A Dose Of Reality

                It was just a day trip.....going back in time fifty years to 1976....and the Pitt campus....and our wedding at the Heinz Chapel. We walked along and pointed out where we took these classes or those classes....but most of all we went back to see what Hillman Library looked like after a seven year renovation....that included a major glass addition.
                I had gone to high school only two blocks from the Pitt campus....so that is almost eight years in Oakland....and I have a photo from 1966.....as a high school sophomore....where on a snowy winter day....my buddies and I were waiting for the Port Authority bus....(we all commuted)....and someone had a Polaroid....so the photo is of us standing before construction fencing....as they were building the Hillman Library! Less than ten years later....after the army....I met my future wife in that library....(where we both worked part-time as students)....that was just being built! So I took a similar photo today.
                We started on the fourth floor of Hillman....half of which contained the periodicals back in 1976....and probably much later....but periodicals in paper form must be outmoded....for there was only three aisles! I used to spend whole days shelving volumes of Time and Life and all the rest! So we walked down to the third floor....where there once was a little office....to get out instructions on what to do....but all of that was gone.....replaced by glass walls and comfortable chairs....comfortably spaced....everywhere....throughout the whole library of four floors and a ground floor!
                  Where were the books? We did find a few tucked away here and there! It was beautiful....no doubt about that....but it looked more like a grand student union than a library.
                  We also visited probably the grandest university building in the world....the Cathedral of Learning....a 42 story....535 foot tall Gothic structure....(check the images out on Google sometime)....and there didn't appear to be an iota of change from when I would choose a nook to study....yeah study....right....I spent half the time watching the girls walk by....and the other half reading some current event book that I picked up at the National Record Mart just up Forbes Avenue a block!
                   Still....it was a bit of culture shock. I guess that everything is online today....I even recommended Google which obviously we did not have back then. Is this good or bad? Well I've been a defender of the written word over the image for a long time. One question does come to mind....what if we do not have the Internet someday? How would we research anything?