"I'm the only secretary they've ever had," says Mae Logan, department assistant for the divisions of Music Theory and Musicology; the departments of Composition, Historical Performance, and Ethnomusicology; and the TIMARA Program. "The first paper that was put into the first folder--I did." This fall someone else will be doing the filing, running the copy machine, typing the exams and correspondence, answering the phone, keeping the records and schedules, dubbing the tapes, and performing the myriad other tasks on which the faculty members and their associated students in the divisions, departments, and program depend.
As of January Logan had worked for the College--in the same area of the conservatory--for 31 years. The first five years were five-hour days, and the College doesn't count them in her longevity, says Logan, adding, "I count them." "I started with 13 people," Logan says. The mailboxes in her office now number 26, and some of the people she works for don't have mailboxes. She also started with a non-correcting typewriter. She remembers her first office as being furnished with- besides the typewriter--a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, and a turntable. Today--besides a computer--she has a copy machine, printer, dubbing machine, DAT machine, microwave, video player, refrigerator, a filing cabinet, a desk with an extension, two chairs, shelving, and a table bearing a supply of coffee and sweet rolls (to share).
Logan's involvement with the College has taken her beyond her office. She and her husband, Matt, have been host parents to foreign students at the College since 1973, "and we have been the richer for it," says Logan. Over the years she has taken several classes in the conservatory and the college religion department, and she has played in the gamelan. "I'll miss the people," Logan says, but she has made quite a few plans for her retirement years.
She's already signed up for the College's secretarial pool. And she has begun training as a volunteer chaplain at Allen Memorial Hospital. Besides also volunteering at the Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization, she will travel with Matt. The couple plans to go rock hunting in Missouri and Arkansas, and to visit their daughter in Arkansas, granddaughter in North Carolina, and friends in Arizona and Florida.