Retirement is another phase of lifelong learning

More time for The New York Times—a retirement goal for Bob McCown Photo by Tim Schoon.

Bob McCown’s job was one unauthorized biographers and gossip columnists might only dream about.

As the University’s manuscript librarian, his primary duty was to collect personal papers of Iowans. These included the manuscripts, memo drafts, private letters, diaries, and journals of noted novelists, poets, politicians, and other historical figures.

Thousands of intimate handwritten or typed details of public people passed through his hands and collected in his head.

"I learned a great deal about so many of these individuals. On a few occasions, I learned more than I wanted to know or needed to know, I’m sure," McCown says, with a hint of a smile.

He was never a snoop. His role was vastly more valued and respected, as gatherer and protector of valuable historical resources in the University’s Special Collections.

Researchers, historians, writers, and the like study these documents to sort out the past and tell the tales for generations to come.

McCown says he enjoyed working with folks like Frank Freidel, a biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with the papers of such talents as Iris Murdoch, the woman on whose life the Academy Award-nominated 2001 film "Iris" was based, and Mary Louise Smith, the first woman chair of the National Republican Party.

He also enjoyed working with ambitious graduate students using materials on their first major research projects.

McCown grew up in northwest Iowa, leaving to do undergraduate work at St. John’s University, teach for five years in a Connecticut high school, and get his master’s degree in library science from the University of Illinois.

He returned to his home state in 1970, accepting the Special Collections position at The University of Iowa. He served as head of Special Collections from 1986 to 1997, before beginning a phased retirement program, working three years at 65 percent time and two years at half time. Now, after 31 years, he’s officially, completely, utterly retired. Sort of.

He’s volunteering time in his old department editing oral history transcripts and at the Levitt Center reception desk a couple mornings a month.

He says his wife, Judi Gust, serves as a fine example. She has been a Museum of Art docent since she retired as a nurse clinician from University Hospitals two years ago.

McCown also plans to exercise, travel a bit, pay more attention to his husky-lab mix dog Baxter, write a family history for his granddaughters, and take time every morning to read The New York Times.

His library career was a source of lifelong learning and growth for him and, he says, he doesn’t plan to stop now.

Article by Amy Schoon