Big Night in the Big Easy

Last night was a Big Night in the Big Easy. Leslie Burger was inaugurated as president of the American Library Association, an organization of 65,000 members. Probably because of her (and another smart, attractive, only child librarian) our other president has pledged $18 million to rebuild New Orleans’ libraries. My daughter and my mother-in-law tell me that Leslie was on the NBC Nightly News talking about how ALA is the first big conference (meaning over 20,000, like Rotary, which bailed to Chicago) to stay in New Orleans since Katrina. Friends Jay Johnston and Alice Knapp, who have been good enough to send regular dispatches this week from NO to NH, were interviewed with Leslie by NPR at Emeril’s restaurant. Leslie has built a smashing destination library in Princeton, NJ, and, as ALA Prez, has been an inspiration to our sometimes beleaguered profession wherever she speaks—Chile, Argentina, or Wallingford, Connecticut. Not only was last night a Big Night, but Leslie is a Big Deal. Since I couldn't be there for "the best party ALA has ever had," according to a late night call live from New Orleans, this morning I'm going Boswellian (and maybe just a little maudlin) to celebrate some of the little deals that I remember about my friend and president.

I met Leslie in 1976, when she arrived at the State Library in Hartford from the Bridgeport Public Library. There were a lot of us young’uns there then—Connie McCarthy and Maureen Well, with whom I’ve unexplainedly lost touch, Vince Juliano, who remains the same prince-among-men that he was then, and Dick Akeroyd, who was Leslie’s boss, and quite the young Turk before he went on to stodgy fame and fortune. We were young, and we had fun, and we believed. Leslie might have $2.50, and I might have $3.75, and then we’d find some other loose change, and then we’d go out to lunch—almost everyday. And we thought we could make things happen, and yes, we thought we could change the world.

The scholarly State Librarian, Chuck Funk, once said, when forced to undergo one of the team building activities so popular in the eighties, that the one he would want in his lifeboat was--Leslie Burger. Who wouldn’t? She saved the state $40,000 when she wrote our way out of an audit exception during the Reagan years, when Ronnie had instructed the Department of Education auditors to be “as mean as junkyard watch dogs.” Then came another State Librarian who promoted someone else over Leslie, a move I’ve never forgiven, but with which Leslie never had a quarrel nor a moment of indulgent rehash.

I remember back in the day when we were both young mothers, doing the Hanukkah candles at Leslie and Buddy’s (aka Alan Burger, her husband and boyfriend since they were 14) and Leslie’s reading the prayers straight from the Book of Jewish Observance propped open on the kitchen counter. I remember our being on the beach in Nantucket, pretending to watch our kids while listening in on the Muffies’ conversation, and Leslie making us all take the pledge to "live each day to its fullest.” I remember our collapsing in giggling hysteria when the Governor’s Conference on Libraries (which we planned with Homer Babbidge, of the Babbidge Library at UConn) was finally over. And I remember our latest (but not our last) shopping trip when we had to admit that we spend money like we had it.

Just last year we organized a visit by Connecticut librarians to Leslie’s beautiful new Princeton Public Library (after we both almost got sued by the Nassau Inn) and she toured and charmed them all, about five minutes after she had brought Buddy home from Sloane Kettering. Leslie is also a cancer survivor, something even I forget because she always looks so great, so young, so gorgeous and full of life. Leslie can build a state-of the-art library. She can get money for American libraries. She can get press coverage for librarians. She can do all the big deals, not only because she believes and because she is smart and talented, but because she knows what is important, even the little deals.

Last night was a Big Night, and Leslie Burger is a Big Deal.