ETSS

ETSS > Profiles

Frederick Lincoln Chenery | Harold Booher | William Bill Mears | Robert Elzy Cogswell

Lucille H. Hager

Christ Seminary/Seminex Librarian
St. Louis (Seminex Seminary) 1974-1983
Austin (LSPS) 1983-1990
Seminex Librarian Emeritus
Austin (LSPS) 1990-2002
[previously director of the library at Concordia Seminary
until the 1974 exile]

Memorial read at the annual meeting of the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) meeting in Austin in 2005:

Over the Independence Day weekend, 2004, H. Lucille Hager died just after midnight (July 5th) after a fall in her home. Lucille never married, but she had more friends than most of us are blessed with – rich, close, dear friendships that shaped her life and made life worth living. And her vacations were simply legendary -- the Greek isles, a trip through the Panama Canal, a bus trip through the museums of Spain – and those were after she was in her 70s and semi-retired.

After graduating from Southeast Missouri State University and the University of Illinois, Lucille began her library professional career at Southeast Missouri State in 1945-1952. She joined the library staff of Concordia Seminary in 1952 and was named director of the library there in 1962. Although, somewhat quiet and thoughtful, Lucille was willing to take great risk when the situation demanded it.

Lucille Hager joined her colleagues -- the only female faculty member in the group -- and bravely robed up and walked out with several other faculty and students from her home seminary in February of 1974, helping birth Concordia Seminary in Exile, later Christ Seminary -- Seminex. At the time she did so with no guarantee of a job, a salary, benefits, or even health care.

The first classes at Seminex were held on the next day in classrooms at Eden (UCC) Seminary and St. Louis (Jesuit) University -- with the support of those liberal congregationalists and militant Roman Catholics. Housing offers for faculty members and students came from Jewish supporters.

Lucille and the other Seminex faculty temporarily shared office space with the jesuits in the theology department of St. Louis University until a store front was converted to hold the library – a library collection born out of hand-me-downs from such luminaries as Piepkorn (who died before Seminex ever began), Tietjen, Caemmerer, Bertram, Lueker, Bouman, Schroeder, Pelikan, and other supporters and benefactors.

While exciting and world-shaping, it was also challenging to take on the job Lucille embraced. She and the library were at the University of St. Louis campus on one side of town, but their cataloguing was being done at Fontbonne College across town. Lucille nursed the fledgling library of Christ Seminary Seminex through several moves and natural disasters -- including an epic flood – during its time in St. Louis. Barely eight years after leaving Concordia, in 1981, Lucille took on the role as a local host for the ATLA convention in St. Louis, knowing even then that Seminex was again about to move.

As Scott Holl, from Luhr Library, Eden Seminary, noted on ATLANTIS last year:

The parent synod of Seminex, the AELC, in the eighties joined with the Lutheran Church in America and the American Lutheran Church to form the ELCA. The AELC became the catalyst for the Lutheran merger that created the ELCA in 1987. Confident that the merger would proceed, the Seminex community decided in 1981 that deploying its resources to other established institutions--rather than remaining an independent seminary--would constitute better stewardship. After the 1982-83 school year, most faculty went on to the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, others to Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, and a few (along with the Library) to the Lutheran Program at Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. Therefore, it could be said that Seminex--by its own hand--sacrificed its own institutional life for what it viewed as the greater good of the Church.

While the seminary was deconstructed and deployed throughout North America, Lucille Hager attempted to keep the library intact in order that it would be of most use to someone else. That new owner was to be both Wartburg and its small new extension program emerging in Austin, Texas, residing on the campus of the Episcopal Seminary here. Because their library could better care for the rare and unusual items, Wartburg retained these in Iowa, and supported Lucille in her decision to take the rest to Austin.

The story goes that Lucille and her staff did such a stellar job packing up the collection – nearly 20 thousand books and periodicals at the time – and loading it systematically into the moving vans, that when the vans arrived in Austin, Texas on a Thursday, by the following Monday, Seminex Library was open for business.

Lucille was an innovator: she brought inter-library cooperative initiatives, OCLC online cataloging, and online interlibrary loan to the Booher Library from St. Louis. The Episcopal library staff quickly adopted these new technologies and further developed their capabilities. While Lucille was admittedly always happier with the technology of pencil and paper, she appreciated and supported the introduction of new technologies.

When ATLA put its serials index on CD-ROM, the Episcopal budget was too tight to buy it, but Lucille scrounged together enough money in her budget to add to the pot to make it feasible, which later paved the way for online access. So in many ways, she and Harold Booher together brought online searching to our library. Rob Cogswell, with their support, made it a usable reality.

Lucille went into semi-retirement in 1989, six years before I started at the Booher Library. She retained the position of Seminex Professor and Director of Library Services, emerita and came in 15 hours a week for nearly 14 more years to do periodical processing, some cataloging, and general library administration until 2002, completing 50 years of service as a Lutheran librarian. During that time, she continued to attend faculty meetings at the Lutheran Seminary Program of the Southwest, contributed to faculty searches, and regularly assisted in fall and spring registrations. Finally, declining health restricted her activity, and Lucille reluctantly, but with great dignity, retired to her beloved hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Hearing of her death, Dr. Wayne Menking, Director of the Lutheran Seminary Program (LSPS) here said:

LSPS was the recipient of an enormous legacy and part of Lutheran history when it received the Christ Seminary – Seminex Library. Lucille was very instrumental in making sure that these holdings were preserved. I think she understood in a very deep way the important symbolism of those holdings for the church. I remember her as a very dedicated, loyal, quiet, and thoughtful woman. She understood theological education, and more importantly she understood the importance of preparing women and men for ordained ministry, and it was to that enterprise that her life was dedicated.

The Seminex collection, currently over 30,000 items and 94 periodical titles, has contributed greatly to the Booher Library here, where it resides. Since it arrived in 1983, the Episcopalians at the Seminary of the Southwest have been proud to host the Seminex collection, still owned by Wartburg Theological Seminary and serving their Lutheran Seminary Program in the Southwest, which is also part of our campus community in Austin. Lucille came with the collection to administer it, and for 17 years Lucille and the Booher library staff worked in the same room, side by side and desk to desk. Rob Cogswell, former cataloger and current Booher Library director, wrote in recognition of her life: “Fondly, I will always remember her profoundly ethical character, her good sense, and her gentle good humor.”

Rob’s comments match well with my experience of eight years of knowing and working with Lucille Hager. So often she did the right thing, not the easy thing. The world is a bit smaller without her.

Mikail McIntosh-Doty
Head of Public Services – Booher Library
Austin, Texas 2005

[Back to Top]