Oral History Transcript - Louis Moloney - November 20, 1986
Interview with Dr. Louis Moloney
Interviewer: David Murphree
Transcriber: David Murphree
Date of Interview: November 20, 1986
Location: Dr. Moloney’s Home, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
David Murphree: This is an interview with Dr. Louis Moloney, retired university librarian at Southwest Texas State University. Dr. Moloney came to Southwest Texas State University in September of 1964 and was promoted to university librarian in June of 1965. The interview takes place in the living room of his residence in San Marcos, Texas, on the evening of November 20, 1986.
We’re here tonight with Dr. Louis Moloney. He was the university librarian from 1964 until, when did you retired, Dr. Moloney?
Louis Moloney: I was associate librarian from September 1964 until about May 1965; then on June 1, 1965, I became university librarian. Then in 1976, in September, I became director of the Learning Resources Center, which not only included the library, it also included, at that point, the AV [Audio-Visual] Center, and later on it included SLAC [Student Learning Assistance Center].
Murphree: And you were hired by whom?
Moloney: I was hired by John Flowers. Dr. Flowers was president from 1941 until August 31, 1964, when Dr. McCrocklin began.
Murphree: Before him, it was Thomas Green Harris who—
Moloney: —was first. And then the long-term one was Cecil Evans.
Murphree: For thirty-one years?
Moloney: You’ve got the dates on that?
Murphree: Right. I have—
Moloney: 1906 was, no—
Murphree: 1903–1911 [was Harris’s term], and 1911–1942 was Cecil Eugene Evans, but he is the long one—thirty-one years. And then John Flowers, he was president for a while, too.
Moloney: Those were the long-term ones. Those after that, it got short.
Murphree: Did you ever work at all or [have] any impressions of Mr. Flowers? Is it Dr. Flowers?
Moloney: Dr. Flowers, yes, he had his doctorate. I’m not sure where from, perhaps Columbia. Columbia Teacher’s College was the teacher’s college. And John Flowers was a Texan, but he was an academic dean at a teacher’s college in New Jersey, which was an elite one. It was called Montclair; that’s where IBM began, in Montclair. Montclair had the first of the library computers, really; they had a punch card system in 1935.
Murphree: Old-type computers.
Moloney: Yes, right. Watson—who was IBM—lived, I am pretty certain, in Montclair. He [Dr. Flowers] went to school in Montclair, Montclair State Teacher’s College, or rather, he was academic dean there. But he was a Texan.
Murphree: Any impressions of Flowers at that time? The general—
Moloney: Actually, I interviewed for this job about four years before—you want these details?
Murphree: Yes, that—
Moloney: Okay, we can cut them out later if we don’t like them. I applied for it about four years before, in 1960, I think, somewhere in there. Then I withdrew, and a friend of mine, who was also on the staff at A&I [Texas College of Arts & Industries], had applied too. He took it. Then when he left in 1964, and he became librarian at San Angelo, where he still is, he called me and asked me if I wanted to do it. At that moment, I was doing a dissertation for Columbia, which was “The History of the University of Texas Library.” Kingsville was rather far away, and I was working on a two-week vacation (laughs). So coming up here meant I could finish, and so I did. And I had an advance too. I became Associate Librarian, which I was not; there was no associate librarian where I was. It wasn’t any smaller than this one [Southwest Texas State University], but it was a different operation. It was going up for me. I did want to finish that dissertation; I’d gotten it that far.
Everything came together, and when this man wrote me and said, “Do you want to come up here,” I did. So I had met Flowers even before. But the impressions I have—he was pretty old then, and he was tired. He was in the church that I joined in immediately, the Methodist Church [First Methodist Church of San Marcos], and he died less than a year after he retired. He was sick.
But the two people I have impressions of, neither of which were Dr. Flowers, they were Joe Wilson and Leland Derrick, who were the academic dean and the dean of everything else; let’s do it that way. Those two were impressive men, and I am not saying anything against Dr. Flowers. But I think those two men, as Dr. Flowers got more feeble—I do not know how old he was, you can check that, but those men were strong administrators. They looked over the candidates more than Flowers did; I could tell that.
Murphree: Wasn’t it Leland Derrick that served as sort of an interim president after McCrocklin—
Moloney: He served as an interim president when Jim McCrocklin left; he served as an interim president while Jim McCrocklin served as Undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Then he served at least a year—that’s subject to checking, too—until they hired Billy Mac Jones.
Murphree: I have here the dates from the spring of 1969 until September of ’69.
Moloney: For Leland, you mean?
Murphree: Right, right, Leland Jones [Derrick]. That was—
Moloney: When did they hire Jones? I thought—
Murphree: Now, this is from Dr. Brown’s Beacon on the Hill: I have Bill Mac Jones was hired 1969 and served until 1973?
Moloney: Oh, I really thought they hired him in 1970, but that’s all right. I thought Leland; then it was because Leland served so long. Of course, McCrocklin was away a full year. He served the end of Lyndon Johnson’s term, which would have been 1968, so I think he went there very early in the year 1968. And served right around until the end of—
Murphree: So almost a full year there?
Moloney: Yes, as undersecretary. And Leland served all that time, so maybe that’s what was in my mind because I’m sure Ron [Dr. Brown, the author of Beacon on the Hill] got his dates right.
Murphree: Right, something else I’d like to ask you about that I read in Dr. Brown’s book about under Dr. Flowers’s administration that the college began changing from a teacher preparation school to, in his [Dr. Brown] exact words, “from a teacher’s college to a multi-purpose regional college.”
Moloney: They didn’t make the name change until about 1968. But the thing was in the making. The business school is getting bigger, and the biology department at this school has always been a big department, all the time I’ve known it. It’s been a big department. I don’t know what it is now, but biology would have as many professors as English—fifty-three on the instructional staff, they weren’t all professors. So that’s a strong department. Why it turned out that way? The “why’s” of university administration, are they happenstance? Henry Norris was in the biology department, he became head of the biology department, he became dean of the School of Science, [and] he became academic vice president.
Murphree: He was the one I was going to ask you about, where one of the science teachers came straight up from.
Moloney: Henry came in 1948, I think, right after the war. And he’s a Texan. He owns the family farm down there by Nixon, and he still owns it. His father is dead, but he still owns it. And Henry Norris’s name is not Henry; that’s what’s so amusing. W.E. Norris, Jr., William Elmore, I think. But I said, “Hey, how come you got called Henry?” He said, “I got a big head; that’s the reason.” You don’t know that comic strip, do you? There used to be a comic strip, and this kid with a big head was called Henry. I couldn’t remember when that comic strip ceased to be published.
Murphree: That’s one of those lost allusions, I guess.
Moloney: Well, not to us old folks. We’ve never lost it.
Murphree: The trouble is there [are] some things that I can remember that aren’t around for present-day students (the interviewer is an older student).
Moloney: So you see “Henry” in parenthesis when you see him listed because nobody knows his other names. He was strong, and it may have been a strong administrator. He came in the department when he started out and became the head; he went up the ranks all the way. I was buying his literature; he wanted it. And he made sure his people published, too. That is a strong, research-oriented department. Probably more so than the others, although I don’t know now; I know math has its pressures too that you’re published.
Murphree: Getting back to the “multi-purpose college,” it’s changing, too; I also read in Dr. Brown’s book that under James McCrocklin, it sort of finished its transition into a “multi-purpose” school. Was there any resistance at all to the move?
Moloney: Oh, that I was sensitive to, that’s what you’re really asking. I couldn’t sense it. Those things happen gradually. Two years in there, and it’s checkable, all of a sudden published in a newspaper, which I can—in one of the in-house educational things came out and said this was the tenth-largest business school in the country and also unaccredited (laughs).
Murphree: That’s what I was wondering—
Moloney: Also unaccredited. But it came as a surprise to everybody. I guess ten years ago, maybe, the business school became as large as the teacher education school. It gradually became larger, and they split it up into the various departments. Before, it was just the Department of Business. It spread out like that, but those things are gradual, and all of a sudden you’re realizing you need a name change.
It isn’t quite like issuing a degree and not issuing a degree. When it went from Normal to State College or State Teacher’s College, that was a big jump. I suppose, I didn’t live through it; maybe, it was just the same way, you know, all of a sudden, but they have to go to the Legislature and get, and I don’t know where else you go in order to be certified to issue degrees.
There wasn’t a coordinating board when I came. That was superimposed, and I’m sorry, I don’t know about when in the politics of that. I am almost certain there was no coordinating board, though not absolutely positive. I think each president went to the Legislature and fought for his own funds. They still do, mind you, but they work with a coordinating board now. They always had their regents, but the coordinating board is superimposed above the regents.
At the time I came, there was the Board of Regents for UT, the Board of Governors or whatever it’s called for A&M. Then many of the teacher’s colleges all had the same board. I don’t know what it was called then; it’s called TSUS now, Texas State University System, but there are only four schools in them. Everybody busily broke away—North Texas broke away, it said it didn’t. I guess they needed some coordination, so that’s when the coordinating board got started.
Murphree: Under Mr. McCrocklin’s time as president, I’ve read about the crisis of the “battle of the bands?”
Moloney: The “battle of the bands?” Like musical bands?
Murphree: In 1965, at Johnson’s inaugural parade, that Southwest Texas State was supposed to lead the parade and UT-Austin tried to take its place.
Moloney: I don’t know anything about it. You got to go somewhere else for that.
Murphree: It wasn’t a huge thing in the college then?
Moloney: Either that or I was asleep.
Murphree: Something about Southwest Texas State’s—
Moloney: There may have been something like that jockeying around because our Strutters went somewhere because of Johnson, he was moving them up. But I don’t know the particulars. I can tell you about size when I came here. You know down Edward Gary [a street that runs through Southwest Texas State’s campus], the school stopped at the little street that goes into the parking lot for—I don’t know the name of that street. It goes by the infirmary? You know that little street in there? [Concho Street]
Murphree: Between Butler and I think Flowers and Falls Hall.
Moloney: Well, below that there were houses. Johnson’s house, which is now the Alumni House, that was not Johnson’s house at all; he simply had a room when he went to school here. That thing was actually north by about three houses; that wasn’t its location. In other words, the town closed in past the Alumni House for a whole another block. The Student Union was where the police are now.
Murphree: Beside Retama [residence hall]?
Moloney: It’s called the Utility Center or University Service Center or something. That was the Student Union. When I came, the school had the—no, they didn’t either; the school ponds either.
Murphree: The fish hatchery?
Moloney: The fish hatchery, I couldn’t think of the name. That was still government land, and Jake Pickle took care of it. That got deeded over. So at one point where I was bringing in a librarian because we were growing then he was able to live in the house that was on the site of the—[a few seconds of verbal stumbling as Dr. Moloney tries to remember] library building.
Murphree: JC Kellam Building?
Moloney: I couldn’t think of Kellam. On the site of JC Kellam Building. They were getting ready to build; McCrocklin got that building right away. He was good about that, and he put in all the dormitories in that area between that little street [Concho Street] you said goes between. They [on the site of the dormitories that line Concho Street] were houses; he got that land bought, and he put in all those dormitories that run up to—he saw it coming. Jim could see.
Murphree: They say the university grew—
Moloney: Yes, it was probably up from, I can’t remember the numbers now, but it was probably up around 9,500 in 1969, wasn’t it? But I don’t know that for sure, but that’s easy enough to check out. He got the facilities; he got dormitories in. The dormitories [that were here are] Harris Hall and Speck up at the top of Roanoke Street.
Murphree: Were some of the students still living in boarding houses then?
Moloney: Oh, yes, they lived in them. They always have for this school.
Murphree: How about any of the other presidents. Any strong [impressions]? Some coming up to the future.
Moloney: McCrocklin was an administrator. He could see what was coming up, and he got things done, and he got money. When that presidential thing dropped in his lap, he used it to the full. If he’s running your school and you’re part of it, this is a good thing; he’s getting things for you. Billy Mac continued it; really, I didn’t know Billy. I knew McCrocklin so well. I knew his kids when they were little, although, as I recollect, his kids were so big that they were almost as big as I was when they were eight years old (laughs). But I knew Billy pretty well. He was a standard academic administrator and went from here to Memphis State, which was and is a big city school.
Murphree: How about his military influence? I heard he was a military type. A strong, staunch—
Moloney: Are you talking about Billy Mac?
Murphree: No, McCrocklin, Mr. McCrocklin.
Moloney: Oh, yes, he was always a Marine. And he wore a short haircut. The Marine haircut. Of course, I think I did too; I’ve taken a look at some of my pictures. I think I was imitating him. Even though he was four years younger than I.
Murphree: How about any of the other administrators? Did you notice the same thing about the haircut—?
Moloney: Ole Lee Smith I got to know pretty well, too, but Lee was different. Mr. Cates, who filled in after Billy Mac left for a while, Mr. Cates and I—because I reported to the academic dean, Joe Wilson until 1975, all the way through right from the beginning. But I also, in effect, had to report to the business [department] because my funding, or the library funding, was a line item appropriation from the Legislature, so I was always working hand-in-glove with the business [department]. If Cates directed me to do something, I needed to do it. Sometimes I might go to Wilson and make sure he knew that I was—but I was in effect reporting to two people, which once in a while made it a little hard. But Mr. Cates and I, he lives right over here, we really—I learned a lot from him. After all, I was a pretty freshman administrator. So I have strong impressions of Mr. Cates. And he isn’t even on now. I doubt if you even know him, do you?
Murphree: No.
Moloney: I believe he came as a business manager, but I guess he was a real dear friend.—I’m sure 1955 [when he came] to—then he did that lick as president, and he was also doing the business part, and he got sick during that period. And so he really retired kind of early; I think he was only sixty-four when he retired. He’s really not too much older than I am; I’m not sure how much, but not very much. Boy, he’d had it; his wife was sick too, and she ultimately died. So he was having a terrible time. But he got through it; he was a strong man. So I have a lot of impressions of Jack Cates.
Lee Smith, who brought in the business methods, he’d brought in MBO, management by objective and all the paraphernalia. Well, this was news. This was an academic setting, and he’s bringing in all these business things. And we’re making reports coming out of our ears; however, he’d put a business emphasis there. And since I first played tennis with him, so I had an inside track to Lee Smith. But it was a different kind of administration. All was not, you know, there were rough edges there. You know, there is contribution, I guess he was there from about 1975, and what is it? 1983 was it?
Murphree: I just got my figures from Dr. Brown’s book, and he wrote the book in ’78, I think, and it still didn’t have an end to his administration.
Moloney: If I remember correctly, it was 1983. That was quite some time; that was actually eight years, which is more than any of the others because Billy Mac was only around for four, McCrocklin was here for four. Then we have the U-turns in there, and then they had eight from Smith. But in some ways, it was a hard go there.
Murphree: How about the man who had your position before you came here, Mr. Earnest B. Jackson—
Moloney: I know that Margaret Vaverek on the reference staff [in Southwest Texas State University’s library]? She called me this morning about E.B. And she’s gathered a bunch of information, and I actually wrote an article in the Library Journal when he died. You can learn something about him from that, and I’d go get Margaret; she’s got it all together. Might as well give it to you; she’s doing it for somebody else. I did that article, and it was “The Death of a Librarian.” I would also go to one of the earlier catalogs, 1959 maybe. And he’ll be listed in there, and you can pick up his degrees. I forgot all about that; just look at his listing. Margaret was trying to get his wife’s address in Austin; she’ll have that by now, I suspect. So you’ll need to do something like that.
And I tried to say that Mr. Jackson was the old-fashioned librarian. When he began in 1926, the various kinds of tools that the library field developed didn’t really exist. He was used to doing his own catalog; having people catalog right on the typewriter. When he came in, doing it on the typewriter was new; there was still some libraries handwriting the catalog cards in 1926. And those big things like the Library of Congress—and I may be getting into stuff that’s too darn technical—the big tools that now exist so that you don’t have to do all these things yourself; you just go look them up. Most books you just go buy the card or hit the terminal, and they send them to you from Columbus, Ohio.
Murphree: I think you might feel free to share because you might have some librarians that are trying to do some research from this tape.
Moloney: Those things didn’t exist. So the cataloging that went on there was straight out by typewriter and no kind of photocopying. You just typed it out. If you wanted a second, you typed the second, but that’s the way it was in the beginning.
Murphree: Now, when you came here, wasn’t the library in Flowers Hall?
Moloney: Yes, the library was in that—what was it called? It wasn’t called Flowers Hall then. No it wasn’t; it was at the end, but not at the beginning.
Murphree: What was your impressions with the other—
Moloney: I’d been there before too, that other time I came to apply. The first thing I saw was that big mural on the LBJ side of the—which wasn’t LBJ, it was—what was the name of that street?
Murphree: Austin Street? The street name you’re trying to remember? That was Austin Street.
Moloney: There was a mural there, and the buildings and the campus looked old to me. Of course, A&I was in the flatlands, so everything was on the points of the compass. But this all has fascinated me because I always—(unintelligible)
The town I lived in, Trenton (New Jersey), was an old, old city, and the streets did the same thing they do in San Antonio and they do here; they wander around by the surface features. So I had that impression that the school was older, but, as I say, that was fine by me. I liked that, and it wasn’t big.
Murphree: Did the conditions generally get kind of intolerable in the library before the move—
Moloney: You’re talking about what happened to the library as we approached the time that we moved?
Murphree: Right, right.
Moloney: Oh dear, yes. It was far too small, and we were piling books in. We actually stored books in the old gymnasium that burned down; we had books in there when it burned down, too.
Murphree: That was terrible.
Moloney: Right, that was where the Aqua Center is now. I got wandering.
Murphree: What I’m leading up to is the move and the, the—
Moloney: Yes, let me tell you about that. I’ll only say this: it got to the point that we couldn’t shelve a book without moving the whole shelf and another one besides. There just wasn’t any space. There was no more room for shelving; there was no more room for anything. And we couldn’t get things shelved because it took so long. The things that’d go out at the beginning of the semester, we wouldn’t have them shelved at the end because we physically couldn’t. Yes, it was a—
But there was a real air of hope because we were moving into a new building, we were getting federal funds. Everything was coming our way, so we knew once we got into the new building, and the planning—it’s always good for a staff to plan a new building.
Murphree: Who initiated the new building? Was it you, or was it Jackson, or was it just a product of—
Moloney: It was McCrocklin.
Murphree: Was it McCrocklin who thought of—
Moloney: Actually, the building was not first. The building was going to be a classroom tower. And then somebody got to thinking about it, and they knew the elevators couldn’t carry it. People would be late. You put in eleven floors of classrooms; you got to get the people there on time. Theirs would never had done it.
Murphree: Even with the library, those elevators—
Moloney: Since I do it consciously, I walk when I go over there, and I did it for years while I was there. I just used the stairways; it was better for me, and quite often I beat the elevator. McCrocklin wanted the building, and thank the Lord he did. So the library was a funding possibility. See, he had to make the case, so actually it was McCrocklin who made the case for that library building.
Then he dropped off to me, and I was happy to get into the planning of the inside. And I really had a pretty free hand in planning the inside after you got sixteen corners on every floor. If you count the corners up there on those—(the telephone rings from out in the kitchen)
Pause in recording—tape turned off for about fourteen minutes
Murphree: Okay, go right ahead.
Moloney: This town then [referring to San Marcos when he first arrived here] was much like Kingsville, and the churches had a lot of influence. We always belonged, so we were—we belonged in Kingsville to the Methodist Church, and when we came up here I joined. You know, in this town, the church had a lot of influence. In Kingsville, the president of the university began his facility meetings with a prayer. Well, Jim didn’t do that.
Murphree: It must have been the Marine influence?
Moloney: No. I wouldn’t say that because it was very possible that a Marine would. It was just that we’d kind of outgrown that, but the rest of the influence was there.
I’ll tell you something else that I’m pretty sure of from the kind of research I was doing on my dissertation. I discovered that when Cecil Evans was hired, one of the persons who was asked for advice was the pastor of this First Methodist Church. He had a say in, it in other words, but that was 1911. But the church still had its influence, and here, the DAR had a strong influence. They had a DAR room in the library; now, we still have an old collection of textbooks.
Murphree: So that we might know, DAR?
Moloney: Oh, I’m sorry. Daughters of the American Revolution. The DRT, there’s a chapter in town, but they didn’t have the kind of influence DAR did. I think there’s a chapter in the town. DRT is the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. But it’s the DAR in this town, and it’s still around.
Murphree: I was reading today about Southwest Texas State being a preparation for teachers, and especially in past history, teachers were instilled with moral upstanding and moral rightness. Do you think that this was the inroad for the churches to have influence?
Moloney: No, I think the churches had the influence before—
Murphree: Before morality—
Moloney: Before, I think, the churches at a time were giving the schools some influence. What is it? It’s called in loco parentis; the school took the place of the parents, and while the kids were in school in the dormitories, the school was taking the place of their parents and leading them. Well, they’ve dropped that; they couldn’t handle it any longer. They dropped that sometime in McCrocklin’s time. I mean legally they probably had to. They certainly do now because a person’s an adult at what? Eighteen or seventeen? In a bar, he’s not, but he can get his license. I don’t know what the age is for power of attorney; I think it’s seventeen, isn’t it?
Murphree: Seventeen, eighteen I think. How about the design; anything that might stand out in your mind? You worked right with the architects, didn’t you?
Moloney: Oh, yes. The architect was the school architect then. His name was Harvey Smith; that was his father’s name, too. I’ll check that, but I’m pretty certain. I thought I’d never forget that name when I used to get mad at him. He and his father were in a firm, and they were the school architects. The board had appointed them, so they built everything. But the last building they built was the circle in the pond, the drama building; that’s the last building that that firm, Harvey Smith and Associates, but they also restored the San Jose Mission. His father probably did that; I expect he was a member of the firm. Do you know the mission in San Antonio?
Murphree: No, I’m not real familiar with—
Moloney: That’s one of the nicest restoration jobs; you think you’re in an old mission. The Alamo is too much in the center of town; that was a mission, too, you realize, but it just isn’t the same—
Murphree: You spoke about when you got mad at him; did that happen often during your planning?
Moloney: Yes, I’ll just give you an example. You’ve been up in that conference room on the eleventh floor?
Murphree: I sure have, yes.
Moloney: Have you noticed that in the big one you are looking at a counter.
Murphree: Yes, I sure have.
Moloney: And there is a door there, and there is a door on the other side?
Murphree: Right.
Moloney: On the right which isn’t a door; it’s fake.
Murphree: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Moloney: That was one of the things I got mad at Harvey about because he said that if there’s a door there, there’s got to be something matching it over there. Well, look on the roof; there’s another example of that kind of thinking. There are four towers on the roof of the Kellam Building. Two of them house the elevator machinery; two of them match the two that house the elevator machinery.
Murphree: And no purpose at all.
Moloney: They store some things in there, but they have no purpose. I got mad. I thought, “If you can’t figure something out any better than that.” And there’s matching all over that building. We wanted certain things certain ways because it made sense, but he had to balance them.
Murphree: And some of the general impressions, I think the building is a little bit criticized these days—
Moloney: The windows never bothered me except from the point of view that they are almost impossible to wash. That doesn’t bother me that somebody in one of the magazines gave it the something prize of the year, an architectural monstrosity at any rate.
Murphree: The great cheese grater in the sky?
Moloney: I didn’t know that one. What is the Texas magazine?
Murphree: Texas Monthly?
Moloney: Texas Monthly came out and gave it an _____(?). And they talked about the windows, but the windows don’t bother me. In fact, it’s a pretty good-looking building, but it is not a very functional building.
Murphree: It looks newer than a building its age.
Moloney: It isn’t very old. 1969, it started to be used then; it hasn’t been up there twenty years. I’ve been in Germany; some of the buildings they’re using are 150 years old. I’ll do it in what little I know. They talk about form should follow function; if the thing’s going to be a factory, you build it so it acts like a factory efficiently. In this one, you got it the opposite; the function was following the form. You’re going to get a door here and here, so you’ve got to work out your function to fit a door here and here. Or you get a fake door over here because—
Murphree: How about the move into the new building?
Moloney: We handled that smoothly. We got money; we were able to hire a mover. He hired a Mayflower mover from Bryan, Texas, and he’d already moved three or four libraries, so he knew what he was about. I had it laid out, so that I knew where every bit of the stuff on the shelves in the old building were and what particular shelves it was going to. And they weren’t going to put it in boxes. I put out the bid that way, and I only got one bid really. All the others wanted to put the books in boxes, and then you get them, and you’d have to arrange them again. And I thought, “This is a big waste of time.” So we got a man who owned these big ole book carts, and he just took the shelves, and some of the old ones as well on the tenth floor you’ll notice the shelves are different from the others. We had it all labeled, so when they came in there, they knew where it all went.
Murphree: Dr. Maloney, excuse me for just a minute; I need to turn the tape over here.
End Side 1, begin Side 2
Murphree: Dr. Maloney, one thing I’d like to ask you, since your time at Southwest Texas State, the concept of a library has broadened as far as—now we call it a Learning Resource Center; we have more tools there. I knew you were here when the change occurred. Could you give us some impressions?
Moloney: The change was occurring in terms of the world of information.
Murphree: When did the name change from library to Learning Resource Center occur?
Moloney: I believe 1976, in September, we officially began as the Learning Resource Center, and that’s when we took on the AV Center, which was part of the education department. They had the tapes and teaching materials.
Murphree: What was the general attitude to the name change? Did you—
Moloney: A good many of my friends on the faculty only laughed and said, I’m going to keep calling it the Library; I don’t care what Smith [the university president at that time] calls it”
Murphree: And yourself?
Moloney: Oh, I wasn’t going to war on that one, and it did have some new things. I was putting it positively to myself. But I would have been just as happy not to—let’s put it that way. But he [Lee Smith] was right; we were storing all kinds of things. When I came, I don’t think we had a microfilm in the library when I came in 1964. There were lots of microfilms out; I’d been using them at A&I, which in certain ways was a more forward-looking library when I moved from there to here. We started to store microfilms first, and then we went into the kits—the learning materials including maybe a tape. We went into movies too. You don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “kits,” and I’m trying—it’ll have a film clip, perhaps, or a filmstrip.
Murphree: Are you talking about the microfilms?
Moloney: No, I’m talking about—that’ll be one of the things. You’ll project something; you’ll have material that goes with it that you read. You may have an audio tape as well. We started to get into that business, and it would be a course in this and a course in that.
Murphree: I’m trying to think of the name of them; I’ve used them in lab myself.
Moloney: Oh, we call it software.
Murphree: Software.
Moloney: Except not computer software; this is AV software, that’s the word. I’m sorry, boy, I get away from it a year; I can get it out of my mind fast, can’t I? I thought I’d never forget (laughs). And then we put in the computers, and that was a good idea. Mears came in 19—he’s university librarian now.
Murphree: Is it Dr. Mears?
Moloney: Yes, Dr. Bill Mears. He was really good in the AV area and in computers too, so we started to buy computers in about 1978.
Murphree: As university librarian, as far as the influx of change of information systems, was it hard for you to keep up with the new technology and the—
Moloney: No, I was—I never got good at computers. I did have a word processing program that I found that I didn’t do as—my other way, which was the way I wrote over there, was to put it on a tape, [the noise in the background is Dr. Moloney’s wife coming in through the front door a few feet behind us] and the secretary would type it out, then I’d go over it again. And that’s the way I wrote, and I did an awful lot of writing.
And then when Mears and I, we switched around towards the end of 1983. My boss, who was Vice President Watson, was going to make a name change. I had a choice of taking on some more things in 1983; what was I? Since I’m going to be sixty-six in a week, I was sixty-three. And I thought, No, I don’t want to take it on, and I didn’t change my salary. So I became librarian, and Mears became director of the Learning Resources Center. Mears has always pushed those—
Murphree: Changes?
Moloney: Yes, that was his line. He’s good with computers, and I’m glad (unintelligible). But I think I lost the point there, I don’t know where there—
Murphree: Okay, I think that pretty well wraps up what we wanted to talk about. Dr. Moloney, I want to thank you for your time today; I think it’s been very interesting.
Moloney: Oh, yes. Good luck.
End of interview