To the editor:

Thank you for the good report on this year’s Wallace Galluzzi Award winner, Eleanor Symons, whose commitment to Audio Reader has been truly exemplary (Journal-World, Feb. 23). She was identified in the article as “a retired Kansas University employee,” which is true enough, an employee in the same sense that Chancellor Robert Hemenway is an employee of the university or Bill Gates of Microsoft – but “employee” is a little indefinite and quite incomplete.

Miss Symons was a librarian (by final rank, Librarian III) and, what’s more, she was a crackerjack – a better librarian even than she is a reader and that’s saying something. She was one of an amazing crew of professional librarians recruited to Kansas in the golden Murphy/Vosper years of the 1950s by the then-director of libraries, Robert Vosper, from such exotic places as England, Massachusetts, California, etc. It was my good fortune to have been hired as a cataloguer when Miss Symons was head cataloguer, than whom there was none better.

After seven or eight years of close association our paths diverged, but after she moved into the reference department at Watson Library, whenever I needed to refer someone with a difficult question to that department, Eleanor Symons was always the librarian to whom I would direct the questioner, not merely because of the depth and breadth of her knowledge but also because of the dogged determination to find an answer. Lawrence is blessed to have such a devoted volunteer; the university was blessed to have such a devoted librarian.

Bill Mitchell,

Lawrence