Fall 2007 - YALSA - American Library Association

feature
Hot Spot: YALSA’s
Fiftieth Anniversary
Remembering
YALSA
The View of “The Oldest
Living YA Librarian”
By Mary K. Chelton
The part of YALSA’s fifty years
that I remember best was in the
1970s, when I was most active in
what was then the Young Adult Services
Division (YASD). Carol Starr can take full
credit for getting me active, because until
she started the Young Adult Alternative
Newsletter, I never realized what a national
community of practitioners would mean
intellectually or politically. I had been
nurturing one of my better snits for several
years over never getting a response
to something I asked of the YASD office,
and it took a kick in the pants from Carol
to make me put it aside and attend ALA’s
Annual Conference in New York City
to see what was going on. I don’t think
enough kind words can be devoted to
Carol’s importance in creating a vehicle
for an entire generation of YA librarians
to communicate with each other. She also
made a concerted effort to learn how ALA
worked and to mentor those of us whom
she thought might need it.
The following are highly personal
anecdotes of YALSA participation, but
vivid memories nonetheless. It is not accidental
that most, but not all, are culled
Mary K. Chelton, a co-founder of VOYA, is a Professor in the
Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens
College, City University of New York. Her 1997 dissertation on
YA services is Adult-Adolescent Service Encounters: The Library
Context. She is the editor of the first three editions of Excellence
in Library Services for Young Adults for YALSA. Among her many
articles is “The Problem Patron that Public Libraries Created: The
Normal Adolescent,” which appeared in The Reference Librarian in
June 2002. She was YASD President in 1976.
from various Midwinter Meetings, which
are much more manageable venues than
Annual Conferences, where I remember
aching feet and learning that I was interested
in the program in the hotel where
I was standing because it took too much
effort to get to another hotel.
Mike Printz
I had heard about Mike Printz from Bill
Morris (the wonderful marketing director
and subsequent vice-president of
HarperCollins, then Harper and Row, for
whom YALSA has named a new book
award), and finally met Mike on a corner
in downtown Los Angeles after the Still
Alive in 75 Best Books preconference. We
instantly bonded amid the winos and garbage
over several titles we loved that other
members of our groups had not. Years
later, Mike asked for my advice on how to
get on the Best Books committee. I knew
that Joan Atkinson, the incoming president,
was looking for regional and gender
diversity for the committee, so I told him
to write her a letter outlining his skills and
experience while at the same time making
it clear that he was male and from Kansas.
He did what I told him verbatim and got
appointed immediately. (It’s still good
advice, by the way.)
While Mike was on the committee,
he got so annoyed with what he felt was a
middle school bias that he brought several
of his school’s seniors to talk to the committee
about what they liked to read. He
and the boys stayed in the hotel together,
and, over dinner, I asked how they were
doing. He said, “Oh, Mary K., it’s terrible!
I have to stay dressed all the time, and they
don’t want to do anything cultural. They
just want to watch the previews of the
X-rated movies on the TV!” Mike was a
teacher down to his toenails, but the New
York Museum of Natural History was
32 YALS | Young Adult Library Services | Fall 2007