I have been married a long time, but my first love affair goes back almost 50 years. In our elementary school years, my brother and I walked two miles each way to the Lake Charles Public Library. He memorized automobiles from the late 1940s on, so we examined old bound copies of Life, Look, and Saturday Evening Post, for car ads, and saw Ike playing golf, Nixon’s kitchen debates, Mickey Mantle vs. Willie Mays, Jackie Kennedy redecorating the White House, and so on. We’d walk home with a stack of books each.
At school, kids were awarded certificates with colored seals for reading 25, 50 , 75, or 100 books each year. My favorites were biographies, romanticized for young readers, inspiring a lifelong interest in history and politics.
When my wife and I relocated to Carroll County in 2008, the Berryville Library was among our first stops, so we could learn where to register to vote, get a driver’s license, find the Post Office and such. (Of course, everything in Berryville is centered around the library or the square.)
Since then, we brought or met students, performed at an end-of-summer block party, checked out a few thousand books, and ran up small overdue fines. The past two years we assembled a band of local musicians to play at major fundraisers.
We like the Eureka Springs library, too, in part because the two are so different. Eureka is quiet and elegant, with wide-eyed tourists wandering in from the tour guide apps. Berryville is busy and noisy — old folks and moms with their broods, youngsters and Mennonite farmers at the computers, patrons visiting with each other and the librarians. Folks browse shelves and use the photocopier and fax machine for important business.
This library has been overcrowded for years. Boxes of donated books are stacked in front, extra chairs and tables stuffed in back corners. The cramped young adult section has two study tables; the ever-expanding Spanish-language area is giving way for materials in Marshallese.
Thus, the Friends of the Library has led the movement to grow a new library from a diaphanous dream to a solid reality. The city donated a big field on Springfield Street for the new library; Eureka Springs Mayor Butch Berry provided exterior architectural drawings.
When Eureka’s library was built a century ago, Andrew Carnegie granted $500 if the townsfolk could match that figure, and the result is that beautiful stone building. It has grown to include a funky annex for meetings, a computer lab, shelf space for DVDs and used books. A new Berryville library will cost into the low millions. Friends of the Library have an annual goal of $10,000, starting now. They hold bake sales, raffles and special events, but memberships are a key way to reach that goal — individual and family memberships drive the corporate and philanthropic gifts upward.
Berryville Mayor Tim McKinney signed a proclamation honoring October 20-26 as National Friends of Libraries week. It is a good time to join the Friends. October 26, Green Forest Library holds a fall festival in that town’s square, with food, fun and games, live music and a talent show. If you didn’t know, Eureka, Berryville and Green Forest belong to a consortium with Madison County libraries — you can request items, check out or return them to any of the six locations. If you have never visited the Kingston Library, it is cute as a bug. We have been reading books by various Democratic candidates for president, borrowed from the St. Paul library, a repurposed FEMA trailer in that Ozark hamlet.
What? You say you do not need a library because you have Internet? Okay, be that way. But libraries represent their entire communities — people without I nternet can borrow books and movies for free, poor people can sit safely in quiet to peruse the newspapers or read a book. You can register to vote in your library, meet like-minded or totally different people, introduce your kids to thousands of classic children’s books. You’ve got a friend in your library.
Kirk Ashworth