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| From the Don Jackson Collection, LLF Library |
As a teenager and next door neighbor of the head of personnel, I actually worked in this building one summer as a payroll clerk and got an inside look at the operations.
By then, the building was showing its age and there were cracks through which daylight poured in countless places. Whenever I had to go into the "safe," a rather large room with a steel door that we never closed, I always was warned by my fellow co-workers to watch out for snakes, as more than one had been spotted in there among the books and papers.
That warning was always followed up with the story of a seamstress who was bitten on the leg by a snake that had crawled into the bundles she was working on. Yikes! No wonder I have an inordinate fear of snakes (herpetophobia) to this day.
I have presented pictures of the interior of the building and the workers on my Facebook page, but not here. Stay tuned for a reprise of those. For the curious, here is an earlier posting of a Library of Congress photo of the building as it looked right after completion in the 1930s.
who knew the Stahl Urban building was a WPA project? Sippiana is just a fountain of info!
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