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A memoir of a music librarian.

Article Excerpt
It was the summer of 1950. I had what I considered a dream job. I was the "disc jockey" for the New York Public Library, planning and presenting the Bryant Park concerts of recorded music, noon to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday, from 5 July to Labor Day. (1) This was the second summer of the concerts. The first had been sponsored by the singer, Lanny Ross, perhaps best known for the song "Moonlight and Roses." For the second year in a row the concerts were underwritten by the Union Dime Savings Bank.

My job was to plan programs of classical recordings with a mix of orchestral, vocal, and chamber music, to watch for anniversaries of births and deaths of composers in order to get program ideas, and to respond to listeners' requests. The records were played in a makeshift studio on the second floor stacks of the library and transmitted to the esplanade at the southeast corner of Bryant Park, just behind the library. Long-playing records were still something of a novelty but were sometimes programmed; most of the recordings were 78s.

I was a twenty-four-year-old musicology student in the graduate school at New York University who had detoured into studying library science at Columbia. I was amazed and highly pleased when Philip Miller, the assistant chief of the Music Division, selected me to be disc jockey. It was he, who in answer to my inquiries, guided me into becoming a music librarian and who was my mentor in the years that followed.

The summer was a pleasant one. Richard Tucker was a guest at the opening concert and had a capacity crowd as he sang...

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