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Chapter 9
The isolation of a prison librarian
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
“I wouldn’t have lasted a day here,” JoAnna observed more than once.
In retrospect, Wendall Wray’s inspiration notwithstanding, serving as prison librarian was not a stellar career move. In spite of my weekly trips to the State Library in Helena, it became an increasingly isolating experience. I was on my own in Deer Lodge, my only onsite mentors being the three prison inmate ‘trustees‘ who worked in the library during the fall of 1974. I never made any professional connections beyond the state library staff and was never encouraged by Alma or Dick to participate in the activities of the Montana Library Association, let alone to become a member. With my next job, 2½ years as an associate editor/editorial librarian at the Merriam-Webster serving as nothing more than a way station, my professional career, as I see it, didn’t get underway until I was hired as a department head at the Oshkosh Public Library 4 years after I graduated from library school.
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On the other hand, I had a most valuable and enlightening life experience, a real-time view of the world not seen by most people. I learned what it was like to live inside a prison at all three level of incarceration: maximum, medium, minimum. I got to know many of the inmates on a personal level, shared many one-on-one and group conversations. The inmates were surprisingly open about their experience ‘inside the joint’. After closing the main library, I often visited the Compound Dorm, a large rectangular room with 30 bunk beds arranged against the two longer walls. (This space now serves as the museum gift shop.). The guards allowed me to interact on my own with the inmates housed there. Some nights I ended up sitting on the edge of someone’s lower bunk while having conversation with a group six or more, all of them young men my age, the majority of them in for drug crimes. I got to know their backgrounds and personal histories. Because of my immersion into the prison’s culture, I started to feel a bit like an inmate myself by the summer of 1975, although one who had the privilege of returning home rather than to a prison cell each day.
Initially, Deer Lodge wasn’t on the trip’s itinerary. We planned to travel to Great Falls after our Yellowstone visit, but JoAnna wanted to see the place where I lived for a year during the mid-70s, nine years before we met.
Until two weeks ago, it was a period of my life that was a blank page to her.
Not anymore.
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