William Pease:  

Life I, Bill, was the second of Palmer & Margaret Pease's four sons and I was named after my grandfather, Artis Levi Pease, with Artis as my middle name. I was born at home, at 7 Achorn Street, in Rockland, Knox County, Maine, on 28 January 1934 with Eliza Steele, District Nurse, as midwife. (Nurse Steele's fame in town has now been acknowledged by naming a street after her in Rockland.) It was the middle of the Great Depression and one out of every four families in the United States was on relief. My father found work to support his growing family as a pants presser in a local factory until he was hired by the Post Office as a Mailman. Like my older brother Dick, I played sports in Rockland High School (a center in football and a half-miler in track) and also was President of my high school class four years. I graduated in 1952, a member of the National Honor Society and third in my class academically. I attended Gorham State Teachers College one year (1952-53) where I also played string bass in the Gorham Civic Symphony orchestra. I then enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1953 to become eligible for the G.I. Bill to pay for the expense of later attending college. I served in the Army from 1953 to 1955 in La Grande Paroisse, France, as a Microwave Radio Repairman and as interpreter for my unit commander in the 102nd Signal Battalion. Upon my discharge from the Army I was accepted for admittance by Harvard College. I received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard in 1959, having majored in Philosophy, and John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. Senator and Trustee of the College, attended the graduation. I had worked in the Harvard College Library all four years of college and decided to make librarianship my career. I earned a Masters Degree in Library Science from Simmons College, Boston, in 1961. In 1960 I married Lydia Katz of Brookline, Massachusetts, and we eventually had three marvelous sons, Eric and the fraternal twins, Jeremy and Nathan. Lydia and I were divorced in 1976. From 1960 to 1980 I was a university librarian at various institutions, including Harvard University (1959-1960), the University of North Carolina (1961-1966), and Franklin and Marshall College (1966-1977). I have published several articles in the field of library science, including an appendix to The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed...Expand for more