Mary and I roomed together for the first time at the 1988 ALA annual conference in New Orleans. I don’t remember how we connected about sharing a room – although it certainly was not via e-mail or TXT message!!! Nor was it possible to make a hotel reservation via a website. All of our communication with each other, and the hotel, was by telephone.



1988 was a year of great transition for both of us. Mary moved from Colorado School of Mines to UC Santa Barbara before ALA, and I was in the middle of moving from Clark University to the University of Washington when ALA occurred. I think that Mary was supposed to make our hotel reservations at the Place d’Armes but I never received a reservation confirmation number from her – so I called…..  Mary didn’t have a reservation number, and the Place d’Armes didn’t have a reservation for us!!!  Fortunately, there WAS room at the inn – in the converted stables on the ground floor. For years after we laughed about that room. The ceiling must have been 20 feet high, the wall behind the beds had huge arches bricked up, the windows had shutters, boards, and bars over them (looked out onto a narrow street or alley) and our swimming suits NEVER dried!!!!! Staying in the room was like living in a terrarium without sunlight!



I was absolutely going to take advantage of having Mary “all to myself” in the evenings. I arrived in New Orleans well prepared – with both sides of a college-ruled sheet of notebook paper filled with questions!! Each night, we would get ready for bed and then Mary would patiently and thoroughly answer another group of my wide-ranging questions.



The first evening Mary warned me that her sleeping mode had frightened some of her other roommates. Mary was such a quiet sleeper, never moved, light breathing, that occasionally roommates had panicked.



That fall, I attended my first WAML meeting and roomed with Mary again. One night we had a funny “OMG, you can’t believe what I found/what they’ve done/what has happened to me” session – all about starting a new job. It was invaluable! Mary had such a commonsense way of approaching work and life.



Map Librarianship has always been a guiding light. I have often suggested it to library school students who are thinking about maps as a possible career path, calling Mary “the map librarians’ map librarian.” Map Librarianship reflects who Mary was personally and professionally. Mary is between those pages, and in the pages of her topographic map cartobibliographies, – straight forward, to the point, easy to engage……  always completely documented with endnotes/footnotes and bibliographies. I have always thought that the text was Mary’s public face and all of the supporting documentation came from her innermost detail-loving cataloger’s soul.



Mary will be greatly missed…..  I think that I’m going to go look for her in the pages of a book…….





Jenny Marie Johnson

Map and Geography Librarian and

Assoc. Professor of Library Administration

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign