25 October 1990--RW smoking away--I got
very sick because I did not notice it soon enough--Left word for Hayward Brock.
5 November 1990--Mailed letters to
Hayward and Maxine--want violations on record--Someone has been smoking in the
dome, even.
7 November 1990--Wrote the Director of
Libraries after she refused to move ashtray urns from the entrances: "If I
as part Choctaw and part Cherokee I complained that the only way I could get
into Morris Library was to walk past signs where the urns read: ‘THE ONLY GOOD
INDIAN IS A DEAD INDIAN’ you would find the authority, fast, to remove the
signs. I don't see that a psychological assault such as a racist sign should be
regarded as necessarily more dangerous than a direct physical assault, which is
what anyone allergic to tobacco smoke now suffers in order to enter the
library." I added parenthetically: "the users of Smoking Room 323 [in
Morris Library] cannot sit in their own smoke: they often prop open the door to
let smoke go out into the stacks." I continued: "I am sending a copy
of this letter and (with your permission) a copy of your letter to Ronald
Whittington, Maxine Colm, Robin Elliott, and Dean Edith Anderson as a way of
raising consciousness about the need to see anyone's objection to smoking by an
entrance to a building of the University of Delaware strictly as an access issue. We build ramps for people confined to
wheelchairs. We can find ways of
preventing unnecessary damage to the health of people who are still mobile but
already damaged by tobacco smoke." [The urns and the smokers stayed, and
the door to Smoking Room 323 continued to be open to the stacks much of the
time. I retired early in large part because I never could gain smoke-free
access to the library.]
12 November 1990--Smokers in lobby--Big
blue No Smoking sign torn down--No sign even in men's room--Left word at Dean's
office.
20 November 1990--Very depressed by RW
and other violators and vandalizing of signs.
As I say in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE, I had to leave the University of Delaware because I could never gain smoke-free access to Morris Library and once inside could never reach smoke-free areas because there were none.
Is it better in Dublin and Rome and London and Paris now? Is it better in Delaware now?
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