April 25, 2019
The Seattle area is blessed with terrific libraries, record centers, and archival collections. The specialized staff who run these facilities are utterly crucial to their success and to the successes of their users. Tonight the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild is bestowing its highest award upon two of those specialists—Carla Rickerson and Richard Engeman.
As wonderful as local libraries and archives have been, the year 1983 marked the dawn of a particularly golden age of librarianship in the area. In that year, the University of Washington hired Richard, and it appointed Carla to the position of Pacific Northwest librarian.
That same year, I arrived at UW. Fresh from my graduate training at Berkeley, I had learned the one key lesson that all academic historians learn. While it is important to keep happy the faculty members who are supervising your work, it is even more important to develop good relationships with two groups: 1) the History department staff (who made sure you got paid; who made sure you didn’t run afoul of rules and regulations; who could obtain tolerable rooms and times for your classes; and so on); and 2) the people who staffed libraries, archives, and record centers—people who not only enabled you to do your research but also knew about materials that could enrich and redirect that research in wonderful ways.
At Berkeley, it had been hard to warm up to the Librarians. I spent a lot of time at the Bancroft Library, and at times it seemed that the staff at the illustrious institution treated me like the proverbial Barbarian at the Gate. The staff was always quite professional, but cool and distant. They never expressed interest in what I was working on; they never bothered to make me feel welcome.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up in Suzzallo Library for the first time, and encountered Carla and Richard. They were always quite professional, too, but they were also warm and encouraging. They possessed great senses of humor. They were full of good advice about my research projects. They treated me exceptionally well, and they were equally generous and helpful to the graduate and undergraduate students that I sent their way over more than three decades. Richard and Carla were as much historians themselves as they were librarians, so they always had a good sense of a researcher’s needs.
Richard Engeman worked at Special Collections from 1983 to 1998. He was assistant librarian for the Pacific Northwest collection, then the photographs and graphics librarian. He helped to teach me the value of visual materials (as opposed to documents). I got to know Richard from a different angle, too. He earned a Masters in History at UW, and I had the pleasure of supervising his work.
In 1998 Richard decided to take his talents to the Oregon Historical Society, where he served as Director of Manuscripts and Archives Collections. Some might say that Seattle’s golden age of librarianship ended then, but as I see it we in the Seattle area were just sharing our good fortune with Oregon. Richard has long had as many ties to the Beaver State as he has had to the Evergreen State.
Carla Rickerson worked in Special Collection from 1983 to 2015. A native of South Dakota (the Mount Rushmore State), Carla initially held the job of as Pacific Northwest Librarian. Then there was the moment when Allen Library was added to Suzzallo, and when the Manuscripts and University Archives were relocated and merged with the Pacific Northwest and Rare Books collections. The new Division was eventually called the Special Collections Division, & Carla was named Head.
I think Carla did a terrific job as administrator. She had more responsibilities than before; moreover, Carla was always involved with a wide variety of professional activities. Like Richard, she served librarians’ organizations, presented frequently at conferences, published numerous articles and chapters, and curated dozens of exhibits. Yet she always made time to talk to users, to answer their questions, to hear their feedback. Many times our conversations turned to the Mariners. (Unfortunately, in Seattle, the golden age of librarianship has coincided with an apparently unending Dark Age of major-league baseball.) Carla retired in 2009 but continued to work six more years part-time as a Public Services Librarian.
Richard Engeman and Carla Rickerson enriched and enlivened the community of Pacific Northwest historians, in both Washington and Oregon, for many years. Please join me in applauding their outstanding careers.