My Library

Her mouth would open a little and her head would nod up and down as if TRYING to comprehend. And if she chanced to look my way her eyes would be big and bright with eyebrows sort of arched. She was quite expert at diagnosing cases of stupidity. But when a new fresh one came up she was always surprised anew -- almost as if she found it unbelievable that there were more than ten cases of stupidity in our wonderful world. One of her biggest assets, in my opinion anyway, is that she had a good sense regarding what she DID and DID NOT know -- this in a world were many pretend they know a lot, sometimes everything. So far as I know, Janet never pretended anything. When I first went to the venerable Society, I wasn't quite sure for some time whether she liked me. She was, I guess, reserved -- perhaps withholding opinion, for I later realized that she didn't jump to conclusions too fast -- that she thought things through, mulling them over slowly. At the time she was research assistant at the ASPR, beginning in 1967. She didn't talk a whole lot about her background, but she had been born in Charleston, Virginia in April, 1936, and carried a slight southern drawl. I think the circumstances of her younger years had been difficult, and at one point she had been in the Army. When I met her, she was busy providing herself with a college education, and in 1972 graduated from Hunter College in New York with a BA degree in psychology.