The Potterf years and the used-book hunts

1935–1959

Margaret Colerick retired in 1934 after thirty-six years, and the library board chose her successor from fifteen applicants. "Potterf to Head Library," the News-Sentinel announced on 19 December 1934. Rex M. Potterf took over as head librarian in January 1935. He came out of the schools: he had headed the social-science department at Central High School, and he had no library training when he was hired, a gap he repaired by earning his library degree afterward. A scholarly history of the library's genealogy work, written by a later director, dates a tradition of heterodoxy in Fort Wayne library service from his arrival, and the word fits. Potterf ran the library for twenty-five years on methods the profession of his day considered strange, and the strangest of them built the collection the library is now famous for.

Early in 1935 he appointed Fred J. Reynolds, twenty-four years old and on the staff since 1930, to head the library's Allen County department. Reynolds became his closest associate for the next quarter of a century, and the two of them did the buying together.

The problem was money. Depression budgets left the shelves depleted and nothing like enough funds for new books. Potterf's answer was to buy used. Over a period of about fifteen years, he and Reynolds scoured the secondhand bookstores of the middle third of the United States. They bought thousands of copies of standard works of fiction and nonfiction, children's books and recent popular titles. And because both men had strong interests in the local history of the Fort Wayne area, they bought history with the same appetite: long runs of nineteenth-century historical and genealogical periodicals, and the fat county histories that every midwestern county had published in the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1940s a late nineteenth-century county history could be had for a dollar or two a volume, and Potterf acquired them not just for Fort Wayne or Indiana but for everywhere his readers' families had come from. The emphasis on travel and used-book purchase faded in the late 1950s, its work done.

His tenure was not quiet. His administration drew controversy, including a fight over a survey of the library, which the library's published history recounts. His standing in the profession was nonetheless statewide: when the Indiana Library Association met in Fort Wayne in October 1952, Potterf was general chairman of the conference, and Reynolds ran the program. In 1944 the library had bought the Hollywood Building on Washington Boulevard to house administrative offices, the first step of the long campaign for a larger Main Library. By 1959, the last year of his administration, circulation had grown to about 800,000 a year. Potterf the historian also wrote: his study "The burgeoning interest in local history in Fort Wayne, 1887-1894" was published in 1968 under the library's own imprint.

Potterf retired at the end of 1959, effective 1 January 1960, and Reynolds, by then associate librarian since May 1959, succeeded him. What happened next is the measure of the used-book years. Early in the 1960s Reynolds set about developing collections and services for genealogists, and in January 1961 the library's original genealogy department began operations in a corner of the old Carnegie building with about 400 books, a gift from the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The heart of the growing collection, though, was what the buying trips had already stacked on the shelves: the county histories and periodical runs bought for a dollar or two in the 1940s. Reynolds added a copying arrangement with the Newberry Library of Chicago, then the largest genealogical collection in the country, under which deteriorating Newberry volumes were photocopied at Fort Wayne, with a copy staying in Allen County; as many as 37,000 volumes were acquired that way. The department, which now carries Reynolds's name, became the largest genealogy collection in an American public library, and the library as a whole the second largest genealogical collection in the United States, behind only the private Family History Library in Salt Lake City. It began, on the record, with two men in the secondhand bookstores, spending Depression money a dollar at a time.

Sources:

1. Rick J. Ashton, "A Commitment to Excellence in Genealogy," Illinois Libraries, Summer 1983 (Potterf's 1935 appointment and background; Reynolds's appointment at twenty-four to the Allen County department; the fifteen years of used-book buying; the dollar-or-two county histories; the genealogy department of January 1961 and its 400 DAR-gift books; the 1959 retirement and succession).
2. Myron Slater-Putt and others, Beyond Books (1995), chapters 2 and 3 (the choice of Potterf from fifteen applicants; his Central High School post and his library degree earned after hiring; the survey controversy; the circulation growth to about 800,000 by 1959).
3. Library Occurrent, vol. 20, no. 1, March 1960 (Potterf's retirement effective 1 January after twenty-five years; Reynolds on the staff since 1930 and associate librarian since May 1959).
4. Tom Castaldi, "Allen County's Amazing Library," Fort Wayne Monthly, March 2011, reprinted in History Center Notes and Queries (the second-largest collection ranking; the first public library to obtain all available federal census records; the Newberry copying arrangement and its 37,000 volumes).
5. Focus on Indiana Libraries, vol. 6, no. 5, October 1952 (the Fort Wayne conference; Potterf general chairman; Reynolds on program).