REGINA STEPHANIE SLUDOCK (1921-????)

Regina S. Sludock received a BA from Queens College in 1942.  She immediately began work at NYPL and also entered Columbia’s School of Library Service.  She received her MLS from Columbia in 1945 and the following year was named as the Acting Branch Librarian of the Cathedral Branch.  This branch was originally part of the Catholic-run Cathedral Library Association which consolidated with NYPL in 1905.  Today the branch is known as the Terence Cardinal Cooke-Cathedral Branch. 

Sludock was promoted to Branch Librarian at Cathedral in 1948 and headed that branch until 1956.  Over the next 22 years she also headed the Library for the Blind and the Epiphany, Fordham and Kips Bay branches until her retirement in 1978.

In her 1948/49 annual report for the Cathedral Branch, Sludock wrote about a young woman who “asked for material on Communism,” after confessing “that she thought she might be one and not know it, there was so much to-do about Communism in the papers, on the radio, etc.”  The young woman wanted to learn about Communism, not just read something “for or against” it.  The Cathedral staff gave her a copy of Marx’ Communist Manifesto, and Sludock wrote that the woman “went off quite satisfied.”  After initially being pleased with this reference transaction, the NYPL librarians had second thoughts about it.  Sludock worried that “having unconsciously been a Communist in the past, our young woman became one consciously, stirred to action by the call of the Manifesto, all with the connivance of the Cathedral Branch, of all places.”

In 2010 Regina Sludock was receiving her pension from NYPL and today would be her 90^th birthday.