Alex Guillén

Dr. John Levinson’s study in Rockland is stuffed with mementos of his life: carvings and decorations from his time volunteering in Vietnam; ivory from his adventures to the poles; paintings depicting one of the most remote places on earth, the south Atlantic Ocean’s Bouvet Island — the one place he says he has never been.

The 81-year-old Atlantic City native said that when he was in high school during World War II, he wanted to be a sailor.

“Like most every kid I knew at that age, we all wanted to join the service,” he said. But at 16 his parents thought he was too young, and so he spent a year at Lafayette College. Just before his eighteenth birthday, he joined the Navy and became a pharmacist’s mate.

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Tom Weaver began visiting his local library before he could read.

“I grew up in a small town, and the library was within walking distance — and if my sister went to the library to get books, I had to get books,” said Weaver, director of the Brandywine Hundred public library.

So, it was no surprise to find him on a recent afternoon in the children’s section. What may be a surprise in a Delaware library, however, is finding someone who looks like Weaver, a black man, working there.

As Weaver well knows, his profession has little diversity. According to a 2007 report from the American Library Association, of the nation’s almost 110,000 credentialed librarians — that is, librarians with master’s degrees — 19 percent are men, 4.5 percent are black, and 0.5 percent are black men. The number of Latino men is just slightly higher — 25 more nationwide.

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On a cool Friday morning, on the grass outside the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, a group takes a quiz about asthma. The interesting thing about the question-and-answer session is that the participants are not medical students but elementary and middle school students.

Asthma education is how they start each day at Spacer Camp, a summer camp sponsored by the American Lung Association for children 7 to 11 who have asthma. It’s called Spacer Camp in reference to the device that ensures inhalers deliver the correct amount of medicine. The association runs four of the weeklong camps in Delaware, two in the Wilmington area and one each in Dover and Lewes.

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