Diamond+Jubilee+Celebration,+March+1984

Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Forest Grove City Library March 5-10, 1984

Produced by Forest Grove City Library and the Metropolitan Area Communications Commission

Jubilate! 75th Forest Grove City Library 1909 – 1984

Narration: The Forest Grove City Library celebrated its 75th Anniversary in 1984 with a week of activities in March. Backed by the Friends of the Forest Grove Library and many contributions from businesses and organizations in the community, library staff and volunteers organized an Oregon film festival, a computer fair, a performing arts night, an Oregon authors fair, a Forest Grove Way of Life Day and a library birthday party. The Forest Grove Way of Life Day brought more than 30 exhibitors to the library representing community businesses, schools, manufacturers and cultural and service organizations.

(Including Hope Co-op and Café, Portland Community College, Forest Grove Police Department, Pacific University, and Tektronix)

In the evening, the middle of the library floor was cleared for demonstrations. Jackie Hicks and Debbie Hill represented their business “Head to Toes” with a massage demonstration. Sheila Strand from the Coral Jungle Pet Center showed how to trim a parrot’s feathers. Dr. Robert Stockhouse, who is on the faculty at Pacific University, demonstrated stir-fry cooking for a creative kitchen. Bob Mason, owner of The Color Shop, demonstrated furniture finishing. Susie Sherwood brought her students from Pacific Elite Gymnastics. A group of instructors from Vitality Plus gave a demonstration of aerobic dancing. And Brent Olgren (?) who teaches kindle in Forest Grove, gave a demonstration of that martial art.

On Saturday, March 10th, the Diamond Jubilee concluded with a library birthday party. Birthday cake was served by the Forest Grove Women’s Club and live music was provided by Rick Williamson and Anson Wright.

The past, present and future of the library was celebrated in speeches by Dr. Margaret Gilbert, Forest Grove mayor Gib Patterson, State Senator Jeanette Hamby and Connie Fries, President of the Forest Grove Women’s Club.

Mike Smith, the library director, introduces Dr. Gilbert:

“Dr. Margaret Gilbert is a retired professor of anatomy from Pacific University. She did pioneer work in human embryology, that you may not know, and she also published one of the first books for expectant mothers describing the development of the child. She said she is still getting royalties from that after 50 years since it has been published. She is very active in Forest Grove cultural life. I am sure she is the foremost authority in town on the 19th century history of Forest Grove, she is president of the Harvey W. Scott Friends of the Library, and she is also a member of the city library commission and has been a big help to me personally in that role. Peg.”


 * Peg Gilbert:** “Thank you Mike. Mike warned me ahead of time that I didn’t have any 50 minutes, which are what college professors are used to having, and to stay under 10 minutes, so I’m going to start right away.

The precursors of the library in Forest Grove were two reading rooms that I found out about. In 1895, there is an ad in the newspaper every week for a freethinker’s library which was apparently in a room in Vertz (?) Hall, as far as I can find out. What the definition was of “freethinkers” and how many freethinkers there were in Forest Grove I haven’t any idea, but they had a reading room. Then later, around 1900 or so, the WCTU started a reading room. The rented an upstairs room in one of the buildings and each person who wanted to use it would pay 25 cents a month and with this they would get books somehow. Some suggestion that they got books from the state traveling library. In 1905, Miss Emma Penfield, a woman in town, felt that there were two lacks in Forest Grove: One was that there was no place to get books, the other was that there was no place to get stationary. So she persuaded a Mr. and Mrs. Burden, who had a millinery store in the building over on 21st and College Way that used to be the Rogers Library, that we knew as the Rogers Library. They had a millinery store there and they gave her one, she could use one side, one corner of it and what she did for rent was she took care of the rest room. There was a restroom at the back of this building, and she did that and had then stationary and books. Some books that were for sale, some books that were hers, or were other people’s. And from this, a year later, there was a library board established by the city council, and they met and asked Miss Penfield if she would be librarian of a library and she agreed, so that was, in one sense, the beginning in 1906 of the library. In 1908, this library board asked the city council if they would levy a one mill tax to support the library and they did that and have levied a tax ever since then. The date we are celebrating this year, is the time in 1909 when Mrs. Adeline Rogers, who was the widow of Dr. Rogers, a retired dentist in town, who was a member of the Women’s Club, became very much interested in having a library on a regular basis, and she bought the building that was then later the Rogers Library, bought the building that Miss Penfield had her bookstore, in effect, in at the time, and gave it to the city. “Gave” or “sold”. The city paid her a $4,000 warrant, but not in cash. What they paid was a promise that they would levy taxes regularly to support the library and have a supply in it, have in it all the books and magazines that were usual for a library and that they would always have a free reading room and a free rest room open in perpetuity, and that if any time the city council reneged on this, they owed Mrs. Rogers or her estate $4,000. So that, as I say, she neither gave nor sold, but kind of a combination of these two things. This was, in effect, the beginning of the Forest Grove Library. When Mrs. Rogers then, in her will – she died in 1922- left $6,000 to the library which the interest of which was to be used to buy books. At least $200 of it was to be used each year to buy books for the library. From then on, there was a small library that gradually grew slowly.

Miss Penfield left the library and started a bookstore on her own. I’ve been told that it was on Main St about where the West Coast Bookstore is now, and the librarian was Mrs. O.M. Sanford. She and her husband were, in effect, librarians. Mr. Sanford had a small store on Main St., Mrs. Sanford was the librarian but they both worked in the library a great deal of the time, and she was librarian for 20 years, from 1908 to 1928. I have talked to people in town who went to the library in the teens and they said she was a very strict disciplinarian as far as the reading room goes. When you went into the library, the first room was a big room that was the reading room, had magazines and newspapers all around the walls and two long tables that people sat at to read, and there you had to have absolute silence, no question, and that Mrs. Sanford was very strict on that. But with the children who came in often, she would take them into the back room, there was a second room in back of a partition, and there she would ask them how they liked the books, and recommend other books for them to read, and she helped them to find out things, look up things in the books of knowledge that they had to have for schoolwork, and was apparently a great friend and a very important person to the children who used the library at that time. She had a story hour, sometimes she would bring cookies. I talked to one woman who said she never missed one of the story hours when she was a child. She always came to it.

The building was a long, narrow building, just about like what we knew. The library that we all, the ones of us who came to Forest Grove since 1920, knew was a building that was built after the fire. The first library burned down, but it was the same size and shape. It was a long, narrow building, 25 feet wide, about 90 feet long, with a front room that had newspapers hanging on racks along the wall and magazines, and in the teens and after that, there were a great many people in town, particularly men, who went to the library regularly when the newspaper came, when their favorite newspaper came and when their favorite magazine came, and there would be disputes, as there sometimes are in families, as to who got to read the magazine first when it came. But this was the front reading room, the big room, and there was a woodstove in the northwest corner of this library. I talked to one man who, well I asked everybody that I talked to who had gone to the library before 1920 where the stoves were. “What stoves?” was the reaction. People were so used to woodstoves that they didn’t pay any attention to them. I finally found someone who remembered, yes, where the woodstove was. It was in the northwest corner of the first reading room, the far west corner. One man remembered noticing the huge cords of wood that were stacked against the outside wall of the library up on College Way and he wondered what they were there for. I talked to one person who was on the library board at one time and she said most of the business that the library board did was to arrange to get the cords of wood that it took to heat the building, and those woodstoves stayed there until 1948 when the building was remodeled and they put in electric heat. One more thing about in the teens, the 19-teens. The Women’s Club in town played a very active role in supporting the library, in buying books, in doing what was needed from then and particularly after the fire. The refurnished the library after the fire and later on they provided the money to establish the children’s needs in the library.

In 1919 there was a big fire on a Sunday afternoon when there was a wind. It started on the east side of Main St. just north of 21st St, and went up Main St on the east side of Main St. and went down 21st St to College Way. All of the buildings on 21st St. were more or less burned. The fire was slow enough, the progress was slow enough, that the college students and townspeople were able to take all the books out of the library and take them over on the campus, and then after the fire people took the books home and kept them in their homes and then a year or so later they brought them back when there was a new library finished. So, there is, as far as I know, no record at all as to how many books there were before the fire. The building was not entirely burned down, part of the walls were left, and the newspaper said right away the next week, it will undoubtedly be rebuilt, but the Women’s Club didn’t leave anything to chance. They sent a committee to speak to the city council about rebuilding the building and offered to help in any they could, and the building was rebuilt very promptly and the Women’s Club helped to refurnish it.

After the fire, the library was open soon, by 1921 at least, the library began to grow. And during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, it’s very interesting to read the records, the reports they make to the city council and to the state library board. There is one report about how the library is run for the whole year on $900. The librarian got $300, the janitor got $100 and that left $500 to buy all the books, the magazines and the wood to keep the library running. By around 1932, 60% of the people of Forest Grove were borrowers at the library and a number of people outside of town were borrowers. The biggest need in the late 30s was for a children’s room, particularly for books and proper furniture that the children could use, particularly in the summer time. And the city council then provided, the Women’s Club put pressure on this, the Rotary Club provided money and the city council some, and the children’s department was built into the library. Then in 1948, the building was renovated, new furniture and one thing that I found interesting that I forgot to say is that when the rebuilt it after the fire, the rebuilt it like a store, that it is you see it had been a store before with a storefront which we all remember from Rogers Library. They rebuilt the storefront purposely, so it still has a storefront that was rebuilt after the fire.

The books were not catalogued during these decades. The amount of money that the city appropriated for the library went up gradually, the librarians pay went up from the $300 a year which it started. The books in the early 50s were finally catalogued with the Dewey Decimal System and they got in 1953 a card catalog, their first card catalog.

In 1968, Dick Boling’s son Tom was the first professional librarian who had a master’s of library science, and then Gregory and Mike Smith have been the librarians since then. In 1974, the library trustees as they were called before were made a library commission by the city council and the library became a department of the city. And in 1978, this wonderful new building was built on a federal grant with no debt on it, and we moved into this building.” (applause)


 * Mike Smith:** Thank you, Peg. Our next speaker who will catch us up on the news of the current library is Gib Patterson. Gib is the Mayor of Forest Grove and in that role, he continues a tradition of public service in his family, as Gib’s father before him, again a resident of Forest Grove, of course, was Mayor about the years 1916-1920. Gib says he can pin down those dates because he remembers his father giving the order the church bell should be rung at the Armistice of 1917. Gib?


 * Gib Patterson**: “Equal chance now, those of you that wish to leave, may, and those who are still standing come on up and have a seat. Virginia, would you like to have a chair? And come on in and be sociable if you care to. Uh, I must make one correction. Mike, I didn’t hear him say that because I wasn’t born then, but he did evidently request that the church bells be rung at the time of the Armistice, at least that’s what he told me and I’m sure that would be true. It says here, “Jubilate” (shows an invitation). Mike sent me this and it says “Cordially invited to celebrate in the Diamond Jubilee of the library”. You know, sometimes these professionals give you a little pause for thought. I said “Jubilate”. I don’t remember that word. It’s kind of like Mike Solomon, my city manager, he throws some things in sometimes and I gotta look him up just to keep him honest. Well you know, I might have known, Mike is honest because, all these books and everything, I looked it up and sure enough it says, jubilate. It comes from a very old word, to rejoice, to be joyful, so Mike, you’re okay. You got off the hook.

Now, briefly just I wanted to tell you that probably the library, having been born here in Forest Grove, it’s touched my life in several ways, has probably touched everyone’s life that has lived in Forest Grove and this is a fine thing. There’s a couple of things. Now, when I came on the scene, Dr. Holmes and his wife May were at the head of the library. Because of her illnesses most of the time the good doctor was more or less the librarian because he did take over. But the thing I remember, starting to talk about how it touched your lives, which was the fact that as a young boy at that time, which I was about six or seven, I remember a very vibrant Dr. Holmes marching down the street with his cane, and very well dressed, and sometimes in a cutaway, because he was, of course, minister of the Congregational Church, and then had moved on later in the years and had come back here to retire. But, you could hear his voice mostly all over Forest Grove, at least uptown, and those of you who remember Dr. Holmes will verify that fact. But the thing that I remember particularly is a saying that he had on cold mornings, and it was always astounding to me until later I finally realized what it meant, but on a cold, slippery, frosty, morning he would stand up in the middle of town and say, “This is a musical day, a musical day, see sharp or you’ll be flat”. And I always thought about that and finally it came through to me what the gentleman had meant. That was one of my first memories of life connected with the library.

The second one I’ll share with you was when Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Anna Moore was librarian, and I started high school at the age of 12. I like people to think, of course, that I was some sort of a gifted youth starting that early, but really what happened was my birthday fell in January and so I had to go to school a year earlier than I should have started school. But anyway, starting school at 12, then when I was 13, I had a wonderful idea that I should have a car because, after all, when you’re in teens, you’ve reached the age of maturity. So, unbeknownst to anyone else, I bargained and got a Model T. It was quite a dilapilated thing, so I went to the library and I said “Mrs. Moore, have you anything that will help me restore this wonderful car” and at that time it should have been in the junk heap, but she said “Why yes, I think I can, Gilbert”. So, very helpfully, we went through the stacks and we did find, of course, Clinton’s Review of the Mechanical Aptitude of Taking Care of a Model T. And so, I got that, took it out, took it home and went through it completely. And about that time, after acquiring the Model T, I parked it behind the house. The next morning my father got up and he said to me, “Gib, is that yours?” and I said, “Well, yes Dad” and he said (and I bless him for this, he didn’t say, “hey at 13, you aren’t going to have a car, now get it out of here) “Well, son, because of insurance, because of the mechanical liability, and because of the fact that it would be quite expensive to restore that car, I feel that by tonight it shouldn’t be back there anymore, it should be gone.” And that was kind of the way he always talked to me, and I got the point, believe me, because he was about my size and I wasn’t that big yet. And so I thought, well, that’s a problem but I guess I better do it, so I sold it to Eldon Bartlett’s dad, at the time he had a garage, in fact, that sat right about here and I got $7.50 for it, and that is just what I paid for it. So, I started out right that way, but I took the Clinton’s mechanic paper back to Mrs. Moore and even at that time, I had a little sense of humor and so that has helped me through the years, and I said, “well, you know Mrs. Moore”, in inquiry to her question “How did you make out with that Gib?” I said, well there was a chapter missing, and she said a chapter missing?, and I said yes, and she said pray tell what was that? And I said well, that was the chapter on your father’s reaction and that wasn’t there, and it would have saved me a lot of time if it had been. But anyway, I’m not sure Mrs. Moore ever did quite figure out what I meant by that, but I knew.

But anyway, now Mike says you can bore them to death and this is a chance to leave, because I’m going to tell you some figures. They’re kind of important and kind of interesting though, and I won’t keep you very long. But as you remember, most of you do, this building was dedicated in 1978 and it was build by federal funding. And it was the Local Public Works Act that did this and our city did receive $2.4 million at that time which was a lot, even yet today, and of that amount we spent $880,000, almost a million, for this building and for its furnishings, which we have used ever since. This building is six times bigger than the one we talked about up on the corner. It has over 10,000 square feet of floor space which ahs been put to good use. They serve about 12,000 people a month. Now that’s a lot of people. That’s more people than live in Forest Grove, come through our doors here every month to use the library. Last year, Mike said that he put out 130,000 items, checked them out to the people who wished to avail themselves. At the present time we have about 36,000 books, I believe, in the library. Mike subscribes to 180 publications. You can find almost anything from how much a used car should cost to Life magazine. Whatever you need, it’s here. We’ve got a new approach too, in this library today, and it’s I suppose what you would call the no print media. Mike has over 1200 tapes and records which people now are availing themselves of, instead of having to come in to look at something, they can hear it, they can read it. For the partially blind or for those that can understand this better, it is quite a godsend. It’s a thing that we probably will go for more and more as time goes on. For eight years, I know for a fact, that the library has cooperated with Washington County in helping people in the county that cannot come to the library, or that need that additional help, or that cannot because of some reason, avail themselves of it here. We’ve had a contractual operation with the county in that respect. And along with that of course, we’ve cooperated with all the libraries in the county so that there is a rapid exchange of books and services which helps everyone in this county. We are probably in a computer age, we all hear that word. I know that Mike’s staff uses a microcomputer to keep up with the records. I’m sure that is going to become more and more prevalent. In fact, it may come a day in which you and I sit at home and press a little red button that says library and then we’ll dial in what we want and it will appear on our screen and also the audio will be there. I don’t think that’s too far off. I don’t know how Mike’s going to work that. At that time, I don’t know why we’d need a librarian really, well we’ll see about that Mike.

Well anyway, in conclusion, I still feel that this is Mrs. Stamford’s library. The reason for that is, people come, they mingle, they talk, they come in out of the cold, they read, they associate, and they Jubilate, if that’s the word, and I find that people can still come and sit and be themselves, and I think this whole thing is the cause of many of you people that are out there, the way that you’ve reacted to our library and I must say that Mike Smith, our librarian, has done a lot to help us get this library started and have it mean to the people of Forest Grove what it means today. Thank you very much. (applause).


 * Mike Smith**: Thank you Gib. Our next speaker is Jeanette Hamby. Jeanette is our state senator. She represents District 5 which goes from Forest Grove all the way through the middle of Beaverton. Jeanette has been eight years on the school board in Hillsboro. In 1981 she was a state representative in Salem. She just finished her first year as a state senator. She served on the senate judiciary committee and on the senate’s mental health for children committee. She returned a few months ago from a trip to Nicaragua. She also authored a bill in the last session to create a commission on futures research and has been appointed by the governor as a member of that commission. So, appropriately, Jeanette will speak to us about the future of libraries.


 * Jeanette Hamby**: Thank you so much. I can’t tell you what an honor and a personal delight it is to be here today to help celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Forest Grove Public Library. And unlike Gil, because I am a politician, if you don’t mind, if I don’t use my script I may well go off on a tangent, so I’ll follow my script a little closer than Gil did.

As we look back, and most especially today in looking back, through our rearview mirror of our road on down to the future, one must recognize that Forest Grove started early as a center for both education and culture. In a day when women were allowed to be a little more than household drudges, and as a matter of fact it was not until 1872 that the Oregon legislature enacted the first law recognizing the existence of married women, and it was called the Married Woman’s Sole Trader’s Bill. But 25 years before this earth-shaking legislation, Tabitha Brown assisted by Harvey Clark founded a boarding school for children and settlers and Indians. The Tualatin Academy finally evolved into Pacific University. Classes in higher education were begun in 1854 and Pacific University’s library was begun in 1855. While education here in the Forest Grove community, began in the late 1840s, more than a half a century passed before the beginnings of the Rogers Library, and significantly, through the dedicated efforts of yet another woman, Mrs. Adeline Rogers. The history of the perseverance and interest of librarians Barker, Sanford, Penfield and to the present day reflects the close community ties enjoyed by the library. The support, of course, that it has received from the city council, the community, sparked by the Forest Grove Women’s Club represented municipal cooperation at its strongest and at its best. And of course, today in 189, pardon me – 1984, we continue to see the support of community strength given to the Rogers Library, and the university library at Pacific continues to be the leader in interlibrary cooperation in the county to ensure that their resource is available to all while preserving the rights for the students and the faculty.

A look to the immediate future reveals plans for a county-wide computer network that will link the holdings and the records of all the public libraries and Pacific University. This will make it possible from any library at all to see the holdings of all the libraries and allow us to use our resources far more fully, and most especially to avoid unnecessary duplication. Computer terminals yes, are replacing our card catalogs in libraries today all over the country, and we can expect this to happen in Forest Grove also. And as the role of computers in storing and transferring information grows, their use in our libraries will also. The city library, of course, will certainly see microcomputers for direct public use, and microcomputers used to help answer reference questions with online databases.

And we can expect to see the start and the growth of video, computer software collections and the transfer of live television programs between the libraries in our country. And just as the library was recognized yesterday as a community center with a room to rest, this role will certainly continue as the library and its patrons learn to use the new avenue of cable television. Imagine, televised local government meetings followed by commercials offering and showing what’s new at the Forest Grove City Library. And just as our cable system develops, the future will allow us to request library books, as Gil mentioned, right from the comfort of our own living rooms. Couple this with a state-wide communication between all libraries allowing quick access for all Oregonians to all of the entire state’s library resources. Yes, these changes will come to pass before the turn of the century, but the role of the public library as a key information provider, essential in a free society, will not change.

I’d like to share with you very briefly a news clip from the __Oregon Statesman-Journal__, just a few days ago, about a debate over a city tax support for the Stayton Public Library, and if I may quote, it reads “A debate over city tax support for the Stayton Public Library is a tragic insight into why the U.S. educational system and technology base are going to hell in a handbag. The __Stayton Mail__ reports that city councilman George Carter told a delegation of library supporters he opposed city funding for the library because reading is a hobby and the city has no business financing a hobby. When community leaders consider reading a frivolous past time, this country is in trouble.” Yes, I don’t need to stand here and remind this audience that free access to information is as important to our way of life as free speech. And we, the public, must continue to defend and support both principles. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your celebration today.

Mike Smith: Thank you Jeanette. Thank you for reminding us that public support is probably the most important thing. We see in all three of the speeches we have had today. This kind of support in Forest Grove is certainly represented in the Forest Grove Women’s Club. You heard the name of the Women’s Club mentioned a number of times in Peg’s presentation and they have been a pivotal organization toward the development of the city library. Connie Fries is the current president of the Forest Grove Women’s Club and she will speak to us next. She has quite a formal library background, working in both public school libraries and at the Florida State University Library. She has lived in Forest Grove a number of years now and is the director of the C Notes singing group at the senior center. She is a realtor for Bump and Green, she is past president of the Hillsboro chapter of AAUW and she is a registered parliamentarian, there aren’t many of those around, and she gives instruction in this skill. She is also a past matron of Eastern Star here in Forest Grove. She is going to speak to us on the role of the Women’s Club in the history of the library. And then, we’re going to have our drawing, which Connie will do as well. Connie… (applause)

Connie Fries: Thank you. Actually the role of the Women’s Club is perhaps considerably broader than any of the other folks you’ve heard this afternoon have alluded to. Let me take you to Miami. Now this is Miami quite some years ago. We’re going to go to the public library; it’s called the Flagler Memorial Library named for Henry M. Flagler who was instrumental in developing south Florida as a great recreational area. The library is on the main floor of the Women’s Club Building. If you are familiar with Miami, it’s right across the street from the back entrance to the large Jordan Marsh department store in downtown Miami. The library was in the building that belonged to the Women’s Club right on Biscayne Bay so as we would walk in the door we could hear the swishing palm trees outside and the sloshing of the bay water as it would pound up against the sea wall which was immediately surrounding the area where the building is. As a youngster, I delighted in going there. My dad was always a very avid reader. We went almost every Saturday. We did not have a car, so it involved walking to the library some little distance, but I loved going in there. It had marble floors, so it was always kind of cool and pleasant. If you know tropical climates, you know it’s quite hot. So it was sort of cool and pleasant in there, and this was also B.A.C, before air conditioning, so it was a delightful opportunity to have a little cool time in a beautiful building and share exciting books. My dad introduced me early to Zane Grey who was one of his favorite authors, so I knew all about the Riders of the Purple Sage and Moab, Utah, a place where we spent a lot of time afterwards. But, that was my introduction to the great West. And also he loved Rex Beach, who sometimes lived in Florida too. He loved Rex Beach and the stories about Alaska so I knew all about the silver horde and thought, ‘My, wouldn’t it be exciting to live in a great place like the West”, never dreaming that I would actually wind up in this great country. So, my introduction to your great country was actually via the printed page, “the great hobby” as the fellow down in Stayton considers it to be. But really much more than a hobby, a great way to open one’s eyes to what is available.

As a youngster, not only did I delight in reading, but I loved to watch the library lady. Do you know Eleanor Estes wonderful books about Rufus M? If y’all don’t, you must get them. If you’re a youngster yourself, ask the librarian at school to show you Eleanor Estes. If you’re an adult, have your children or grandchildren read about Rufus M. Rufus M learned to write his name in the library, with the direction of the lady whom he always called the library lady. He didn’t know her name. New Haven, Connecticut, a wonderful story, charming. At any rate, I loved the library lady at the Flagler Memorial Library. The thing I liked best was the little gadget she had on her pencil. Now, if y’all are old enough, you’ll remember that years ago, at the checkout desk, the library lady used her pencil with a sort of metal gadget into which the pencil was inserted and by tipping the pencil down, the date would be stamped because at the end of this little gadget was a way to insert letters and numbers to spell out the date. I thought that stamping arrangement was just the neatest thing and I can remember thinking, “Oh, if one ever could get to be a librarian, then one could stand at the desk and just have such a great time stamping books.

As a college student, I worked in the public library. It had been moved out of the building that belonged to the Women’s Club, it was downtown then. And one of the neatest things to me was when the librarian said to me, “Would you like to work at the desk?”, Oh would I like to work at the desk, get to stamp the books with that marvelous little gadget on the end of the pencil.

As Mike told you, later on I became a school librarian. I was head librarian in a school where we had about 15,000 volumes, about 1300 youngsters coming and going every day. When I got to be head librarian, I thought, “Oh, I’m going to have a whole collection of those cute little things that stamp”. Mike has something else that I think is just darling. I used to look in the library catalog and see those wonderful kick-stands, there are three of them over here at my left. I always thought if I ever got to be a rich librarian, I’d have a whole assortment of those so I could just have stands everywhere and pop up and down to get books off the high shelves because short people always struggle as you know. At any rate, here I was, head librarian, and I had about a dozen of these little stamping gadgets. There’s only one little problem, when you’re working with wee little kiddies, wee little youngsters can open, can break, can tear up, can undo anything. Did you know that? A salesman came to me one day and he said, “Mrs. Fries I am going to sell you a piece of equipment that is absolutely childproof. It’s earphones so that youngsters can listen to cassettes. No child can ever take this apart”. The next day after the salesman left, two of my youngsters had already figured out how to take it apart. So, you see, nothing is really childproof. So here I was with my dozen little stampers and my little youngsters all ready to stamp. Children learn very quickly that by one quick flip the little screw that turns the little __???__  place there can be undone, and do you know what happens?, the type flies out. So I discovered I was spending half my day down on my hands and knees picking up these miniscule pieces of type and sticking them back in this little dater thing. So, it didn’t take very long before we chose to use the kind of band dater that you see Mrs. Hunter and other folks in this library using. But it was an exciting thought while it lasted.

I told you that we used to go to the library in the Women’s Club. I didn’t realize why we went to the library in the Women’s Club. When I was a college student in Tallahassee, I used to go to the library there and it was also in the Women’s Club building. I did not put two and two together until much later. In fact, not until just a few years ago, did I learn something that I think is very significant and very exciting. Women’s Clubs in the United States were responsible for the inception of 93% of all the libraries in the United States. And that’s kind of exciting to think that all across America women, at the turn of the century or slightly before, were busy figuring out a way, how can we have this centerpiece right in the middle of town, or someplace where patrons can get to it easily. How can we have this wonderful place where everybody can come and read and share and have wonderful times like the folks in Forest Grove have had. Just think what America would be like if women all over America had not been eager to do that. Later, our library, as I said, did move out of the Women’s Club Building. It has in most communities. It has gone into a building of its own, but always there will be that great feeling of gratitude for the impetus that Women’s Clubs everywhere have given to library service.

As a classroom teacher, I went every two weeks to our public library to take books back to my classroom. I would like y’all to know that I did that for seven years, every other week, and I took 50 books at a time, and out of all those books, we lost only one book, which I think is rather a creditable record. I’m telling you this because I want you to know the name of one of my students. Some of you, who know me well, know my story. Those of you who have not heard it will rejoice to know that the young man who is the president of the Farmers and Merchants Bank, here in Forest Grove, a young fellow named Hal Andrews was in my fourth grade 30 years ago. So, he was one of the youngsters for whom I went to the Miami Public Library and got books every other week. There are lots of Florida crackers coming and more are going to be coming because those of us who’ve moved here from Florida are singing the praises of Oregon as loudly as we can.

One of my longtime friends was state librarian in Kansas and she has told me too of the small towns in Kansas, which would be like small towns in Oregon, small towns everywhere, where the library staff perhaps working on a very informal basis was able to provide service for the patrons. You’ve heard the others refer to working out a card catalog. The first card catalog that I saw in a small town library had cards all written by hand. It’s been a long time since librarians have done cards by hand. We’re in a very sophisticated period now. Senator Hamby referred to new horizons of sophistication. Just think, we have spanned the period between handwritten catalog cards and the ultra sophistication of being able to plug in to a computer terminal and talk to libraries all over America. You can imagine sweet little housewives everywhere and sweet little friends of the library struggling with their copies of Dewey, trying to figure how a catalog card might be worked out, doing it by hand. Now step into Mike’s workroom and see all the sophisticated material that he has to work with. With the exception of a few of the major libraries in the United States like the New York Public, the Boston Library, and by the way for those of you who have not been to Boston lately, the new Neiman-Marcus department store is right across the street from the Boston Public Library, think how neat it would be to be a librarian there Mike. You could have lunch at the Copley Plaza, and then shop in Neiman-Marcus, and then come back to the great Boston Public which has a tremendous collection of books. Chicago, some of the other big cities, were actually started as city libraries, but just think of all the other libraries in America, most of which were started just because women in Women’s Clubs saw the need for having the centerpiece, the focal point of the community be its library.

Some of y’all will remember seeing “The Music Man”. Remember the heroine in “The Music Man” was a library lady named Marian Caroo (Paroo). Do you remember the song about “Marian The Librarian”? I saw that in New York City by myself one Fourth of July quite some years ago, and when she sang the line about her patrons could lie like carrion because Marian always was very quiet, you know ssshhh, very quiet type librarian, I was the only one in the theater who laughed, and I decided maybe I was a Marian librarian type, or maybe I was the only one who knew what the word carrion meant. At any rate, nobody else laughed, I was the only one who was just absolutely hysterical.

After the women’s clubs in America had gotten libraries started, it became evident that more money, more types of financing would have to be forthcoming. You will recall that during the 1930s and the early 1940s, much money from Andrew Carnegie, even as early as the late 1920s, much money from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation was channeled into libraries and it was at that point that many libraries in the east, in the south and in the Midwest, were able to build fine buildings and were able to really make an impact, a bigger impact on the community than ever before. It is a joy to see that the library in this community is the centerpiece. It’s a joy to see many people coming to the library and using it in all the wonderful ways that Mike and his staff have worked out. As a former school librarian, I can tell Mike that the floor in his library today looks very much like a disaster area in a school library and I understand exactly what it’s going to take to work over here, but we’ll give you a little hand on that. Also as a former librarian, it’s a great privilege to Jubilate with the Forest Grove Library at the time of its 75th Anniversary. I bring you greetings from the Forest Grove Women’s Club because we love libraries and we love Forest Grove. Thank you so much. (Applause)

This concludes our program. The Forest Grove City Library Diamond Jubilee Celebration is supported entirely by private donations.

Jubilee Participants: Computer Fair, Col. Edward Blackman,