I Remember Sue
by Georgia Finnigan
One of the things that I remember about Sue was her "just do it " attitude. She never wasted time worrying about whether things would be possible. The style of a true entrepreneur is "ready, fire, aim!" and that was Sue. When I teamed up with her I was in awe of her street smarts and guts. I came from the formal library world where neither characteristic existed, let alone the concept of "just doing it!" Librarians had to check the rules first. If they couldn't find any, they formed a committee to make some up. Meanwhile, decades went by!
Sue had a great way with people. It was amazing what she could accomplish on one phone call. She was an opportunist, always thinking about how a relationship with someone or some other service would benefit both parties. She is the only person I know who could get on an elevator on the 10th floor, and know everyone else on it by the time she reached the 1st floor. I learned a tremendous amount from her about the value of relationships and customer contact.
Her creativity was amazing. Who else do you know who started five businesses and led a new industry association in a single, and tragically short, lifetime? She was always seeing what the next step could be.
Sue could make any task fun to do.We spent a lot of time on floors. First there was the floor in her bedroom (our first office) which served as a desk-annex for sorting out our document delivery orders. Then there was the floor of her car where we sorted out books we were returning to the library. At conferences, we were always stapling promotional literature together on the floor of our hotel room....at the last minute of course ( sound familiar?). These projects were always done to the music of Sue's cheerful chitchat and excitement.
But what I remember most about Sue was her sense of humor! She had the greatest laugh and a smile that would melt an iceberg. I can see her now, sitting at one of our make-shift desks at Information Unlimited's "international, world headquarters" laughing at some problem we had. What other reaction was even remotely suitable?
Sadly, she was the only person that did not believe, or even see, the gifts she had.
Information Unlimited... A Nostalgic Remembrance
By Georgia Finnigan
I met Sue Rugge in 1970 when we were both members of SLA (the Special Libraries Association). She was working for Singer Friden Business Machines and I for Shell Oil. She moonlighted on the side for engineers who had left the company and needed literature searching.
When a recession hit , we both lost our jobs and Sue said, "Well, can't lose for trying....let's start a business". She came up with the logo based on a symbol from the Isle of Man, her Manx background.....It was running feet -- perfect! I remember meeting her on a park bench in North Beach; she had gotten someone with graphic design experience to run off various letterhead proposals. We picked one and Information Unlimited's image was born.
Work started slowly with Sue leveraging her moonlighting experience, and I got consulting jobs organizing libraries. The idea for document delivery came from the observation that Shell, Chevron and other libraries in the area were sending messengers up to UC Berkeley to retrieve articles for the R&D scientists. Students and moonlighting librarians did the running around, then rendezvoused with the messengers. It was a ragged system at best, but faster than interlibrary loan. Sue convinced the Chevron librarians to try a professional, committed approach....namely Information Unlimited. I think there was hesitation because we were young and had long hair. How could we know what we were doing? We didn't but apparently they thought they had nothing to lose, so they gave us a chance and we were off! Chevron sent us the orders in a beat-up brown leather briefcase. This was dropped off by their messenger at a secret hiding place in the main library stacks. We would go get it in the morning and get our orders, fill them and leave the copies in the bag at night. I really like to think about how such a quaint system supported the R&D efforts of a multi-national corporation! It just goes to show you how relationships not tight legal contracts, still run the world!
Our office:
I remember the early days of Information Unlimited when we got our first office. Up until then we had been operating out of Sue's bedroom. She lived up in the Berkeley hills, and I would drive up there early in the morning to get started sorting out our orders for the day. Sue's bedroom wasn't very large so we used her bed as our mail and sorting room. I will always remember this because she had a black velour bedspread which made a nice contrast to the white papers all over the place. Things got complicated if Sue's husband wasn't out of bed by the time I arrived in the morning, or even worse, sick with a cold. The other complication was with her cat, Pumpkin. Pumpkin liked to sit on our orders.
One of our first executive decisions was whether or not to get an answering service. Answering machines had only recently come on the market and were not terribly flexible. You could not dial into them from afar, for example. We finally decided to use Taxi Unlimited. Yes this sounds like a cab company and it was....Berkeley style. The cabs were painted multiple colors sort of like a tie-dyed shirts and the drivers matched, sporting long hair and beards. They ran an answering service on the side and really did a great job, because the operators were middle class, intelligent dropouts who had become hippies. The only problem we had with them was that sometimes when you called them you could hear guitars and babies crying in the background! Not exactly professional, but the operators always got the messages right and that counted for a lot in an answering service.
Information Unlimited started before the PC and Federal Express were invented.....pre- technology in general. Research was done by phone and plowing through library indexes and abstracts. The document delivery side of our business was by mail (snail mail of course) and we sorted our orders out and went down to the Berkeley campus where we had to look things up in the card catalog. There was no online system.The photocopy machines were coin-operated and there were no copy cards. In the beginning, we did everything ourselves.(great for the waistline) The University library let you check out bound periodicals at that time, so we would check out the journals we needed and haul them over to an off-campus photocopying place where copies were made overnight. We used those wire shopping carts on wheels to get them to our car. Usually, we parked (illegally) on the campus and put the books in the trunk, then drove around to each branch library to return them.
Business grew and the day came when we had to confront getting an office. Not knowing where to start, we opened up the yellow pages to "real estate", closed our eyes and pointed. The first place we called was a residential broker but said he just happened to have a little space near a typrwriter store on Channing Way near the UC campus. It was 100 square feet and $100 a month. We looked at it and took it on the spot.
We bought some of those cheap folding tables to use as desks and stacking chairs. Our orders were stored in a cardboard box with dividers and at some point we got the brilliant idea of numbering them with a Bates numbering machine, so we could keep better track. Other innovations followed, including the development of "runners" at other campuses, the Library of Congress, etc.
Dialog came online about a year later and we make the biggest purchase of our young business lives when we invested in a 40 lb. "portable" Texas Instrument 300 baud terminal. This gave us access to 3 databases: Engineering Index, ERIC and NTIS. Everyone knows the rest of this story!
As the company got larger, there were employees around most of the day doing something so Sue and I had zero privacy. If we had to talk about something, we went to the women's room. This was no bigger than a closet, so our meetings in there were not very long and we had to meet standing up. Sometimes we went to the restaurant across the street.
(to be continued…)