LSA News

No. 96, March 2009

If you have anything you want in the next newsletter, send it to lsaweb@lists.uoregon.edu

Index Newts in the Field by Lonni Sexton Libraries' Food Drive a Huge Success by Elizabeth Duell Origins compiled by Jennifer Rowan Family Stories by Mary Grenci Searching for the Past by Cassie Schmitt Neither Here Nor There by David Landázuri In the Land of the Agency by Dean Walton Immigration Stories by Andrew Bonamici Earth Day 2009 at the Cascades Raptor Center by Jeanie Stuntzner Humorous Internet Links Transcend Cultures by Sherra Hopkins Fact File Answers Events of Interest People in the Library

Puck the American Kestrel at the Cascade Reptor Center © 2008 Cascade Raptor Center. Used by kind permission.

Newts in the Field
by Lonni Sexton

Jim the boy naturalist was the most fascinating big kid I'd ever met. He was a fourteen year old, working on his Eagle Scout badge. Jim wanted to be a scientist when he grew up. He hung around with my big brother.

I was eight years old, one of a rabble of little kids who hung around the big kids and tormented them. Big kids sped off on their bikes, or climbed higher in their trees to escape us. Occasionally they would pound us or shove us away, or even flip a couple of rocks in our direction if we got too close. It did not discourage us.

Jim was somewhat nicer and more tolerant of us than the other big kids. He had a knack for finding creatures where you'd never think of looking for them: in culverts, by the side of the train tracks, under the paving stones in our front walkway. I think he was flattered to have acolytes.

"Potato bugs" I would say, after overturning a large rock.

"No: woodlice — Armadillidiidae vulgare" Jim would say authoritatively. "An isopod. It breaths though gills and is related to lobsters. Marine species in the deep sea grow as big as a dinner plate and are considered a delicacy in the far East."

He picked one up for me to examine the armored plates and waving antenae. Its frilly legs scrabbled desperately against my fingertip. I was amazed that I could feel something as tiny as a bug's foot. Jim carefully replaced the woodlouse exactly where he'd found it, then gingerly rolled the rock on top of it. No living creature was undeserving of respect, according to Jim. I never saw him deliberately harm an animal, not even a bug.

(story continued)

Libraries' Food Drive a Huge Success
by Elizabeth Duell

The barrels are gone. The events are over. All that is left is the weighing and counting. But by all accounts the UO Libraries' participation in the State Employee's Food Drive was a big success!

As you might know, last year we accumulated 448 lbs of food. This year, although we don't have a final count or the amount of food donated just yet, from the preliminary money count it looks like we have almost QUADRUPLED THAT AMOUNT!!!! From just the cash donations, the sale money and the chocolates we have raised 1740 POUNDS OF FOOD!!!! Look to the Staff Bulletin for the final counts.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped this year! Special mention goes to Sheila Gray in the Administration office.

Don't forget this is a yearly Food Drive. We'll be back next February! We have lots of plans for next year including a Buy-a-Plate potluck and an UO Libraries Cooking Champion Competition. Any other ideas? Please feel free to email Elizabeth Duell or call her at 6-1883. (Submission of ideas does not automatically put you on the committee!)

Congratulations to everyone! Great job!

Origins
compiled by Jennifer Rowan

Eugene, Oregon. Not known for its ethnic or cultural diversity. When we moved here from Detroit in the early 1980s, my partner and I did a double-take every time we saw a person of color, it was that exotic. We'd just relocated from Detroit's urban inner core where my daughter was the only white student at her Montessori school. She insisted that I try to cornrow her strawberry blonde hair in the fashion of her classmates. That was nothing new. She was born in Toronto, one of 25 babies delivered that night, most to Hispanic, Portuguese, Italian and Jewish mothers, and she stuck out like a sore thumb in the rows of bassinettes in the hospital nursery. Our flat-neighbors were from Portugal, Egypt and Argentina in a neighborhood that was mostly Polish and Ukrainian. Except for its aging hippy population, we found Eugene to be a bland, white-bread experience where we blended into crowds and longed for just one authentic Middle-Eastern restaurant.

Immigration from Mexico, Central and South America has changed Eugene's pallid complexion to some extent, although recent trips to California and Texas remind us of immigrant populations that are growing elsewhere in earnest. It's easy to overlook the fact that just a scant few generations ago, many of us can point to family who, willingly or not, left their country of origin, survived the journey and the red tape, and managed the difficult adjustment to a new culture, livelihood, climate and language. As homogenous as Eugene remains on its face, the stories of our parents and grandparents illuminate our diverse origins and lend a sense of perspective to a population in perpetual flux through the generations. Our workplace is a microcosm reflecting the greater community around us. Where better to dig deep for those narratives of leavetaking and of arrival in a strange land? We hope that this collection is the first of a series about the personal and familial histories of your coworkers in the Library. If you have a family story to tell, we would like to hear from you.

Mary Grenci, Metadata Services and Digital Projects: Family Stories

Carmella Sorrento Grenci with sons Frank (left) and Nicola, at her 97th birthday party

When I agreed to write about my family for the newsletter, I thought it would be interesting and fun, but it's turned out to be much more than that. I got many of the details about my father's family from a conversation with my 97-year-old Nana a few weeks ago. She was my last surviving grandparent. She lived with my Dad, continued to care for all of her own personal needs and, until recently, had continued to be strong, going out and about almost every day, even while dealing with surgeries and treatment for cancer.

A week or so after I got the information for this article, and before I began to write, the family took her to the hospital to find out why she had recently been so weak. It turned out that the cancer she'd lived with for several years had taken over her liver. Nana never went back home and died in a hospice during the night of February 17-18, peacefully and without the usual pain associated with this kind of death.

As I sit here typing, while the first of my Nana's funerals is going on in Pennsylvania, I'm thinking how lucky I was that LSA asked me to write this article. Otherwise, I would have missed hearing Nana tell the stories from the Italian side of my family, many of which I'd not heard before.

The importance of that conversation is evident by the amount of detail I've included in the section about my dad's family as compared to what I've said about my mom's side. So even though the writing has turned out to be a bit difficult, thank you, LSA, for giving me the reason to ask questions and find out more about my Italian family history directly from Nana.

(story continued)

When confronted with a family heritage/immigration assignment during my childhood I always focused on my father's mother's family. I grew up in a predominantly white, Catholic, middle-class suburb and wanted to do a different assignment and be different than my classmates. While my grandmother was born in Brooklyn, NY, her parents and most of her brothers and sisters were born on the island-nation of Barbados. How exotic, compared to the very common Irish, Dutch, British, and other European combinations reported by my classmates. The family names can be traced back to Britain (specifically Scotland) and ancestors who migrated to Barbados in the 1600s following the sugar trade and ran a successful sugar plantation. I have been told that I have second cousins once removed (or some variation) still living on the island.

Recently, I find myself researching another side of my family. This coming summer, I am taking a trip to Ireland with my mothers, sisters, and aunt. This has resulted in a renewed interest in our ancestors, and now that there is an archivist in the family, they have turned to me for genealogy help.

(story continued)

La Familia in Ecuador: Aunts Fina and Laura; cousins Adela, Laurita and Ricardo (brothers Roberto, center, and David, second from right)

Both of my parents and two of my five siblings were born in Ecuador. My parents met in Quito; my mother was a native of that city, and my father attended high school and medical school there. After graduating from medical school in the early 1940s, my father came to the U.S. for a residency at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. My mother was already attending graduate school at Seton Hill College in Pittsburgh, probably via a scholarship from the Organization of American States (a UN regional organization largely backed by the U.S.) which had revived the "Good Neighbor Policy" of the 1930s. I think getting away from prying family eyes had a good effect on their courtship, and they were married on Saint Patrick's Day in 1944 (so we were told: there are no wedding pictures, though my mother said she wore a blue dress). A year later, on March 24th, my eldest sister, Margarita was born in Indianapolis, presumably near another residency position my father had. Within a year, they moved back to Ecuador, and had two more kids, Carmen Monica and Gabriel. They did well enough (for example, he represented his home province, Carchi, in the national congress in 1947), but given the perennial political instability and scant economic and professional opportunities in Ecuador, they moved back to the United States in 1951.

My father told me that he had three choices of states to move to: New York, which he assumed was too urban, California, which he (wrongly) presumed was too much like Ecuador, and Illinois. My family ended up in Havana, a small (population 4400) farming community mid-state, sort of in-between Springfield and Peoria. My older siblings entered school not knowing English, but they learned quickly. Over the next decade, me, my brother Roberto Dario and my sister Maria Laura were born.

(story continued)

Dean Walton, Science Library: In the Land of the Agency

The neighborhood where I grew up in McLean, Virginia wasn't typical, although back then I assumed it was. I should have been more suspicious, but it was the only neighborhood that I knew. It was the land of hushed acronyms, land of the Agency. As a youngster, I might ask a friend what his dad did. "Oh, he works for the government" was the standard reply. If I asked someone's parents about what another neighbor did, the reply would be much the same. Other friends had neighbors who worked at places with names, like the Pentagon or the Department of Commerce. In my neighborhood, "the government" was about as specific as they got.

When I was a kid of about 5, I even got to venture into the halls of the CIA because of my neighbors. My kindergarten was a little less than a mile from the CIA, and on the way back home one day, the kiddie carpool stopped to pick up the driver's spouse. We all got out to go inside. However, even at this young age, I experienced the darker side of living in the Agency's shadow. In elementary school, my classmate's father died while overseas. Later, people would use terms like "assassinated" to describe that death.

(story continued)

Andrew Bonamici, Library Administration: Immigration Stories

My paternal grandparents, Ferdinando (Fred) Bonamici (b. 1897) and Leonetta Tognozzi Bonamici (b. 1899), were raised in the Tuscan village of Monsummano Terme, situated in the province of Pistoia, between Florence and Pisa, Italy. Other Monsummanesi include the poet Giuseppe Giusti and the actor Yves Montand . This area of Tuscany is filled with spectacular beauty, history, and family tradition. If you visit today, you will find a prosperous region of tourism (including some very expensive destination spas), small manufacturing facilities, and agriculture. In my grandparents' era, though, daily life was hard. Grandpa started working in the marble quarries when he was only ten years old, and became a highly skilled stone cutter and mason. After serving in the First World War and marrying Leonetta , it was time to move on. In the winter of 1921, Grandpa and Grandma sailed from Genoa, bound for America on a ship with an appropriately Tuscan name — the Dante Alighieri.

(story continued)

Earth Day 2009 at the Cascades Raptor Center: Don't Miss It!
by Jeanie Stuntzner, photos courtesy of the Cascades Raptor Center

Juno the Great Horned Owl © 2008 Cascade Raptor Center. Used by permission.

I don't mind the hissing. As a volunteer on the Animal Care Team at the Cascades Raptor Center, I am prepared for hissing, as well as biting, diving, clawing, even projectile vomiting (courtesy of the Turkey Vultures). An owl enthusiast since childhood, I am honored to be exposed to the angry language and expelled fluids of our resident and rehab birds. Every hiss or menacing swoop by my ears is balanced by the knowledge that the hisser (or swooper, or sometimes both) is either safe in his/her bower with a full stomach and dreaming the dreams of owls and eagles, or resting in the clinic, growing closer every day to being released back into the wild — always the ultimate goal. And besides, it's not all hisses and swoops, some of my room service clients can be quite charming. Nani the Barn Owl — a real stunner by Barn Owl standards, we're talking the Angelina Jolie of Barn Owls — will sometimes beep at you softly, as if to say "Is it dinnertime already? Please leave it by the door, we'll tip you later." And owls leave interesting tips — pellets of undigested fur and bones, little wads that neatly describe some small prey animal's misfortune. Not much to take to the bank, but a real rewarding sign if you're worried that customers don't like what's on the menu.

(story continued)

The World Around Us
Humorous Internet Links Transcend Cultures
by Sherra Hopkins

Humorous internet "linkz" — I "has" them.

Do you sometimes wonder what a "meme" is, or who "lolcats" are, or why certain people seem to giggle when someone says "epic fail!"? Well today is your lucky day! Memes are a little complicated; people argue over the "rights" that they have over this creative and humorous content. Memes start out as image or video entertainment based on a wide range of sources, usually found on the internet and modified, then posted on specific forums. Then they become so profound and memorable that they are titled things like "Ceiling Cat" and reused for a number of image/caption-based jokes. Most meme-oriented humor is slap-stick in nature, ranging from very innocent to "epically" mature in content. One of the most benign and inoffensive forms of meme is called "lolcat" (technically meaning "Laugh Out Loud" "cat"). Some of the first "lolcats" were Longcat and its rival Tacgnol. Others that were created are called Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat, which are completely different from longcat/tacgnol, but often misconstrued as synonymous. There are many more such as Monorail Cat and Cheeseburger Cat, and the list will grow as more users have new ideas.

Longcat was based on a photograph on the internet of a man holding his cat up in a standing position. Since you cannot see its hindquarters, its body seems to continue indefinitely, hence "longcat". An undisclosed website (I can give you more information should you feel compelled to contact me about this personally) claimed the image was plagiarized from them. Tacgnol is the blackened, silhouette version of longcat, in reverse. The site that claims ownership of these images is extremely possessive of them, though they are not copyrighted. Should they find out that another site has "stolen" these images and personalized them (e.g. an avatar community that makes these memes into avatar clothing and sells them for real US dollars, true fact!), the "original" site will attempt to raid, hack, and destroy the accused internet community.

(story continued)

Fact File Answers
Seven Staffers Spot "Sevens"

In our February Fact File, we took a look at the myriad ways in which the number 7 figures into religion, folklore, literature and popular culture. Almost like magic, exactly seven readers identified all ten of the titles and groupings that we hinted at in our clues. We were obliged to select a single winner by lot, and we're pleased to announce that Victoria Mitchell, of the Science Library will be receiving a gift card valued at $10.00 toward purchases at the Duck Store. Kudos also to the others who identified our ten heptads: Kay Brooks of MSDP, Ben Farrell, of the Law Library, John Russell, of Reference & Research Services, Sherra Hopkins, of Acquisitions, Lori Robare, of MSDP, and Peter Gunn, of Portland Library and Learning Commons, to whom we would like to apologize for causing Elmer Bernstein's main title music for The Magnificent Seven to get stuck in his head.

The Answers:

1. House of the Seven Gables
2. Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
3. Seven Dwarfs
4. Seven Liberal Arts
5. Seven Years' War
6. Seven Sisters
7. The Magnificent Seven (after Seven Samurai)
8. G-7
9. Seven Deadly Sins
10. The Seven Year Itch

Events of Interest

As well as featuring upcoming LSA events, we'd like to get the word out about events staff are involved in that might be of interest to co-workers. If you'd like the world, or at least your co-workers, to know about something cool coming up, please email Harriett Smith or lsaweb.

LSA EVENTS

Tuesday, March 31, 2009: The LSA Spring Sale will be held from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room. We're looking for someone to donate a wonderful treat for the Raffle. If you would be willing to cook up something special to be raffled, please email Pam DeLaittre or phone her at 6-1826. She's also the person to contact if you can help with the Sale in other ways.

NON-LSA EVENTS

Monday, March 9, 2009: The Forgotten Films Series returns from 8-9:30 p.m. in Proctor 41, Knight Library. Screening will be a selected mix of instructional, industrial, narrative, and experimental cinematic delights from the UO Libraries' collection of old 16-mm films. The event is free and open to the public.

Friday, April 3, 2009: The EMU Ballroom is the site of a benefit for Tariro. The benefit features Lucky Moyo, a Zimbabwean singer/dancer currently residing in London, Boka Marimba from Portland, Dance Africa, and local groups Hokoyo Marimba (including Marilyn Mohr's daughter, Grace), and Vakasara Mbira (including Marilyn). The concert is part of the conference Integrating Biomedical and Sociocultural Approaches to HIV/AIDS in Africa (see the UO's African Studies website.

Saturday, April 4, 2009: David Landazuri writes that Accordions Anonymous will be playing for the opening day of Eugene's Saturday Market at 1 p.m. at the park blocks. Free!

Monday, April 6, 2009: A Taste of Russia food and film series is aimed at learning about Russian and Soviet culture through cinema and cuisine. Featured at 7 p.m. at Earl Residence Hall, International House Kitchen and Classroom 2 will be the film Kavkazskaia Plennitsa (Kidnapping in Caucasian Style) (1965), directed by Leonid Gaidai. On the menu are vegetable cake, baklava, and manty (Central Asian dumplings). Films will also be shown on May 1. The film series is sponsored by the Russian and East European Studies Center, UO Libraries and UO Housing. Free.

People in the Library
edited by Jen Lindsey

Welcome:

On the Move :

Staff announcements and photos by Jen Lindsey unless otherwise indicated