 I was attending the National Urban League Conference at James Weldon Johnson in Pittsburgh. My best friend from Youngstown, Ohio, had recently married the Urban League Secretary in Maslin, Ohio. And because she was young and not as outgoing as I was, he asked if I would attend the conference with them, and I did. And it was outdoors, and I was sitting on the grass, Reba Wardlaw and I were sitting on the grass listening to the lectures and so forth. And Maurice Moss, who was the Secretary of the Urban League in Pittsburgh, was sitting by us, and he said, start talking, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm in college at Geneva College. I'm about to graduate. He said, what are you going to do? I said, I'm debating whether to become a librarian or a social worker, because at that time only six modes of work were available to African-Americans. If you were lucky, you became a doctor or a lawyer, but it was social work, teaching, preaching, and nursing. And so he said, how are your grades? I said, I'm an honor student. He said, a librarian is the only profession that African-Americans do not have in the city of Pittsburgh. Why don't you apply to Carnegie Institute of Technology, and if they don't accept us, come back to us and we'll go to bat for you. So I applied at Carnegie Institute of Technology at the urging of Maurice Moss of the National Urban League. Back to the library situation, my colleagues in Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh were wonderful to me. It was the city that was racist. I was asked to leave the restaurant, the Bar City restaurant at Craig Street and Center Avenue and not to come back. A white couple had protested my being there, so when I went to pay my bill, the manager or the owner of the restaurant said, don't come back. And I'm an aquarium, so I never know how I'm going to react or what I'm going to say, and I sounded off. I said, our men are fighting in war for the likes of you and for democracy and all, how dare you ask me not to come back. And so happened that the man standing back of me said, if you don't serve her, I won't come back and I will tell my friends not to come back. And it just happened to be a professor from the University of Pittsburgh, and they're decent white people and good white people, no matter what or where. But the city was really violently racist, really racist, and many of the faculty at Carnegie Institute of Technology were bigoted and racist. So the school was, they had one at a time or two at a time, and when I was in library school, there were four of us, none of who were native Pittsburghers. And remember when Ralph Mann said to me, I'm sorry you don't look more like a Negro than you do, we've been looking for somebody like you for a long time. Remember he said looking, they weren't searching because if they had been searching they would have found somebody in the city of Pittsburgh. But it had been 20 years from the time that I was admitted to the library school until the time that a librarian, a native Pittsburgher from a good family had graduated from the library school. But when she did her fieldwork, her practice work, she could only observe. At Wiley Avenue branch, where the Negro branch, she could only observe, she could not tell stories to the children. It was terrible. Pittsburgh was terrible, but I'm glad to say it has changed, changed, changed, and for the better, it's a good city now. Well, Pittsburgh was an entirely different city than it is now. Smoke, steel was the big industry and foggy and dirty, and my aunt was ashamed to wash my clothes. She lived in North Carolina where I would finish because they were tattletail gray. The streetlights would stay on until noon or all day because it would be so smoggy and dirty. And it was something else. And I suffered so from sinus. And my mother, who was very avant-garde, said to me, she said, you will never do any good as long as you stay in this Pittsburgh city. You've got to get out. When I was a little girl and my neighbor, we practiced being librarians. We had gotten for Christmas roll-top desks, and we practiced being librarians. So I've always been intrigued by becoming a librarian. It's been a wonderful profession. Right now, I'm impressed. I would have to be retrained. I was on the cutting edge of information retrieval when the New York Times integrated, you know, became computer-wise on the cutting edge of it because—but now I would have to be retrained. But there will still be books to be read because you can't cuddle up with a computer, and you can't write in the edges. You can't turn down to leave. You know, there will always be the print book. But it's been a wonderful life. I've been blessed and I've been lucky because I'm so glad that I met Mary John Hewitt. After two and a half years, he took me to New York where I met people of the Harlem Renaissance and had the positions that I had. I'm the only librarian who has been chief librarian at Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Council on Foreign Relations as assistant chief librarian. But it's been a wonderful life, wonderful life. And I'm glad to recommend and mentor people to become librarians.