Evolution of the University of St. Francis

Transcript of video (June, 2005):

Sr. Dorothy Clare Zuleski

Hi, my name is Sr. Dorothy Clare Zuleski. I was a Librarian or Assistant Librarian at the College of St. Francis during the 60’s.

But before I get into that, let me tell you a little bit about Sr. Rose Agnes, a little footnote that perhaps others haven’t heard about.

I was very impressed at the funeral of Sr. Rose Agnes, when Sr. Vivian Whitehead, our President, got up to give the reflection and her opening words were, "Do you know that Sr. Rose Agnes was born in Austria?"

Well, of course I didn’t know that and I was very surprised and very impressed. I thought, "Oh this means there’s language that she had to learn, culture that she had to assimilate, and lots, a lot of other obstacles," but she did beautifully.

The other thing I remember about her would be her thick glasses, her scholarliness, and her dedication as a teacher.

I also believe that she was a stock-holder in the "red ink" company. I was shocked the first time I got back my first assignment and it was covered with red markings all over.

Because from my background, red mark meant something bad. And so to have all these red marks, I thought oh my goodness. I looked around and everybody else had red marks. I thought what does this mean? It meant that she was very thorough in her grading of the papers. And she would add her insights, of her view points and another presentation that I perhaps would never thought of, of course. And so, reading her footnotes to me was like an extra plus. It was the tutoring experience between Sr. Rose Agnes and myself.

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Now, oh one other thing regarding Sr. Rose Agnes. I remember she had on her bulletin board on the back of her classroom, "To know the scriptures is to know Jesus." Now maybe I’m misquoting it, but in essence that’s what it amounted to. And that made such an impression on me that that’s the only bulletin board that I remember from College, except the ones that I put up. And so, it was a message, know your scriptures and know Jesus.

Now I’m going to change topics. I’m going to share with you a little bit about my experiences as Assistant Librarian at the College of St. Francis. Sr. Aurea was the main Librarian and I was her Assistant.

I did the cataloging, which means typing up the cards for the card catalog. I did behind the scenes work, so I did a lot of work in the Library book bill. So I did not have that much to do with the students.

But then there was a lot of planning that was going on regarding the new Library. And after the grants were received, the building was being put up and the big move was about to take place. We had to very carefully plan how are we going to do this.

Well I remember it was one evening, about 6 o’clock after supper, I went back to the College Library and had packed up a whole dolly of books to take across the street to the new Library. When, who was walking by but Bishop Blanchette for his evening stroll. He says, "Oh what cha doing?" Well, I’m moving books to the Library. "Well let me help you so that I could say that I had a hand in helping move the Library." So of course we let him push the dolly across the street and we put the books where they were supposed to be and so forth.

So the hours in preparing the plan of moving was just endless. The adjusting to all the space that we had was really marvelous.

But a significant impression that I had of our new Library was this, it was 26 below zero wind chill in the winter. They came to the new Library to test the air conditioning. It was so cold. It was incredible and we were shivering through all of this. We lived through it all, but I thought the timing was not too appropriate.

Thank you.