Ken Appell's First Job: The New York Public Library

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While attending Manhattan College in the Bronx in 1940-42, Ken helped pay for school by working with his boyhood friend Arthur Barnett at the information desk in the card catalogue room (room 315) of the midtown Manhattan main branch of the New York Public Library (exterior at top in 2009, reading room below as it appeared in a Life magazine photo from 1944). His job was twofold: he would send patrons' request slips down to the stack via pneumatic tube (which required him to memorize which Dewey decimal numbers corresponded to which stacks), and also replaced the long, narrow card-catalogue drawers that patrons would regularly leave on the desks after using.

"I would try to get some studying done," he recalled, "and so I would let the drawers accumulate on the desks. But I came up with a technique that let me replace them very fast all at once. So every once in a while I would whip around the room, bam-bam-bam-bam! It got pretty noisy."

Ken worked Mondays through Thursdays after classes, from 5 to 10 pm, as well as afternoons every other weekend, for the munificent sum of 15 to 20 cents an hour. His name is inscribed on plaque at the library honoring employees who went off to service in World War II.