COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

Charles W. Mixer
In Memoriam

JUST twenty years ago the Friends of the Cohniibia Libraries
came into being. Among the officers of the new organiza¬
tion, its Treasurer, in fact, was a genial but self-effacing
individual whose name was Charles Mixer. He said little, but
at Council meetings it soon became apparent that he knew the
answer to almost every question that came up. When the first Sec¬
retary of the Friends, Merle Hoover, retired in 1953, the Council
turned to "Charlie," and he became Secretary-Treasurer. The
following year, when the position of Assistant Editor of tlie
Cohninis fell vacant, there once again was Charlie (with a useful
background as a former editorial assistant at Ginn and Company)
to take on tlie assignment.

From that time on—indeed, up to the very last days of his brief,
terminal illness—Charlie planned and worked for the Friends. It
hardly seems possible, now, that the quietly efficient force that
was Charlie Mixer, on whom librarians. Council members and
Columns editors depended for two unruffled decades, has sud¬
denly been extinguished.

Charlie's talent, often unnoticed at the time, was unobtrusively
to do most of the work but to give his committees the impression
that they had done it. Like magic, Bancroft Dinners, meetings and
presentations of all kinds, financial statements and i.ssues of the
 

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