Marcelle Lively Hamer

Elizabeth Marcelle Lively Hamer (July 14, 1900 – March 4, 1974) was an American librarian and folklorist. Her career spanned more than thirty years at the University of Texas and the El Paso Public Library, where she was an expert in Texas folklore and history. She served for seventeen years as the treasurer of the Texas Folklore Society.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Marcelle Lively was born in Whitewright, Texas, on July 14, 1900.

She married Robert Coit Hamer in 1922; they had one daughter, Mary Marcelle Hamer Hull, and divorced in 1930. The imposing Battle Hall Reading Room served as Hamer's office.

She was hired as a reference assistant at the El Paso Public Library in 1955. She expanded the collections in the library's Southwest Reference Department, which Maud Durlin Sullivan had started in 1929. At her retirement in 1965, she shared the department's most frequently asked about topics in an El Paso Herald-Post article, describing how the staff answered questions about Pancho Villa, Billy the Kid, and John Wesley Hardin from all over the United States.

Scholarship and service

Hamer studied and wrote about Texas history, politics, and folklore for journals such as the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and the Frontier Times. She compiled and wrote the first publication on the Texas Governor's Mansion, a thirteen-page brochure, in 1937.

She was the treasurer of the Texas Folklore Society from 1934 until her resignation in 1951. Described by one of the society's later secretary-editors as "an indispensable part of the Texas Folklore Society during its most vital years," Hamer served as the organization's corresponding secretary, assistant editor, and was left in charge of the business of the society when secretary-editor J. Frank Dobie was "off a-wandering."

Hamer died on March 4, 1974, and was buried at Oakhill Cemetery in Whitewright.