Alumni Updates
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Jim Gaylord
M.Lib, 1968
Jim retired in 2002 after spending 18 years with Pierce County Library, most of it as a reference librarian at the Lakewood branch. He currently spends time fighting with his computer, reading, taking care of his house and yard, and listening to an ever-growing collection of records, discs, and tapes. He volunteers at a thrift shop and as a "librarian" at Rainbow Center, Tacoma's gay and lesbian community organization.
Patrick Kehoe
M.Lib, 1968
Though he is technically retired, Patrick continues to produce and edit the video series An Oral History of Law Librarianship for the HeinOnline legal database. He has traveled around the country and conducted over 100 scripted "conversations" with selected law librarian colleagues, who, collectively, have described the evolution of the profession over the past 50 years. Many graduates of the iSchool’s law librarianship program are being interviewed for the project, including program director Professor Penny Hazelton.
Mary Nickum
M.Lib, 1968
A retired librarian and project manager, Mary is now an author and editor. Her work focuses on science-related topics for children; her fictional account of a family forced to confront a chronic disease, Mom's Story: A Child Learns About MS, was published in 2013.
Glenda Goldwater
M.Lib, 1967
Glenda was featured in the article, "Glenda Goldwater, Portland's Bon Vivant" in the May 2014 issue of Portland Monthly. She has also modeled for Portland-based fashion designer Alexa Stark.
Mary Levering
M.Lib, 1966
After working for the Library of Congress for 45 years in a variety of diverse positions and different departments, Mary retired as one of the Library's Senior Government Executives in 2011. Mary says: "Working at the Library of Congress with talented people and amazing collections from all over the world inspired me with a great love of travel, adventure and a thirst to learn about other cultures and countries. I have now visited 141 countries on all 7 continents. I just returned in December 2015 from my latest travel adventure on an expedition ship, visiting 7 remote island countries in the South Pacific, meeting local families, and SCUBA diving on pristine reefs. My goal is to visit all 193 independent countries in the world. At home [Maryland] in between my foreign trips, I practice yoga several days a week, am learning to speak Spanish, and volunteer for Chevy Chase at Home, helping older folks age in place."
Richard Waters
M.Lib, 1966
Richard is a full-time library consultant living and working in Dallas, Texas.
Joan Tracy
M.Lib, 1965
Joan retired from Eastern Washington University in 1993, but she keeps up her interest in libraries by submitting recommendations for purchase to the EWU Library and by serving as chair of a book group at the Cheney Community Library. Her daughter is also a librarian, working at North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene, ID.
Margaret Read MacDonald
M.Lib, 1964
Margaret's newest book is "The Wishing Foxes" (Illustrated by Kitty Harvill; Plum Street Publishers, 2017). It's a Kentucky version of the tale of the kind and unkind girls, retold with Jennifer and Nathaniel Whitman. She has written many books, including "Teaching with Story: Classroom Connections to Storytelling," which she co-authored with Jennifer MacDonald Whitman and Nathaniel Forrest Whitman to encourage teachers to incorporate storytelling into their classrooms. The book won a 2014 Storytelling World Award.
Margaret tells stories and offers workshops across the globe, recently traveling to India, Iceland, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand.
She is also the artistic director of the PowellsWood Storytelling Festival, which takes place annually in July in Federal Way, WA.
John Cole
M.Lib, 1963
As of 2024, Historian and librarian John Y. Cole received the 2024 Trask award from the Society for History in the Federal Government in recognition of "his innumerable contributions to federal history over the course of his fifty-five year career at the Library of Congress." Before becoming the Library's first official historian in 2016, for more than four decades he served as director of the Center for the Book, which initiated activities such as the National Book Festival and the Library of Congress Literacy Awards. He wrote or edited more than a dozen books about the Library and its activities.
Lethene Parks
M.Lib, 1963
Lethene is Library Director for the Clark County Genealogical Society in Vancouver, Washington, and teaches one or two genealogy classes a year for the society. She is also Chair of the Collections Committee for the Oregon-California Trails Association.
She also writes occasional book reviews and articles. She is working with her daughter on an article about an ancestor who killed a man in Arkansas in 1838, changed his name and went west to California, where he lived for more than 40 years under an assumed name and worked as a physician. It is due to be published sometime in the next year.
