Henrietta Hay's Column

The local Information Store is the source of all the facts we used to know but have forgotten, the things our curiosity leads us into wanting to know, the world of ideas, and the source of hours and days and years of entertainment. My local Information Store is the Mesa County Public Library District, but every town has its own.

Last week I pulled together some memories from many years of working for my favorite information store, as I talked to a group of library people who are young enough to suspect that libraries sprang full blown from the brow of Zeus.

'Tain't so! Like any institution a library is the basically the sum of the people who have worked to create it. Alongside the books are the people who have formed it and the stories they tell. There are the ones I remember, and there are the ones being created now which will be told and re-told in the years to come.

Once upon a time the Grand Junction City Library was housed in the building on White Ave., which is now a part of City Hall. One day I was on the desk. That was early day library talk for "in charge of adult books and checkout." The whole first floor was my domain. A well-dressed man came in and asked whether we had any books on the care and feeding of a pet snake.

I found one for him and with my usual unfortunate habit of talking too much I commented, "I'm glad you didn't bring your pet with you." "Oh but I did," he said and opened his jacket. Around his waist in place of a belt was a big spotted snake, which he stroked lovingly. My reaction emptied the building faster than a fire would have.

The "employees' lounge" was a long narrow room in the basement, with a sink and a couple of straight chairs. We had one employee who loved weird animals. One time she kept a baby alligator in the sink for a while. During that time there was very little water used in the lounge.

Animals caused a lot of the excitement in that building. We had a children's librarian who had a little trouble with hamsters. One day one of the little beasties got away and hid behind a bookcase. I offered to help get it out, but being a practical soul, I did the chasing and she did the catching. She caught it all right. It glommed onto her finger and wouldn't let go. There is something vaguely undignified about a children's librarian running around the room uttering unchildlike words, with a hamster hanging from her finger. She was the one who grabbed a hamster by the tail once, only to have the tail come off in her hand. We were told that this is a normal process, but that librarian still can't bear to look a hamster in the eye.

The children's room was in the basement, which had a door at each end. One little boy about three or so loved to sneak out of story hours and head for the great outdoors. I often caught him at the door and carted him back at arms length with his feet flailing like propellers. I was not at all surprised when he later became an all-state halfback for Grand Junction High School.

There was a cataloguer who shall remain nameless who sat one morning at the first computer the library owned. With her mind off in the toolies somewhere she wrote, "format" and hit the return key. For about 120 seconds she sat in horror and watched the little red light glow while the hard disk was methodically stripped of all the information that had been so laboriously put onto it. It took two days to get everything back on it after the head librarian decided, somewhat reluctantly, not to send her to the road department for a job at hard manual labor.

The city and county libraries were combined, later moved into the old Safeway store and still later became a library district. The collection grew, the staff grew, hours increased, computerization arrived and we became a major professional library.

But the memories still hover around the shelves. The people who have been there a long time swear that sometimes they can smell George's pipe and quickly look over their shoulders to see where he is standing with a book in his hand. Libraries are more than books. They are people and legends. I wonder what tomorrow's stories will be.