Copyright © 2001 Henrietta W. Hay

The Information Store April 6, 2001

My favorite information store is still the best buy in town. You probably think of it as the Mesa County Public Library. It has been serving our community for nearly 100 years, and is looking forward to another hundred.
This is National Library Week - a good time to think about what Libraries mean to the world and to us as individuals. The urge to preserve knowledge is as old as the cave dwellers. The earliest known library was a collection of clay tablets in Babylonia in the 21st center B. C. But my favorite is still that of Persian vizier Abdul Kasem Ismael in the first millennium A. D. He traveled with 400 camels who carried his 117,000 volume library everywhere he went. The animals were trained to walk in an order that ensured the manuscripts were alphabetically arranged.
It is a long way from 400 camels in Asia to our library building in Happy Valley. In the 21st century buildings are more practical than camels and more convenient for the users. But a library is more than bricks and mortar -- or camels. It is the knowledge which it guards and the librarians who care for it. It is the people who love it and use it, and the memories that linger on. I spent 25 years working in this one, and have a lot of memories.
Probably my most vivid one of the building on White is of the day I was working at the desk when a well dressed man came in asking for a book on how to feed a pet snake. Being a well trained librarian, I found him a book on the subject, but instead of quitting while I was ahead I commented, "Well, I'm glad you didn't bring your pet in." "Oh but I did," he said as he opened his jacket. Instead of a belt he was wearing a large, spotted snake. I know I didn't check the book out.
In that building the employee's "lounge" was a long, narrow room in the basement with a sink and a couple of straight chairs. We had one staffer who loved weird animals. One time she kept a baby alligator in the sink for a while. I never did find out where she got it.
For a while the city's computer department shared the basement of the old building with the Children's Department. One day the Summer Reading Party for children was scheduled for the west lawn. That was the day that the city decided to push its huge new computer down the west stair well between the Children's room, where the punch and cookies were stashed, and the lawn where the kids were. Children's librarian, Terry Pickens, getting some early practice in how to be Director, planted her feet firmly in front of the door and said, "Over my dead body." The city was willing to oblige, but when her boss was forced to choose between an angry librarian and an angry computer expert he wisely decided in favor of the librarian.
The first time the staff visited the present building, was on a cold winter day. We skated on the ice that had formed on the basement floor. We weren't much impressed with the Kiva before it was re-modeled, and one of the staff suggested that we fill it with root beer and put a spigot on it.
Library Directors leave their spirits behind, too. I can still see Irene Wubben sitting at her desk in the dusty basement that was the first County Library. And when I am wandering around the present building I swear that sometimes I can still get a whiff of George Van Camp's pipe, and wait for one of his awful puns.
Libraries contain the wisdom of the ages and the hope of the future. As knowledge and the means of its dissemination have increased, so has the need for larger buildings -- or more camels. The building on Grand is bursting at the seams and a major campaign in underway to build a new, much larger one for the next century -- and what wonders will that century hold?