“It all started with a crime,” Richard Widdicombe, a librarian at the S.C. Williams library from 1966 to 2006, serving as director for many years, stated in an email to The Stute. Indeed, on March 12, 1972, it was discovered that two “state-of-the-art” Wang calculators had been stolen from the library, among other items. According to an article written in The Stute on March 17, 1972, the total value of the stolen items was $9,367, equal to approximately $58,000 today. These calculators “had been donated by Bill McClean, a VP at Stevens and board member of the Wang corporation” (Widdicombe), and had been used by students to “shorten the tedious process of solving lab and problem calculations” (The Stute, Vol. 67, Issue 22).
Widdicombe tried preventing further theft in the library by asking a senior math student to live in the third floor of the Williams Library, in the Staff Room for library employees. He stated, “From 1972 – 2004 various students (and one employee of the Physical Education Department) stayed in the library.” Eventually, Room 317 on the third floor became the more permanent dorm room, as they were “fixed up with bunk beds, study desks, etc.” Even to this day, Room 317 is still there, serving as the office of Ms. Leah Loscutoff, the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian. Loscutoff recalled that when she moved into the office in 2013 there was still a mattress on the bunk bed that remains attached to the wall.
The handful of people that lived in the library had all of the typical amenities as the other dorms: “Where the ELC is now, across the way on the third floor […] there was a little kitchenette and a shower,” Loscutoff stated. Widdicombe recalled that “the many residents over the years also had fun in the library […] they played hide and seek in the stacks, whiffle [ball] in the Great Hall, while also being able to let the piano tuner in when the building was closed.”
Mr. Widdicombe seems to think that his idea of housing students in the library worked, and “gave the library extra security,” citing three examples. The first was one incident in which “someone threw a firecracker into the book drop […] This set fire to the Library’s paper storage room.” The second was a case where a urinal fell off the bathroom wall, causing “cascades of water flowing into the library vault (where the DaVinci collection was then stored).” Finally, as Mr. Widdicombe recalls, a student resident “caught a security guard breaking into the coin box of a copy machine.” In all three cases, the student resident was able to mitigate the damage done to the library.
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