How do you tell someone what a library is and what it is for? Reflections on the impact of words someone else bothered to write and probably did not get paid well for, and upon the gracious gifts to community by the wealth makers and creators of our system of economy.

As I have revisited my childhood, a dominant theme for me has been that we were just above the poverty line-maybe just a fraction, and that we were at the same time rich. Two things contributed to that truth: 1. We lived where a great industry was on its's last leg, and 2. we enjoyed the public gifts of people made fabulously wealthy by the riches of the earth: Nearly every well-known and some lesser known Moguls of the 1800's contributed heavily to civic development, parks and schools, and to libraries. Microsoft and others who give today are doing what has been done before. Philanthropy is a blessing of American life we take so for granted.

Old postcards of the McClelland Public Library show a white stone building with what looks to be a red tile or possibly a copper roof. But then the building was built about 1902. Dale Carnegie had made good on his promise to spread his fortune about the country by creating libraries where communities raised adequate seed money, and McClelland dished out a considerable sum to make it a beautiful reality. It was 1960 when we first climbed the steps of a building made of stone hewn from the not-distant mountains and entered the repository of all good things. Polished marbled floors and columns supported the weight of knowledge contained in thousands of books. It was quite simply an architectural delight.

In the basement where the restrooms were, inaccessible doors held research and precious materials I wished to prowl. In a second floor room you could plainly see through the glass a Mummy's Sarcophagus casually propped against the fireplace tile. Our Girl Scout troop would later visit that room and the story of how the Mummy had found a home in Colorado was told only to be forgotten in my adult life. But for now, where did the wings to the right and the left go? What other museum treasures, I wondered, could this fabulous and spacious monument hold? The third story and full basement must have been full of needful knowledge, all under wraps!

On the main floor, fine woods crafted into moldings and ladders, desks and drawers, newspaper racks, and card files, all with a patina told of over 60 years of earnest use by thousands of fingers that had traced their grain. High ceilinged rooms opened upon rooms with mezzanines overlooking the activities below. Quiet and order prevailed.

We were ushered to the youth area, but at 9 years of age I had read the Funk & Wagnall's obtained by frugal parents one at a time at Safeway with qualified purchases, and the Bible had broadened my vocabulary and reading skills well beyond most of the fiction offered there. A good dictionary with the origins of words was part of our home library, as was the National Geographic and a rotating supply of Readers Digest Condensed Books--many too old and boring for my taste.

Restlessly I joined my sister with stacks of 5 or 6 books to last a week or two until I became bored with that section. Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Childeren and the Bobbsey Twins seemed trite. Louisa May Alcott and Robert Louis Stevenson seemed worthwhile and I quickly burned through them. Rusty's Spaceship is the only other book from that section having any lasting impact on my imagination. At the old age of 11 I was ready for more serious reading.

Growing up during the Civil Rights Movement with a father whose evening never started without a heavy dose of Walter Chronkite had made it impossible not to be alert to the meaning of certain words. But somehow I failed to grasp what a ghetto was. In our lives in Denver and Pueblo we were not really far from what must have been the poorest of the poor. But the prosperity of the Gold Rush Years had left rather nice housing for even them--and us, and an abundance of fresh crops from the surrounding plains made it possible to feed a family fairly inexpensively.

But one day, dressed in a red fabric hardback was a book whose name arrested me then and there;
The Ghetto. I thumbed it's pages, small print and thickness undaunting. Maybe I just needed that book this time. So I took it to the checkout desk where it was duly stamped when I showed my library card, then went to sit in the foyer to read while my siblings finished their searches.

It wasn't the Ghetto being spoken of in the nightly news, as it turned out. Instead, it was The Warsaw Ghetto. Very quickly I was being drawn into a world I had thought existed in the distant past. My friend, Helen, attended Sabbath School and spoke Yiddish at home. Her parents were nervous about Gentile visitors, and I scarcely remember her mother having spoken English. Both Helen and I were born in 1951 and that, to us, was long after the War had ended. But Helen's parents both bore the numbers scorched on their skin to identify their precarious place in Nazi concentration camps. They had managed to survive and Helen and her older sister, Frieda, were the ages of myself and my older sister, Mary.

Our father always called us to the television any time a program dealt with the atrocities of WWII. I was not born yet when our great uncle, a Colonel, brought home 18mm film of the liberation of a camp (we believe Dachau) which he was present for. The family had watched impossible wretchedness, never to forget as he projected it on the farmhouse wall. He told of gathering up the townspeople and marching them to and through the camp to impress upon them what their cooperation had wrought.

Now I was reading the stories of countless individuals, adults and children who learned to resist, who tied up German resources and time, and who gave their lives trying to preserve the lives of their families and friends. It was compelling and life changing. I felt older and more wary than my class mates who were still engaged in childhood games. Throughout our city were many Eastern Europeans who had immigrated before and after the war. We all had more to be grateful for than we could possibly imagine, I thought.

Now were books like the Diary of Anne Frank, and books like An Episode of Sparrows. But we lived in a peaceful vacuum where we could sell pop bottles for enough cash to take a stroll down a shady street with a friend and have a Coke and some peanuts, or save money from lunch for Beatle records, somehow immune to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My gratitude for this lucky life increased measurably. And I would finally learn about a different kind of ghetto not from books, but from the news as blacks demanded and obtained freedom they were already guaranteed under the Constitution. And already simmering in Southeast Asia was the next war......

History began to have weightier relevance as we watched the evening news and I wondered how the seemingly simple concepts our forefathers had fought for were so twisted and complicated when politics and media mixed. The books, the films, the stories of both happiness and imagination,
and those tragic accounts of barren, bleak worlds where someone could do something to change it all, combined to help me do the one thing my father wanted me to do.

So many times he would turn from the news report or look up from a newspaper and say, "A lot of eople are like sheep. They say, "I think..." and then repeat what they read in a paper or book or heard on the news. The fact is, " he would say, "they really don't think at all. They just read or hear something on the news and repeat what they've been told." Our parents read, and they made sure we read and watched and asked what we thought, expecting us to think.

Not every book was weighty and ponderous. There were Lewis Carrol tales and Robert Lewis Stephenson poems. The Brontes and the Brownings, all familiar friends to visit. And sifted between, other books by lesser known authors to take away the boredom of a sweltering summer evening or long winter's night and leave behind thoughts and musings over subjects we might never have approached alone.. Check out, read, gather up, check in. Up the stairs, through the doors, down the stairs, into the light of Day.

Today we blog on, still unpaid and unappreciated authors chronicling what we are witnesses to. We had moved away when the library was torn down and replaced with a new and comparatively undistinguished edifice. It was replaced with one more suited to modern needs, part of a system that included satellite buildings to serve a growing geographical area. The financial moguls who give now include Bill Gates, the Hunt Brothers, and T. Boone Pickens. They have it right: giving back is sweet. Someone after us will want to read what we did, hear what our music sounded like,and learn what a hero really is. The laptop and the computer terminal are now the McClellan Public Library. Books are sold in the stores, but long afternoons are spent honing computer game skills and evenings searching topics to understand homework assignments.

It feels strange to look back into that room with the Sarcophagus. Was the mummy still in there, or was it an empty box? I don't remember the answer--I just remember the wonder.