Sharon Stewart Reeves ’68, of San Diego, California, spent 38 years as a special collections librarian. As director of library services for the San Diego Union-Tribune newspapers, she was a pioneer in creating online, searchable newspaper archives.
“News libraries are exciting places to work,” Stewart Reeves says. “There is always something going on, and deadlines come at all hours of the day and night.” During her 31 years at the newspaper, Stewart Reeves and her staff contributed to many significant news stories: “Olympics, Super Bowls, school shootings, 9/11, crooked congressmen, fires, and floods,” including the 2006 Pulitzer-prize winning coverage of bribe-taking by former Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
A native of Balaton, Stewart Reeves earned a bachelor of arts in history from Morris and a master of library science from the University of Washington. Before joining the Union-Tribune, she was a librarian at The Seattle Times, Batelle Northwest, Boeing Aerospace, and the James S. Copley Library. She is a past president of the San Diego chapter of the Special Libraries Association and a recipient of the Distinguished Alumna Award from the Information School at the University of Washington. Stewart Reeves also serves on the Morris campus Archives Advisory Council.
When she retired in 2006, Stewart Reeves turned her love of knitting and crocheting into her “way of giving back.” She has made thousands of baby caps—the count is well over 3,000—which she donates to hospitals. Connie Merritt, a San Diego midwife, helps distribute Stewart Reeves’s handiwork. “Her gifts of precious baby caps spread joy all over the world.”
