A Memoir of a Music Librarian

It was the summer of 1950. I had what I considered a dream job. I was the "disc jockey" for the New York Public Library, planning and presenting the Bryant Park concerts of recorded music, noon to 2 P.M., Monday through Friday, from 5 July to Labor Day.¹ This was the second summer of the concerts. The first had been sponsored by the singer, Lanny Ross, perhaps best known for the song "Moonlight and Roses." For the second year in a row the concerts were underwritten by the Union Dime Savings Bank.

My job was to plan programs of classical recordings with a mix of orchestral, vocal, and chamber music, to watch for anniversaries of births and deaths of composers in order to get program ideas, and to respond to listeners' requests. The records were played in a makeshift studio on the second floor stacks of the library and transmitted to the esplanade at the southeast corner of Bryant Park, just behind the library. Long- playing records were still something of a novelty but were sometimes programmed; most of the recordings were 78s.

I was a twenty-four-year-old musicology student in the graduate school at New York University who had detoured into studying library science at Columbia. I was amazed and highly pleased when Philip Miller, the assistant chief of the Music Division, selected me to be disc jockey. It was he, who in answer to my inquiries, guided me into becoming a music librarian and who was my mentor in the years that followed.

The summer was a pleasant one. Richard Tucker was a guest at the opening concert and had a capacity crowd as he sang Leoncavallo's "Mattinata," a song which Mr. Miller pointed out had been composed specifically for the new invention of the gramophone. The rest of the summer was rewarding. The lunchtime crowds were generally large and the response by the public was gratifying. I don't think any concerts had to be cancelled because of rain. A number of programs were changed at the last minute after I read an obituary of an artist or composer and substituted a memorial selection.

One August day Mr. Miller came up to the "studio" while I was playing selections from the recording of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov sung by Alexander Kipnis with an orchestra conducted by Nikolai Berezowsky. He was accompanied by a woman whom he introduced as Mrs. Alice Widener. The first thing she said was "He's playing Nicky's record." Then she said, "Nick was my first husband." She was the former Mrs. Nikolai Berezowsky.

While the records were spinning, Mrs. Widener began to question me in a staccato voice. "Mr. Shank," she said, "I must be perfectly frank with you. Mr. Miller has spoken very highly about your musical qualifications. I must ask you to answer me truthfully. Have you ever been a Communist? Or have you ever been a member or sympathizer of any Communist organization?" "No to both," I answered, nearly flipping as I tried to flip a recording on the turntable.

Mrs. Widener then told me why she had come to meet me. She was employed by Radio Free Europe to produce a weekly thirty-minute program, twenty-five minutes of music, five minutes of political commentary. She needed a part-time assistant. The pay would be seventy-five dollars per week.

I asked for more details. She told me, "Mr. Shank, do you know that behind the Iron Curtain they are broadcasting the music of Wagner and Mascagni and making subtle changes in the libretto, for instance, instead of Parsifal, the hero might be Stalin, instead of Siegfried, the hero might be Molotov. What do you think we should do to combat this?"

"We should broadcast the correct libretto," I answered. "Mr. Shank, this is war," came her response. "We must fight fire with fire. We should use names like Truman and Marshall." Mrs. Widener then asked if I would meet her at her Park Avenue apartment to discuss the position further and I agreed to see her the next day.

At...