The words were spoken by a freshly-scrubbed bright-eyed young man of about twenty. As leader of a student-conducted orientation tour, he addressed a small group of prospective students and their parents: "This part of the library is the newest, built in 1982. This is our card catalog where you can get a lot of information for term papers, and stuff.... The library has about a million books, and they're going to put the catalog on computers soon...." Moving his audience past the catalog cabinets and west into the Current Periodicals Reading Room, he continued, "This is the oldest part of the library. It's where you can find recent newspapers and magazines and stuff, and lots of students find this a good place to study, and it's a great place to meet friends, and stuff like that...."

His remarks set me to musing, as is my wont, on the nature of stuff in general and TCU's Mary Couts Burnett Library stuff in particular.

The more I thought about it, the more apt the word "stuff" became in regard to what this library holds for me, a fifty-year sojourner in this place. The very vagueness of the term allows for the tangibles as well as the intangibles--the books, periodicals, papers, furnishings, fixtures, equipment, the progression of people, the aggregation of matter, memorabilia and, yes, memories--that are captured here.

If you were here in 1924, you will know that the "oldest part" of the present library space was built that year to provide a larger place for the stuff that had accumulated to that time. Those who were here before then will remember another space, another library housed within the walls of Old Main, the first building on the Fort Worth campus, opened in 1912, which is now Dave Reed Hall. The TCU libraries that existed prior to that, first at Thorp Spring and then at Waco, reside now mostly in pictures and written accounts, for 1873 is back beyond living memory, and the years at Waco from 1895 to 1910 recede farther and farther into the past.

If you were here between 1957 and now, you will recall two other library versions--the first being the expansion completed in 1958 that extended the outer walls farther north and westward toward University Drive, altering forever the colonnaded facade of the 1924 building. The second, the 1982 expansion, has spread the library farther east along Lowden Street, and has turned its once-western face to the south. Those who will be here in the two thousandnth century of our time may find the size and the shape and the stuff in yet another form.

As the young man pointed out, the Current Periodicals Reading Room is the oldest part of the library and survives almost sixty-five years in close-to-original form, although its function... and stuff... have changed some. The southern wall of tall arched windows that let in the light of 1924 lets in the light of 1988, and if you stand in just the right place outside, you can see the original brick high up around the arches. The ceiling of the room still reaches up two floors and is still crossed in six places by bands of ornate plaster, between which, some might recall, three great chandeliers hung from filigreed iron plates. The high ceiling gives a feeling of spaciousness that belies the ever closer conditions below, where the original heavy oak tables and chairs are set among stack ranges of current periodicals and are filled most nights now with a new generation of students on their way to Parnassus or points between or beyond. Along the walls, the inset wood shelves replace the built-in catalog drawers of an earlier time.

From an interior half-moon window of a second-story room that used to hold the University's archives and rare books, one can look across and down into the Reading Room which was, in the beginning, the nerve center of the library. From my vantage point behind the glass in this room, I can get in touch with all sorts of intangibles, all sorts of visions and stories that rise up out of time and dance unrehearsed across the scene.

I have only to look in that direction to see the main desk that once ran out and across from the center of the east wall, behind which the library staff took requests for materials that were shelved in mysterious realms called "closed stacks" and were just as mysteriously retrieved by means of a dumb waiter that can, and sometimes does, still operate in its 1924 shaft. The faces that move into that memory-piece belong to Mary Charlotte Faris, Emily Garnett, Nell Van Zandt, Irene Cox, and the Head Librarian, Mrs. Bertie Mothershead. The light captured is a soft one that reflects a time of pleasance and quiet competence that had to do, no doubt, with the gentle nature of "Mrs. M." herself. I'll tell you something else about Mrs. Mothershead, too, that you might not know unless you lived across Rogers Street and up three houses from her. She had a delicious laugh. Like bells sweet-toned and clear, the sound of her laughter lingered long in the air of a still summer evening. Mrs. Mothershead still stands on duty in the Reading Room where a bust of her likeness sits in a south window, hair in long braids around her head and that laugh just behind the smile caught by an artist's touch.

Like the movement of microfilm across a lighted surface, other framed snippets of time come into view--a wedding on a rainy December day in 1931 that took place before the desk, an assembly of family, TCU folk, God, and Prexy Waits, that was the beginning of a life-long partnership between Elizabeth Harris and Willis Hewatt that was, by chance, my genesis. Another picture in another frame reveals a door that still opens behind and to the right of where the desk stood, and that once led to the back stairway of the library. It was through this door that my father carried Chemistry Professor F. Woodall Hogan to take his place in the receiving line of the President's reception held in the Reading Room at the beginning of each Fall semester for several years. Crippled by infantile paralysis, Mr. Hogan was unable to negotiate the long flight of marble steps at the library's front, so the back stairs were used by his friend and colleague to make his entrance less conspicuous.

Beneath and beyond the room that holds those pieces of special time for me, and to the west, north, and south, are spaces that hold more memories and hundreds of volumes that hold the time of our kind in histories, philosophies, and theories of all that we know. Individually, we poke around among all that and, taking readings of height, breadth, and depth, we make of it what we will. Each observer brings his own measure of space and time -- and all that stuff.

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