Michigan lost one of the giants of our profession when Dick Chapin passed away on July 30. Dick was director of the MSU library for nearly 30 years and moved it into the top tier of research libraries in the country. But not only was he a top-notch academic library director, Dick was a visionary and a leader for all Michigan librarians.

I never had the opportunity to work for Dick but I count myself as one of the many he touched. I first met Dick in 1986, when he was nearing the end of his career and I was at the beginning of mine. He was one of the speakers at MLA’s Leadership Academy that year. I still remember his talk and I have the book he recommended so highly. It was Max DePree’s Leadership is An Art. I won’t say it taught me everything I needed to know about leadership but it certainly set me on the path. And that was how Dick viewed his job: mentoring librarians so that they could discover on their own how to become excellent librarians.

It’s not an overstatement to say that without Dick’s guiding hand at MSU all those, Michigan libraries wouldn’t have the rich array of resources available to them through MeL and other statewide programs. He wasn’t interested in just building up MSU but he had a keen interest in working with other libraries to move the state forward. In 1974, Dick, along with Vern Pings, then dean of libraries at Wayne State University, were primarily responsible for founding the Michigan Library Consortium. I remember one of Dick’s stories about the meeting at the Kellogg Center that year. He told me that the director at the University of Michigan needed some convincing that MLC was a good idea. So he grabbed one arm; Vern Pings grabbed the other and Dick said, “C’mon we’re going to get this done.” And off they marched. So like Dick Chapin. He rarely let anything stand in his way when something important needed to be done.

Dick did not quietly disappear after retirement. He continued to keep a hand in the library world. In 1997, when the Capital Area District Library was struggling to be born, Dick jumped in and worked with us on the millage campaign committee. He wrote letters and even appeared on a local cable television show to answer questions.

I’ll always be grateful to Dick Chapin. He laid so much of the groundwork for us to build on. Without his vision and hard work, our ability to share resources, electronic and print, would be far poorer. Thanks, Dick.