Obituaries
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Donald C. Adcock, 86, director of library services at Glen Ellyn (Ill.) School District 41 from 1963 to 1989, died July 15. He served as coordinator for program support of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and later as interim director. After leaving AASL, he became university supervisor and then interim director for the school library media program at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois.
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Christine Lorraine Gehrt Wynar, 88, founder and co-owner of Libraries Unlimited in Littleton, Colorado, died June 28. Wynar also worked at several public and university libraries in the Denver area. During the Cold War, she cataloged and preserved volumes of Ukrainian history and literature as part of her work with the Ukrainian government in exile.
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Betty Mary Ellen Croft, 94, former head of the cataloging department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and director of Northwest Missouri State University Library in Maryville, died April 9.
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Leslie M. Haas, 54, dean of library services at Fort Hays State University (FHSU) in Hays, Kansas, died June 10. Haas joined FHSU in 2020 after working at Georgia Southern Uni-versity in Statesboro; Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Loyola University Chicago; University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Kent (Ohio) State University; and Texas A&M University in College Station.
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William T Henderson, 90, who served as acquisitions librarian at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and preservation librarian at UIUC, died June 11, 2020. Henderson was an American Library Association (ALA) life member and an early implementer of automation for bindery efforts. He and his wife Kathryn (also an LIS instructor) team-taught preservation courses at UIUC. In 2014 Beta Phi Mu’s Alpha Chapter established the Kathryn Luther and William T Henderson Award to honor them.
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Regina Minudri, 84, director of Berkeley (Calif.) Public Library from 1977 until her 1994 retirement, died June 18. After California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 reduced public library financing, she became the first library director in the state to secure tax funding through voter approval in 1980. She also started Berkeley’s Tool Lending Library, developed a citywide community information model, and established a library-based adult literacy program. She served as California Library Association president 1981–1982 and ALA president 1986–1987 and was elected to the California Library Hall of Fame in 2012.
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Elizabeth Ann Mueller, 86, director of Appalachian Regional Library in North Carolina until retiring in 2000, died May 24. She previously served as consulting services director for Chicago Suburban Library System in Burr Ridge, Illinois, and was named the Illinois Library Association’s Librarian of the Year in 1993.
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Marie Antonella Parker, 63, librarian for North Londonderry (N.H.) Elementary School for 10 years, died April 3.
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Devona Pendergrass, 63, district library team leader at Mountain Home (Ark.) Public Schools, died May 2. Pendergrass was a board member at large of the American Associa-tion of School Librarians from 2016–2018, a charter member of the Arkansas Rural Education Association, and 2014 president of the Arkansas Association of School Librarians.
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Jane Sánchez, 72, deputy librarian for library collections and services at Library of Congress (LC), died March 26. Sánchez joined LC in 2014 as chief of the Humanities and Social Sciences division. She was appointed the 25th law librarian of Congress in 2017. She had previously served as head of history and culture libraries at Smithsonian Libraries and acquisitions manager for electronic databases at BNA Inc.
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Anne M. Shepherd, 68, a library director for more than 35 years at libraries in Florida, Louisiana, and Rhode Island, died January 13. Most recently, she founded Shepherd and Associates, a library consulting and executive search firm.
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James Ubel, 83, executive director of Shawnee Library System in Carterville, Illinois, until his retirement in 2000, died February 7.