A familiar figure on the campus for years was head librarian Miss Opal Williams. She began working in 1928 in the college library and officially retied in 1973—a tenure of forty-five years of service to faculty and students.

When Miss Williams started in 1928, the library was located on the second floor of Industrial Hall above the girl’s gym and the industrial arts workshop—not an ideal location for serious study and reading. Miss Williams recalls that she and the other librarians suffered from the smell of burnt glue from Professor J. G. Grove’s wood working classes. The students heated the glue to soften it up for use for furniture making but sometimes forgot to watch it carefully enough and the smell of burnt glue wafted upstairs into the library. The girls’ gym proved a further distraction. The sound of girls screaming and bouncing basketballs on the first floor gym penetrated to the library.

The reading room was the favorite place for formal dances, before the construction of the old student union building. Miss Williams and the other three librarians had the arduous task of moving the large, heavy oak tables and chairs to the side to make room—and sometimes even chaperoning the dances. All the dancing made the beautiful black and white tile floor scuffed and unsightly. Someone in the library, according to Opal Williams, came up with an ingenious solution to this problem: they secretly spread powdered wax on the floor to let the dancing students wax the floor. Unfortunately, the idea did not work as planned; dancing on the wax created a mess that took janitors several days to clean up.

The librarians had to contentd with other rather unpleasant results of letting students use the reading room for dances. The library, which was left wide open during the dances, allowed students to roam throughout the building. Gretchen Howell Colehour, catalogue librarian in the 1930s and 1940s, recalls she found, one Monday morning following a Saturday night dance, that catalog cards had been scattered in the ditch on Monroe Street. There had been rain during the weekend. The librarians brought the cards back into the library in trashcans and attempted to give them a bath and to dry them. Howell typed them, but she was never sure that they had found all the cards.

During the Second World War, the student population, particularly the males, declined to the point that the shop classes, taught by Professor Grove, could not make because of lack of students. To provide employment, Miss Williams remembers, he worked in the library bookbindery for a time. The administration also transferred Professor W. B. Stone from sociology into the library for the same reason—not enough students to make his sociology classes.

The war also brought a contingent of 300 WAACs to campus—which further impacted the librarians and library. To create classrooms for them, two partitions were erected in the reading room of the library. The positive result of the “military occupation” was the WAAC officers got the school to lower the ceiling lights which increased illumination at the study tables. (WAACs also insisted that the local movie theaters open on Sundays despite tradition of closing on the Sabbath.)

The serious business of running an academic library continued, despite these interruptions. Miss Williams was noted for keeping a close watch on overdue books. The school had a rule that required all book fines be paid before a student could graduate. “I remember frequently of students coming in at the last minute, running up the steps of the library to take care of a fine,” Miss Williams said.

Don Kerr, late former head of Technical Services, told a similar story about a student who left some library books on top of a car while he was watching a baseball game. The car drove away with the books. After worrying several days about the fate of the missing books, he received a letter from Miss Williams saying that the books had been returned to the library after being found on top of the car and that he would not be able to check out any more books for the rest of the semester.

In the late 1950s, it had become obvious that the old library no longer had enough space for the book collection. In 1959, Miss Williams oversaw the move into the present library building.

Miss Williams headed the library under different titles from 1933 until 1969 and worked in the library until she retired in 1973. Over those four decades, she provided continuity to the library operations and staff, organized many departments in the library and established and taught the first library science course at the institution. Her professionalism, dedication, and knowledge of librarianship were an excellent role model to the three generations of A&M-Commerce librarians, and her no- nonsense approach to running the library insured an efficient operation. In the last years of her tenure as director, she served as a bridge between the old library organization and the new modern computerized library. She accepted, even encouraged innovation, such as computerized circulation, with open arms.

After leaving the library, she volunteered her professional services to the Commerce Public Library, orchestrating the move to the new library building in the renovated post office and establishing procedures for the library staff. Miss Williams lives in a nursing home in Sulphur Springs, one of the treasures of the school’s past.