The Vatican, Civil Rights, Hyde Park, San Francisco

William Madison Randall was born 1899 in the Detroit suburb of Belleville. He graduated Central High School at age 16 but due to his young age, completed another year of post-graduate study. He went on to pursue a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in linguistics at the University of Michigan and worked in the university library helping to reclassify the book collection.

In 1924, Randall enrolled at the Hartford Theological Seminary to begin work on a Ph.D. in Islamic Philosophy, when he was invited by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to reorganize and catalog the Vatican Library. There he befriended Eugene Gabriel Tisserant: scholar, librarian and archivist of the Holy Roman Church with whom he became lifelong friends.

Tisserant served as the Vatican Librarian; was Dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals in 1951; presided over the board of presidents at Vatican Council II (1962-1965); accompanied Pope Paul VI on his major voyages to the five continents. In testimony to their friendship, Cardinal Tisserant’s archives are housed with Randall’s at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

In 1929, William Randall graduated from the Hartford Theological Seminary summa cum laude and became Associate Professor of Library Science at the University of Chicago. He authored several books on Library Science and founded Library Quarterly, a scholarly journal still published today. Twice he traveled to the Middle East on fellowships to research Arabic manuscripts. He spoke 30 languages.

During World War II, Randall was commissioned a Major in the U.S. Army Air Force, sent to Cairo, Egypt as a liaison officer for the British Air Transport Command and then to Accra to assist in the organization of the African branch of the Command. He became an intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services in 1943, reporting to the Pentagon and President Roosevelt concerning the Middle East. He spoke Arabic and stories are told that dressed as a waiter he served dinner to Erwin Rommel, the German “Desert Fox,” while gleaning intel for FDR.

In September of 1951, Randall and his first wife were involved in a car accident about ten miles outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. News of the accident spread and Randall was offered, then appointed Dean of Wilmington College. In 1954, Randall married Mary Johnson McGee, who had a son, Robert McGee, from a previous marriage.

Rob McGee had grown up in the segregated South, the world of separate and unequal, then came of age during the era of Emmitt Till’s murder; Rosa Park’s refusal to get out of her seat; the “Southern Manifesto” of Senators and congressmen declaring as unconstitutional the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision; and, in 1957, the Civil Rights Act. The world was changing and William Madison Randall, a “Renaissance Man” of rare breadth infused in Rob a global perspective, inspired him to think beyond the present, to go forward to the future.

When Rob landed in Chicago’s Hyde Park his vision was broad, his work ethic deep, he developed three successive nationally-funded state-of-the art integrated library systems (ILS). Rob served as deputy to Charles T. Payne, Systems Development Librarian, and produced the proposals, systems requirements, systems designs, technical plans, and library automation planning processes that continually advanced the state-of-the-art of library automation. The proof of concept of an integrated library system was developed by Charles Payne at the University of Chicago. Rob was present at the creation.

Hyde Park always attracts stellar talent. Howard Dillon had left OSU and become the Librarian of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University but in 1975 he joined the U of C Library as Associate Director for Public Services. Howard became part of a strategic thinking group, four librarians – including Rob and Charles Payne – and he recalls, “I remember lunch times when the four of us would head off campus to the cafeteria of one of the nearby theological seminaries for blue-sky thinking or the summer days when we gathered on benches in Harper Quadrangle to eat sack lunches and mull over our ideas and challenges.” Of note, Charles Payne’s nephew is “that skinny kid with the funny name,” former Professor of Law at the University of Chicago: Barack Hussein Obama II. But that is not my story to tell. Mine is the story of library automation and how it changed the life of Douglas Lee Woodhouse.

At the vanguard of library automation Rob McGee saw the need to educate librarians, trustees, and administrators in issues and solutions. Early in 1987 he asked me to organize, promote and manage the first RMG seminar series at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco in July. There were multiple offerings, each requiring detailed documents, copied onto different colored paper to easily identify the offerings. Still in the hard copy era and given the cost and time of shipping, I had to make, collate, staple and sort all of it after we arrived in San Francisco. I also had to manage the registration as more than 200 librarians had signed up.

The RMG Seminars became a staple of the ALA Conferences, for 31 years. At the Summer Annual conference, RMG spoke to the librarians. At the Mid-Winter, RMG’s Annual Presidents’ Seminars (The View from the Top) would invite global ILS company executives to focus on industry initiatives and trends. Rob McGee developed the topics and themes, and lead the seminars, which consistently identified trends and predicted the future of library automation. Driven to teach and to lead, Rob worked both sides of the aisle, education always the goal. On a personal note, in San Francisco, 1987, I discovered the joy of an expense account in an extraordinary food town. Rob’s trust in me was absolute.

In August, Douglas pulled into town and, on the strength of the seminar program things really picked up. Douglas began as a filing clerk and helped on word processing. He had an aptitude for technology, a moxie about business, the work load was increasing: his timing was ideal.

There was a spark between Douglas and me, and given my temperament – ready, willing and able to shovel coal – and Douglas’ unique capacity to fan the flame, our spark ignited combustion which we converted into growth. Brian, my brother, provided ballast, through his rigorously keen mind and a willingness to wrestle ideas with Douglas and me, both in the office or while throwing darts or drinking beer after work. We three formed an easy and effective team.

Rob’s value proposition was simple: if we kept up with his pace, he gave us carte blanche. He trusted Douglas, Brian and me to make the right decisions, and looking back says, “I got the good part of the deal…all that we were able to accomplish as a team, all on the fly.” His demands were intense: driven, tenacious, unyielding, unconditionally committed to access to information, libraries as a civic space, a learning opportunity. His negotiating style was to dominate the vendor on behalf of his client, even correcting, during negotiations, the grammar of vendors’ contracts. His breadth of knowledge was vast, his attention to detail a laser focus, and we three kept the operation steady, stable and growing.

To be continued…

…next week…Thos Moser in NOLA; going global; love at the threshold; life in the pits, open outcry 30-Year U.S. Treasury Bond futures…