Repository: UIHistories Project: Booklet - Katharine Sharp Appreciation (1914) [PAGE 4]

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Sharp may be called a typical Illinois won m. Her college preparatory work was done at Elgin Academy of v. Inch in 1881, she was a graduate, and to which, four years later, she returned as a teacher. It was during her college days at Northwestern that I came to know her. In college she was a leader showing early in her college life, even in her freshman days her exceptional administrative abilities. As a student her work was excellent, well-balanced, intelligent, perhaps not brilliant, and it received, later, some year- after graduation, the stamp of Phi Beta Kappa. Her class, her sorority chapter of lea literary society which were hers. Katharine Sharp was always very intensely alive! One could not be long in a room with her without feeling her compelling personality. After leaving college she returned, as has been stated, to Elgin Academy as a member of its teaching force. Here follow two rather unhappy years. Strange to those w h o knew her later as a teacher in the Library School, Miss Sharp did not like to teach! Just exactly her reason, I confess I have never quite fathomed, but I more than suspect that it was the discipline incident to high school life which troubled her. Her standards of life and of conduct were held so high for herself that it is quite possible in her youthful experience before she had gained the charity that comes with maturity, she had difficulty in learning how to overlook with discretion. In 1888, Miss Sharp was appointed assistant librarian of Scoville Institute, now the Oak Park public library, and here what Altho "assistant librarian," she was in fact the only libra little library, the titular librarian being a Chicago ss man, who had accepted his honorary office at the request of the founder of the Institute, and who in actual pract management of the infant library almost wholly u ment of the a distant librarian. Miss Sham f*>lt alw the library though she fit with