A Wealth Of Knowledge, Sans Degree

For a guy who now works in a library, a younger Richard Freider spent a surprising amount of time avoiding books — or book-learning, at least.

Today Frieder organizes community events at the Hartford Public Library, but he started out a bored high schooler, part-timing it as a supermarket parking attendant in suburban New York.

The yawn-inducing experience didn’t fire him up for academia: “I was really bored in high school, and it seemed that college was going to be more of the same,” he said. He spent some time loading and unloading mail trucks — a bit more interesting, but not really ideal as a career path.

Most suburban kids would have headed to college at this point: Frieder answered an ad in “Mother Earth News” and went to be a hired hand at a Missouri dairy farm.

“Being 18, I just sort of quit my job in the post office and packed my bag and went off to Missouri,” he said. “For a suburban kid from New York, it was really terrific.”

After leaving the cows behind for life in Manhattan, Frieder — on a whim — started taking classes at the YWCA: silk screen printing, woodworking and bookbinding. With the last, he’d found his new love and a new career goal.

To pursue this craft, he wrote about 70 letters to bookbinders, asking for work. Two positive replies came, and Frieder accepted a job with a Providence, R.I., bookbinder.

“You may have noticed that I haven’t said, ‘And then I went to college,’” Frieder said. “Because I never did.”

Broad Experience

Instead, he eventually worked as a bookbinder at Washington D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library before landing at Chicago’s Northwestern University as a bookbinder and library manager. He started taking library science classes at the University of Chicago, and before he knew it, he said, he was halfway through the university’s master’s program.

“The problem was I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” he said. But the university agreed to let him go through the program anyway – so Frieder has a master’s in library and information sciences, without ever matriculating as an undergraduate.

Wanting to add a little community involvement to his ivory-tower existence, Frieder volunteered to be on the board of a Chicago credit union. Working on community issues suited him, and he eventually came to Connecticut’s public library as its community development and civic services librarian. Now he organizes community programs and public forums, among other things – the culmination of his community work and library experience.

Frieder acknowledges that his career path wasn’t exactly conventional.

“I love my job, and it’s kind of a miracle that I am where I am.”