Day 34, Monday March 18: Berkeley, California to Petaluma, California

Carnegie libraries visited: San Rafael, San Anselmo, Petaluma

Having neglected to do my laundry over the weekend, I drove to the BB Laundromat and Dry Cleaners, about two miles from the hotel. There were a couple of other laundromats in the area, so I chose this one based both on proximity and consumer ratings. A couple customers commented favorably on the laundromats cleanliness and friendly staff and, when I arrived, I reported these reviews to Holly, who was mopping the floor. Just then Dan, the manager, walked in. Holly shared my enthusiasm with Dan, who opened the box of pastries he had just brought in and said “Here, take one.” I have a weakness for apple fritters and I took him up on his offer. In short: I did something nice, and my niceness was rewarded here in this life, notwithstanding whatever happens in the next one.

I like to do nice things – most often, giving praise – for persons I have just met. It makes me feel good, and I think it does the same for them. Just yesterday I took Goldfinger to a Subaru dealer for routine maintenance. My service guy, Ethan, was pretty friendly and so after I settled my account I asked him where his manager was. He pointed to the fishbowl office closeby. I popped in and said “Hey, I just wanted to sing Ethan’s praises. He did a great job!” The manager said “Glad to hear – I’ll take him out to lunch.” Ethan seemed pretty happy when I told him this.

In the early 2000s I was flying fairly often for work, and the flights were not usually short hops. Then came the horrible events of 9/11. One of my good friends from work, Leslie Whittington, and her husband and young daughters, were killed when the flight they were on crashed into the Pentagon. Four hundred and seventy first responders and military personnel died in those terrorist attacks, along with some 2500 others (not including the 19 terrorists who died that day). Among the fatalities were 25 flight attendants. 

Even on the best days, flight attendants have difficult jobs. If you yourself have flown, you have had a small taste of what flight attendants must put up with every day: crammed planes, surly passengers, crying babies, clueless novices, tight schedules. Oh, and crazy hours, low pay, and zero prestige. Ginger Rogers had to dance backwards and in heels. Flight attendants must envy how easy Rogers had it.

Prior to 9/11, I had not spent much time thinking about how challenging, potentially dangerous, and apparently thankless the work of flight attendance was. Afterwards I began bringing gifts, usually chocolates or flowers, for the flight crew. To my surprise, these gifts were often reciprocated, as the crews would give me free drinks or, on rare occasion, an upgrade on my seat. Wow! I thought. I am doing something out of the goodness of my heart, and I’m being rewarded for doing so. 

After a year or so I stopped giving gifts. Not because the flight attendants stopped meriting them. Not because I forgot about 9/11. Not because I became more miserly. The reason I stopped was because I realized that I was no longer giving gifts from a spirit of generosity, but because I expected to receive a gift in return. I was motivated by selfishness, not by kindness. (Hey, where is my upgrade? I gave you Toblerone!) So now I give gifts to flight attendants only from time-to-time, when the spirits move me to do so.

Oh yeah: I also visited some libraries. Inside the San Rafael Carnegie, a poster advised that free showers were available by appointment (made by phone, 20 minute limit, if  you bring your pet someone will watch it for you) through a local non-profit. Soap, shampoo, and towels are complimentary.

The sun is always shining, today anyway, in San Rafael and San Anselmo, two charming towns about twenty miles north of San Francisco in affluent Marin County. Mount Tamalpais is on full glorious view to the south of both towns. It’s the kind of place that makes me think “Who is lucky enough to live here?” Well, San Anselmo’s most famous resident is George Lucas, of Star Wars Fame, and several major video game developers have their studios in San Rafael. I wonder how they are able to focus so intently on their screens amidst so much natural beauty.

When I introduced myself to Pamela, who was working the desk at the San Rafael Library, I wasn’t quite sure if she was paying attention to me. Dressed in a blue and white striped shirt, with shoulder length salt-n-pepper hair, her nearly-shut eyes gave her the appearance of Mr. Magoo’s sister, deep in thought. Over the course of the next hour or so, she repeatedly dropped what she was doing to find more material for me from the library’s archives and brought it to my desk.

In 1912, a group of 34 townswomen formed the “San Anselmo Women’s Improvement Club” (the goal was to improve the town, not the women) with the goal of making San Anselmo a more desirable place to live. Each member paid ten cents a month in dues. A few issues needed immediate attention: filling in mosquito-breeding ditches, planting trees along the main street, placing a mailbox at the train depot and, not least, improving the quality of movies shown at the San Anselmo Theater. I can see why movies were a priority, as the worst movies of 1912 include such titles as “How a Mosquito Operates,” “From the Manger to the Cross,” and “The Musketeers of Pig Alley.” Oddly, Flickchart also lists “The Musketeers” as the third best movie of the year. 

Within six months of forming, the SAWIC turned its collective energy to establishing a library. On September 25, 1913, Letetia Jones (who served for 38 years on the library’s board) wrote to Carnegie on behalf of the Women’s Club to request funding for a library; the town leaders followed suit on November 17.  Lucy Kortum of Sonoma wrote in her 1990 thesis, Carnegie Library Development in California and the Architecture it Produced 1899-1921, that “Carnegie secretary James Bertram objected to their plans as lacking a basement and being too narrow a rectangle. Hodges defended the shape and resisted lowering on the grounds of possible contamination from sewage, but he eventually agreed to raise the site so that the basement could be recessed four feet.”

The library opened in 1915, and for the next 100 years all the head librarians were women: Bessie L. Wise, Alice Kerchman, Annie Belle Meagor, Martha S. Adams, Christine Coolidge, Virginia Richwagen Stewart (who had to deal with three feet of water in the basement after a flood), Lucy Palo, Marcia Keller (another flood, yet higher and with more mud), Ann Golden, Elizabeth Wingate, Heather Lamb and Barbara Jacobs (who supervised a seismic retrofitting), Sara Loyster (yet one more flood), and Linda Kenton, who has served from 2010 to the present (March 2025). Perhaps the library would have been better off without a basement.

The members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were on to something. They wanted men (mainly) to stop drinking, and they knew that it’s hard to give up something unless you receive something to replace it. So less booze, more books! On April 20, 1887, the local chapter of the WCTU decided to establish a coffee and read­ing room (for “sober contemplation” as Wat Takeshita wrote in San Rafael’s Daily Independent Journal in 1958) in the town of San Rafael, next to a venue selling wine. In May, appropriately, the group staged a Flower Festival and Musicale to raise funds for their project. As The Marin Journal reported on June 2, “The Coffee Room and Free Library is now open”  Not resting, the ladies solicited donations and sold subscriptions, so they were able to move to a rented building on Fourth Street by early December. By that time, the new Library Association had more than 60 members, each paying $1 a month. As the May 8 issue of The Marin Journal put it, “It is a matter of congratulation that through the efforts of a few public-spirited women the town is now in a position to maintain a free library.” In 1909, the new library funded by Carnegie opened its doors to the public.