By Tess Goldwasser
This week’s very special profile is of Mac Elrod, a founding member of the RT, with decades of library (and life) experience. He’s so fascinating, I’m just going to let him tell us all about himself:
TG: What is your role within the GLBTRT?
ME: Founding member.
What professional work do you perform?
Director to Special Libraries Cataloguing, Inc.
Tell us about your personal life.
Living apart from my wife of 50 years, but we visit back and forth.
Five surviving children, eight grandchildren, and one great grandchild.
Partnered with a lover for 15 years (Whom I met when he was 21. I am 82, so it is very much an intergenerational relationship.)
What is your passion?
Social justice issues. I funded the appearance of the Canadian Unitarian Council before the Supreme Court of Canada in support of equal marriage rights. Apart from gay rights, I very much favor ending the classist, racist, counterproductive War on Drugs, and treating drug addiction as a public health issue.
What are you most proud of, professionally and/or personally?
Professionally: founding Korea’s first library school; before the end of the card catalogue era, pioneering the divided catalogue and ticked tracing in Canada; more recently, founding Special Libraries Cataloguing.
Personally: participation in the Southern Civil Rights Movement; pastoring Black churches; assisting refugees in Canada, including Vietnam era war objectors.
What are your goals?
At 82, little beyond continuing my present activities as long as possible, including performing gay weddings, hosting a quarterly pot-luck for gay men in my log house on a mountain, and posting to Autocat.
If you were an animal, what animal would you be?
A cat. Home does not seem home without an affectionate cat.
If you could have a dinner party with 5 culturally or historically significant figures, living or dead, who would you invite?
Spinoza, Erasmus, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King.
