Indeed I do. How could anyone from my era at then-SMS, or a decade before, or after, not remember Maggie Crighton? You remember her as surely as you remember Virginia Craig or President Ellis or Professor Shannon. Especially if you were a guy interested in sneaking a glimpse of the cutest girls on campus, or a female student unopposed to being glimpsed — or if you were among the erudite young ladies or dapper guys who scurried to the library every evening.
Maggie had the title of assistant professor of library science, but to the student body she was guardian of the gates of both libraries: the North and the South Library, located at opposite ends of the main floor of the Administration Building (now Carrington Hall).
At that time, the college had no Student Union — hence, no central locale for boy-meets-girl. Which some claimed was exactly the way the dean of women, Bertha Wells, preferred. Over the course of time and tide (some estimates say it took as long as 24 hours), the two libraries took on that role.
As far as library personnel were concerned, the purpose of the library was restricted to the pursuit of knowledge and the printed word — nothing more and nothing less. For generations of SMS students, however, the main purpose (though clandestine and surreptitious) was otherwise.
Maggie Crighton, as everyone knew, was the library watchdog, or bird dog, or even greyhound, as she raced from north to south as the situation flexed and fluxed. There were student “Paul Reveres” to warn that “Maggie is coming.” Hence, throats cleared, books opened, pages turned and misty eyes quickly focused on the Dred Scott case and other philosophies too numerous to mention. Thus, during the course of an afternoon or evening or a week or a term, boy met girl and romances ebbed and flowed.
An upperclassman once confided to me that he met the love of his life in the South Library every day at 3:05 on the dot, except when she went to the North Library to do research. One day, he grew weary of waiting for her, wandered in to the North Library, and learned the awful truth: “She was huddled with some guy from Ash Grove,” he lamented. “You might say I was in the war between the North and the South, and lost.”
The two libraries existed for more than five decades, and Maggie and her associates were well aware of the situation. In President Roy Ellis’ “Shrine of the Ozarks: A history of Southwest Missouri State College 1905-1965,” he writes: “To further complicate the maximum utilization of the limited library facilities, some students were there for purposes alien to those which the library was dedicated.”
And the Standard newspaper of June 23, 1933, had an item that said, “The College dates having their derivation in the library are very amusing to observe. Every night we may observe a surplus of the fairer sex spending much time trying to catch the attention of one of the less numerous date possibilities that occasionally wander through the library.”
In retrospect, Maggie was to SMS what actress Eve Arden was to “Our Miss Brooks,” a popular radio show in the ’40s and ’50s. When construction of a new Library Building was completed in 1955 (and the North and South Libraries ceased to exist), Maggie had little trouble recruiting a crew of students to help with the move. By that time, the two libraries contained more than 80,000 volumes, but the move was completed in one weekend.
“It was a great adventure,” Maggie said to me some years later. But she didn’t say if she meant the move to the new facility, or her years as gatekeeper of the North and South Libraries.
Don Payton, ’50, is former information services director at Missouri State University.
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