Hi, my name is John Whitt

I live in the Chelsea section of Manhattan in New York City with a wonderful woman, Gayle (a.k.a. Janet), who was somehow persuaded to marry me twenty-one years ago.

Visit my wife's homepage.
See a map of our community, centered on the neighborhood branch library.

I am a member of the Riverside Church and strongly support its Racial Justice Initiative. Riverside is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ. My denominational heritage is American Baptist.

I work at the Bloomingdale Branch of the New York Public Library where I am the senior reference librarian

Gayle and I met at Denison University in the time of the furies; she majored in music or psychology (depending on her mood of the moment) amd I majored in history, rack, and tube (not necessarily in that order) with a strong minor in an archaic card game known as five hundred with an occasional excursions into bridge and chess.

I went on to take a master's degree in library science at Syracuse University, suffered through unemployment for a while before taking a job as a "teacher" at Greenwood School, a warehouse for retarded adults where I learned a lot about how the world really works and where I was fired twice, and, finally, after another period of unemployment, (and with the assistance of the New York State Office of Vocational Rehabilitation which has since changed its name to hide from potential clients) landed a position with NYPL where I have worked for the past quarter century.

When I was in college, doing my version (admittedly pretty tame) of the '60's radical thing, people (mostly older people) used to tell me that I would become more conservative when I got out into "the real world" and as I grew older.  Well, I aged (though there is some doubt that I've grown up) and in some ways I have certainly gotten more conservative, but I don't believe that being out in "the real world" has had much to do with that.  In fact, those manifestations of my early radicalism which were deemed most offensive by my critics have only become more pronounced as the years have passed.

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This page was last updated June 21, 1999.