pushed ahead in a new school so that she reached both high school and college very young. (2)
Ruth enrolled at the University of Southern California for a bachelor of music degree with a major in piano. By the time she graduated she had become interested in theory and had nearly a second major in theory. Beginning in her sophomore year she taught piano students: "It was clear I wanted to be a teacher." (3) About the time of her graduation with the B.Mus. in 1937 (4), a chance remark by a faculty member led her to consider continuing her education, this time as an English major.
I never had so much fun in my life! I really was very, very happy there.... Also, the thing that made it more interesting for me and more enjoyable was that I was with people my own age. Previous to that I had been so much younger than the others that I did not have the kind of confidence one would have socially if one were in company with one's peers. (5)
After the A.B. in English, 1939, she completed a master's in English, studying music in Elizabethan dramaturgy excluding Shakespeare. She became interested in musicology and the historical study of music and took the seminars offered by Pauline Alderman at USC. Ruth completed the M.A. in English in 1941, and the M.Mus. in musicology in 1942. She decided to pursue a Ph.D. in English.
That plan was interrupted in April of 1942 when she and her parents were evacuated from the West Coast because of the war with Japan. First, the Watanabes were sent to a "reception center" hastily constructed at the Santa Anita Racetrack. Some evacuees were housed in the stables, which were very crowded. The Watanabes were billetted in rough barracks built on the parking lot of the racetrack. There they lived behind barbed wire awaiting relocation to permanent quarters for the duration of the war.
The Watanabes had enough warning of the relocation to put a lot of their furnishings into storage--they could take with them only what they could carry. Ruth's father did not have time to sell his business; he simply had to abandon it, his assets frozen. At their last meeting before the evacuation, Pauline Alderman, Ruth's professor at USC, offered advice she hoped Ruth would never need: As long as you're alive, there's nothing you can't live without. Many years later Ruth said it was Pauline's influence that kept her spirit alive. (6)
The grandstand at Santa Anita was equipped with a sound system so that events could be held. Sunday afternoons, after all the religious services were over, Ruth offered musical programs for four to five thousand attendees. Speaking extemporaneously without books or notes, she played records--brought to her by non-Japanese friends--on equipment provided by the Army. That experience, at age 26, taught her "it was what you had within you that would eventually come out," referring to her fine education and upbringing.
The Friends Committee in Philadelphia spearheaded an effort called Student Relocation which canvassed the reception centers early in the summer of 1942 with the goal of getting students out of the centers as soon as possible. Students were given forms which resembled college applications to register their academic circumstances; this information followed the students when they were sent on to the relocation centers designed for the duration of the war. Based on Ruth's form, she was accepted by Smith College, but they had no Ph.D. program. She was also accepted by the University of Wisconsin but that location was not acceptable to the authorities because of U.S. Navy forces there.
After the summer, the family was moved to its permanent relocation center seventeen miles outside of Lamar, Colorado. Unable to find an academic escape, Ruth began to teach children in the center. Late September the Army delivered a telegram from Dr. Howard Hanson, director of the Eastman School of Music, which asked Ruth to come to Rochester where a fellowship awaited her. (7) Advised by an officer, "The sooner the quicker," she left for Rochester the same day. Two and a half days later, 2 October 1942, she was met at the railroad station by Eastman's women's advisor.
At Eastman, Ruth registered for courses which would lead to a Ph.D. in musicology; Charles Warren Fox was her advisor. She decided to build on her combination of music and poetry, selecting the Italian madrigal as her field of interest, and subsequent dissertation topic.
One month after Ruth's arrival in Rochester, her father died suddenly in Colorado. Her mother was unable to handle the arrangements so Ruth returned to Colorado where she tended to her father's funeral and cremation. Not permitted to leave the relocation center to retrieve his ashes from Denver without a "mission," the center's educational director arranged for her to address a seminar in progress at the University of Denver. The seminar was concerned with the relocation of large numbers of people; Ruth spoke about the one in which she was involved.
Ruth returned to Rochester by train, nearly broke. The only assets she could access were her own, her father's being frozen. The three crosscountry train trips and her father's funeral had depleted her bank account. Talking with friends in the dormitory, someone suggested she ask Barbara Duncan, librarian of the Sibley Music Library, for a job. Duncan readily hired her at thirty-five cents an hour as a "fetch-it" girl to retrieve and reshelve materials from the library's closed stacks.
In the Sibley Library Ruth experienced a new relationship with a library. "I never knew that a library could be so much fun." (8) In college she disliked the grim, restrictive atmosphere of the reserve room, and the "quiet-please" dictum. During her graduate days she sometimes accompanied Pauline Alderman on visits to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Ruth found it "a glorified paradise" with its exhibits, art gallery, gardens, and scholars' heated discussions. Otherwise, she avoided libraries.
In 1944 Ruth was appointed Head of Circulation, a salaried position requiring a forty-hour work week. That position put her in charge of the desk, "answering 'real' reference questions, keeping an eye on rare books, tabulating statistics ... and supervising the annual inventory." (9) At the same time, Ruth served as a junior counselor in one of the three Eastman dormitories for women. (By 1946 she was head resident, overseeing all three women's dormitories.) In 1946, she was appointed to the Eastman teaching faculty and assigned three sections of music history.
When Ruth's mother was released from the relocation center, she traveled to Rochester to be with her daughter. Her physical condition had deteriorated; she was fatally ill. Although mentally alert, the sad situation was that her body "was dying by inches." Despite the post-war housing shortage, Ruth found them an apartment near Eastman. As their sole support, she needed additional income. Again she faced a career choice: the library or teaching. She decided in favor of teaching and sought a meeting with Hanson. Rather than reducing her library responsibilities, Hanson greeted her with the news that she would be the new librarian: Duncan was 65, the mandatory retirement age. Ruth "was dumbfounded" and protested her lack of training in librarianship. Hanson suggested she remember all the college bibliography courses she had taken, particularly as an English major. (10) Ruth asked about going to library school, perhaps not to finish a...
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