New Page For an Old Bookworm

By Martha Duffy

One day last spring, a group of people gathered in a private room at the Century Association, an elite club in Manhattan, to meet their new boss. They were all senior staff members of the New York Public Library and, not knowing who the new president might be, they were all edgy. For one thing, who could possibly replace Vartan Gregorian, the charismatic fund raiser who had led them out of fiscal ruin? And, of more immediate concern, should they have a drink while waiting? Perhaps not. After all, a leading contender was known to be Timothy S. Healy, a Jesuit priest. Sure enough, when the door opened, the big, bulky man who entered was wearing a Roman collar. Silence. He walked into the stiff assemblage and said in a gravelly baritone, "Anybody got a light?"

* The tension evaporated, and the librarians tucked into lunch, with wine. Healy, 67, is a reassuring presence, a tall man with a slight, accommodating stoop, ruddy coloring and blunt features. In mufti -- which he always wears at the library -- he could pass for a football coach or, with more pronounced sartorial accents, an aging sportswriter. He can discuss old movies or baseball or Virgil. He is, in fact, wildly articulate but manages to wear that gaudy mantle easily, without any of William F. Buckley Jr.'s arcane showboating.

At that first lunch he talked mostly about his past. It was as good a way as any to introduce himself and his qualifications to head the great library (the country's second largest after the Library of Congress) and its 82 branches around the city. As for intellectual credentials, Healy is an English scholar with a string of degrees, co-editor of the Oxford edition of John Donne's prose. Can he run an institution? From 1969 to 1976 he was vice chancellor of the City University of New York and an impassioned leader of the successful drive for open admissions there. He left that post to become president of Georgetown University in Washington, presiding over the growth of the endowment from some $30 million to nearly $250 million. He is obviously a bricks-and-mortar man with formidable fund-raising smarts.

At N.Y.P.L. Healy has his work cut out for him. Despite its name, the library is a private institution and has just come through a $304 million fund drive in which Gregorian, philanthropist Brooke Astor and board chairman Andrew Heiskell shook every money tree in the city. Gregorian restored the splendid beaux arts edifice on 42nd Street, eliminated a years-long lag in cataloging and listed all publications after 1972 on a computer. Then he departed to be president of Brown University where, presumably, he will charm the birds out of the Rhode Island foliage.

But every dollar of that eight-year campaign was budgeted from the start. Especially for the circulating libraries, N.Y.P.L. is dependent on money from the city, and New York has been in worse than usual straits since the 1987 stock-market crash. "I think I was chosen because they wanted someone who could care enormously about both the research and branch aspects of the library," says Healy. As a scholar, he acknowledges that he is more attuned to the 88 miles of stacks at the main library, one of the half a dozen foremost research libraries in the world. But, he adds, "the branches are one * place where, when you go to bed at night, you can say, 'I have been of some use to my fellow man today.' "

In fact, there is a slight shift in library priorities. During the '80s the emphasis was on restoration. Gregorian liked to call the main building the "people's palace"; the library became perhaps the city's most fashionable benefit cause. But, reflecting the Bush era, the new buzz word is education, the province of the branches. "Essentially, we serve grammar school and junior high kids," says Healy, "and the agenda is not what you read but that you read."

Healy is wading into turbulent shallows. He is holding a series of dinners with branch librarians, and they are fast stripping him of any illusions. Videos get lifted wholesale, and the staff must be on constant patrol to keep drug dealers, often teenagers themselves, from preying on children. When the building closes, the librarian-baby-sitter must figure out what to do with very little kids whom no one has claimed.

When Healy asks about relations between branches and local schools, the librarians just smile. There are no links. But he is determined to forge them. He quickly called on incoming city education chancellor Joseph Fernandez, bringing along several proposals, including one that would target first grade and the first year of junior high as focus years for familiarizing kids with how the branches work.

Healy's zeal to yoke public schools with libraries springs from his long commitment to the poor, particularly members of minorities. He firmly believes that in the future, America will be "multicolored" and had better be ready to make the most of it. Some 16 years ago, he tried to start a community college in the Bedford Stuyvesant ghetto in Brooklyn (it failed for lack of funding). Perhaps the high point of his career was the years at CUNY where, with fighting-Irish brio, he led the fray surrounding the open-admissions policy, in the early '70s a divisive urban issue. "It was so simple at CUNY," he sighs. "There were no agendas, no politicking. Your task was clear: educate the poor. And that's what we did."

Another reason Healy relished CUNY was that his job put him in the thick of things in his beloved hometown. He grew up as the eldest of four children in comfortable circumstances, mostly on Manhattan's Upper East Side. His Australian father had been a wildcat oilman in Texas until the 1929 Crash wiped him out. Later he fetched up as host of a Proctor & Gamble radio show, Captain Tim Healy's Stamp Club, on NBC. He had a short fuse and a robust disregard for social conventions and was a devout Catholic.

Young Tim went to Regis, a Jesuit high school that admitted only the brightest kids. As he remembers it, "One night in June they called a meeting of all new boys and their parents. The principal got up and said, 'Note that I start at 8 o'clock, not one minute before or one minute after. At Regis we do things on time.' Well, my father said, loud enough to be heard ten rows in front and ten rows behind, 'Aw, s---!' I thought, that's it! I'm finished. They'll have my ass out of here in the morning." They did not.

His parents gave him a little Dodge with a rumble seat for his high school graduation in 1939, and when he announced that he intended to start training as a Jesuit, they hung on to the vehicle for a while, thinking that their quick-tempered son might not last. He does not see his vocation on a grand scale of spiritual drama. "I truly think it takes more to keep a good marriage going over a number of years than it does to be a priest," he says. The order itself was the natural choice for a young man who was torn between scholarly interests and an active temperament. Cities, rather than remote monasteries, are Jesuit stamping grounds, and whether as teachers, missionaries or administrators, Jesuits thrive in the secular world.

Pre-Vatican Council, aspiring Jesuits moved through 15 years of training in lockstep. Healy spent four years studying theology at Belgium's Louvain University. Seven years later he went abroad again, in pursuit of a Ph.D. at Oxford, and if there is an invisible monastery in his life, a spiritual refuge, it is there. At the Bodleian Library he worked in a room containing a first edition of Don Quixote, shelved in the same spot where Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder, placed it in 1605. "It gave me a sense of how high I loomed in the large scale of scholarship, and that's good for a young graduate student." He became a protege of Dame Helen Gardner, the eminent Donne scholar, who also had a keen sense of scale. "The point of wide reading is absorption, not citation," was her comment on one showy Healy effort. "I've used that line many times since," he says, "and I can't say I've always attributed it."

Several strands that extend through Healy's life thrived at Oxford: his deep love of poetry, his passion for teaching, his enthusiasm for young people. Despite his heavy administrative and fund-raising load at Georgetown, he always taught classes, including a popular course on Eliot and Donne ("Kids love him because he's raunchy -- great for seductions").

He gave out his office key to students who needed a quiet place to study at night. And nowadays he goes to heroic efforts to keep in close touch with kids he got to know. Dan Porterfield, an ex-pupil, recalls that in 1983, when Healy had a heart attack followed by a triple-bypass operation, he and a friend drove to New York to visit him. Over a nurse's protest, Healy asked to see them briefly. He was in a welter of tubes and looked ashen. "I felt that even then he was teaching us," says Porterfield, "trying to show us how to cope in dire circumstances, maybe how to die."

There are times when Healy has something on his mind that cannot be shared by either teaching or example. Then he is apt to write a column for his old friend Meg Greenfield, editorial-page editor of the Washington Post. Recently he wrote a wise, forbearing essay on the troubles of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, concluding with Donne's words, "Thou knowest this man's fall, thou knowest not his wrastling."

A Jesuit, Healy says, is looking for places where "service multiplies itself." Inserting himself into this highly visible post in New York's cultural life, he aroused a certain skepticism. "What do I call him, because I'm sure as hell not going to call him Father," groused an N.Y.P.L. trustee during the search. (He is called Dr. Healy.) "Does he really say Mass every day?" whispers a society lady. (Yes.) Writer Gay Talese expressed concern in the New York Times letters column that Healy might have a Rome-dictated agenda. (Healy points with some asperity to his record at secular CUNY.) Actually the trustees put a related question to him: What would happen if the church ordered you to remove books on a sensitive subject like abortion from the shelves? He replied: "I can't imagine that happening, but if it did, I would resign from the library." That answer satisfied everyone.

Services may multiply, but Healy may have to clone himself too. He has embarked on an ambitious five-year planning scheme. Among the toughest issues are the need for a separate building to house the vast business, science and technology collections; ways to funnel private money to the branches (the city tends to chop public funds from branch budgets by the amount that they get from other support); guiding the library into the 21st century; and the burgeoning area of nonpaper information.

Two imposing stone lions that flank the entrance are the beloved symbols of the library, but the most formidable job Healy faces is turning himself into the biggest, roaringest lion of all. He must be on top of every important issue of education, literacy and censorship. He must keep up with the mayor, the comptroller, the Governor, foundation heads and corporate trust officers. Says Gregorian: "If you conserve your energy, you do a disservice to the library." A harsh fact of New York life is that visibility is vital in a fiercely competitive game. If the honcho of an organization is not regularly seen in public, the assumption is that the institution either is in good shape or doesn't matter anyway.

Healy is of course a master of networking. Through his jobs and the boards he works on, he is at home with several layers of the Establishment. Among his old friends are Art Buchwald, Justice William Brennan and Jeane Kirkpatrick. These days, however, when he can relax at the end of the day, he turns up at America House, the Jesuit headquarters near the midtown apartment the library puts at his disposal. "Jesuits who are about my age are really my closest friends," he says. "After all these years, there are no secrets, no pretensions." When asked if he ever considered ascending within the order rather than outside it, he replies, "No. No! I'm not even-tempered enough, I don't have the patience, I don't pray enough."

Then, after a quiet drink and a smoke with these friends who share a common spiritual life, it's right back to the library fund-raising circuit. Back to wrastling.