A few days ago I opened up the quarterly publication that the university library system puts out to find a short obituary on the last page of my friend Hardy Carroll. He died this summer at the age of 81.
When I was a student I took a part job in the university’s Business Library where I was responsible for making sure that journal’s were sent out for binding into hardcover volumes on a regular basis. At that time, Hardy was also working in the Business Library, though that’s a bit like saying that Einstein had an interest in physics.
Hardy was the most well-read man I have ever met in my life. I like to consider myself pretty well-read and overeducated, but I’m not in the same league that Hardy was in. His office was just wall to wall books, many of them in piles on the floor, open to some page where he had temporarily stopped reading to move on to something else for the moment.
Hardy’s breadth of knowledge was almost scary, and he was constantly suggesting books and journal articles I should read. There were quite a few students who would repeatedly come back to the library when their next round of term papers were do and insist that the other librarians wouldn’t do — they wanted to talk to Hardy and that was that.
But apparently along with knowing pretty much everything, he had also had a varied work life. Before becoming a librarian, he had been a construction worker, a forester, a director of an overseas Quaker work camp, and a public school teacher.
Now that’s living life to its fullest.