What Happened to Me

About the Book

What Happened to Me: My Life with Books, Research Libraries, and Performing Arts is a personal memoir, providing insight into the world of research libraries and particularly colorful librarians in the U.S. from the 1960’s through the 1990’s. It focuses largely on the author’s own experiences in leadership positions at Marlboro College, The Newberry Library, The Johns Hopkins University, The New York Public Library, and Syracuse University. Told partly as an exploration of predestination and free will, the story begins with the author’s childhood in a Christian fundamentalist environment, and goes on to recount frankly his distinctly secular coming-of-age experiences through the Navy, the arts world in New York City, the Vermont scene of the 1960’s, his many years of involvement—surprising to him—in some rarified academic and research circles, the philanthropic world of New York, and the integration in later years of personal interests in music, local community, family, and classical music and musicians.

About the Author

David H. Stam pursued a forty-year career in library administration, directing a number of academic and research libraries in the United States, notably the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library (NYPL), and the Syracuse University Libraries. He served in the U.S. Navy as a journalist with ships in the Mediterranean, the Northern Atlantic, South America, the Antarctic, and in port in Philadelphia where he was put in charge of the library of the USS Galveston. After discharge he briefly was a clerk typist at the New York Public Library and became Associate Editor of Library Publications in April 1959. In 1964, a year after his marriage to Deirdre Corcoran, he became Librarian of Marlboro College, Vermont, and taught on the faculty there. He became head of Technical Services at the Newberry Library in 1967 and Associate Director in 1969. He was Director of the Eisenhower Library at Hopkins from 1973 to 1978, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries at NYPL, and University Librarian at Syracuse University from 1986 to 1998. On retirement in 1998, he became University Librarian Emeritus and Senior Scholar in the History Department at Syracuse, where he continues an active life of scholarship and writing on Polar studies. Born in the largely Dutch community of Paterson, New Jersey, on July 11, 1935, he holds a B.A. from Wheaton College (Ill.), an M.L.S. from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University. He also attended the University of Edinburgh and City College, New York. He has published widely including his edition of An International Dictionary of Library Histories (2001) and Books on Ice: British and American Literature of Polar Exploration, with Deirdre C. Stam (1995).