There are quite a few Mudcatters who knew my father, John Dwyer. He was a folksinger/librarian in the Pacific Northwest, and he died in late 1997 (six months later my Mom died--it was a couple of rough years).

Dad was famous for his puns, was well known to be assertive with noisy people in libraries, and had a few public squabbles going during his lifetime (like many other faculty at the community college where he worked, it was often conducted via the editorial page of the local paper). He was a careful researcher, especially when it came to song lyrics and kept lots of tapes and copious notes. He hated the Blue Book if people were going to sign from it at any song circle or other events. He didn't suffer fools gladly and there were times in my childhood when I felt like he didn't suffer us very gladly, either. We were raised in the time (1950s, 60s) when Dads weren't as hands-on with kids as they are now. But when it came to things like fishing, books, fishing, poetry, songs, fishing, culture, the arts, and fishing, we were of an accord and he was glad to have us around to teach and enjoy these things.

My parents went through a painful divorce when I was about 14, and after he died I found a file with some terse notes about things he wanted to talk to me about, mostly to do with how Mom behaved during and after (nothing she should be proud of). We talked about some of them over the years, of the others, I wish he'd said something.

Before he went into library school, his BA was in English, and he read voraciously all of his life. When I went back to graduate school as an English major, he delighted in proofing a paper that I had written for a class and that was subsequently accepted for publication in a scholarly journal. He was one of the few folks I knew who had read the author I was writing about, so it was a great help to get his comments. I dedicated that one to him when it was published.

SRS