"Libraries have been my life," he says. "And the wonderful thing is that I've always had jobs that I loved."

He eventually would earn master's and Ph.D. degrees in library science, and has been hanging about libraries professionally for more than 40 years. A good part of that time has been at the University of North Texas, where as Regents Professor and associate dean of the School of Library and Information Sciences he has guided hundreds of students into the profession he loves.

Birthday party

This year he's also president of the Texas Library Association. He will preside over the organization's centennial celebration during its annual meeting April 23-26 in Dallas. With 7,300 members, the TLA is the largest library association in the country. It expects some 8,000 to attend its birthday party.

"Texas has many very good public libraries," Dr. Totten says. "It has libraries far above the level of support that the state gives them. We have good library systems – particularly in our major metropolitan areas – mainly because they have dynamic Friends of the Library groups that raise money for them."

In Texas, where politicians who hold the public purse strings traditionally have looked upon learning with suspicion, libraries usually are among the first victims when budgets are cut. They always have depended on lovers of books for their survival. Most of those book-lovers have been women.

Dr. Totten smiles and sometimes breaks into laughter as he talks about the women who taught him the joy of reading and steered him into the only career he ever really wanted. His memories are warm and happy.

"My grandmother was the wife of a sharecropper," he says. "But she went to school at a Presbyterian seminary for girls in Crockett, Texas. So for the first eight years of her life, she got a very solid education. She had a tremendous understanding of phonics, so she could pronounce any word she saw. And she used this with me."

Her name was Jeannette Shorter Simms. She was Dr. Totten's maternal grandmother. Her husband, Herman Simms, for whom Dr. Totten is named, was a wise but uneducated farmer.

"He used to tell me: 'You never learn anything when your mouth is open. You learn only by listening.' " Dr. Totten laughs. "I've never been able to live up to that. I talk all the time."

Dr. Totten's mother, Dulvi, was the prettiest of seven sisters, he says, and her nickname was "Cinderella."

"The Simmses were warm, friendly, loving people," he says. "I owe a lot of my values to them. My father was well-educated, and my mother wasn't. But he used to say that she kept him from being a stiff shirt."

The man he calls his father was really his stepfather, Joseph Tucker, an academic. During the time Dr. Totten's grandmother was teaching him to read, the family was living in Muskogee, Okla., but his stepfather was dean at Philander Smith College, a black school in Little Rock, Ark. He commuted between Muskogee and Little Rock on weekends and holidays.

He later would become dean of Langston College in Oklahoma. Oklahoma hadn't been a part of the Confederate States of America, but racial segregation was as strictly enforced there as elsewhere in the South.

"I don't think I paid that much attention to it," Dr. Totten says. "It was the status quo, and I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I was more concerned with learning than I was with the social order."

A special librarian

Segregation meant he was barred from the main public library in Muskogee and its white branches. But there was a black branch, and a black librarian named Emmarene Moore.

"Mrs. Moore was very, very dynamic," Dr. Totten says. "Every summer, she systematically went through the neighborhood and gathered up the little kids and took them into the library for story hours. For high school kids, she had all kinds of crafts. She gave very competitive awards for reading. All this made me really like being in the library.

"By the time I was 5, I was really going through the picture books. Mrs. Moore recognized this, so she always gave me something a little harder.

"She taught me how books can enlarge your life. She taught me that you didn't have to go to Amsterdam to find out about Holland," Dr. Totten says. "She would find me a book that would carry me there.

"She had a way of connecting with people, especially children. She had the ability to grab your interest and hold it from the time you started kindergarten until you graduated from college. That's a wonderful gift. She had an impact on the whole community. She was my role model."

Mrs. Moore even found a way to tiptoe around segregation.

"She had very good rapport with the white officials at the main library. And if she had a reader who had run through all the materials available at our branch," says Dr. Totten, "she would make special arrangements to take you to the main library and get materials and browse for a while.

"She didn't let you 'work in the basement of your capacity,' as she used to say. She knew the reading habits of us all, and if she figured out that you were reading above your grade level, she always had something new to challenge you."

About the time his grandmother was teaching Dr. Totten to read, he made his first public speech. It came at the end of a program that the children performed at his Methodist church. "It was (and I quote): 'Now, dear friends, our program is done. Go home, be happy, everyone.' "

As in many African-American families during segregation, most of Dr. Totten's childhood social activities were in school and church. He has loved the church ever since and has served his Denton congregation, Trinity United Methodist Church, in many capacities over the years.

"My spirituality has always given me an inner strength," he says. "I have always felt that I'm able to overcome any obstacle placed in my path. God knows there have been many."

An aptitude

When Dr. Totten got to junior high school, the librarian chose him as a library assistant.

"Librarians seem to recognize aptitude in students," he says. "She taught me the circulation system so I could check out books. She taught me the Dewey Decimal System so I could re-shelve the books that people had used. I picked it up easily. I had a knack for it."

The junior high librarian passed him on to the high school librarian, Annabelle Maddox.

"On the first day of classes, she came to my homeroom and told the teacher she wanted to see me during my study period," he says. "She corralled me."

Mrs. Maddox became his mentor. When Dr. Totten was a senior, Gertrude Howard Mason, the librarian at Wylie College in Marshall, Texas, came to Muskogee for a regional meeting of her sorority. She asked Mrs. Maddox about students who were graduating that year, and what colleges they were planning to attend. Mrs. Maddox told her about Herman Totten.

He graduated as valedictorian. Wylie College awarded him a scholarship and Mrs. Mason gave him a job in her library. He worked there the whole four years he was in college. By the time he graduated in 1961, he was head checker.

He had majored in music, but he knew he wanted to go on to library school. So he hired on at H.B. Pemberton High School in Marshall as librarian.

"I worked two years and saved my money because I didn't want to go to library school in pieces, picking up courses here and there."

In 1963 he departed for the University of Oklahoma to work on a master's degree in library science. When he completed that, a professor persuaded him to pursue a Ph.D.

"He said, 'You have enough experience as a librarian,' " Dr. Totten says. "He said, 'You really ought to be in the classroom, because you have the ability to communicate.' So I stayed."

In 1966, with new sheepskin in hand, Dr. Totten returned to Wylie as its library director. It was the beginning of an academic career that would take him to teaching and administrative jobs at the University of Kentucky and the University of Oregon before he arrived at UNT in 1977.

He's now 63. His profession has changed tremendously during the course of his career.

"I got two degrees in library science before computers found their way into our libraries," he says. "The profession has embraced and harnessed technology to do many, many, many things that librarians used to have to do.

"It's an information profession now. Almost every major entity in the world – in business, government, whatever – has some way of organizing for its easy retrieval all the information it needs to do what it does. They don't call it a library. They call it an information center. So a librarian – a professional information person – may have a job organizing and providing information at the American Heart Association, at Frito-Lay, at Bank One, as well as the Dallas Public Library."

Favorite books

Dr. Totten's large personal library tends toward the literary. "My favorite book – I'll bet you I've read it 20 times – is Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington," he says. "Also Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea. Since high school I've read Ulysses about four times. And probably the book that has had the most impact on me is War and Peace. For some reason, I've always been fascinated with Russia."

But tucked in among the heavyweights are about 20 slender Golden Books that his mother and grandmother bought for him at Safeway for 89 cents apiece when he was a child.

"Librarians didn't consider Golden Books to be very good books, but I loved them," he says. "The first book I remember reading was called Little Toot. It was about a tugboat. Another I remember is one my grandmother bought me as a reward for learning the Lord's Prayer. It's called The Taxi That Hurried. It's about a driver and a taxi that have to get a lady to the train station before her train leaves.

"I have kept that book. It's really, really worn, but I have kept it."