Memory Book for Linda Young

Linda Young is retiring at the end of June 08 from her position as administrator in the Catherwood Library director’s office.  She has nearly 34 years of service at Cornell.  Most of Linda’s career has been devoted to work in the library and archival field beginning with her first position a month out of high school in 1965 in Olin Library.  A year later, she moved over to the Kheel Center processing the pamphlet collections.  Shortly after her marriage in 1968, the couple moved to Virginia where Jim was in the Navy at the time.  In 1977 she returned to Olin Library for a short time until she accepted the position of department secretary in Uris Library in 1978.  Shortly thereafter, she was recruited back to Catherwood and ultimately succeeded to the position of executive staff assistant to the director upon Ellen King’s retirement in 1987.

Linda manages a budget of nearly $2 million dollars and over the years has a near perfect record of restraining the library director’s natural inclination to overspend the accounts.  Given the varied intervals during which both domestic and international publishers produce an invoice for purchase of materials, always being able to come in on budget year after year is a high art.  Linda has mastered that, and all other aspects of her job, perfectly.

Several years ago, Linda and Jim built a brand new log home in the Owego area.  In late spring, summer, and early fall, they spend weekends at their camp on Oneida Lake enjoying the water and fishing for perch and walleyes. (Linda reels them in and Jim’s role is to throw them back in the lake.)  Both enjoy hunting and not only on their own estate of seventy-three acres near Owego but also in Colorado (elk and deer).

Linda and Jim have two children, Michelle and David, eight grandchildren and four great grandchildren.  Jim retired from Human Ecology’s Division of Nutritional Sciences in February 2007.

Linda exemplifies the type of individual at Cornell which makes this a great university.   She has worked tirelessly, readily accepts responsibility, and deserves as much credit as anyone on our staff for the fact that our library is an exceptional resource and one of a kind in North America.  She has so much corporate memory of the university, school, and library stored away upon which we have relied all these years. 

We wish her a well deserved retirement and will miss her profoundly.

Gordon Law