What was left of my Dad's library when we started packing it...

Since the main purpose of the trip was to get my father's library out of my step mother's home, I figured I'd give you an idea what was in it. Below are the pictures I took of the books before we boxed them. I left in all the resolution the camera gave me so the information on the spines would be readable. What you see is what I got.

Back when I stayed with them in the winter of '95-'96 Dad's office was essentially half of the basement. He had all of American History arranged chronologically across the wall behind his desk. We're talking about five rows of books at least ten feet wide. There was also a lot of other stuff in boxes and other shelves around the room. He'd pared things down a lot before he died, but it was still an interesting collection.

My Dad's personal finances weren't that great. I'd say if he got his advice from those books stay away from them.

One time I got him a book that was mostly pictures of buffalo hides painted to honor historic events by Native Americans from the prehistoric era. Some were quite beautiful. Others had fascinating captions. Rather than give it to him I stuck it in the appropriate spot in his library. Never even heard that he saw it. I would have thought it'd be in this area if he'd kept it. It could be that somebody else decided that was a "must have" for their library sometime in the year between when he died and when we boxed it up. Anyhow, it was gone.

Before he started giving stuff away he had just about everything Senator Fulbright wrote. He gave me a couple of those. Good books. That guy understood well how the situation in the 1960s came about.

Back in '96 I remember that Colin Powell book being the one on the bottom right for a little while. Then he got something else more recent, but I forget what.

I think of those "Who's who" books as something of a scam. He was always getting junk mail from outfits that wanted to put his name in their next edition for "a small fee". They would send him the book with his details just the way he wanted them, along with the name of every other soft touch for the money. Then they'd do the same thing again next year.

Sometimes browsing the spines of his books something would grab me for some reason. I'd pull a book down and think about it a bit. Now I'm wondering what's inside that book about the 20th Century. Didn't have time to find out when I took that picture.

The Language of Trade was one of the books my dad wrote when he was at USIA. He said it was fairly popular, and every now and then they would get him to do another updated and expanded edition. There were copies scattered around in different places, and a stack of them in his office, which probably meant he still enjoyed handing them out when he got another chance to do so.

Didn't realize until I was browsing these pictures that he had a tape of his high school reunion there. Wondering what's on that. Ooops, it's too late to find out now....

This shelf was his hometown background. It's particularly leany because I stole quite a few of the books that were here when I visited for his funeral. Something in me just wanted that connection to where he came from, even though I'm barely a memory of another tourist there.

I brought that phone home with me. I'm glad I did, because it works a lot better than the one it replaced. The box it was sitting on was full of books on cassette. He used to listen to that kind of stuff while driving. He had an ocean of cassettes, but they were all in boxes. Sorry about not cataloging those!

I think this is the area where both Shane and I got copies of Small is Beautiful by Eric Shoemaker. Unfortunately, I've still not read it. Hopefully he's had better luck on that! For sure when he died every shelf was full to bulging with books. The ones that were already gone when we started packing it all away were parting gifts for someone else.

I gave him War Made Easy as a present for his birthday or Christmas one year. After he read it he told me on the phone "that was a good book."

I remember looking at all the scholarly tomes and wondering what good government is if it doesn't start with informed consent. For sure I saw lots of corners cut on that in my Sacramento days. What is low voter turnout if it isn't proof that there isn't as much "informed" as there should be? Much more recently we had huge crowds saying no to war and the Bush II administration ignored us. Where is the consent in that?

I find it so fascinating that Warrior Without Weapons was in with the CIA books. I would have thought it belonged in with the WW II books.

He gave me a copy of Villard's book years ago. He said he had known Villard early in his Foreign Service career. I read it and told him it had "the same kind of stretchy ideas as Madeleine Albright had in her Memo to the President Elect." He said he had to read that book to find out what I meant by that. We never talked about the matter again. I think that commonality is part of the State Department's institutional need to talk about a very wide range of matters clearly and quickly.

There was also lots of paper. We anguished about that for a while. I didn't want to go through it looking for nuggets of value and neither did my brother or sister. In the end we just shredded and recycled most of it. Evelyn wanted it out of her hair. Who am I to argue? The stuff could be a fire hazard in the wrong situation.