Page Nine
From the Dusty Shelf
(Editor's note: A continuing series featuring manuscripts from the Commonwealth's archival/manuscript repositories)
Marge Cummings of Clear Creek Baptist Bible College in Pineville submitted this manuscript for publication. The brief memo is from the "Mountain Preacher's School Library Accession Book".
"The library was organized in July 1943 by Miss Margie Helm, Librarian, Western Kentucky Teachers College, Bowling Green. The books were classified and the classification heading written inside the front cover to facilitate shelving. The shelves have been labeled with these headings."
"A simple charging system has been installed with a notebook and a pencil attached. A few rules for loans have been worked out and posted at each end of the room. It is hoped that these few rules may be sufficient for a satisfactory system. If they are not, changes can be made."
"You might say I'm a nut," says Shields, 77. "We are driven by compulsions we don't know."
Shields--a short, balding former minister and teacher--has recorded his life in five-minute increments since 1972. Stored in 81 cardboard boxes, and running to more than 37.5 million words, the diary records every event in Shield's life since Nixon defeated McGovern 24 years ago.
Every expense. Every trip. Every bowel movement. Every thing you can't print in a family newspaper. He has, for example, found dozens of ways to describe urination.
"I'm completely uninhibited," he says.
The Guiness Book of Records lists Edward Robb Ellis of New York City as having the longest-kept diary, covering 68 years. But his is a standard journal of stories and observations, and at around 20 million words far shorter than Shields' chronicle.
The scope of Shield's diary is breathtaking. If some cop in the future asks Shields where he was at 7 a.m. on July 25, 1993, Shields could find the answer. And what was he doing?
From the diary: "I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin."
There follows a description of....well, call them bathroom matters. Then, at 11:15 a.m., he "shaved for the third time with a Gillette Atra II blade and threw it away."
Taped to the pages recording his travels, financial transactions and philosophical ruminations are pennies he's found on the sidewalk, nose hairs (complete with residue), grocery-store receipts, meat labels and the complete text of "Jasmine Nights," an erotic novel he ghostwrote.
Shields keeps three typewriters going in the study of his home in this tidy little farming town south of Spokane, in the rolling hills of Washington's Palouse region.
He scribbles notes constantly and spends about four hours each day transcribing them into the diary.
He used IBM memory typewriters, which store his words on magnetic cards. They stopped making the typewriters years ago, but Shields picks them up at rummage sales. He prints the diary on heavy custom-cut paper that has two holes punched in one end, binding the pages between heavy covers.
The volumes are packed in boxes that used to hold bananas, cherries or encyclopedias. The taped boxes are wrapped in plastic and then stored on shelves on his back sunporch.
Each box is numbered and labeled on five sides. He keeps a separate index for each box, noting its contents and word length.
For 50 years, he has kept a separate inventory of every postal delivery - 10 to 15 - pieces per day, including junk mail - in a looseleaf notebook.
"I have every check I have ever written for 60 years," he says. "I have a record of every nickel I ever took in and every nickel I spent."
Selections from Associated Press Story
Page 10, Spring 1998 Newsletter