BY VANESSA PEARSON
Maybe the only thing more established than Mary Jane McNamara at the Carnegie History Center at College Avenue and Elm Street is the building itself.
Since 1942, Ms. McNamara has by her own estimate missed only about two years.
“I’m accused of having a bed in the basement. I don’t — I truly don’t,” the 86-year-old said.
She began her career at age 18 as a librarian apprentice, working 45 hours a week at the Carnegie Library for three months without pay. She said she was lucky a position opened at the end of her summer training. Beginning librarians made $45 a week then.
She spent 50 years working in the job she’d wanted since she was 11.
“Libraries were magic,” she said.
She was a city librarian for 28 years before moving to the Tyler Junior College library for 22 years. When she retired, she did some archiving for her church while volunteering at the Smith County Historical Society.
But by 1996, she was back in the old Carnegie Library, just as she is today, where she might be found rifling through dusty shelves of yellowed folders or carrying around old photographs.
But no matter what “Miss Mary Jane” is up to, she’s probably talking — she’s a self-proclaimed “loud-mouth.”
“I’ve been telling stories all my life,” she said.
When she travels — her biggest trip was to Ireland in 1996 — she said “poor people on the train or plane have to hide their faces in a magazine to keep me from talking,” adding that she loves to hear people’s stories.
Developing an interest in history was a natural path for her.
Ms. McNamara said both sides of her family were crazy about history and reading, calling them “addicted to the printed page.” Many were educators, and most attended at least some college.
“I was raised to love history,” she said.
She said history is about people’s lives and emotions and how they felt and reacted to events and that, that’s what caused history.
“I love to know what caused things to happen.”
SPECIAL SKILL SET
A coin found during renovations in a downtown building — what’s its origin? A great-grandfather died in Smith County — where’s his grave? An old house recently purchased — who lived in it before?
If you’ve got questions about Smith County history, Ms. McNamara’s your woman.
If she doesn’t know the answer, she knows where to find it.
Sam Kidd, office manager and treasurer at the historical society, said Ms. McNamara’s key assets are her knowledge of where things are in the building and finding the information the rest of the staff can’t.
Relaying a recent instance of Ms. McNamara’s ability, he said a request came in for a picture of a house that was moved to a new location, and Kidd couldn’t find it.
He waited for Ms. McNamara to come in, which she does about three days a week, to ask her. Five or 10 minutes later, she emerged, book in hand, with a tiny photograph printed of the house.
“She knows all the little sources to tap,” Kidd said.
Ms. McNamara is a “walking encyclopedia of history,” said Zelda Boucher, chairwoman of the historical society’s board of governors, adding that they wish they “could download her mind.”
Around the city and Smith County, sites are nominated for historical markers, and Ms. McNamara coordinates them.
She’s been working with the committee for more than 10 years and now serves as markers chairwoman to help choose among the nominees.
“I love it — I really love it,” she said. It’s “fun, fun, fun.”
The archive has outgrown its space and is moving from its upstairs room across the hall and downstairs.
Sherry Kidd, who has been volunteering as archives manager and working with Ms. McNamara for about four years, said Ms. McNamara was working alone in the archive for about three years, and it was physically and mentally exhausting for her.
Now, Mrs. Kidd is helping straighten it up to Ms. McNamara’s liking.
Kidd said she really has a “librarian’s mind” with her own system of labeling — there’s a “method to everything.”
Mrs. Kidd said, “It definitely works.”
Then there’s the recataloguing each item so it can be found the next time.
The archive’s resources are “useless if we can’t use it to answer people’s questions,” Ms. McNamara said.
TYLER'S HISTORIAN
With ease, Tyler’s past slips from her lips, weaving a tale of Tyler before the streets were paved, when Broadway Avenue had yet to bisect the downtown square, at a time when everybody knew everyone.
There was “none of this ‘I don’t know who they are’ business. Of course, you knew who they were,” she said.
There’s the story of the Blackstone Hotel where oil executives rented rooms and people lined up for job interviews to work in the oilfield during the Great Depression. Then there was its destruction in 1985 to save tax money and make room for a parking lot.
Below what’s now the Downtown Coffee Lounge was a pool hall parents urged their children to hurry past.
Downtown was once the center of Tyler’s ebb and flow. Businesses were tucked into every nook and cranny, sometimes only 15 feet wide, she said. At lunch, workers could slip into a lunch counter at Woolworth’s or Neil Simpson drug store and grab a bite.
Horse-drawn carriages still tied up when residents came down to the courthouse, and businesses stayed open late on Thursdays and Saturdays. Farmers brought in fresh produce for low prices.
The 1970s and 1980s were a rough patch, she said, when people didn’t listen to their fathers, and it was all about the bottom line. The bottom fell out of the oil business, and real estate was hard to move. Aluminum fronts were a mess, and looked like nobody was in any of the storefronts.
“Nothing can stop a downtown when it moves,” she said.
When Ms. McNamara first arrived with her family for the oil boom in 1931, Tyler’s population was 18,000. By the end of the year, the city’s population had swollen to 31,000.
The city was crammed. Some rented screened-in porches with cots. The people came from far and wide and were all kinds. And the newcomers were just as strange to Tylerites as residents were to them, she said.
It was a little hard for her to fit in, she said, because she was Catholic, which was one of the city’s smallest denominations.
She’s attended the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler since she arrived and remembers when they laid the cornerstone for the church’s current location in 1934. Her father died from a heart attack the next day.
Her mother worked as a seamstress — alterations were important because clothes didn’t have elastic — and made party foods to support Ms. McNamara and her older brother, John, who worked as airport manager at Pounds Field for more than 30 years.
Mrs. McNamara said Tyler had superior schools from the beginning and that educators’ very presence was remarkable. Teachers had control over their classrooms, with “none of this silly business now.”
“School was a great adventure,” she said.
Back then, everyone walked. Her mother always told them to “put your feet in the road” when they asked to go somewhere.
She said when she grew up in Tyler, the city was little and safe. In junior high school, little girls could walk down to the movies and come home at 11 without a problem, she said.
She soon will mark her 80th year in Tyler.
“I know I’m prejudiced about Tyler,” she said, but there are tons of wonderful stories to tell.
OUTSIDE THE ARCHIVE
Ms. McNamara’s just as much a fixture in the community as she is the historical society.
She’s lived in the same home she purchased on West Rusk since 1956, and she gives her time to other community organizations — Daughters of the American Revolution, Delta Kappa Gamma, which is an educators’ group, and Habitat for Humanity.
She’s passionate about Habitat — “I love to do it” — and said she’s done more than just serve as a board member. She’s helped build the houses, including putting in the locks and cooking meals with her Catholic Daughters of America group.
Anything to help people own homes and establish themselves in a community gives the new owners an uplift renting can’t, she said.
The “greatest move is a move up to productive citizenship,” she said.
On Dec. 19, Ms. McNamara visited patients at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler with members of the local Catholic Daughters of America group to spread holiday wishes of wellness and homemade cookies. She said they would tell patients, “God bless you, and I hope you are better tomorrow,” and that they hoped patients would go home before Christmas. They left treats with the nurses and doctors and spent time with those waiting in the emergency room.
“It’s an old, old tradition — we find it does better for us than it does for them,” Ms. McNamara said. Her mother started going out in 1948 when the health center was the East Texas Tuberculosis Sanatorium.
She enjoys going because it brightens the faces of patients and loved ones to know “that there are people out there who care.”
JUST A NUMBER
“She may be outliving everyone, but she remembers everything,” Mrs. Boucher said of Ms. McNamara during the holiday museum open house Dec. 9.
Ms. McNamara was dismissive and said with a laugh, “I’ve just outlived them all, and they can’t contradict me.”
“When she’s gone, we’re going to lose half our history,” Mrs. Boucher said.
So what happens when Ms. McNamara decides to call it quits?
“She can’t make that decision — we won’t let her,” Mrs. Boucher said.
Ms. McNamara said she will keep coming in until she’s physically unable or “so absent-minded, they ask me to stay home tomorrow.”
“I feel like a prisoner (if I) stay home too many days in a row,” she said.
Ms. McNamara, who never married, is the oldest one left in her family, and none of the younger members lives in Tyler.
All her life, she said, she’s been strong and healthy.
“I’m well and working and enjoying life — I don’t see any point in worrying about 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. But 80 does daunt you a little,” Ms. McNamara said. “What is old? A state of mind.”
This story originally appeared in the Tyler Morning Telegraph on Jan. 3, 2011.
Maybe the only thing more established than Mary Jane McNamara at the Carnegie History Center at College Avenue and Elm Street is the building itself.
Since 1942, Ms. McNamara has by her own estimate missed only about two years.
“I’m accused of having a bed in the basement. I don’t — I truly don’t,” the 86-year-old said.
She began her career at age 18 as a librarian apprentice, working 45 hours a week at the Carnegie Library for three months without pay. She said she was lucky a position opened at the end of her summer training. Beginning librarians made $45 a week then.
She spent 50 years working in the job she’d wanted since she was 11.
“Libraries were magic,” she said.
She was a city librarian for 28 years before moving to the Tyler Junior College library for 22 years. When she retired, she did some archiving for her church while volunteering at the Smith County Historical Society.
But by 1996, she was back in the old Carnegie Library, just as she is today, where she might be found rifling through dusty shelves of yellowed folders or carrying around old photographs.
But no matter what “Miss Mary Jane” is up to, she’s probably talking — she’s a self-proclaimed “loud-mouth.”
“I’ve been telling stories all my life,” she said.
When she travels — her biggest trip was to Ireland in 1996 — she said “poor people on the train or plane have to hide their faces in a magazine to keep me from talking,” adding that she loves to hear people’s stories.
Developing an interest in history was a natural path for her.
Ms. McNamara said both sides of her family were crazy about history and reading, calling them “addicted to the printed page.” Many were educators, and most attended at least some college.
“I was raised to love history,” she said.
She said history is about people’s lives and emotions and how they felt and reacted to events and that, that’s what caused history.
“I love to know what caused things to happen.”
SPECIAL SKILL SET
A coin found during renovations in a downtown building — what’s its origin? A great-grandfather died in Smith County — where’s his grave? An old house recently purchased — who lived in it before?
If you’ve got questions about Smith County history, Ms. McNamara’s your woman.
If she doesn’t know the answer, she knows where to find it.
Sam Kidd, office manager and treasurer at the historical society, said Ms. McNamara’s key assets are her knowledge of where things are in the building and finding the information the rest of the staff can’t.
Relaying a recent instance of Ms. McNamara’s ability, he said a request came in for a picture of a house that was moved to a new location, and Kidd couldn’t find it.
He waited for Ms. McNamara to come in, which she does about three days a week, to ask her. Five or 10 minutes later, she emerged, book in hand, with a tiny photograph printed of the house.
“She knows all the little sources to tap,” Kidd said.
Ms. McNamara is a “walking encyclopedia of history,” said Zelda Boucher, chairwoman of the historical society’s board of governors, adding that they wish they “could download her mind.”
Around the city and Smith County, sites are nominated for historical markers, and Ms. McNamara coordinates them.
She’s been working with the committee for more than 10 years and now serves as markers chairwoman to help choose among the nominees.
“I love it — I really love it,” she said. It’s “fun, fun, fun.”
The archive has outgrown its space and is moving from its upstairs room across the hall and downstairs.
Sherry Kidd, who has been volunteering as archives manager and working with Ms. McNamara for about four years, said Ms. McNamara was working alone in the archive for about three years, and it was physically and mentally exhausting for her.
Now, Mrs. Kidd is helping straighten it up to Ms. McNamara’s liking.
Kidd said she really has a “librarian’s mind” with her own system of labeling — there’s a “method to everything.”
Mrs. Kidd said, “It definitely works.”
Then there’s the recataloguing each item so it can be found the next time.
The archive’s resources are “useless if we can’t use it to answer people’s questions,” Ms. McNamara said.
TYLER'S HISTORIAN
With ease, Tyler’s past slips from her lips, weaving a tale of Tyler before the streets were paved, when Broadway Avenue had yet to bisect the downtown square, at a time when everybody knew everyone.
There was “none of this ‘I don’t know who they are’ business. Of course, you knew who they were,” she said.
There’s the story of the Blackstone Hotel where oil executives rented rooms and people lined up for job interviews to work in the oilfield during the Great Depression. Then there was its destruction in 1985 to save tax money and make room for a parking lot.
Below what’s now the Downtown Coffee Lounge was a pool hall parents urged their children to hurry past.
Downtown was once the center of Tyler’s ebb and flow. Businesses were tucked into every nook and cranny, sometimes only 15 feet wide, she said. At lunch, workers could slip into a lunch counter at Woolworth’s or Neil Simpson drug store and grab a bite.
Horse-drawn carriages still tied up when residents came down to the courthouse, and businesses stayed open late on Thursdays and Saturdays. Farmers brought in fresh produce for low prices.
The 1970s and 1980s were a rough patch, she said, when people didn’t listen to their fathers, and it was all about the bottom line. The bottom fell out of the oil business, and real estate was hard to move. Aluminum fronts were a mess, and looked like nobody was in any of the storefronts.
“Nothing can stop a downtown when it moves,” she said.
When Ms. McNamara first arrived with her family for the oil boom in 1931, Tyler’s population was 18,000. By the end of the year, the city’s population had swollen to 31,000.
The city was crammed. Some rented screened-in porches with cots. The people came from far and wide and were all kinds. And the newcomers were just as strange to Tylerites as residents were to them, she said.
It was a little hard for her to fit in, she said, because she was Catholic, which was one of the city’s smallest denominations.
She’s attended the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler since she arrived and remembers when they laid the cornerstone for the church’s current location in 1934. Her father died from a heart attack the next day.
Her mother worked as a seamstress — alterations were important because clothes didn’t have elastic — and made party foods to support Ms. McNamara and her older brother, John, who worked as airport manager at Pounds Field for more than 30 years.
Mrs. McNamara said Tyler had superior schools from the beginning and that educators’ very presence was remarkable. Teachers had control over their classrooms, with “none of this silly business now.”
“School was a great adventure,” she said.
Back then, everyone walked. Her mother always told them to “put your feet in the road” when they asked to go somewhere.
She said when she grew up in Tyler, the city was little and safe. In junior high school, little girls could walk down to the movies and come home at 11 without a problem, she said.
She soon will mark her 80th year in Tyler.
“I know I’m prejudiced about Tyler,” she said, but there are tons of wonderful stories to tell.
OUTSIDE THE ARCHIVE
Ms. McNamara’s just as much a fixture in the community as she is the historical society.
She’s lived in the same home she purchased on West Rusk since 1956, and she gives her time to other community organizations — Daughters of the American Revolution, Delta Kappa Gamma, which is an educators’ group, and Habitat for Humanity.
She’s passionate about Habitat — “I love to do it” — and said she’s done more than just serve as a board member. She’s helped build the houses, including putting in the locks and cooking meals with her Catholic Daughters of America group.
Anything to help people own homes and establish themselves in a community gives the new owners an uplift renting can’t, she said.
The “greatest move is a move up to productive citizenship,” she said.
On Dec. 19, Ms. McNamara visited patients at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler with members of the local Catholic Daughters of America group to spread holiday wishes of wellness and homemade cookies. She said they would tell patients, “God bless you, and I hope you are better tomorrow,” and that they hoped patients would go home before Christmas. They left treats with the nurses and doctors and spent time with those waiting in the emergency room.
“It’s an old, old tradition — we find it does better for us than it does for them,” Ms. McNamara said. Her mother started going out in 1948 when the health center was the East Texas Tuberculosis Sanatorium.
She enjoys going because it brightens the faces of patients and loved ones to know “that there are people out there who care.”
JUST A NUMBER
“She may be outliving everyone, but she remembers everything,” Mrs. Boucher said of Ms. McNamara during the holiday museum open house Dec. 9.
Ms. McNamara was dismissive and said with a laugh, “I’ve just outlived them all, and they can’t contradict me.”
“When she’s gone, we’re going to lose half our history,” Mrs. Boucher said.
So what happens when Ms. McNamara decides to call it quits?
“She can’t make that decision — we won’t let her,” Mrs. Boucher said.
Ms. McNamara said she will keep coming in until she’s physically unable or “so absent-minded, they ask me to stay home tomorrow.”
“I feel like a prisoner (if I) stay home too many days in a row,” she said.
Ms. McNamara, who never married, is the oldest one left in her family, and none of the younger members lives in Tyler.
All her life, she said, she’s been strong and healthy.
“I’m well and working and enjoying life — I don’t see any point in worrying about 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. But 80 does daunt you a little,” Ms. McNamara said. “What is old? A state of mind.”
This story originally appeared in the Tyler Morning Telegraph on Jan. 3, 2011.