Cathy Sadler (interviewed by Lisa Hayes on May 1, 2023)
Dublin Core
Title
Cathy Sadler (interviewed by Lisa Hayes on May 1, 2023)
Creator
Date
2023-05-01
Description
Cathy Sadler was born in Vicksburg, MS in 1949. She was promised a job at the Library Society when she was five and went on to work at the Library for nearly forty years, first as Librarian from 1971 to 1978, and then as Head Librarian, from 1979 to 2008. Ms. Sadler talks about projects she worked on and how things were organized during her tenure. Her grandfather served on the board of the Library and her family roots go back to the Mouzon family of Huguenot descent.
Contributor
Hayes, Lisa
Cox, Danielle
Format
MP3
Type
Audio
Language
English
Identifier
CathySadler_OralHistory_20230501
Oral History Item Type Metadata
Transcription
00:00:05 Cathy Sadler
I'm not.
00:00:06 Lisa Hayes
Me either. It'll just be fun. So my name is Lisa Hayes. I'm the special collections librarian at the library, Charleston Library Society. It is Monday, May 1st, and I am delighted to be here in the conference room with Cathy Sadler, who is here today to give us an oral history about her time here at the Library Society and growing up in Charleston. Cathy was the head librarian here from 1971 until 2008. Is that right?
00:00:42 Cathy Sadler
I was the assistant librarian until, from ‘71 to ‘78, and then head librarian from January of ‘79.
00:00:52 Lisa Hayes
Oh, that's a very long time. So she has a lot--
00:00:55 Cathy Sadler
And a student assistant.
00:00:57 Lisa Hayes
Before that, when you were in college, that's right.
00:00:58 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:00:59 Lisa Hayes
So she has a lot that we're going to be able to learn, learn from her. So thank you for, for being here. So. So let's see. So you were born in 1949. And I know you didn't, you weren't born here in Charleston, but it, it sounds like you grew up right across the street from us. Can you tell us about that?
00:01:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, I was. I was back here by the time I was 2. And we lived on Orange Street with my grandparents for a couple of years, and then we lived on 5 Gateway Walk, which is right across the street. So yes, and then I, we moved to Tradd Street after that.
00:01:35 Lisa Hayes
After that. So when you were a student assistant, where were you living? On Tradd Street?
00:01:36 Cathy Sadler
On Tradd Street.
00:01:41 Lisa Hayes
Well, so I know the Gateway Walk right now. We walk through there often to get to, during lunch to get to the Unitarian Church. Tell us about what that was like? What, what was Charleston like when you were living there, and also on Tradd Street? So much different than it is now, I guess.
00:01:58 Cathy Sadler
Yes, it was much more of a small town feel. James Island, Johns Island were the country, and people went there for the summer and didn't come back and forth. When I was on the Gateway Walk, I went to Miss McGinnis’ first grade, which was on Chalmers and walked through the Gateway Walk that way to school. And then I walked through the churchyard to get to Memminger regularly. We, once we found a rabbit at the Gibbes, in the yard. Pat Rabbit, that we took home. We found out he liked to drink Coca-Cola and he liked to nibble on books. And then we had at one point we had two monkeys living next to, chimpanzees and monkeys, living next door to us at 4 Gateway Walk.
00:03:02 Lisa Hayes
Those were someone’s pets?
00:03:02 Cathy Sadler
So, yes, they were studying animals.
00:03:03 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh.
00:03:06 Cathy Sadler
It was a scientist and they were studying animals and found that chimpanzees have to wear clothes inside because they can't be potty trained. And spider monkeys like to climb up your window.
00:03:19 Lisa Hayes
So, well, so you have three siblings and you're, you're the oldest.
00:03:23 Cathy Sadler
Yes.
00:03:24 Lisa Hayes
Well, did you all grow up with a lot of books in your home? Did you love to read?
00:03:27 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, yes, I was a bookworm all my life. And I loved to read. The others didn't read that much. My brothers were dyslexic. So they had trouble reading. But my mother read to us regularly.
00:03:51 Lisa Hayes
And, and so you joined the Library Society when you were a child, is that right?
00:03:54 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, I had a child's membership on my grandfather’s card.
00:03:55 Lisa Hayes
Oh, who was your grandfather?
00:04:02 Cathy Sadler
Harold Allen Mouzon was my grandmother, my grandfather, and he was on the Board of Finance and the Book Committee. So yes, yes. And he used to come to see his lawyer downtown. He used to come in every Wednesday and sit and read for a while and we would come over when Daddy got home from work and get him and take him back to the house for drinks and then he would go to the Old Bats and play poker.
00:04:52 Lisa Hayes
What is the Old Bats?
00:04:53 Cathy Sadler
What is its proper name? It's an artillery organization, supposedly an artillery organization, but it's really a poker club.
00:04:53 Lisa Hayes
Did they meet in someone's home to play poker?
00:04:54 Cathy Sadler
They meet. Yes, I think they usually change around, but I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but they play poker every Wednesday and I think it's still going. I know Mr. Ripley was a member.
00:05:09 Lisa Hayes
So your grandfather was a member. Was your dad also a member.
00:05:12 Cathy Sadler
No, he was not. He was not. He was a civil engineer at the ports authority.
00:05:18 Lisa Hayes
And what about your mom? What did she do?
00:05:20 Cathy Sadler
She was a homemaker. She worked for a while at Delta before she was married, and then she volunteered at the Preservation Society store for years before she died.
00:05:39 Lisa Hayes
So you, so your grandfather was on the board here and you all were members. Did you come here like once a week when you were a kid, or more, more than that?
00:05:45 Cathy Sadler
Well, it came probably more than. Yes, this was our library. This was our Public Library. I don't think I ever went to the Public Library until it moved to King Street.
00:05:58 Lisa Hayes
Well, so we have the picture that you mentioned in the reading room right now that shows you and your sister and Julia Logan and Garden Frampton is looking like she's reading a story to you or about to read to you.
00:06:10 Cathy Sadler
She was an assistant, student assistant at the time.
00:06:14 Lisa Hayes
So what were some of the things that you would do when you were here at the library? Did you go, I know there wasn't that there wasn't a rabbit hole, but where would you sit and read?
00:06:25 Cathy Sadler
It was on the main floor right next to where the desk is, the circulation desk used to be. It was just that one little area. A table and two rows of shelves for books, yeah.
00:06:41 Lisa Hayes
So the kids section was really small it sounds like?
00:06:43 Cathy Sadler
Very small.
00:06:44 Lisa Hayes
And do you remember some of the librarians at that time? Who was the?
00:06:49 Cathy Sadler
Miss Haigh and Miss Rugheimer.
00:06:50 Lisa Hayes
So Garden Frampton's mom was the, was the librarian. And then.
00:06:54 Cathy Sadler
She was assistant librarian and Miss Rugheimer and Miss Sheetz was here as well. I did not know her that well. We, Margaret now used to make loom woven potholders for the librarians for their tea breaks.
00:07:15 Lisa Hayes
Did the library close during the day for any amount of time or?
00:07:20 Cathy Sadler
No, it was open 9:30 to 6:00. They did have an hour and 1/2 lunch breaks, because the librarians went home for lunch, as did a lot of lawyers and people at that time. The library was open until 6, yes.
00:07:34 Lisa Hayes
But the library was open. What about on the weekend? Do you remember?
00:07:40 Cathy Sadler
It was open till 6:00 on Saturday. Not open on Sunday, was never open on Sunday.
00:07:46 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember any of the people from then besides the people who worked here? Any of the members that would come in, any names come to mind?
00:07:56 Cathy Sadler
At that time, I don't. I know John Ziegler used it a lot.
00:08:05 Lisa Hayes
Did you know this is, this is early. Anybody like, well, later I guess it would have been Sam Stoney, when you were older.
00:08:16 Cathy Sadler
Oh yes, Sam Stoney and Milby Burton both. And they were both deaf, so, so one of them would be in the locked section and one in the main reading room, and they would be yelling back and forth at each other. And Milby, Burton was a cusser, shall we say, that was his normal speech, but they toned it down when they were in here in deference to the ladies. But it still got pretty hot.
00:08:51 Lisa Hayes
So you started as a child, as a student assistant when you were eight.
00:08:54 Cathy Sadler
I was promised a job when I was five. I started as a student assistant in ‘67.
00:09:01 Lisa Hayes
And you were 17, is that right? 16 or 17? 16. So you were at the College of Charleston? What did you study in school?
00:09:12 Cathy Sadler
I got an AB which requires 3 years of Latin or Greek. I took the Greek. I don't remember any of it. I majored in English and minored in a bunch of different things because I was into three different catalogs. So I think officially it was French and history, but I'm not sure .
00:09:33 Lisa Hayes
Oh, wow. Well, so you worked here and then, I want to hear about that. But then you went to Florida State. Is that where you got your library degree?
00:09:40 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:09:41 Lisa Hayes
OK. And then you did, you know when you were getting your library degree, you wanted to come back here and work?
00:09:47 Cathy Sadler
I do. I would like to at some point and but she's had been letting me catalog before I went. So I knew I was going to be a librarian when I was in college. I did interview one other place that was on the border of Alabama and Georgia for a children's librarian and county system, but I would have had to buy a car. It was miles from any place, I think Atlanta was the nearest city. And it was like 2 hours drive or three hours drive or something. And I could work here and use my grandmother's car.
00:10:36 Lisa Hayes
And live downtown?
00:10:37 Cathy Sadler
And live downtown.
00:10:37 Lisa Hayes
You can't beat that.
00:10:40 Cathy Sadler
So, and walk to work all the time.
00:10:44 Lisa Hayes
So let's go back to when you worked here, when you were a student assistant. What were some of the duties that you had then?
00:10:50 Cathy Sadler
We reshelved books. We did the circulation. We, I cataloged maps and manuscripts because they knew what I was going to do. That wasn't the normal thing. We marked and shellacked books. Had to shellack them to keep cockroaches from eating the covers. We served at the annual meeting. When I first came, it was downstairs in the Barnwell annex.
00:11:27 Lisa Hayes
That's what the bindery is today.
00:11:32 Cathy Sadler
And we carried trays of sandwiches, some things around. The members made a lot of food. And the librarians always made, made cucumber sandwiches and shrimp sandwiches.
00:11:48 Lisa Hayes
It wasn't catered by Hamby’s.
00:11:49 Cathy Sadler
It was not catered. No, it was not catered and we all, we made the punch. So yeah, it was put on by the library staff and a few members.
00:12:01 Lisa Hayes
So that was when you were a student. So tell us about, gosh, so you got to work on the manuscripts. Were the, were those, were, do you feel like some of the manuscripts you got to catalog had not been seen by anyone in 100 years?
00:12:16 Cathy Sadler
I think they had been seen, but they were disorganized. And you might have noticed that the letters of some people are broken up into their correspondence. That was because we, they were not copied at the time. They weren't all microfilm or fiche. And so we didn't want people going through everything in some of the bigger collections. So we split it up so that we could give them one folder at a time.
00:12:52 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember some of those collections now? Does anything come to mind?
00:12:56 Cathy Sadler
Francis Marion, John C. Calhoun. Lots of them.
00:13:02 Lisa Hayes
That's, I mean, that's amazing.
00:13:03 Cathy Sadler
Lots of them. The Ross Estate manuscripts.
00:13:06 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah, you worked on that.
00:13:08 Cathy Sadler
They were all part of the manuscript collection.
00:13:11 Lisa Hayes
Did, I mean you were, you were a kid. Did you know how important some of those papers were?
00:13:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I learned early on, yes, but yeah.
00:13:23 Lisa Hayes
That's remarkable. So OK, so you went to college and who, who hired you when you came back from?
00:13:31 Cathy Sadler
Ms. Rugheimer
00:13:32 Lisa Hayes
So she hired you? And what did you? What was? Did you? Were you excited about coming here or did you see the library as a place, as a sort of a stepping stone to working somewhere else? Did you think you would be here for so long?
00:13:50 Cathy Sadler
Probably. I had no great desire to go any place else except England, which I did later on. I would have stayed in England, if I could have gotten a job there. But otherwise I was never tempted to leave here. I enjoyed it.
00:14:08 Lisa Hayes
Tell us what the University of Hull is. I don't know what that is.
00:14:13 Cathy Sadler
It's an English university. And I got a Bachelor of Philosophy in Victorian literature, which is a masters degree by coursework and dissertation. Because the English at the time a master's degree was just the dissertation. So I wanted to do the coursework as well because I felt like I would be cheating if I didn't.
00:14:41 Lisa Hayes
Well, you said by correspondence, what does that mean?
00:14:43 Cathy Sadler
No, not by correspondence. I did it in Hull. I was in Hull for a year.
00:14:46 Lisa Hayes
You were there. I bet that was really fun.
00:14:49 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:14:51 Lisa Hayes
And you would have stayed there if you could have?
00:14:52 Cathy Sadler
I, I loved it. Yorkshire was wonderful.
00:15:00 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, I'm glad you came back here. So what was one of the most, the thing that you were most afraid of when you first moved back here, as far as getting to work? Not afraid, but like what was so daunting about working here? Anything?
00:15:15 Cathy Sadler
Nothing, because I'd done it before.
00:15:16 Lisa Hayes
You were very comfortable. Did you want to change anything?
00:15:23 Cathy Sadler
We changed some things along the way. I reworked the Cutter system, for the nonfiction, particularly. Because airplanes and things have been added so we, and some things were split up in different places. So we worked to that. I checked all of the book catalogs and marked everything that was in those to go to the vault because the latest one was 1876.
00:16:02 Lisa Hayes
So let me pause. So Cathy is telling us about the Library Society’s catalog of books. So we have these going all the way back to 1750, and she's, she was able to go through and, and I've seen these cards, so she marked on the cards in the card catalog or in the shelf list when a book first appeared in a catalog. So a book from 1790, she will have written on the card “first appears in the 1806 catalog,” something like that. So, sorry, go on.
00:16:33 Cathy Sadler
And these were book catalogs, not card files.
00:16:38 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah.
00:16:39 Cathy Sadler
So they were published as books.
00:16:42 Lisa Hayes
So you pulled things that were on the shelves and, and put them in the rolls.
00:16:44 Cathy Sadler
Yes. Among them a copy of The Rights of Man from the 1700s, which had a card and pocket in it and circulated. Oh wow, yeah. So we moved all of the early books to East Basement at the time because we didn't have room to move them to the vault. When we got the new building we moved those to the vault.
00:17:12 Lisa Hayes
So was that under, is that where like, under where Janice's desk is now? Is that where you kept things? And that was not the locked section, that was...
00:17:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes. East basement. The lock section was on the floor by Janice at the back, and that was more a reference collection with some of the genealogical books and things in it.
00:17:35 Lisa Hayes
And then the old books and the manuscripts also were.
00:17:38 Cathy Sadler
No, the manuscripts were in a manuscript case at the time. They were in a cabinet.
00:17:41 Lisa Hayes
And, and, where was that?
00:17:44 Cathy Sadler
On the ground floor in front of the ladies room with the Hinson clippings.
00:17:51 Lisa Hayes
And was that accessible to people or, or that was, yeah.
00:17:53 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes. The manuscript cabinet was locked, but the others were accessible.
00:18:00 Lisa Hayes
Did you divide, were members allowed down there and and without staff, or was there someone down, down there also?
00:18:11 Cathy Sadler
But not research members.
00:18:14 Lisa Hayes
What's the difference?
00:18:15 Cathy Sadler
And they were the two. The section with the early books was locked up, to each door on it and the individual rooms downstairs were locked up. The Hinson Room and the washroom and the staff room where the maps were, were all locked up.
00:18:33 Lisa Hayes
Uh-huh. Uh, huh. So did you have circulating books down there? Or was it just the Hinson clippings?
00:18:40 Cathy Sadler
We had circulating fiction down there. And we had periodicals down there.
00:18:47 Lisa Hayes
Ok. Was it an inviting place or was it kind of dark down there?
00:18:51 Cathy Sadler
It pretty dark down there. That, we tried to leave the lights in the, in the stacks downstairs off as much as possible to save energy. Anybody looking for old fiction, we also had plays down there too. Anybody looking at those could turn on the lights in the stacks when they were down there, but otherwise we tried to keep them turned off.
00:19:18 Lisa Hayes
Ohh lights. What were some of the other cost saving, or I guess you had some financial challenges probably at the beginning or?
00:19:33 Cathy Sadler
It wasn't too bad. We had a book budget, which was the Jockey Club income.
00:19:45 Lisa Hayes
How much was that? Do you remember?
00:19:46 Cathy Sadler
It varied. It varied. But it was always supplemented from the regular income as well. We got books from the newspaper. The review books came here. Unfortunately, we still had to buy a lot of the fiction in order to get it, because you had to order it in advance.
00:20:16 Lisa Hayes
Did you, were you in charge of acquisitions after a while?
00:20:19 Cathy Sadler
We did. Everybody did everything.
00:20:20 Lisa Hayes
Ohh everybody did OK.
00:20:22 Cathy Sadler
Everybody did everything except for Janice. She did memberships and bookkeeping with me. And she gets some. But she did reference work and all as well. But we all did acquisitions. We all read reviews. Made cards out for things we thought would be popular. Put them before the book committee. They added their things.
00:20:51 Lisa Hayes
So tell us about the book committee. Who, how big was that and how many?
00:20:55 Cathy Sadler
It was 10 to 12 people usually.
00:20:59 Lisa Hayes
Is that it?
00:20:59 Cathy Sadler
They didn't all come at the same time. They were members. And they could bring in selection, suggestions for us to buy.
00:21:10 Lisa Hayes
Did you vote on something or was it just up to your discretion?
00:21:17 Cathy Sadler
They discussed everything that we put before them. I don't think they actually voted, although in some cases they did turn things down after discussion.
00:21:27 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember what's a, what's a reason a book would have been turned down?
00:21:46 Cathy Sadler
An expensive reprint of Audubon or something that we had already in other copies. You know if it was a, reference books never went before them. Children's books never went before them. But the adult circulating books went before them.
00:22:09 Lisa Hayes
They were asked about those, right? And you said the acquisition fund varied. Did it depend on the like, how the endowment did?
00:22:20 Cathy Sadler
It was the income from the Jockey Fund.
00:22:20 Lisa Hayes
And so it varied because of the economy. Yeah, yeah. Was it? Do you, I mean, are you talking like $5000 a year or like $1000 a year?
00:22:31 Cathy Sadler
No, it's no, it was maybe $10,000 or $12,000 a year probably, but then a book only cost $5 at the beginning, you know, so. It went a long way. And we got a discount when we ordered them so.
00:22:47 Lisa Hayes
Who did you order the books from?
00:22:48 Cathy Sadler
Emory Pratt was the big one, and then when we got into large print, we ordered from Ulverscroft, which is a British large print company.
00:22:49 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, we still have some of those books, yeah. So did you weed also? What were some of the other projects that you worked on?
00:23:09 Cathy Sadler
The fiction collection had been weeded numerous times, the last time before I came. A lot of the early books have been moved downstairs, including books that had been weeded but hadn't been thrown out. So we found, next time we inventoried, we found a large number of novels downstairs that weren't in the catalog anymore. So I weeded a lot of those. I gave some of them to Nan Morrison for the English department because they had maybe five more readings of them before they fell to pieces and we finally got all of those straightened out. The nonfiction I don't think had ever been weeded. And it was very difficult to do. Because of course, we had things from the late 1800s on. We ended up moving some of those to the vault. We went through the others. I had several people look through lists of them. Nan Morrison did literature, PJ got and did the gardening books and the cookbooks. And when I left, we were trying to look up the remainder to see if they were on WorldCat nearby to see whether we thought we thought we ought to keep them or not.
00:25:05 Lisa Hayes
You look to see if the College of Charleston had a copy.
00:25:07 Cathy Sadler
Right. Yes, yeah.
00:25:07 Lisa Hayes
Yeah. OK. Well, so you brought up WorldCat, so you were here for the, not for when the the online system, not for when our...
00:25:18 Cathy Sadler
Not for online.
00:25:19 Lisa Hayes
But, but we did have computers during your time.
00:25:21 Cathy Sadler
We had computers. We were using computers for the bookkeeping. And we had, the order lists and all on the computer, yes.
00:25:31 Lisa Hayes
You could order them eventually through the computer. Did that make things easier I suppose, or did you feel like it was unnecessary?
00:25:45 Cathy Sadler
When I started, we started with floppy disks. For example, one of the board members wanted to put the manuscripts on to digitize them. I did not feel that was the time to do it because I knew there were lots of changes that were going to come up. And you're going to have to redo it every single time. They ended up being microfiched by the Historical Society, although some of them are unreadable.
00:26:26 Lisa Hayes
So what year, when did the microfilming project take place? I know we did this.
00:26:30 Cathy Sadler
Well, the filming of the newspaper started before I started.
00:26:33 Lisa Hayes
OK.
00:26:35 Cathy Sadler
And we continued that. We were working on the 1800s. Sending those off to be filmed. We had to collate them. Fill in blanks, all that stuff, you know.
00:26:53 Lisa Hayes
And filling, filling in blanks, you would request a copy from someone, from another...
00:26:57 Cathy Sadler
Well, we didn't actually. Miss Rugheimer had requested copies from people for their early papers. When we got to the later ones, we had double copies of some of them because the College of Charleston had given us some. And so we had to go through both volumes and insert missing pages and that kind of thing. So we usually ended up with full copies. But the American Antiquarian Society filmed those. And they filled in the gaps if there were any.
00:27:29 Lisa Hayes
OK. Would you send off like a volume at a time or would you, were you sending off a whole bunch?
00:27:35 Cathy Sadler
They had to go off by truck because they had to be insured, yeah.
00:27:36 Lisa Hayes
A whole bunch of volumes.
00:27:38 Cathy Sadler
And so it was like 10 or 15 at a time of the bound volumes.
00:27:46 Lisa Hayes
Did you feel like that was a, I know that people have said that having those newspapers in their college, you know, all over the world has made such a difference to their scholarship. Did you know at the time that you were being able to provide that kind of access?
00:28:01 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, we did, because we had research, researchers come in one, one summer we had three men working on the same newspaper time period and we would load the newspaper bound newspapers onto a book truck and roll them up to the table. They all sit at the same table and they would use them as they needed them. It worked out very nicely.
00:28:31 Lisa Hayes
And then when it was microfilm, did you ask people to use the microfilm? Or, yeah.
00:28:34 Cathy Sadler
Yes, once you were on film the originals were not in use anymore.
00:28:39 Lisa Hayes
And did you, were you here when that really big old microfilm machine was being used? Or did that predate you?
00:28:48 Cathy Sadler
The one that magnified?
00:28:49 Lisa Hayes
Yes, yes.
00:28:50 Cathy Sadler
There were two of them and they were wonderful because they magnified yes. They were great. They were downstairs below Janice.
00:28:58 Lisa Hayes
OK, there's still...
00:28:59 Cathy Sadler
One of them was by the safe and one of them was on the other side by the dumb waiter.
00:29:02 Lisa Hayes
We still have one of those, and we should try and try and hook it up and use it one time.
00:29:03 Cathy Sadler
They're wonderful.
00:29:09 Lisa Hayes
Just for fun.
00:29:13 Cathy Sadler
You could get seasick reading them, but that was true of all microfilm.
00:29:19 Lisa Hayes
Make your eyes go crazy. So let's see. Why, would you tell us about the, without naming names, the theft of the Audubons? Is that something you would like to talk about?
00:29:38 Cathy Sadler
They were in the green top table downstairs. And it was very difficult to get the drawers open. So people weren't just, you know, that's where we put the shellacked books. There were fifteen of them that have already been redone. And they were in the Ross Room. Fifteen were not stolen, yeah. We had a security system at the time but it was on the doors. It was not a motion detector. And one of the members, he found out they were in there. He was going through things he shouldn't have been going through and pulled the drawers open.
00:30:34 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:38 Cathy Sadler
And said something to the student assistants who were down there. Excuse me. We don't know exactly what he did because he has to have had a truck to carry them in, but he stayed behind in the building, hid in the stacks somewhere. And walked out with them.
00:31:00 Lisa Hayes
And did that set the alarm off when he went through the door? Do you remember?
00:31:10 Cathy Sadler
No, that one did not have, didn't have an interior alarm on it. It wasn't dead bolted so it, it would unlock from inside, which we had to have for emergencies. And so he walked out with them. We would have found them anyway because he started bragging about having them. But the student assistants we, Miss Rugheimer went downstairs about a week later to send some more off to be worked on. And they weren't there. And the students said about it. And so we found them. So he was, I think there was one person right after the Civil War, but he was basically the first person to be blacklisted from the library.
00:32:07 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Was he trying to sell them or was he just having wanted them for himself?
00:32:11 Cathy Sadler
He intended to sell them. He had not sold any so far, but he intended to sell them.
00:32:20 Lisa Hayes
So the, so he returned them and...
00:32:21 Cathy Sadler
And they were returned. They sat in a bank vault underground vault for years after that in wooden crates. That were screwed and strapped. And I had to go once a year, and they had to be pulled out on the floor because they didn't have a table big enough for them. They had to be pulled out on the floor and I had to go through them all one at a time because he couldn't unstrap two of them at the same time, so it was very very time consuming. And there were two other complete sets in town. So at that point, we decided to sell them in order to pay for humidity control for the preservation of the rest of the collection.
00:33:16 Lisa Hayes
Well, that makes sense. So we sold the, sold the Audubons and and we're able to...
00:33:24 Cathy Sadler
Only the birds, not the quadrupeds.
00:33:25 Lisa Hayes
And we still have those quadrupeds and they are lovely, lovely books.
00:33:28 Cathy Sadler
Yes, you still have the quadrupeds.
00:33:32 Lisa Hayes
Well, thank you for that. I, I didn't know all those details. How about? Let's see. The Aiken Garden Club collection. Do you remember receiving that collection?
00:33:46 Cathy Sadler
It was received before I came. And it was a permanent loan. By the time I came it had been cataloged and it was shelved in the Ross Room as a separate collection. And it had had book plates put into all the volumes. Long after Ms. Rugheimer had retired they came in one time to see the collection. Well, we had added books to it since that time, because it was a garden collection, so we just added some of our own collection. Then we got a letter saying they wanted it back, so we wrote to them and we said could you send us a list of the books that you gave us, which they did. We pulled those books out and we, we moved the book plates out of everything else that wasn't actually part of their collection, and we separated them. The end result was that they got a new president and they had no place to store the books in temperature controls. And they wanted to put it in the library in Aiken, and nobody in Aiken would take it. So we finally got it given to us.
00:35:47 Lisa Hayes
Well, that's great because I...
00:35:47 Cathy Sadler
But that's the story of Aiken Garden Collection.
00:35:49 Lisa Hayes
The story it did include, I know it includes books dating back to the 1500s. It's a, it's a neat collection of books, yeah. Well, tell us about when the library purchased the newest building, 160.
00:36:04 Cathy Sadler
Well, it was a wreck. It was, the front of the building.
00:36:06 Lisa Hayes
What was that process like?
00:36:10 Cathy Sadler
It was the front of the building and the property was foreclosed on. One of our board members heard about it.
00:36:21 Lisa Hayes
This was 1995, right?
00:36:23 Cathy Sadler
And went and purchased it. We already owned the Barnwell Annex. And this was right next door to us. So they purchased it.
00:36:36 Lisa Hayes
For the library or?
00:36:39 Cathy Sadler
For the library. Kitty Ravenel had died and left her estate to the library. We used the money from her estate to build that building.
00:36:54 Lisa Hayes
With the vaults and some staff space?
00:36:56 Cathy Sadler
With the vaults and the normal shelving, compact shelving and two offices and the children's collection was over there at one point, and downstairs was to be a meeting room in the front where the bookstore is now and the vault in the back and we moved the Hinson collection, the bound periodicals, East Basement, to the vaults.
00:37:28 Lisa Hayes
OK, I always wonder why the East basement is called that because it's not right now the East basement, but that's because it's the old location that's in the name. OK, that makes sense.
00:37:39 Cathy Sadler
Yes. Yeah. Periodicals were on the other side on that level.
00:37:48 Lisa Hayes
Did you enjoy working with the board? Was the, did you feel like the board was for the most part, pretty easy to work with for the librarians?
00:37:57 Cathy Sadler
We did not attend board meetings. Miss Rugheimer did under Mr. Gibbes. I was never invited to attend a meeting except when they were discussing the tea craft for our retirement. I was allowed to, I was invited to go to that one. That's the only board meeting I ever went to.
00:38:20 Lisa Hayes
Did they? Did you?
00:38:21 Cathy Sadler
I presented a report, a quarterly report to them. I don't know. We stayed away from the boardroom, while they're having meetings.
00:38:35 Lisa Hayes
Well, so let's see, what about, are there the ghost of Mr. Hinson? Can you tell us any stories about Mr. Hinson's ghost?
00:38:40 Cathy Sadler
Yes, I've seen him. I've seen him. Yes. He, he didn't like the humidity control, though he hasn't been around since then. Janice and I both saw him at different times. Mr. Hinson had left his historical collection, including novels, but basically the Civil War to the library.
00:39:07 Lisa Hayes
In, in, in 1919.
00:39:08 Cathy Sadler
And it was in the room above the boiler room. Which is down, it's now the rabbit hole.
00:39:17 Lisa Hayes
Ok, the rabbit hole.
00:39:22 Cathy Sadler
He also left his clipping file, which we had added to over the years, and there were four or five file cabinets worth of clippings. And there's also a portrait of him. And every now and then, people would hear books shifting in the Hinson Room. And footsteps. Including some of the student assistants. I mean, some were really scared by it. I saw him standing in front of his clipping file. In a frock coat and top hat, looking into the files.
00:40:09 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh. Where, where were those cabinets? Were those in that room?
00:40:12 Cathy Sadler
Those were in front of the ladies room.
00:40:14 Lisa Hayes
OK.
00:40:18 Cathy Sadler
On the same level, but not yeah. And I saw him early in the morning when I came, I was the first one in one morning. And so I'm there.
00:40:26 Lisa Hayes
Oh, my goodness. Were you scared or was it?
00:40:27 Cathy Sadler
No, I knew who he was right away. I don't know how, but I did, you know? I mean just.
00:40:34 Lisa Hayes
He was seeing and seeing what had happened to his clipping files.
00:40:34 Cathy Sadler
That’s Mr. Hinson. He was using them for research And then we had a, we had a janitor early on. William McCall. And William used to climb around on the outside of the big windows, washing them from the ledge on the, on the main building, yes, yes. The main reading room and the windows opened at the time. When I first came the windows were in use. And he would, if it started raining, he would jump up on top of the bookshelves to close the windows because he was little...
00:41:21 Lisa Hayes
So yeah, well, I've heard that someone else I spoke with said the air conditioning in the library society was really good in the summer, that they would come in here to cool off specifically because we had good, good AC.
00:41:34 Cathy Sadler
That was not until the 70s. Before that, there was no air conditioning in the building at all. And it was rather interesting because we had maybe 400, 450 members. Adult members. But a lot of Charlestonians left for the summer went to the mountains or the beaches, of the islands. And so in the summer time, we did projects. We leave two people upstairs and everybody else would go in the basement or something and do projects.
00:42:15 Lisa Hayes
Because it was so cool.
00:42:16 Cathy Sadler
Because it was so quiet, yes.
00:42:20 Lisa Hayes
Well, times have changed. I guess we still, the summer is still our quiet time now with programming and, and that kind of thing. Well, tell us what you think about the library. I know it's changed a lot. What are some of the biggest changes?
00:42:31 Cathy Sadler
I have not been involved in that. I mean, I've just come in to check out books. You've added all the programming, although at the end of my tenure we had a former student assistant who was hired to do programming. But it wasn't allowed to be advertised outside of the membership. So it didn't draw in any new members. Basically, you know, wasn't, and it was maybe once a month in the winter.
00:43:10 Lisa Hayes
Was it with like you would invite an author to come present?
00:43:14 Cathy Sadler
And that was it. The annual meeting there was no, well, the speaker was the president. And the librarian initially gave an oral report because members are the library. They're the society. So all Members could attend, not most of them did. But they came for the food is what they came for. The President would give his report, and then the librarian would give hers. But when Mr. Ripley took over his report was the same as like the librarian’s report.
00:43:57 Lisa Hayes
He would read.
00:43:57 Cathy Sadler
So he did. He just did the whole thing. Before that had been, John Gibbes had done it like history things. The library has report. And then they elected the new board members and then they went and ate. Some of them had already started eating. And then we still served them. We went around with the trays and refilled trays, served punch, and then after which you had to go around the reading room and look for all the glasses, people that left sitting on the shelves.
00:44:34 Lisa Hayes
Did we use the silver punch bowl during that time?
00:44:36 Cathy Sadler
Yeah. Yes, yes. And the candelabras, we used all the silver. We used the silver trays. That's what everything was served on.
00:44:45 Lisa Hayes
Were, were you here when we received, I guess, was that from the Kitty Ravenel collection? Is that the silver or the Ross family?
00:44:53 Cathy Sadler
No, the, I think some of it's from the Ross family. The candelabras were from Miss Rugheimer’s friends, they were, but and they were sharing an apartment. Miss Rugheimer originally had rented from her, and she loaned us the candelabras every year. So she left them to us when she died.
00:45:26 Lisa Hayes
So, so tell us about Miss Rugheimer. What was her, what was she like? What was her personality like?
00:45:37 Cathy Sadler
Janice will tell you she was always going, “Now do this, girls.” She was very pleasant. She could be stern. She always wore a skirt or dress. Which I did too. And she had, she had started the filming of the papers. I think she may have gotten the first typewriters. Because under Miss Fitzsimmons, all the cards were handwritten. They didn't get an electric typewriter until ‘71 because I was off at library school, and then she typed me a letter on it. Well, I learned to type on catalog cards.
00:46:37 Lisa Hayes
Oh wow.
00:46:39 Cathy Sadler
We used to put them in a wooden box that the secretary at the time had. And we would, this is why everything's on the back of the main entry. We typed the main entry when we cataloged. And then she typed all the additional cards. Which is why the accession number and the subject headings and all on the back of the main entry, because that's what she takes.
00:47:08 Lisa Hayes
She did that, yeah. And when did miss Rugheimer retire? Did she?
00:47:11 Cathy Sadler
‘79. January of ‘79, she and Miss Haigh both retired that year.
00:47:13 Lisa Hayes
And that's when you became. OK. And then you became. How, and how many Members do you think we had? Did the membership grow much?
00:47:24 Cathy Sadler
It was about 450 when I was a student. And it grew, yes. At one point we said we had 1000, but then Janice discovered that it wasn't really 1000 because they hadn't pulled the numbers for the people who died and you know, so I don't know how many it was. We had lots of research workers at that time because nothing was on film or computer.
00:47:51 Lisa Hayes
Uh-huh.
00:47:54 Cathy Sadler
People would come, so people had to come here to use them. So especially the newspapers that hadn't been filmed.
00:48:02 Lisa Hayes
Tell us any topics you remember that people were most interested in.
00:48:09 Cathy Sadler
Black goldsmiths, shipping, travel, submarines, Civil War, genealogy, of course. Craftsmen. All sorts of things.
00:48:30 Lisa Hayes
Did you, when you were helping people, did you learn about all these topics too? I guess as you were helping them find things you must.
00:48:36 Cathy Sadler
Somewhat, yes. Yes, I think you always do.
00:48:43 Lisa Hayes
Well, I know you like to read still. Tell us what you enjoy reading now that you're retiring.
00:48:47 Cathy Sadler
I like cozy mysteries and nonfiction. Social life and customs of England and Europe. Sometimes I read them on Indians, American Indians. I did go through a period I was reading Egypt and China. But things of that sort. History of different periods. But not the straight history. The social life is what I'm interested.
00:49:22 Lisa Hayes
And who you like? Cozy mysteries, who’s of one of your favorite mystery writers?
00:49:26 Cathy Sadler
Oh Dorothy Sayers. Agatha Christie, Corola Dunn. Radford. Lots of those.
00:49:34 Lisa Hayes
Do you, I know some people would mark in the back of a mystery a little mark to know that they had already read it.
00:49:40 Cathy Sadler
That was actually, they didn't realize that they could tell from the card number in the front if they'd already read it.
00:49:46 Lisa Hayes
They had already read it there.
00:49:48 Cathy Sadler
Yes, there were a lot of people who did that, and they each had their own little symbol.
00:49:54 Lisa Hayes
Well, did you make, you must have made a lot of friends working here?
00:49:57 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:49:54 Lisa Hayes
It sounds like you have really fond memories of your time here, yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time.
00:50:06 Cathy Sadler
Working with the board. Challenge. Yeah, it depended on what mood they're in. You know? And then we had the old leak and the old old leak and the new old leak.
00:50:19 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, where?
00:50:20 Cathy Sadler
Oh, you know.
00:50:20 Lisa Hayes
Where was? Where did we have leaks?
00:50:22 Cathy Sadler
The windows in the reading room, especially the front, lower the, the top of the two southern windows.
00:50:32 Lisa Hayes
Where would it come in? At the top or the bottom? At the top? And what, destroyed their plaster?
00:50:33 Cathy Sadler
At the top. And drip down the, yeah.
0:50:38 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh. Did it damage books?
00:50:41 Cathy Sadler
No, no. The only time we ever had books other than in a home. The only time we ever had books damaged by water was in the hurricanes.
00:50:50 Lisa Hayes
So yeah.
00:50:51 Cathy Sadler
And the in Hurricane Hugo, the roof hatch blew off, and the books directly under it just happened to be theology, got wet. Just that books in the one section.
00:51:05 Lisa Hayes
Is that the skylight kind of a thing? Was that whole thing on?
00:51:07 Cathy Sadler
It's helpful to get on the roof.
00:51:08 Lisa Hayes
But oh, so not.
00:51:11 Cathy Sadler
It's in the balcony.
00:51:11 Lisa Hayes
Oh, oh, oh. Upstairs on the, OK.
00:51:12 Cathy Sadler
Upstairs in the balcony here.
00:51:15 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, that's that's still the theology section.
00:51:16 Cathy Sadler
Where the ladder is.
00:51:19 Lisa Hayes
That's right. So we lost that, that collection there.
00:51:21 Cathy Sadler
Well, not the whole collection, but that section, yeah.
00:51:24 Lisa Hayes
Some of those books. Were you part of, did you stay for Hugo? Yeah, I think Janice said you took your family. You brought your family here.
00:51:33 Cathy Sadler
I brought my family here later on for another hurricane. But because we stayed in the new building I was not in the building for Hugo. I was on Green Hill with my sisters, but we stayed and I came in the next morning and wrote checks.
00:51:54 Lisa Hayes
What do you mean you had to, you just kept payroll?
00:51:57 Cathy Sadler
Paychecks and everything to do so.I went every room. We didn't have any power, but I could write checks.
00:52:02 Lisa Hayes
You didn't let it stop you. Did you worry about mold when the power was out for so long after that?
00:52:11 Cathy Sadler
The things that have already been sitting around here for, since 1814 with no humidity control so. What difference did it make, right?
00:52:26 Lisa Hayes
Well, is there? Are there any other things that you would like to share about your time or your impressions of the library society? You know so much.
00:52:40 Cathy Sadler
What I liked was meeting people. And it wasn't very good for production, probably. We were all in the area by the staircase. That's where our desks were. So some people think all we did was read because we're reading book reviews. But I would go up to the, excuse me. When somebody came in, I would try to go up to the desk and ask whoever was up there, what they thought of this book so people would realize this book reviews we were doing. But you heard all the questions. And so if somebody was helping a researcher particularly, and you knew something about the subject, you could go up afterwards and tell the the other librarian that.
00:53:46 Lisa Hayes
So that she could share it with her researchers?
00:53:47 Cathy Sadler
So she yes, there's a lot of that. And then there were members who would come in and say, “I want the next 10 mysteries.”
00:54:01 Lisa Hayes
And you would get, you would help them get that.
00:54:03 Cathy Sadler
When you just go to the next ten mysteries from the last one she had.
00:54:07 Lisa Hayes
Was it self-serve? Or did you go retrieve them from the shelf?
00:54:10 Cathy Sadler
Well, people would call in. And want the next ones on the shelf. Didn't matter who, they were by, yeah. OK. So that was, that was interesting, yeah. I have, I have wondered though, and I haven't checked it. When you, you, because you changed the cataloging on the fiction. You don't have the cutter system anymore, you just have it alphabetically, but what do you do with Ellis and Elizabeth Peters?
00:54:50 Lisa Hayes
We do still have the cutter system? I think for a while after you left, they attempted. This is before my time. But they did attempt to start using the Library of Congress classification system.
00:55:01 Cathy Sadler
Oh yes, they did and it didn't want to work. It wasn't worth it.
00:55:06 Lisa Hayes
So we do still use the Cutter system.
00:55:08 Cathy Sadler
But I'm talking about the, the last name part.
00:55:11 Lisa Hayes
Oh.
00:55:11 Cathy Sadler
The last name Cutter.
00:55:13 Lisa Hayes
Well, tell me what, what's your question?
00:55:14 Cathy Sadler
The, in the fiction you now use the last name of the author, but what do you do about people like Ellis and Elizabeth Peters? Because they have the same last name and the beginning of the first name.
00:55:27 Lisa Hayes
So we put like we would put Ellis all the same first name, I don't know.
00:55:32 Cathy Sadler
I mean cause Ellis is yeah, ELLIS.
00:55:32 Lisa Hayes
I don't know. I guess we just have their two sections being distinct. I don't, I don't really know.
00:55:42 Cathy Sadler
I know you've got some of them labeled by the detectives.
00:55:45 Lisa Hayes
By the series, I don't know.
00:55:46 Cathy Sadler
Yeah, but.
00:55:50 Lisa Hayes
Two authors with the same name, I guess. It would be hard. Well, I'm so glad that you came in today and did this because I, I really enjoyed talking to you to do it and I did.
00:56:00 Cathy Sadler
I’m glad to do it. I don't know whether we've ever here at all. Let's do this. We used to throw Christmas parties too.
00:56:20 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Tell us about it.
00:56:21 Cathy Sadler
For the staff.
00:56:21 Lisa Hayes
Christmas parties.
00:56:25 Cathy Sadler
Well, sometimes we went out to eat for dinner and sometimes we had it here. And we did things, we didn't exchange presents normally. But we did. I made a pie once. With streamers that pulled out a little little gift, yeah. Let's see. Oh, we used to give sherry to the board all the time. That was from, from Doctor Joe Waring, he used to give us a bottle of sherry every Christmas. And that used to be served to the board until we had some who had to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, so we had to stop serving the-- oh, government documents.
00:57:16 Lisa Hayes
Oh no.
00:57:20 Cathy Sadler
When I first came, all of East basement was dug deep with documents shelved 3 thick. Because nobody ever used them. So we had to pull them out, I, we had to pull them out, box them up, bring them over downstairs here. Then rearrange them all by number, then contact, um, I think it's the Citadel and forgot who else, other other depositories in the area? And see if any of them wanted them, which of course they didn't because they're crumbling leather bindings, before we could get rid of them. Yeah, yeah. I think that's probably, yeah. Except for the annual reports. We used to do ourselves. And take them, copy them, staple them together. Fold them, put them in envelopes and you, we had an assembly line for that.
00:58:44 Lisa Hayes
You would give those to just the board members. Or did those?
00:58:46 Cathy Sadler
No, that went out to the whole membership of the members.
00:58:47 Lisa Hayes
Was it is it kind of like our what we do in the newsletter now? The reader? No? More elaborate?
00:58:53 Cathy Sadler
No, it was a full financial report for the year and gifts from members. You can look back and see them, but it was, we had the financial report. We had my report, which was what had happened during the year. And we had gifts with it.
00:59:21 Lisa Hayes
So, learn, you could learn a lot about the library’s history during your time by looking at those annual reports. All right. Well, well, thank you.
00:59:30 Cathy Sadler
And I learned a lot about it because I went through the old minute books. And made notes of when we got various things.
00:59:39 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, I've seen those notes.
00:59:42 Cathy Sadler
So that was even more in depth.
00:59:46 Lisa Hayes
Yeah. When did, so, you went through what we call Ms. 29. When did you do that? For a lot of, was that your tenure that you were doing that? I mean, your, when you were a younger person doing that or did you do that when you were older?
00:59:59 Cathy Sadler
I did that when I was, right before I finished college I did that.
01:00:06 Lisa Hayes
When you were working...
01:00:07 Cathy Sadler
Not when it, that's not when I went through them. I went through them later on, any time I had time.
01:00:11 Lisa Hayes
You read, you read those? Those are interesting aren't they? Learning about the library’s old history?
01:00:16 Cathy Sadler
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:00:17 Lisa Hayes
Old history. Well, I think.
01:00:19 Cathy Sadler
And the gentleman that tried to throw the desk out of the window. Threw the half of the desk out of the window. That was the other one that got blacklisted, yeah.
01:00:27 Lisa Hayes
Oh, is that right?
01:00:30 Cathy Sadler
That was in the brick building.
01:00:32 Lisa Hayes
Well, Debbie, Debbie Fenn, our current curator and historian, she is going through those same books and and transcribing them so that they'll be available to, to people down the road.
01:00:42 Cathy Sadler
Good, yes.
01:00:45 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, well, it's a lot.
01:00:47 Cathy Sadler
I did not transcribe them. I was thinking more in terms of indexing them.
01:00:52 Lisa Hayes
Sure, capturing the highlights.
01:00:53 Cathy Sadler
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:57 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah, all of it's built on what people before had done. So this interview, I think you know, in 100 years, maybe somebody will be writing a history of the library society in the 20th century and they'll they can listen to to you sharing, sharing your, about your time.
01:01:11 Cathy Sadler
Well, we had Mr. Raven come in and do a whole book on the library. Based on the booksellers and the revolution.
01:01:22 Lisa Hayes
Right. Do you remember working with him? He's a delightful person, yeah.
01:01:24 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, he could walk along the shelves and pick out the books that they had sent us from the binding.
01:01:31 Lisa Hayes
Oh, from the binding.
01:01:34 Cathy Sadler
Well, so that's cool, yes.
01:01:37 Lisa Hayes
All right. Well, thank you, Cathy. Really nice talking to you.
01:01:39 Cathy Sadler
Well, thank you. Talking with you. Thank you.
I'm not.
00:00:06 Lisa Hayes
Me either. It'll just be fun. So my name is Lisa Hayes. I'm the special collections librarian at the library, Charleston Library Society. It is Monday, May 1st, and I am delighted to be here in the conference room with Cathy Sadler, who is here today to give us an oral history about her time here at the Library Society and growing up in Charleston. Cathy was the head librarian here from 1971 until 2008. Is that right?
00:00:42 Cathy Sadler
I was the assistant librarian until, from ‘71 to ‘78, and then head librarian from January of ‘79.
00:00:52 Lisa Hayes
Oh, that's a very long time. So she has a lot--
00:00:55 Cathy Sadler
And a student assistant.
00:00:57 Lisa Hayes
Before that, when you were in college, that's right.
00:00:58 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:00:59 Lisa Hayes
So she has a lot that we're going to be able to learn, learn from her. So thank you for, for being here. So. So let's see. So you were born in 1949. And I know you didn't, you weren't born here in Charleston, but it, it sounds like you grew up right across the street from us. Can you tell us about that?
00:01:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, I was. I was back here by the time I was 2. And we lived on Orange Street with my grandparents for a couple of years, and then we lived on 5 Gateway Walk, which is right across the street. So yes, and then I, we moved to Tradd Street after that.
00:01:35 Lisa Hayes
After that. So when you were a student assistant, where were you living? On Tradd Street?
00:01:36 Cathy Sadler
On Tradd Street.
00:01:41 Lisa Hayes
Well, so I know the Gateway Walk right now. We walk through there often to get to, during lunch to get to the Unitarian Church. Tell us about what that was like? What, what was Charleston like when you were living there, and also on Tradd Street? So much different than it is now, I guess.
00:01:58 Cathy Sadler
Yes, it was much more of a small town feel. James Island, Johns Island were the country, and people went there for the summer and didn't come back and forth. When I was on the Gateway Walk, I went to Miss McGinnis’ first grade, which was on Chalmers and walked through the Gateway Walk that way to school. And then I walked through the churchyard to get to Memminger regularly. We, once we found a rabbit at the Gibbes, in the yard. Pat Rabbit, that we took home. We found out he liked to drink Coca-Cola and he liked to nibble on books. And then we had at one point we had two monkeys living next to, chimpanzees and monkeys, living next door to us at 4 Gateway Walk.
00:03:02 Lisa Hayes
Those were someone’s pets?
00:03:02 Cathy Sadler
So, yes, they were studying animals.
00:03:03 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh.
00:03:06 Cathy Sadler
It was a scientist and they were studying animals and found that chimpanzees have to wear clothes inside because they can't be potty trained. And spider monkeys like to climb up your window.
00:03:19 Lisa Hayes
So, well, so you have three siblings and you're, you're the oldest.
00:03:23 Cathy Sadler
Yes.
00:03:24 Lisa Hayes
Well, did you all grow up with a lot of books in your home? Did you love to read?
00:03:27 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, yes, I was a bookworm all my life. And I loved to read. The others didn't read that much. My brothers were dyslexic. So they had trouble reading. But my mother read to us regularly.
00:03:51 Lisa Hayes
And, and so you joined the Library Society when you were a child, is that right?
00:03:54 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, I had a child's membership on my grandfather’s card.
00:03:55 Lisa Hayes
Oh, who was your grandfather?
00:04:02 Cathy Sadler
Harold Allen Mouzon was my grandmother, my grandfather, and he was on the Board of Finance and the Book Committee. So yes, yes. And he used to come to see his lawyer downtown. He used to come in every Wednesday and sit and read for a while and we would come over when Daddy got home from work and get him and take him back to the house for drinks and then he would go to the Old Bats and play poker.
00:04:52 Lisa Hayes
What is the Old Bats?
00:04:53 Cathy Sadler
What is its proper name? It's an artillery organization, supposedly an artillery organization, but it's really a poker club.
00:04:53 Lisa Hayes
Did they meet in someone's home to play poker?
00:04:54 Cathy Sadler
They meet. Yes, I think they usually change around, but I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but they play poker every Wednesday and I think it's still going. I know Mr. Ripley was a member.
00:05:09 Lisa Hayes
So your grandfather was a member. Was your dad also a member.
00:05:12 Cathy Sadler
No, he was not. He was not. He was a civil engineer at the ports authority.
00:05:18 Lisa Hayes
And what about your mom? What did she do?
00:05:20 Cathy Sadler
She was a homemaker. She worked for a while at Delta before she was married, and then she volunteered at the Preservation Society store for years before she died.
00:05:39 Lisa Hayes
So you, so your grandfather was on the board here and you all were members. Did you come here like once a week when you were a kid, or more, more than that?
00:05:45 Cathy Sadler
Well, it came probably more than. Yes, this was our library. This was our Public Library. I don't think I ever went to the Public Library until it moved to King Street.
00:05:58 Lisa Hayes
Well, so we have the picture that you mentioned in the reading room right now that shows you and your sister and Julia Logan and Garden Frampton is looking like she's reading a story to you or about to read to you.
00:06:10 Cathy Sadler
She was an assistant, student assistant at the time.
00:06:14 Lisa Hayes
So what were some of the things that you would do when you were here at the library? Did you go, I know there wasn't that there wasn't a rabbit hole, but where would you sit and read?
00:06:25 Cathy Sadler
It was on the main floor right next to where the desk is, the circulation desk used to be. It was just that one little area. A table and two rows of shelves for books, yeah.
00:06:41 Lisa Hayes
So the kids section was really small it sounds like?
00:06:43 Cathy Sadler
Very small.
00:06:44 Lisa Hayes
And do you remember some of the librarians at that time? Who was the?
00:06:49 Cathy Sadler
Miss Haigh and Miss Rugheimer.
00:06:50 Lisa Hayes
So Garden Frampton's mom was the, was the librarian. And then.
00:06:54 Cathy Sadler
She was assistant librarian and Miss Rugheimer and Miss Sheetz was here as well. I did not know her that well. We, Margaret now used to make loom woven potholders for the librarians for their tea breaks.
00:07:15 Lisa Hayes
Did the library close during the day for any amount of time or?
00:07:20 Cathy Sadler
No, it was open 9:30 to 6:00. They did have an hour and 1/2 lunch breaks, because the librarians went home for lunch, as did a lot of lawyers and people at that time. The library was open until 6, yes.
00:07:34 Lisa Hayes
But the library was open. What about on the weekend? Do you remember?
00:07:40 Cathy Sadler
It was open till 6:00 on Saturday. Not open on Sunday, was never open on Sunday.
00:07:46 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember any of the people from then besides the people who worked here? Any of the members that would come in, any names come to mind?
00:07:56 Cathy Sadler
At that time, I don't. I know John Ziegler used it a lot.
00:08:05 Lisa Hayes
Did you know this is, this is early. Anybody like, well, later I guess it would have been Sam Stoney, when you were older.
00:08:16 Cathy Sadler
Oh yes, Sam Stoney and Milby Burton both. And they were both deaf, so, so one of them would be in the locked section and one in the main reading room, and they would be yelling back and forth at each other. And Milby, Burton was a cusser, shall we say, that was his normal speech, but they toned it down when they were in here in deference to the ladies. But it still got pretty hot.
00:08:51 Lisa Hayes
So you started as a child, as a student assistant when you were eight.
00:08:54 Cathy Sadler
I was promised a job when I was five. I started as a student assistant in ‘67.
00:09:01 Lisa Hayes
And you were 17, is that right? 16 or 17? 16. So you were at the College of Charleston? What did you study in school?
00:09:12 Cathy Sadler
I got an AB which requires 3 years of Latin or Greek. I took the Greek. I don't remember any of it. I majored in English and minored in a bunch of different things because I was into three different catalogs. So I think officially it was French and history, but I'm not sure .
00:09:33 Lisa Hayes
Oh, wow. Well, so you worked here and then, I want to hear about that. But then you went to Florida State. Is that where you got your library degree?
00:09:40 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:09:41 Lisa Hayes
OK. And then you did, you know when you were getting your library degree, you wanted to come back here and work?
00:09:47 Cathy Sadler
I do. I would like to at some point and but she's had been letting me catalog before I went. So I knew I was going to be a librarian when I was in college. I did interview one other place that was on the border of Alabama and Georgia for a children's librarian and county system, but I would have had to buy a car. It was miles from any place, I think Atlanta was the nearest city. And it was like 2 hours drive or three hours drive or something. And I could work here and use my grandmother's car.
00:10:36 Lisa Hayes
And live downtown?
00:10:37 Cathy Sadler
And live downtown.
00:10:37 Lisa Hayes
You can't beat that.
00:10:40 Cathy Sadler
So, and walk to work all the time.
00:10:44 Lisa Hayes
So let's go back to when you worked here, when you were a student assistant. What were some of the duties that you had then?
00:10:50 Cathy Sadler
We reshelved books. We did the circulation. We, I cataloged maps and manuscripts because they knew what I was going to do. That wasn't the normal thing. We marked and shellacked books. Had to shellack them to keep cockroaches from eating the covers. We served at the annual meeting. When I first came, it was downstairs in the Barnwell annex.
00:11:27 Lisa Hayes
That's what the bindery is today.
00:11:32 Cathy Sadler
And we carried trays of sandwiches, some things around. The members made a lot of food. And the librarians always made, made cucumber sandwiches and shrimp sandwiches.
00:11:48 Lisa Hayes
It wasn't catered by Hamby’s.
00:11:49 Cathy Sadler
It was not catered. No, it was not catered and we all, we made the punch. So yeah, it was put on by the library staff and a few members.
00:12:01 Lisa Hayes
So that was when you were a student. So tell us about, gosh, so you got to work on the manuscripts. Were the, were those, were, do you feel like some of the manuscripts you got to catalog had not been seen by anyone in 100 years?
00:12:16 Cathy Sadler
I think they had been seen, but they were disorganized. And you might have noticed that the letters of some people are broken up into their correspondence. That was because we, they were not copied at the time. They weren't all microfilm or fiche. And so we didn't want people going through everything in some of the bigger collections. So we split it up so that we could give them one folder at a time.
00:12:52 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember some of those collections now? Does anything come to mind?
00:12:56 Cathy Sadler
Francis Marion, John C. Calhoun. Lots of them.
00:13:02 Lisa Hayes
That's, I mean, that's amazing.
00:13:03 Cathy Sadler
Lots of them. The Ross Estate manuscripts.
00:13:06 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah, you worked on that.
00:13:08 Cathy Sadler
They were all part of the manuscript collection.
00:13:11 Lisa Hayes
Did, I mean you were, you were a kid. Did you know how important some of those papers were?
00:13:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, yes, yes. I learned early on, yes, but yeah.
00:13:23 Lisa Hayes
That's remarkable. So OK, so you went to college and who, who hired you when you came back from?
00:13:31 Cathy Sadler
Ms. Rugheimer
00:13:32 Lisa Hayes
So she hired you? And what did you? What was? Did you? Were you excited about coming here or did you see the library as a place, as a sort of a stepping stone to working somewhere else? Did you think you would be here for so long?
00:13:50 Cathy Sadler
Probably. I had no great desire to go any place else except England, which I did later on. I would have stayed in England, if I could have gotten a job there. But otherwise I was never tempted to leave here. I enjoyed it.
00:14:08 Lisa Hayes
Tell us what the University of Hull is. I don't know what that is.
00:14:13 Cathy Sadler
It's an English university. And I got a Bachelor of Philosophy in Victorian literature, which is a masters degree by coursework and dissertation. Because the English at the time a master's degree was just the dissertation. So I wanted to do the coursework as well because I felt like I would be cheating if I didn't.
00:14:41 Lisa Hayes
Well, you said by correspondence, what does that mean?
00:14:43 Cathy Sadler
No, not by correspondence. I did it in Hull. I was in Hull for a year.
00:14:46 Lisa Hayes
You were there. I bet that was really fun.
00:14:49 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes.
00:14:51 Lisa Hayes
And you would have stayed there if you could have?
00:14:52 Cathy Sadler
I, I loved it. Yorkshire was wonderful.
00:15:00 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, it's beautiful. Well, I'm glad you came back here. So what was one of the most, the thing that you were most afraid of when you first moved back here, as far as getting to work? Not afraid, but like what was so daunting about working here? Anything?
00:15:15 Cathy Sadler
Nothing, because I'd done it before.
00:15:16 Lisa Hayes
You were very comfortable. Did you want to change anything?
00:15:23 Cathy Sadler
We changed some things along the way. I reworked the Cutter system, for the nonfiction, particularly. Because airplanes and things have been added so we, and some things were split up in different places. So we worked to that. I checked all of the book catalogs and marked everything that was in those to go to the vault because the latest one was 1876.
00:16:02 Lisa Hayes
So let me pause. So Cathy is telling us about the Library Society’s catalog of books. So we have these going all the way back to 1750, and she's, she was able to go through and, and I've seen these cards, so she marked on the cards in the card catalog or in the shelf list when a book first appeared in a catalog. So a book from 1790, she will have written on the card “first appears in the 1806 catalog,” something like that. So, sorry, go on.
00:16:33 Cathy Sadler
And these were book catalogs, not card files.
00:16:38 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah.
00:16:39 Cathy Sadler
So they were published as books.
00:16:42 Lisa Hayes
So you pulled things that were on the shelves and, and put them in the rolls.
00:16:44 Cathy Sadler
Yes. Among them a copy of The Rights of Man from the 1700s, which had a card and pocket in it and circulated. Oh wow, yeah. So we moved all of the early books to East Basement at the time because we didn't have room to move them to the vault. When we got the new building we moved those to the vault.
00:17:12 Lisa Hayes
So was that under, is that where like, under where Janice's desk is now? Is that where you kept things? And that was not the locked section, that was...
00:17:16 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes. East basement. The lock section was on the floor by Janice at the back, and that was more a reference collection with some of the genealogical books and things in it.
00:17:35 Lisa Hayes
And then the old books and the manuscripts also were.
00:17:38 Cathy Sadler
No, the manuscripts were in a manuscript case at the time. They were in a cabinet.
00:17:41 Lisa Hayes
And, and, where was that?
00:17:44 Cathy Sadler
On the ground floor in front of the ladies room with the Hinson clippings.
00:17:51 Lisa Hayes
And was that accessible to people or, or that was, yeah.
00:17:53 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes. The manuscript cabinet was locked, but the others were accessible.
00:18:00 Lisa Hayes
Did you divide, were members allowed down there and and without staff, or was there someone down, down there also?
00:18:11 Cathy Sadler
But not research members.
00:18:14 Lisa Hayes
What's the difference?
00:18:15 Cathy Sadler
And they were the two. The section with the early books was locked up, to each door on it and the individual rooms downstairs were locked up. The Hinson Room and the washroom and the staff room where the maps were, were all locked up.
00:18:33 Lisa Hayes
Uh-huh. Uh, huh. So did you have circulating books down there? Or was it just the Hinson clippings?
00:18:40 Cathy Sadler
We had circulating fiction down there. And we had periodicals down there.
00:18:47 Lisa Hayes
Ok. Was it an inviting place or was it kind of dark down there?
00:18:51 Cathy Sadler
It pretty dark down there. That, we tried to leave the lights in the, in the stacks downstairs off as much as possible to save energy. Anybody looking for old fiction, we also had plays down there too. Anybody looking at those could turn on the lights in the stacks when they were down there, but otherwise we tried to keep them turned off.
00:19:18 Lisa Hayes
Ohh lights. What were some of the other cost saving, or I guess you had some financial challenges probably at the beginning or?
00:19:33 Cathy Sadler
It wasn't too bad. We had a book budget, which was the Jockey Club income.
00:19:45 Lisa Hayes
How much was that? Do you remember?
00:19:46 Cathy Sadler
It varied. It varied. But it was always supplemented from the regular income as well. We got books from the newspaper. The review books came here. Unfortunately, we still had to buy a lot of the fiction in order to get it, because you had to order it in advance.
00:20:16 Lisa Hayes
Did you, were you in charge of acquisitions after a while?
00:20:19 Cathy Sadler
We did. Everybody did everything.
00:20:20 Lisa Hayes
Ohh everybody did OK.
00:20:22 Cathy Sadler
Everybody did everything except for Janice. She did memberships and bookkeeping with me. And she gets some. But she did reference work and all as well. But we all did acquisitions. We all read reviews. Made cards out for things we thought would be popular. Put them before the book committee. They added their things.
00:20:51 Lisa Hayes
So tell us about the book committee. Who, how big was that and how many?
00:20:55 Cathy Sadler
It was 10 to 12 people usually.
00:20:59 Lisa Hayes
Is that it?
00:20:59 Cathy Sadler
They didn't all come at the same time. They were members. And they could bring in selection, suggestions for us to buy.
00:21:10 Lisa Hayes
Did you vote on something or was it just up to your discretion?
00:21:17 Cathy Sadler
They discussed everything that we put before them. I don't think they actually voted, although in some cases they did turn things down after discussion.
00:21:27 Lisa Hayes
Do you remember what's a, what's a reason a book would have been turned down?
00:21:46 Cathy Sadler
An expensive reprint of Audubon or something that we had already in other copies. You know if it was a, reference books never went before them. Children's books never went before them. But the adult circulating books went before them.
00:22:09 Lisa Hayes
They were asked about those, right? And you said the acquisition fund varied. Did it depend on the like, how the endowment did?
00:22:20 Cathy Sadler
It was the income from the Jockey Fund.
00:22:20 Lisa Hayes
And so it varied because of the economy. Yeah, yeah. Was it? Do you, I mean, are you talking like $5000 a year or like $1000 a year?
00:22:31 Cathy Sadler
No, it's no, it was maybe $10,000 or $12,000 a year probably, but then a book only cost $5 at the beginning, you know, so. It went a long way. And we got a discount when we ordered them so.
00:22:47 Lisa Hayes
Who did you order the books from?
00:22:48 Cathy Sadler
Emory Pratt was the big one, and then when we got into large print, we ordered from Ulverscroft, which is a British large print company.
00:22:49 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, we still have some of those books, yeah. So did you weed also? What were some of the other projects that you worked on?
00:23:09 Cathy Sadler
The fiction collection had been weeded numerous times, the last time before I came. A lot of the early books have been moved downstairs, including books that had been weeded but hadn't been thrown out. So we found, next time we inventoried, we found a large number of novels downstairs that weren't in the catalog anymore. So I weeded a lot of those. I gave some of them to Nan Morrison for the English department because they had maybe five more readings of them before they fell to pieces and we finally got all of those straightened out. The nonfiction I don't think had ever been weeded. And it was very difficult to do. Because of course, we had things from the late 1800s on. We ended up moving some of those to the vault. We went through the others. I had several people look through lists of them. Nan Morrison did literature, PJ got and did the gardening books and the cookbooks. And when I left, we were trying to look up the remainder to see if they were on WorldCat nearby to see whether we thought we thought we ought to keep them or not.
00:25:05 Lisa Hayes
You look to see if the College of Charleston had a copy.
00:25:07 Cathy Sadler
Right. Yes, yeah.
00:25:07 Lisa Hayes
Yeah. OK. Well, so you brought up WorldCat, so you were here for the, not for when the the online system, not for when our...
00:25:18 Cathy Sadler
Not for online.
00:25:19 Lisa Hayes
But, but we did have computers during your time.
00:25:21 Cathy Sadler
We had computers. We were using computers for the bookkeeping. And we had, the order lists and all on the computer, yes.
00:25:31 Lisa Hayes
You could order them eventually through the computer. Did that make things easier I suppose, or did you feel like it was unnecessary?
00:25:45 Cathy Sadler
When I started, we started with floppy disks. For example, one of the board members wanted to put the manuscripts on to digitize them. I did not feel that was the time to do it because I knew there were lots of changes that were going to come up. And you're going to have to redo it every single time. They ended up being microfiched by the Historical Society, although some of them are unreadable.
00:26:26 Lisa Hayes
So what year, when did the microfilming project take place? I know we did this.
00:26:30 Cathy Sadler
Well, the filming of the newspaper started before I started.
00:26:33 Lisa Hayes
OK.
00:26:35 Cathy Sadler
And we continued that. We were working on the 1800s. Sending those off to be filmed. We had to collate them. Fill in blanks, all that stuff, you know.
00:26:53 Lisa Hayes
And filling, filling in blanks, you would request a copy from someone, from another...
00:26:57 Cathy Sadler
Well, we didn't actually. Miss Rugheimer had requested copies from people for their early papers. When we got to the later ones, we had double copies of some of them because the College of Charleston had given us some. And so we had to go through both volumes and insert missing pages and that kind of thing. So we usually ended up with full copies. But the American Antiquarian Society filmed those. And they filled in the gaps if there were any.
00:27:29 Lisa Hayes
OK. Would you send off like a volume at a time or would you, were you sending off a whole bunch?
00:27:35 Cathy Sadler
They had to go off by truck because they had to be insured, yeah.
00:27:36 Lisa Hayes
A whole bunch of volumes.
00:27:38 Cathy Sadler
And so it was like 10 or 15 at a time of the bound volumes.
00:27:46 Lisa Hayes
Did you feel like that was a, I know that people have said that having those newspapers in their college, you know, all over the world has made such a difference to their scholarship. Did you know at the time that you were being able to provide that kind of access?
00:28:01 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, we did, because we had research, researchers come in one, one summer we had three men working on the same newspaper time period and we would load the newspaper bound newspapers onto a book truck and roll them up to the table. They all sit at the same table and they would use them as they needed them. It worked out very nicely.
00:28:31 Lisa Hayes
And then when it was microfilm, did you ask people to use the microfilm? Or, yeah.
00:28:34 Cathy Sadler
Yes, once you were on film the originals were not in use anymore.
00:28:39 Lisa Hayes
And did you, were you here when that really big old microfilm machine was being used? Or did that predate you?
00:28:48 Cathy Sadler
The one that magnified?
00:28:49 Lisa Hayes
Yes, yes.
00:28:50 Cathy Sadler
There were two of them and they were wonderful because they magnified yes. They were great. They were downstairs below Janice.
00:28:58 Lisa Hayes
OK, there's still...
00:28:59 Cathy Sadler
One of them was by the safe and one of them was on the other side by the dumb waiter.
00:29:02 Lisa Hayes
We still have one of those, and we should try and try and hook it up and use it one time.
00:29:03 Cathy Sadler
They're wonderful.
00:29:09 Lisa Hayes
Just for fun.
00:29:13 Cathy Sadler
You could get seasick reading them, but that was true of all microfilm.
00:29:19 Lisa Hayes
Make your eyes go crazy. So let's see. Why, would you tell us about the, without naming names, the theft of the Audubons? Is that something you would like to talk about?
00:29:38 Cathy Sadler
They were in the green top table downstairs. And it was very difficult to get the drawers open. So people weren't just, you know, that's where we put the shellacked books. There were fifteen of them that have already been redone. And they were in the Ross Room. Fifteen were not stolen, yeah. We had a security system at the time but it was on the doors. It was not a motion detector. And one of the members, he found out they were in there. He was going through things he shouldn't have been going through and pulled the drawers open.
00:30:34 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:38 Cathy Sadler
And said something to the student assistants who were down there. Excuse me. We don't know exactly what he did because he has to have had a truck to carry them in, but he stayed behind in the building, hid in the stacks somewhere. And walked out with them.
00:31:00 Lisa Hayes
And did that set the alarm off when he went through the door? Do you remember?
00:31:10 Cathy Sadler
No, that one did not have, didn't have an interior alarm on it. It wasn't dead bolted so it, it would unlock from inside, which we had to have for emergencies. And so he walked out with them. We would have found them anyway because he started bragging about having them. But the student assistants we, Miss Rugheimer went downstairs about a week later to send some more off to be worked on. And they weren't there. And the students said about it. And so we found them. So he was, I think there was one person right after the Civil War, but he was basically the first person to be blacklisted from the library.
00:32:07 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Was he trying to sell them or was he just having wanted them for himself?
00:32:11 Cathy Sadler
He intended to sell them. He had not sold any so far, but he intended to sell them.
00:32:20 Lisa Hayes
So the, so he returned them and...
00:32:21 Cathy Sadler
And they were returned. They sat in a bank vault underground vault for years after that in wooden crates. That were screwed and strapped. And I had to go once a year, and they had to be pulled out on the floor because they didn't have a table big enough for them. They had to be pulled out on the floor and I had to go through them all one at a time because he couldn't unstrap two of them at the same time, so it was very very time consuming. And there were two other complete sets in town. So at that point, we decided to sell them in order to pay for humidity control for the preservation of the rest of the collection.
00:33:16 Lisa Hayes
Well, that makes sense. So we sold the, sold the Audubons and and we're able to...
00:33:24 Cathy Sadler
Only the birds, not the quadrupeds.
00:33:25 Lisa Hayes
And we still have those quadrupeds and they are lovely, lovely books.
00:33:28 Cathy Sadler
Yes, you still have the quadrupeds.
00:33:32 Lisa Hayes
Well, thank you for that. I, I didn't know all those details. How about? Let's see. The Aiken Garden Club collection. Do you remember receiving that collection?
00:33:46 Cathy Sadler
It was received before I came. And it was a permanent loan. By the time I came it had been cataloged and it was shelved in the Ross Room as a separate collection. And it had had book plates put into all the volumes. Long after Ms. Rugheimer had retired they came in one time to see the collection. Well, we had added books to it since that time, because it was a garden collection, so we just added some of our own collection. Then we got a letter saying they wanted it back, so we wrote to them and we said could you send us a list of the books that you gave us, which they did. We pulled those books out and we, we moved the book plates out of everything else that wasn't actually part of their collection, and we separated them. The end result was that they got a new president and they had no place to store the books in temperature controls. And they wanted to put it in the library in Aiken, and nobody in Aiken would take it. So we finally got it given to us.
00:35:47 Lisa Hayes
Well, that's great because I...
00:35:47 Cathy Sadler
But that's the story of Aiken Garden Collection.
00:35:49 Lisa Hayes
The story it did include, I know it includes books dating back to the 1500s. It's a, it's a neat collection of books, yeah. Well, tell us about when the library purchased the newest building, 160.
00:36:04 Cathy Sadler
Well, it was a wreck. It was, the front of the building.
00:36:06 Lisa Hayes
What was that process like?
00:36:10 Cathy Sadler
It was the front of the building and the property was foreclosed on. One of our board members heard about it.
00:36:21 Lisa Hayes
This was 1995, right?
00:36:23 Cathy Sadler
And went and purchased it. We already owned the Barnwell Annex. And this was right next door to us. So they purchased it.
00:36:36 Lisa Hayes
For the library or?
00:36:39 Cathy Sadler
For the library. Kitty Ravenel had died and left her estate to the library. We used the money from her estate to build that building.
00:36:54 Lisa Hayes
With the vaults and some staff space?
00:36:56 Cathy Sadler
With the vaults and the normal shelving, compact shelving and two offices and the children's collection was over there at one point, and downstairs was to be a meeting room in the front where the bookstore is now and the vault in the back and we moved the Hinson collection, the bound periodicals, East Basement, to the vaults.
00:37:28 Lisa Hayes
OK, I always wonder why the East basement is called that because it's not right now the East basement, but that's because it's the old location that's in the name. OK, that makes sense.
00:37:39 Cathy Sadler
Yes. Yeah. Periodicals were on the other side on that level.
00:37:48 Lisa Hayes
Did you enjoy working with the board? Was the, did you feel like the board was for the most part, pretty easy to work with for the librarians?
00:37:57 Cathy Sadler
We did not attend board meetings. Miss Rugheimer did under Mr. Gibbes. I was never invited to attend a meeting except when they were discussing the tea craft for our retirement. I was allowed to, I was invited to go to that one. That's the only board meeting I ever went to.
00:38:20 Lisa Hayes
Did they? Did you?
00:38:21 Cathy Sadler
I presented a report, a quarterly report to them. I don't know. We stayed away from the boardroom, while they're having meetings.
00:38:35 Lisa Hayes
Well, so let's see, what about, are there the ghost of Mr. Hinson? Can you tell us any stories about Mr. Hinson's ghost?
00:38:40 Cathy Sadler
Yes, I've seen him. I've seen him. Yes. He, he didn't like the humidity control, though he hasn't been around since then. Janice and I both saw him at different times. Mr. Hinson had left his historical collection, including novels, but basically the Civil War to the library.
00:39:07 Lisa Hayes
In, in, in 1919.
00:39:08 Cathy Sadler
And it was in the room above the boiler room. Which is down, it's now the rabbit hole.
00:39:17 Lisa Hayes
Ok, the rabbit hole.
00:39:22 Cathy Sadler
He also left his clipping file, which we had added to over the years, and there were four or five file cabinets worth of clippings. And there's also a portrait of him. And every now and then, people would hear books shifting in the Hinson Room. And footsteps. Including some of the student assistants. I mean, some were really scared by it. I saw him standing in front of his clipping file. In a frock coat and top hat, looking into the files.
00:40:09 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh. Where, where were those cabinets? Were those in that room?
00:40:12 Cathy Sadler
Those were in front of the ladies room.
00:40:14 Lisa Hayes
OK.
00:40:18 Cathy Sadler
On the same level, but not yeah. And I saw him early in the morning when I came, I was the first one in one morning. And so I'm there.
00:40:26 Lisa Hayes
Oh, my goodness. Were you scared or was it?
00:40:27 Cathy Sadler
No, I knew who he was right away. I don't know how, but I did, you know? I mean just.
00:40:34 Lisa Hayes
He was seeing and seeing what had happened to his clipping files.
00:40:34 Cathy Sadler
That’s Mr. Hinson. He was using them for research And then we had a, we had a janitor early on. William McCall. And William used to climb around on the outside of the big windows, washing them from the ledge on the, on the main building, yes, yes. The main reading room and the windows opened at the time. When I first came the windows were in use. And he would, if it started raining, he would jump up on top of the bookshelves to close the windows because he was little...
00:41:21 Lisa Hayes
So yeah, well, I've heard that someone else I spoke with said the air conditioning in the library society was really good in the summer, that they would come in here to cool off specifically because we had good, good AC.
00:41:34 Cathy Sadler
That was not until the 70s. Before that, there was no air conditioning in the building at all. And it was rather interesting because we had maybe 400, 450 members. Adult members. But a lot of Charlestonians left for the summer went to the mountains or the beaches, of the islands. And so in the summer time, we did projects. We leave two people upstairs and everybody else would go in the basement or something and do projects.
00:42:15 Lisa Hayes
Because it was so cool.
00:42:16 Cathy Sadler
Because it was so quiet, yes.
00:42:20 Lisa Hayes
Well, times have changed. I guess we still, the summer is still our quiet time now with programming and, and that kind of thing. Well, tell us what you think about the library. I know it's changed a lot. What are some of the biggest changes?
00:42:31 Cathy Sadler
I have not been involved in that. I mean, I've just come in to check out books. You've added all the programming, although at the end of my tenure we had a former student assistant who was hired to do programming. But it wasn't allowed to be advertised outside of the membership. So it didn't draw in any new members. Basically, you know, wasn't, and it was maybe once a month in the winter.
00:43:10 Lisa Hayes
Was it with like you would invite an author to come present?
00:43:14 Cathy Sadler
And that was it. The annual meeting there was no, well, the speaker was the president. And the librarian initially gave an oral report because members are the library. They're the society. So all Members could attend, not most of them did. But they came for the food is what they came for. The President would give his report, and then the librarian would give hers. But when Mr. Ripley took over his report was the same as like the librarian’s report.
00:43:57 Lisa Hayes
He would read.
00:43:57 Cathy Sadler
So he did. He just did the whole thing. Before that had been, John Gibbes had done it like history things. The library has report. And then they elected the new board members and then they went and ate. Some of them had already started eating. And then we still served them. We went around with the trays and refilled trays, served punch, and then after which you had to go around the reading room and look for all the glasses, people that left sitting on the shelves.
00:44:34 Lisa Hayes
Did we use the silver punch bowl during that time?
00:44:36 Cathy Sadler
Yeah. Yes, yes. And the candelabras, we used all the silver. We used the silver trays. That's what everything was served on.
00:44:45 Lisa Hayes
Were, were you here when we received, I guess, was that from the Kitty Ravenel collection? Is that the silver or the Ross family?
00:44:53 Cathy Sadler
No, the, I think some of it's from the Ross family. The candelabras were from Miss Rugheimer’s friends, they were, but and they were sharing an apartment. Miss Rugheimer originally had rented from her, and she loaned us the candelabras every year. So she left them to us when she died.
00:45:26 Lisa Hayes
So, so tell us about Miss Rugheimer. What was her, what was she like? What was her personality like?
00:45:37 Cathy Sadler
Janice will tell you she was always going, “Now do this, girls.” She was very pleasant. She could be stern. She always wore a skirt or dress. Which I did too. And she had, she had started the filming of the papers. I think she may have gotten the first typewriters. Because under Miss Fitzsimmons, all the cards were handwritten. They didn't get an electric typewriter until ‘71 because I was off at library school, and then she typed me a letter on it. Well, I learned to type on catalog cards.
00:46:37 Lisa Hayes
Oh wow.
00:46:39 Cathy Sadler
We used to put them in a wooden box that the secretary at the time had. And we would, this is why everything's on the back of the main entry. We typed the main entry when we cataloged. And then she typed all the additional cards. Which is why the accession number and the subject headings and all on the back of the main entry, because that's what she takes.
00:47:08 Lisa Hayes
She did that, yeah. And when did miss Rugheimer retire? Did she?
00:47:11 Cathy Sadler
‘79. January of ‘79, she and Miss Haigh both retired that year.
00:47:13 Lisa Hayes
And that's when you became. OK. And then you became. How, and how many Members do you think we had? Did the membership grow much?
00:47:24 Cathy Sadler
It was about 450 when I was a student. And it grew, yes. At one point we said we had 1000, but then Janice discovered that it wasn't really 1000 because they hadn't pulled the numbers for the people who died and you know, so I don't know how many it was. We had lots of research workers at that time because nothing was on film or computer.
00:47:51 Lisa Hayes
Uh-huh.
00:47:54 Cathy Sadler
People would come, so people had to come here to use them. So especially the newspapers that hadn't been filmed.
00:48:02 Lisa Hayes
Tell us any topics you remember that people were most interested in.
00:48:09 Cathy Sadler
Black goldsmiths, shipping, travel, submarines, Civil War, genealogy, of course. Craftsmen. All sorts of things.
00:48:30 Lisa Hayes
Did you, when you were helping people, did you learn about all these topics too? I guess as you were helping them find things you must.
00:48:36 Cathy Sadler
Somewhat, yes. Yes, I think you always do.
00:48:43 Lisa Hayes
Well, I know you like to read still. Tell us what you enjoy reading now that you're retiring.
00:48:47 Cathy Sadler
I like cozy mysteries and nonfiction. Social life and customs of England and Europe. Sometimes I read them on Indians, American Indians. I did go through a period I was reading Egypt and China. But things of that sort. History of different periods. But not the straight history. The social life is what I'm interested.
00:49:22 Lisa Hayes
And who you like? Cozy mysteries, who’s of one of your favorite mystery writers?
00:49:26 Cathy Sadler
Oh Dorothy Sayers. Agatha Christie, Corola Dunn. Radford. Lots of those.
00:49:34 Lisa Hayes
Do you, I know some people would mark in the back of a mystery a little mark to know that they had already read it.
00:49:40 Cathy Sadler
That was actually, they didn't realize that they could tell from the card number in the front if they'd already read it.
00:49:46 Lisa Hayes
They had already read it there.
00:49:48 Cathy Sadler
Yes, there were a lot of people who did that, and they each had their own little symbol.
00:49:54 Lisa Hayes
Well, did you make, you must have made a lot of friends working here?
00:49:57 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yeah, yeah.
00:49:54 Lisa Hayes
It sounds like you have really fond memories of your time here, yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time.
00:50:06 Cathy Sadler
Working with the board. Challenge. Yeah, it depended on what mood they're in. You know? And then we had the old leak and the old old leak and the new old leak.
00:50:19 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, where?
00:50:20 Cathy Sadler
Oh, you know.
00:50:20 Lisa Hayes
Where was? Where did we have leaks?
00:50:22 Cathy Sadler
The windows in the reading room, especially the front, lower the, the top of the two southern windows.
00:50:32 Lisa Hayes
Where would it come in? At the top or the bottom? At the top? And what, destroyed their plaster?
00:50:33 Cathy Sadler
At the top. And drip down the, yeah.
0:50:38 Lisa Hayes
Oh my gosh. Did it damage books?
00:50:41 Cathy Sadler
No, no. The only time we ever had books other than in a home. The only time we ever had books damaged by water was in the hurricanes.
00:50:50 Lisa Hayes
So yeah.
00:50:51 Cathy Sadler
And the in Hurricane Hugo, the roof hatch blew off, and the books directly under it just happened to be theology, got wet. Just that books in the one section.
00:51:05 Lisa Hayes
Is that the skylight kind of a thing? Was that whole thing on?
00:51:07 Cathy Sadler
It's helpful to get on the roof.
00:51:08 Lisa Hayes
But oh, so not.
00:51:11 Cathy Sadler
It's in the balcony.
00:51:11 Lisa Hayes
Oh, oh, oh. Upstairs on the, OK.
00:51:12 Cathy Sadler
Upstairs in the balcony here.
00:51:15 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, that's that's still the theology section.
00:51:16 Cathy Sadler
Where the ladder is.
00:51:19 Lisa Hayes
That's right. So we lost that, that collection there.
00:51:21 Cathy Sadler
Well, not the whole collection, but that section, yeah.
00:51:24 Lisa Hayes
Some of those books. Were you part of, did you stay for Hugo? Yeah, I think Janice said you took your family. You brought your family here.
00:51:33 Cathy Sadler
I brought my family here later on for another hurricane. But because we stayed in the new building I was not in the building for Hugo. I was on Green Hill with my sisters, but we stayed and I came in the next morning and wrote checks.
00:51:54 Lisa Hayes
What do you mean you had to, you just kept payroll?
00:51:57 Cathy Sadler
Paychecks and everything to do so.I went every room. We didn't have any power, but I could write checks.
00:52:02 Lisa Hayes
You didn't let it stop you. Did you worry about mold when the power was out for so long after that?
00:52:11 Cathy Sadler
The things that have already been sitting around here for, since 1814 with no humidity control so. What difference did it make, right?
00:52:26 Lisa Hayes
Well, is there? Are there any other things that you would like to share about your time or your impressions of the library society? You know so much.
00:52:40 Cathy Sadler
What I liked was meeting people. And it wasn't very good for production, probably. We were all in the area by the staircase. That's where our desks were. So some people think all we did was read because we're reading book reviews. But I would go up to the, excuse me. When somebody came in, I would try to go up to the desk and ask whoever was up there, what they thought of this book so people would realize this book reviews we were doing. But you heard all the questions. And so if somebody was helping a researcher particularly, and you knew something about the subject, you could go up afterwards and tell the the other librarian that.
00:53:46 Lisa Hayes
So that she could share it with her researchers?
00:53:47 Cathy Sadler
So she yes, there's a lot of that. And then there were members who would come in and say, “I want the next 10 mysteries.”
00:54:01 Lisa Hayes
And you would get, you would help them get that.
00:54:03 Cathy Sadler
When you just go to the next ten mysteries from the last one she had.
00:54:07 Lisa Hayes
Was it self-serve? Or did you go retrieve them from the shelf?
00:54:10 Cathy Sadler
Well, people would call in. And want the next ones on the shelf. Didn't matter who, they were by, yeah. OK. So that was, that was interesting, yeah. I have, I have wondered though, and I haven't checked it. When you, you, because you changed the cataloging on the fiction. You don't have the cutter system anymore, you just have it alphabetically, but what do you do with Ellis and Elizabeth Peters?
00:54:50 Lisa Hayes
We do still have the cutter system? I think for a while after you left, they attempted. This is before my time. But they did attempt to start using the Library of Congress classification system.
00:55:01 Cathy Sadler
Oh yes, they did and it didn't want to work. It wasn't worth it.
00:55:06 Lisa Hayes
So we do still use the Cutter system.
00:55:08 Cathy Sadler
But I'm talking about the, the last name part.
00:55:11 Lisa Hayes
Oh.
00:55:11 Cathy Sadler
The last name Cutter.
00:55:13 Lisa Hayes
Well, tell me what, what's your question?
00:55:14 Cathy Sadler
The, in the fiction you now use the last name of the author, but what do you do about people like Ellis and Elizabeth Peters? Because they have the same last name and the beginning of the first name.
00:55:27 Lisa Hayes
So we put like we would put Ellis all the same first name, I don't know.
00:55:32 Cathy Sadler
I mean cause Ellis is yeah, ELLIS.
00:55:32 Lisa Hayes
I don't know. I guess we just have their two sections being distinct. I don't, I don't really know.
00:55:42 Cathy Sadler
I know you've got some of them labeled by the detectives.
00:55:45 Lisa Hayes
By the series, I don't know.
00:55:46 Cathy Sadler
Yeah, but.
00:55:50 Lisa Hayes
Two authors with the same name, I guess. It would be hard. Well, I'm so glad that you came in today and did this because I, I really enjoyed talking to you to do it and I did.
00:56:00 Cathy Sadler
I’m glad to do it. I don't know whether we've ever here at all. Let's do this. We used to throw Christmas parties too.
00:56:20 Lisa Hayes
Oh yeah. Tell us about it.
00:56:21 Cathy Sadler
For the staff.
00:56:21 Lisa Hayes
Christmas parties.
00:56:25 Cathy Sadler
Well, sometimes we went out to eat for dinner and sometimes we had it here. And we did things, we didn't exchange presents normally. But we did. I made a pie once. With streamers that pulled out a little little gift, yeah. Let's see. Oh, we used to give sherry to the board all the time. That was from, from Doctor Joe Waring, he used to give us a bottle of sherry every Christmas. And that used to be served to the board until we had some who had to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, so we had to stop serving the-- oh, government documents.
00:57:16 Lisa Hayes
Oh no.
00:57:20 Cathy Sadler
When I first came, all of East basement was dug deep with documents shelved 3 thick. Because nobody ever used them. So we had to pull them out, I, we had to pull them out, box them up, bring them over downstairs here. Then rearrange them all by number, then contact, um, I think it's the Citadel and forgot who else, other other depositories in the area? And see if any of them wanted them, which of course they didn't because they're crumbling leather bindings, before we could get rid of them. Yeah, yeah. I think that's probably, yeah. Except for the annual reports. We used to do ourselves. And take them, copy them, staple them together. Fold them, put them in envelopes and you, we had an assembly line for that.
00:58:44 Lisa Hayes
You would give those to just the board members. Or did those?
00:58:46 Cathy Sadler
No, that went out to the whole membership of the members.
00:58:47 Lisa Hayes
Was it is it kind of like our what we do in the newsletter now? The reader? No? More elaborate?
00:58:53 Cathy Sadler
No, it was a full financial report for the year and gifts from members. You can look back and see them, but it was, we had the financial report. We had my report, which was what had happened during the year. And we had gifts with it.
00:59:21 Lisa Hayes
So, learn, you could learn a lot about the library’s history during your time by looking at those annual reports. All right. Well, well, thank you.
00:59:30 Cathy Sadler
And I learned a lot about it because I went through the old minute books. And made notes of when we got various things.
00:59:39 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, I've seen those notes.
00:59:42 Cathy Sadler
So that was even more in depth.
00:59:46 Lisa Hayes
Yeah. When did, so, you went through what we call Ms. 29. When did you do that? For a lot of, was that your tenure that you were doing that? I mean, your, when you were a younger person doing that or did you do that when you were older?
00:59:59 Cathy Sadler
I did that when I was, right before I finished college I did that.
01:00:06 Lisa Hayes
When you were working...
01:00:07 Cathy Sadler
Not when it, that's not when I went through them. I went through them later on, any time I had time.
01:00:11 Lisa Hayes
You read, you read those? Those are interesting aren't they? Learning about the library’s old history?
01:00:16 Cathy Sadler
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:00:17 Lisa Hayes
Old history. Well, I think.
01:00:19 Cathy Sadler
And the gentleman that tried to throw the desk out of the window. Threw the half of the desk out of the window. That was the other one that got blacklisted, yeah.
01:00:27 Lisa Hayes
Oh, is that right?
01:00:30 Cathy Sadler
That was in the brick building.
01:00:32 Lisa Hayes
Well, Debbie, Debbie Fenn, our current curator and historian, she is going through those same books and and transcribing them so that they'll be available to, to people down the road.
01:00:42 Cathy Sadler
Good, yes.
01:00:45 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, well, it's a lot.
01:00:47 Cathy Sadler
I did not transcribe them. I was thinking more in terms of indexing them.
01:00:52 Lisa Hayes
Sure, capturing the highlights.
01:00:53 Cathy Sadler
Yeah, yeah.
01:00:57 Lisa Hayes
Yeah, yeah, all of it's built on what people before had done. So this interview, I think you know, in 100 years, maybe somebody will be writing a history of the library society in the 20th century and they'll they can listen to to you sharing, sharing your, about your time.
01:01:11 Cathy Sadler
Well, we had Mr. Raven come in and do a whole book on the library. Based on the booksellers and the revolution.
01:01:22 Lisa Hayes
Right. Do you remember working with him? He's a delightful person, yeah.
01:01:24 Cathy Sadler
Yes, yes, he could walk along the shelves and pick out the books that they had sent us from the binding.
01:01:31 Lisa Hayes
Oh, from the binding.
01:01:34 Cathy Sadler
Well, so that's cool, yes.
01:01:37 Lisa Hayes
All right. Well, thank you, Cathy. Really nice talking to you.
01:01:39 Cathy Sadler
Well, thank you. Talking with you. Thank you.
Citation
Sadler, Cathy, “Cathy Sadler (interviewed by Lisa Hayes on May 1, 2023),” Charleston Library Society Digital Collections, accessed May 16, 2024, https://charlestonlibrarysociety.omeka.net/items/show/1313.