Nearly 54 years ago, a confused and fascinated hoard of students, faculty and news reporters gazed at the multi-colored smoke billowing from the old chemistry building.
Among them was a freshmen named David Howard, who you may know now as Beaman’s periodicals librarian.
That event, which marked the beginning of his decades at Lipscomb, has stuck in the mind of Howard ever since.
Howard grew up in a small town in southern Illinois and was brought to Lipscomb mainly through the influence of a 5th grade teacher who had also attended here.
His visit in July of 1957 sealed his decision to attend school here rather than at Harding.
“There’s hardly anything for me that is pre-Lipscomb,” Howard said. “[My teacher] was always so happy about my decision to go here.”
Howard graduated in 1961 with a degree in Psychology and a minor in German. He then left Nashville for a little over a year to take classes back home in Southern Illinois University’s sociology graduate program.
During the summer of 1962, Dr. Mack Craig convinced Howard to return to Nashville and Lipscomb as a German professor while also taking graduate classes at Vanderbilt.
In 1972, after obtaining a library science graduate degree from Peabody and again at the request of Dr. Craig, Howard began his 39 years as the periodicals librarian. However, for the first three years he was also still teaching German fulltime until Dr. Charles McVey took over.
Over the course of his 49 years in the library, Howard has witnessed the evolution of the library as well as the campus as a whole.
“[The Library] has changed greatly,” Howard said. “In 1972 there were no computers at all so everything was done completely manually with pencil and paper.”
Although technology has made his job easier in some respects, the addition of electronic journals has created plenty of work, particularly since the pharmacy school opened.
“It’s the idea ‘it’s the same, but it’s different,’” Howard said. “You are doing the same things, just in a different way. It is an evolving process and where it is evolving to, no one knows!”
He did not expect 15 years ago that his job would transform into something that required him to be in front of a computer all day.
In regards to Lipscomb as a whole, Howard repeated, “It’s the same, but it’s different.”
Although he believes in many ways Lipscomb has not changed, some things certainly have.
“We’re bigger, we’re smarter, we have more buildings and more money,” Howard said. “But I really don’t think that our students, surprisingly, have changed that much. They are different, but they’re still awfully nice. I think our students are still way above average.”
Howard admits he is “not a great lover of change,” and appreciated that the basics about Lipscomb have remained the same.
“I am a creature of habit, but I think librarians usually are,” Howard said. “It takes a certain quality of exactness and definiteness.”
A little more personally, Howard and his wife, whom he met at Lipscomb, have been married nearly 45 years and have two children, Melanie and Michael.
Their son, Michael, lives in Massachusetts and works as a nuclear engineer.
Their daughter, Melanie, graduated from Lipscomb and is an executive assistant to the head of Public Relations for the Middle Tennessee YMCA.
Beyond his family, Howard’s interests lie in Basenjis and mystery novels. Howard and his wife currently have a Basenji as well as two terrier mixes and three cats. However, over the past 20 years, they have been involved in Basenji rescue and have taken in 8 dogs.
“The biggest things we spend our time with are these dogs that we take in,” Howard said.
However, there is always time for reading.
“Librarians surely all love to read,” Howard said. “But I love mystery novels!”
Howard prefers British mystery novels to American ones, although he enjoys authors such as Marcia Grimes and Margaret Coel.
“I like what they call a ‘cozy,’” Howard said. “It’s usually a murder or something like that that has happened in a small English village rather than a big city. So you get included in all the things that are doing on in this small town.”
When asked about his plans after he retires this spring, Howard replied, “I don’t have any.”
However, he made a point to say he certainly looks forward to never shifting the large bound volumes around the library again, a multi-month process which he has done six times and to which he jokingly attributes his retirement.
Although his retirement is well-earned to say the least, David Howard’s presence on this campus will be greatly missed.
“It is a good feeling. In a way it is,” Howard said. “I’m just going to let it happen as it will.”
One can’t help to think that the Beaman Library will be the same, but different.