Day 68, Friday May 10, 2024: Moberly, Missouri to St. Joseph, Missouri

Carnegie libraries visited: Huntsville, Marceline, St. Joseph Carnegie, St. Joseph, and Washington Bluff, Missouri.

Susan Jennette Kitchen Gully was born in Moberly, got married there, and was buried there. In the meantime, she worked for the Little Dixie Regional libraries (which included those in Moberly, Huntsville, Madison, and Paris) for 45 years: two-thirds of her life. A memorial to her says “Her love for reading was second to the love for her family. Depending on the day, she sometimes chose books first.” A bench commemorating her service sits just outside the Carnegie library in Moberly.

Susan Gully

Mrs. P.L. Vasse, the secretary of Huntsville’s library committee, reached out to Carnegie in February 1914: “We have a great many young men here who need such a space [a library] to spend their evenings and they have repeatedly urged us to make an effort to secure one.” A women's club had indeed begun a library nine years earlier, “but it has been a hard struggle to keep [it] going…” Count me skeptical about how many young men were demanding this. Maybe they were. Maybe Mrs. Vasse intuited that Carnegie would be responsive to the idea that young men were seeking self improvement through books, as he once had. Within three months of Vasse’s request, Carnegie wrote Huntsville a check for $8000.

Huntsville Carnegie Library

The Marceline (“The Magic City”)  library has a working twenty-five drawer card catalogue. It’s a relic, as the library’s card catalogue was digitized years ago. In 1967 Henriette Avram (1919-2006), an employee of the Library of Congress, developed the Machine Readable Card format code, MARC. Avram’s MARC system allowed libraries to digitize their catalogues, and they did. This helped revolutionize the work of librarians, who now spend much of their days in the digital domain.

Avram did not plan on becoming a librarian. As a child, she dreamed of curing cancer, and majored in pre-medicine at Hunter College, at that time a college for women. She later studied math at George Washington University before joining the National Security Agency as one of its first IBM programmers. In the 1960s she took a job with the Datatrol Corporation, where she was tasked with developing a computer science library. She read some books to get up to speed on library jargon and hired a librarian to assist her. She connected with the Library of Congress (LoC) Card Division Service through this project and, when the LOC had an opening, she took it.

Henriette Avram

Avram was notable for many things: her petite stature, New York accent, her leadership, and her “indefatigable drive.” “She was able to foster a cooperative spirit among the computer specialists and librarians on her staff. In her typical fashion, she stepped into the world of libraries and learned libraries' problems, adopting them as her own,” as Lucia Rather and Beacher Wiggins put it in “Henriette D. Avram: Close-Up on the Career of a Towering Figure in Library Automation and Bibliographic Control,” which appeared in their 1989 article in American Libraries. She retired as the LoC’s Associate Librarian for Collections Services, where she led a staff of seventeen hundred.

I opened the physical card catalog and randomly opened it to The Ethics of Abortion (Jennifer A. Hurley, editor) of the “An Opposing Viewpoints Series.” The chapters include “Abortion is Sometimes Necessary,” “The Myth of Abortion as a ‘Necessary Evil’, “Late Term Abortion is Unjustifiable,” and “Late Term Abortion is Sometimes Justifiable” among others. Libraries are best when they provide information on multiple viewpoints, and libraries are the best at doing this. 

Marceline was bubbling over with women’s clubs at the beginning of the 20th century. The Bible Club, the town’s first women’s organization, was started in 1901 by Mrs. Sigmund (Georgia Steves) Steiner, a Methodist who got the idea at a birthday party she hosted for her mother, Mrs. Louise Steves. (Club membership was capped at 25, with the ministers’ wives serving as honorary members, and the club’s official song was “The Bible.”) The Ladies’ Home Culture Club (1901). The Philanthropic Educational Organization (PEO), established in Marceline in 1906. The Quality Rebekah Lodge, the female affiliate of the International Organization of Odd Fellows (1907). The Rural Home Circle (1910). And many others.

Marcelline Carnegie Library

It was the town’s Women’s Civic League, with Mrs. Steiner serving as its president, that took the steps to bring a library to Marceline. In 1914 a reading room was opened in the Marceline First National Bank building and the League donated 300 books to it. In 1917, the League persuaded town officials to approach Carnegie for a grant (the application for the grant stated that Marceline did not have a library; instead, it had a “ladies rest room.”) and, shortly thereafter, to adopt a library tax. Bertram swiftly agreed, and in 1920 the library opened. A plague celebrating the Civic League’s efforts is on the library’s walls.

Since its inception, women have served as the library’s directors.

Flo Cooper Carr, 1920-1929

Olive McAllister, 1926-1967

Thelma Dean, 1967-1976

Marjorie Dearing, 1975-1981

Gayle Lyons, 1981-1982

Donna Terrell, 1982-1987

Renee Hannibal, 1987-1987

Vicki Schaal 1988-1990

Joyce (Stallo) Clapp 1990 - present

Thirteen individuals, “many of them young girls,” applied to be the first librarian. When Flo Carr was selected, it was noted that “The duties of the librarian are multifarious, and the person who capably fills that position must be a person of poise, education, and tact. These qualities are certainly possessed by Mrs. Carr…” She died while in office in 1929 and her assistant, Olive McAllister, was promoted to librarian.

Olive McAllister

Although Lyons and Hannibal served less than two years (no doubt, there is a story behind that) McAllister and Clapp led the library for decades. Olive never married and, after the death of her mother, “she took over the duties of maintaining the house for her brothers and father.” Joyce began working for the library only four days after she graduated from high school. And it’s a family affair: Elaine Stallo, Joyce’s sister, also works there as Joyce’s assistant.

If you want to do your own research on Marceline’s history, you could easily do so. Library Director Clapp, in announcing the library’s participation in the Marceline History Connection, wrote “Getting easily searchable, digital access to Marceline’s historic newspapers will help anyone who wishes to work on genealogy, or the history of our town, and we couldn’t be happier.” The catch? If you want to do this from home, you’ll have to pay for a subscription to Newspapers.com. At the library, you can access this resource, free to all.

While in Marceline, I popped into the Walt Disney Hometown Museum. Walt and his family (parents Elias and Flora, brothers Herbert, Raymond, Roy) moved to Marceline in 1906 when Walt was four, and they lived there for five years. Walt sold his first drawing there – a horse owned by a retired doctor – and he developed his skills by tracing the cartoons that appeared in the Appeal to Reason newspaper. Walt, together with his brother Roy, created one of the most imaginative and successful animation studios and theme park resorts in the world. We would be a poorer world without his creativity. He was nominated for more Oscar awards than anyone else (59) and won 22 times. 

The museum paid tribute to his early childhood and his other family members, with all sorts of Disney memorabilia scattered throughout. Walt’s story and successes are incredible, although the Disney who interested me most was Herbert. The Disney family remained close throughout their lives – all but Raymond ultimately moved to California, so they could be closer to each other, and Raymond’s work in insurance allowed him to provide “knowledge and support” to the family business – and still Raymond never got involved with the various Disney enterprises. He worked for the US Postal Service his entire career. He was happy, it seems, doing the routine work of processing and delivering letters to those in his community, honorable public service.