Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-956

Acknowledgments and Permissions

Acknowledgments and Permissions Thisprojecthasbeenalongtimecoming,andIowegreatdebtsof gratitudetoscoresofpeopleandlibrariesovertheyears.MythankstoJane Robbins, Louise Robbins, and Doug Zweizig (the first two are former directors of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Library and InformationStudies ),whosupportedmeinnumerouswayswhileItaughtthere, and Jane Robbins (again) and Larry Dennis, deans of the School of Information Studies and now the College of Communications and Information StudiesatFloridaStateUniversity,whodidthesameafterImovedtoTallahassee in 2003. That I list Jane twice should give readers some idea of how I came to the South. I especially want to thank librarians at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (where Michelle Besant of the School of Library and Information Studies Library helped me find essential details to this story in the collections she manages), and archivists at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives. At Florida State University I owe thanks to librarians at Strozier Library and at the School of Library and Information Studies Goldstein Library, to Director Pamala Doffek and her staff, many of whom in the three years before completing this study chased down that “last” elusive footnote. I also want to thank librarians and archivists at the Library of Congress and Yale University ’s Beinecke Library. A fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the spring semester of 1998 allowed me to complete conventional historical research on Main Street Public Library. My thanks to other fellows at the IRH during that delightful semester for their commentary on my research, and especially to its then director, Paul S. Boyer, who suggested I apply for the fellowship. Visits to each of the four libraries described in this book brought me into contact with people who care much about what their public libraries can do for their communities. Each helped me find my way around, each made special efforts to make sure I was comfortable and my needs addressed. Often that involved giving me a door key so I could use collections and x • acknowledgments archives during times a library was not open. For helping me at the Bryant Library I owe thanks to Phyllis Lahti, Nancy Kazlauckas, and Dawn Shay, and especially to John Christenson, who in the early 1990s suggested the Bryant Library as a suitable site as I was contemplating this study. Thanks also to Richard Hedin, who spent an hour with me in a telephone conversation in 2008, telling me about his Bryant Library experiences as an adolescent in the 1930s. For helping me at the Sage Library, many thanks to Cindi Youngblut, recently retired, who was director during the entire time of this study. At Rhinelander, I owe thanks to Lisa Cochenet, Robert Toth, Ed Hughes, and Kris Wendt. Finally, at the Moore Public Library, I want to thank Beth Schumacher, and especially I want to remember the late Philomena M. Falls, president of the board of trustees of the Moore Library, who worked very hard in the 1990s to make sure her library was among those in my study. I am glad she was so persistent, and I hope this study is a fitting memorial to her efforts. For six years I employed scores of college work-study students, paying them with money from rent I charged residents of an apartment attached to my home. By 1998 these students had transferred all the information in the accessions books of the four libraries covered in this book into one database . The database also contains the records of a fifth library—the Morris Public Library of Morris, Illinois—not described in this book. Readers will find a discussion of the Morris Public Library (including a discussion of its collections) in the Winter, 2010, issue of the Journal of Illinois History. For help with this database I especially want to thank Bria Rewey, Toni Samek, and particularly Kendall Larson (who prepared a set of instructions so others could use the database and traveled with me to several conferences to demonstrate its potential to others). The entire database is now available at http://cms.bsu.edu/Academics/CentersandInstitutes/ Middletown/Research/MiddletownRead/MainStreetPublicLibraryData base.aspx. BecauseIampairingthisbookwithanotherprojectconsistingofaseries of essays by subject experts who analyze my database from perspectives I could not cover, I want to thank Rima Apple, Joanne Passett, Sarah Wadsworth ,KateMcDowell,Charles Johanningsmeier,MelanieKimball,Christine Jenkins, Emily Honey, Michael Chasar, Michael Hedstrom, and Sarah Wadsworth for comments on the manuscript they read as background informationfortheir ownessays.Iespecially want tothankChristine Pawley, acknowledgments • xi who read...