Today in the WCS Archives we pay tribute to WCS’s Administrative Professionals, past and present. In fact, without our Administrative Professionals, we would not have an archives. For in their everyday roles, it is these staff members who have recorded, organized, saved, managed—and sometimes even decoded—the records that are WCS’s archives today.
We were so pleased to be gifted the photo above recently of one of these Administrative Professionals, Lucy Ouzoonion, who spent her career as secretary to William Bridges, WCS’s Curator of Publications from 1935 to 1967. Even though we are indebted to these women—and in WCS’s past, they were always women—for our archives today, they tend to turn up in our records in indirect ways. Most often, they appear as typists’ initials at the bottom of letters.
Letter from John Behler to Gary Clarke, typed by Gail Bonsignore. WCS Archives Collection 2043. 
Letter from WCS President Fairfield Osborn to Mary Moses, typed by Rosalie Sevcik, WCS Archives Collection 1029.
So to Lucy Ouzoonion, ef (Edith Franz), res (Rosalie E. Sevcik) gb (Gail Bonsignore), li (Louise Ingenito), gm (Gerry Marsetller), and ms (Myra Schomberg), we thank you and WCS’s dozens of other Administrative Professionals. You have ensured that WCS’s Archives exist today.