Bartol Brinkler ’37

WE JUST LEARNED of the death of quiet librarian Bart Brinkler, of Alzheimer's, Oct. 2, 1993. At Portland H.S., Bart was a member of the French club and was active in dramatics. He majored in English at Princeton, with second-group honors and honorable mention for the Thomas B. Wanamaker English Language Prize. After three years at Princeton Graduate School, with an M.A. and Ph.D., he taught at L.S.U. and then served in the army for about four years. He termed his army service a "country club" existence; he interviewed recruits and was wardmaster instructor in Atlanta before being shipped out to Bermuda. From 1947-82, Bart worked at the Harvard Univ. Widener Library as head of classification and cataloguing and lived in Cambridge. When Widener changed to the Library of Congress classification system and subject headings in 1976, he trained all catalogers to use this quite different system. After he retired, he spent three or four months, instead of the previous one month, at his summer place in Maine.

Bart's learning of Root's Roots is shown in his scholarly 50th yearbook rendering of synonyms.