Mom as Alan Lomax's Office Manager

Sylvia sent the following as a comment on the last post I made, which was about mom's work with Alan Lomax. As with everything Sylvia sends me, it not only gives me new insights to mom's life, but is easily identifiable as Sylvia's (she doesn't always sign her messages. Why should she? She knows I can tell. That's confidence that I envy and admire).

Here's what she said:

"From my vantage point, Linge was extremely important in Alan Lomax’s work. She was the office manager on his project to study correlation between cultural markers and music. For example, he was studying whether there is there a correlation between cultures with traits of violence or peacefulness, hunting gathering or agricultural traditions and the music of those groups. Lomax had thousands of recordings of music from across the globe and he had a musicologist (maybe two) and an ethnologist coding musical and cultural characteristics, respectively, of these groups. The coding was then keypunched and input to a computer which performed correlations. You can imagine the stage of computing in those days! Linge performed all of the grind work and kept the office running smoothly.

"She was very young but had to have a great deal of poise and organization to do this. Alan and the other employees were more of the artiste personalities and Linge was the calming and prodding voice of efficiency and practicality. Alan was very well known and counted all of the famous folk artists among his friends, requiring Linge to deal with these celebrities, too. She was not stodgy or pious in her methods of herding these cats, though. She was cajoling and practical. And they all seemed to respect her, while holding obviously warm feelings toward her. I think this dual ability to keep people on track with humor and grace probably marked all of her career ventures.

"One example I particularly like reflects her ability to appease Alan’s quirks. Alan had a notion that the office should be open at a puritanically early hour. Eight or eight thirty, I think. No one ever arrived and no work ever started until after 10 am. But Alan would wake up at 8:00 or 8:30, telephone the office to insure someone was there attending to business, and, I imagine, roll over and go back to sleep. Linge would wake up in our apartment 20 minutes before the call, shove her clothes and make-up into a bag, and take off like a rocket for the office to answer the telephone when Alan called. When she had reassured him by crisply answering his early morning call, she would leisurely take a shower, put on make up, and dress. Then she would go down stairs to a deli for coffee and breakfast. She would be back upstairs and working by the time Alan and the others arrived. No one was ever the wiser."