It was an ordinary day. Recently, an obituary appeared in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania newspaper telling of the death of Ruth Steinmuller Freitag (pronounced FRY-tog).
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| Ruth Steinmuller Freitag |
Recognize the name? I didn't think much of it, since I never had heard her name before it appeared on the obituary page of the paper. Seems that Ruth was a very special lady over her lifetime. She was born in Lancaster on June 8, 1924 and died October 3, 2020. Her father, Albert, was an immigrant from Germany who worked at Lancaster Lock Company while her mother, Lina, her father's third wife, was a homemaker and expert seamstress. While in high school she won a trip to Washington D.C. according to a front-page article in "The Lancaster New Era." She studied biochemistry at Penn State University, graduating with a liberal arts degree in 1944. She then served with the Women's Army Corps in China beginning in 1945. After three years she was accepted to the United States Foreign Service, working as a communication specialist at the US Embassies in the UK and Hong Kong. By 1959 she had earned a Master's Degree in Library Science at the University of Southern California and took a post at the library of Congress. In the 1960s she was instrumental in developing the MARC (Machine-readable cataloging) standards, which helped standardize digital records shared between libraries. While at the Library of Congress she was a reference librarian specializing in the implication of bibliographic guides, particularly on topics related to astronomy. She was given special recognition for her compiling, illustrating and annotating an extensive bibliography on Halley's Comet, which was published by the Library of Congress in 1984. Her patrons included Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. She retired from the library in 2006 at the age of 82 and died October 3, 2020 at a nursing home in Falls Church, Virginia. She rests today at Greenwood Cemetery in the south of the city of Lancaster. A longtime colleague of Ms. Freitag, Constance Carter, visited Ms. Freitag last year just before the Covid-19 pandemic shut down nursing homes, then lost touch with her. She finally looked her up on Google this spring and came across her obituary. Seems that Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process. Ms. Carter said that, "Ruth was known for her ability to find a needle in a haystack. She always had a book in her lap." She was best at compiling epic bibliographic guides and resources. She was best known for her knowledge of subjects such as the star of Bethlehem, the flat earth theory and women in astronomy. Her greatest achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235 entry bibliography on Halley's Comet, complete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. The bound book was published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for Halley's comet's last pass-by of Earth in 1986. London's Halley's Comet Society made frequent calls to Ms. Freitag for information. This lady also compiled bibliographies on presidential inaugurations and whether a new decade or century was considered to begin in the year ending in zero or the year ending in 1. In 1995 she compiled a pamphlet titled "Battle of the Centuries" which had spirited quotations about disputes over the ages. She was also known for her relentless quest for precision. And then, on October 3 of 2020, at the age of 96, Ms. Ruth Steinmuller Freitag died. "She was absolutely the go-to person for getting manuscript material and goods," David DeVorkin, the recently retired curator of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, recently said. Her death went largely unreported at the time, announced only in the short obituary by the Charles E. Snyder funeral home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was buried with military honors. A true hero to many! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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