Day 97, Tuesday June 11, 2024: Kirklin, Indiana to Marion, Indiana
- Mark Carl Rom
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Atlanta, Alexandria, Gas City, and Converse, Indiana
My clothes have never been cleaner. I have not gone to a laundromat since back in the dark ages when I was in Berkeley, California. The SpringHill Suites where I parked last night had a guest laundry, although the hotel had the audacity to have its door locked so that only overnight guests could use it.
When I arrived at the 24 hour laundry in a strip mall outside Sheridan, the parking lot held only a few stray cars. The Rabbit City Vape & CBD store and the Los Cotorros Mexican restaurants which bordered the laundry were not yet open, and only a Subway at the far end was ready to serve footlong sandwiches, with the second one fifty percent off, for those who need two feet for breakfast.
The reason for the super-duper cleanliness of my clothes is that I’ve washed them twice. The first time, I put them into a standard white front loader, like the one I have at home. The detergent machine was out of Bounce, Cheer, Snuggle, Gain, and all the other soaps and softeners, so I used my Meyer’s hand soap, which will give my clothing that olive oil and aloe vera sheen. When the cycle had finished, I scooped everything up and put them into what I thought was a large silver industrial dryer. The $6.50 to use it seemed outlandish to me, yet I submissively slipped quarter after quarter into the slot. Only when I pushed play and saw water coming into the drum did I realize that I had simply chosen a larger washer, even though the sign right in front of me said “Easy Washing.”
A big black and blue Chevy pickup pulled into the lot, so Goldfinger finally had some company. It was customized for commercial purposes: Bragg Insurance Agency (Home-Auto-Business-Life). Mr. Bragg, I’m assuming, in khakis and a logoed golf shirt, got out and walked into his office a couple of doors down. Throughout the two cycles of the laundry, no other cars came into our end of the lot. Was insurance his pride and passion, or was he just trying to earn a living? Did he begin cold calling potential clients and checking in on existing ones, or did he think “Well, nothing’s going to happen until at least 10, so I’ve got time to place some fantasy football bets.” If I wasn’t working on my skills at avoiding temptation, I’d go in and introduce myself and ask him how much my life was worth.
While the clothes are tumbling, I’m giving myself a laundromat spa treatment. I’ve used Papatui (rejuvenating toner for real men!) on my face to tighten it and tea tree mint scalp treatment which promises to “invigorate your senses with a minty tingle.” After brushing, flossing, and gargling with Crest Glamorous White, my teeth are as white as a BBC TV anchor circa 1950. Normally I don’t floss. I’m doing so today because I’m seeing my dentist in two weeks and I want to make a good impression. I treat medical checkups as a way of showing how fit I am rather than to learn about any maladies I might have. Also, my dental floss is not just minty. As the geared for the masculine man label states, the floss is Extreme Mint, not the mild mint that the testosterone deprived use.
Just when I’m about to pack my clothes and spa treatments and leave, Phil walks in wearing the black and red “buffalo check” shirt ubiquitous among hipsters everywhere. No hipster himself, Phil is a fully disabled veteran who served in Korea. I don’t know how lonely Phil is; I do know that man wanted to talk and talk. He asked me if I lived here and I said no, just passing through. I mentioned that I was sleeping in my car and he exclaimed “You shouldn’t be doing that! You’re likely to get shot!” before going off on how our society was going to hell. I thought he was going to go full Trump on me when to my surprise the only president he mentioned was Barack Obama, and not to say that he was a Kenyan Muslim. Phil said “I wrote to Barack Obama to tell him that I was exposed to Agent Orange the entire time I was in the DMZ in Korea, and the next thing I know I was given 100 percent military disability, no questions asked.” What followed was a long monologue about his three heart operations and the lack of laundromats in the area.
The Atlanta Carnegie was deserted and not just of people. The shelves had been stripped and the furniture removed. The library was closed, permanently. The issue was more about the direction of the town than its size. When the library was built Atlanta was as small as it is today, with around 700 residents. In 1916, the residents might have believed that Atlanta might become the Atlanta of the north. Even though the Welcome to Atlanta sign reads “750 Friendly People…and a Few Soreheads” it must be obvious to all that the local library is an unaffordable luxury. While I was driving out of town, a lone tabby cat was sitting in the middle of the red bricked road. When I slowed to a stop in front of him, he just gave me a look and didn’t budge. He glared at me as I pulled around. One of the soreheads, I imagine.
Another day of county roads, with a few golden fields of wheat interspersed among the growing corn. Many of the roads are ringed with daylilies, their orange heads skyrocketing up. Not so the lawns, which are almost always cut to putting green height. In Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where my sister Cristine lives, many of the pocket-sized yards have no grass at all, having been converted (and often advertised) as butterfly gardens. Not so here: butterflies can go roost on the unmowed medians, I’m keeping my yard like the 18th hole.
Terri, the Alexandria Carnegie’s unofficial historian, seemed delighted by my interest in her library’s history. With salt and pepper hair in the “classic curly” cut, her deep set blue eyes were framed by tortoise shell horn rims. A gold crucifix necklace dangled down her black v-neck sweater, a red cardigan on top. In reading the online history, I learned that the library was built on a vacant lot next to the home owned by Anthony Bertsche, a local goldsmith, and his wife. Scanning down the list of Head Librarians I saw the name Mrs. Cornelia Ralph Bertsche. Putting Bertsche and Bertsche together, I asked Terri if she had more information about that family.
Terri seemed most interested in telling me about Anthony, and I had to remind her that I was more in the Cornelia lane. After telling me that Anthony the blacksmith had at least a couple of his shops burn to the ground (it seems to me that a blacksmith might be interested in building a shop that was not a tinderbox) and showing me a picture of his final one, located just across the street from the lot on which the library was built, she gave me a couple of fat binders of material on the library’s history. Funding for digitizing and printing archival material was provided by one of Bertsche’s great granddaughters.
Before the Carnegie library opened in 1903, the town’s library had resided in the Central School and then an I.O.O.F. lodge. During a few of those years, Bertsche’s daughters Effie and Elsie served as librarians. The first five librarians – Edna Elrich, Effie Bertsche, Daisy Lindsey, Sarah Cunningham, and Birdie Fink “fall into an area of unverifiable information from 1896 through 1905,” so the information about them in the library’s archives had been gleaned from various sources “written many years after the events.”
Edna Elrick Swanders was one of four students in the first graduating class of the Alexandria high school in 1896. The town’s first librarian, she served for two months before moving to Greencastle. Married and the mother of two children, she died of kidney failure when she was just 17 . Effie Bertsche Ray, also a member of Edna’s graduating class, replaced her as librarian later that same year. One of the four Bertsche family members who eventually worked at the library, Effie was the one responsible for first cataloguing the library’s books. She directed the library from 1896-1899, before permanently moving to Colorado with her husband Joseph Ray. Very little is known about Roberta 'Birdie' Fink McMurtry, who worked at the library in 1898 and 1899, or Daisy Lindsey Ranft, who served there from 1899-1902). Effie, Birdie, and Daisy – whose names sound like they might have been a Marin County folk trio – served together at least some of the time during those three years.
We know a bit more about Miss Irma Pierce Buck, who worked as an Assistant Librarian in 1905, the year she graduated from high school. Her high school yearbook listed her as the Treasurer of the first girls basketball team, where like Tim Duncan, Karl Malone, and Kevin Garnett she played power forward. She served as President of the senior class, where she was noted as being quick witted “with a sharp reply” and “being pretty, does well in spelling, and is likely to become a librarian in the future.”
After the Carnegie was completed in 1903, Head Librarians came and then pretty quickly went: Sarah Cunningham (1902-05), Ortha Maud Peters (1905-07), “Miss Jane” (1907-12), Miss Zada Carr (1912-14), and Miss Jennie Henshaw (1914-19). Just when I wrote that sentence, Terri again appeared: “You really need to know more about Ortha Maud. She’s my favorite.” Terri handed me the script she had written to present at the library’s 120th birthday, celebrated just last year. Terri also gave me a manuscript that contained biographies of many of the women who had worked at that library.
Orpha Maud Peters was a 1903 graduate of the Flora Stone Mather College for Women, which has since merged with Case Western University. After spending a year attending the New York State Library School in Albany, she moved to Alexandria, where she became the library’s first professionally trained librarian. This was only one of Orpha Maud’s firsts: she created the library’s first in-house information service and its first BLM (I didn’t know what this is, and Google’s suggestions of Bureau of Land Management and Black Lives Matter wont cut it). I guessed it was the “Book of Library Minutes” until Terri corrected me: “It’s the Board Ledger Minutes. I got tired of typing the entire name.”
Orpha Maud’s information service involved recruiting volunteers to come to the library, clip articles from the newspapers, and then gluing them to cards to form a reference file. In recognition of this effort, the Library Board spent $16 at Branham Lumber to build a case to contain the cards. One of the first events she sponsored to encourage patronage was an art exhibit, perhaps including portraits by Adams “Lightning” Wayman, whose work adorns the library today. To raise funds for the library, she sponsored a lecture at the Lipps Theater, located in the town’s Opera House. (The Opera House, built in the 1890s when the town’s population was at its peak, around 8,000, was destroyed by fire in 1914. The town went into sharp decline between 1900 and 1920, with its population varying between 5000 and 6000 since then.) Her salary was $39 a month, well more than the $24 that the janitor Mr. McDowell was making.
In 1907 Peters resigned from the library to take a position in the library of Elwood, a bigger town. After two years there, she was chosen to develop the library system in Gary, Indiana, doubling her previous salary. In Gary, Orpha Maud served as Assistant and then Head Library, helping to open additional branches and deposit stations. When the person who hired her, Louis Bailey, was serving in WWI, Orpha Maud took over the leadership of the Central Library and the library system. The 1920 census records her as living in the household of Bailey and his wife; perhaps a simple matter of economic necessity during the post-war depression, as in the next two decennial censuses she is listed as living by herself.
By 1922, Orpha was the Indiana State Librarian, not that libraries were her entire life. In 1923 and again in 1929, she sailed to Europe to visit England, Ireland, France, and Belgium. The reason for these bon voyages? According to her passport application, “education.”
Becky Little’s 2018 essay “See How Women Traveled in 1920” was published in National Geographic in honor of Women’s Equality Day, celebrated each year on August 26 to commemorate the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. She quotes Craig Robertson, a media historian at Northwestern University and author of The Passport in America: “Whether she’s traveling alone in the name of her husband or whether she’s unmarried and traveling alone…in all situations it represents something sort of outside of the norm.” (Robertson’s university profile indicates that she is working on a book-length history of the filing cabinet in which she argues the filing cabinet is a pivotal information technology that radically transformed the collection, storage, and retrieval of information. I love historians just about as much as librarians.) The journalist Ruth Hale, who didn’t want to travel under a passport in her husband’s name, founded the Lucy Stone League (named after the suffragette and abolitionist) in 1921 to seek the right of married women to use their own names while traveling. The league helped writer Doris E. Fleischman to become the first married woman to receive a passport in her given, or “maiden,” name.
African American women – those who could afford it – might choose to travel to countries whose policies and practices were not as racist as America’s. Bessie Coleman, born to Texas sharecroppers, used her passport to travel to France so that she could enroll in flight school, not being allowed to sign up for one in the US. Coleman thus became the first Black woman in the US to have a pilot’s license. The activist-journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was not so fortunate in her travels. Before passports were required for foreign travel, she had visited Europe numerous times. Her 1918 application to travel to the Paris Peace Conference was denied because the US government considered her “a known race agitator.”
After retiring in 1943, Peters wrote the book The Gary Public Library, 1907-1944. Peters summed up why that library was so effective: “SERVICE, in the broadest, truest sense of the word, was the basis on which the library was founded."
Because my travel is so abbreviated today, I’m spending lots more time writing up notes in a library than usual. By 2 o’clock, I needed a break so I grabbed food (mixed greens, blue cheese crumbles, balsamic dressing, can o’ tuna, and a banana) from Goldfinger and crossed the street to where a small park has replaced Bertsche’s shop. The streets by the park are lined with banners showing the faces of those, billed as Smalltown Heroes, who had served our country in the military. A quietly murmuring wall fountain puts my mind closer to the Rockies and at ease.
Not entirely. I was thinking of Senator Bill Haggerty (R-TN) who appears to be seeking to become Trump’s VP nominee. Bill was once my brother-in-law. I hate to speak ill of family, yet Bill no longer is, so here goes. I knew Bill only casually, mainly as my ex-wife Lisa and I would go to parties at his fab place where those on the rise would be. He was a nice guy, very sharp, and he knew which way was up. I was envious of his selection as a White House Fellow, as I was merely a Brookings Fellow, although that envy faded decades ago, really. Later, he made a ton of money in private equity, served as Ambassador to Japan, and was elected Senator. A stellar career.
I know this is now a vile slur: Haggerty was a "country club" Republican. He was presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s national finance chair in 2008, after all. I assumed, or hoped, that as a Senator he would just be one of those “no comment” or “I haven’t heard about that” politicians regarding Trump’s oafish recklessness. Now reports have Haggerty, or his staff, actively promoting him as a potential vice presidential candidate. Haggerty recently attended two Trump fundraisers to be close to the nominee. Suck up. I mean, I get it: Haggerty is only 64 years old, and if he is picked as VP he is next in line to be President if Trump is elected and next to line for the nomination in 2028 if he is not. (Right, Mike Pence?) And, I know, I know, people can find all sorts of reasons to justify that what they are doing is good for the world, says the former professor who spent his career teaching the progeny of the wealthy at a university charging luxury car tuition so that they, too, could live the good life. Still, Senator Haggerty: really?
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