Bull Remembered

I met Mr. Bullen, as I first called him, over ten years ago when we worked together on Sarah Long’s ALA Presidential campaign.  I don’t remember when I switched to calling him “Bull” like everybody else.  For his part, he never called me by name. “We don’t have that name in the South,” he’d say, preferring instead to spell out “I-A-N.” (Mississippi, his home state, remains the most Ian-less of the fifty.)

Bull split his volunteer time between calling his old library contacts and the menial tasks of stuffing and addressing envelopes.  He didn’t mind doing either one: “I don’t give a hoot,” as he put it. Socially, he had the unique talent of, with complete impunity, broaching topics many others wouldn’t be able to touch.  At one point, I heard him ask a phone call recipient, “Is it Miss or Mrs.?” Afterwards, I told him, “You know, you probably shouldn’t ask  her that.”He frowned and said, “Boy! How else would I know how to address the envelope?”

That sudden burst of playful, feigned anger was one of his trademarks.  So, too, were the word variations.  Not a “sticker” but a “sticky.”  Not “candy” but “a bit of sweet.”  I wish I could remember all of them.  Some of them may have been regional but I have a feeling the majority were just Bull being Bull.  His words would sometimes lilt about when he’d say them: a “cute” girl came out as being “cah-yute.”

I figured at one point that he knew everyone who’d ever worked in a library anywhere in the country.  When we’d stuff envelopes, he’d have stories about each addressee–sometimes ones that probably wouldn’t be part of their Library Journal profiles.  I asked him a lot about Vicksburg and the Natchez Trace and about the writers he’d met.  He’d met them all, at least the southern ones: Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and the ultra-cool Flannery O’Connor, who, Bull picked up at the bus station for a library reading and was quite surprised to find in her housecoat.

A life in libraries is well-spent.  Bull served an important part in creating the library service in parts of the north Chicago suburbs that are still enjoyed today, including what became the Ela Area, Warren-Newport, and Vernon Area libraries.  That’s not nothing.  Or as he would say, it’s a credit to him.  He’d always say that, “Be a credit to me”, before he ended each phone call.  This after reminding me that his blue suit was waiting in his closet for my wedding day.  (When I did get married, he wore gray, but never mind.)  Then before hanging up, he’d say, “Call me day or night.”