A New Library Spurs Optimism in Oklahoma

Marion Moore Hill (Guest Blogger)

Like most writers, and others who love to read, I adore libraries. Lately I’ve been hearing about such facilities shutting their doors, or reducing hours and services for lack of funds, and that saddens me.

But I’m feeling much more upbeat about the future—for readers, for writers, and for libraries—than I was a year ago.

What’s different? My town has a brand new $8-million library (and community center)! Such “miracles” can happen even in 2011.

I live in Durant, Oklahoma, a town of about 17-18,000. During most of the 40-plus years I’ve lived here, the library was in a white stone building, stately and beautiful but “land-locked” (no room to expand) and seriously decrepit (leaky roof; bathrooms outmoded, at times unusable). Obviously a whole new building was needed, but how to get one with the city already strapped paying for day-to-day operations costs?

Fortunately, my fellow citizens refused to settle for the status quo. The librarian and many library patrons kept agitating for a new facility, until finally our state legislators wangled $1 million in earmarked funds from the Oklahoma legislature to buy an appropriate site. The city then hired an architect and drew up plans, but the project languished for lack of construction funds.

Then the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas, NV, got involved. Reynolds had owned Donrey Media, a chain of media outlets (newspapers, radio and TV stations, and cable entities) in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Nevada, including at one time the Durant Daily Democrat. The foundation he set up and endowed in 1954 has built many community-focused buildings in those three states since it began.

I was on the publicity committee for the dedication of the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center and Library, so my time for several weeks was taken up with historical research, writing articles for a special newspaper supplement, collecting photos, and scheduling TV interviews for the librarian, all to get the word out about what a special facility the town now had. Like many volunteer jobs, it turned out to be much more time-consuming than I’d expected.

But also like many volunteer jobs, it’s been worth the effort. The library dedication attracted a standing-room-only crowd of citizens nearly bursting with pride. Use of the library is way up, hundreds of new library cards have been issued, and everywhere in town people have been talking with amazed pride about “our new library!” Not even the opening of a new sports complex a few months ago sparked such enthusiasm.

The new facility boasts a computer lab with a rotating schedule of free computer classes, community meeting rooms, special sections for genealogy, children and teens, a black-box theater, and even a café. This truly is a venue that enriches lives in our community.

The book is not dead, folks, nor is the library. Just as e-books haven’t caused the death of printed books—they only offer another choice—libraries are evolving to meet modern patrons’ needs and wants. You can still study or do research in Durant’s library, can still discover a great new author or a fun beach read, but you can also become computer literate, gather in groups, participate in distance learning from a far-off college, do video-conferencing, put on a play, or relax with snacks and a buddy.

To help launch the new venue, I had to put aside the writing of the new mystery in my Scrappy Librarian series. But I’m back at my computer again, with a renewed appreciation of the relationship between libraries and their communities. Our new facility isn’t exactly what a library used to be. But it’s what libraries are coming to be in the 21st century.

Marion Moore Hill is the author of two mystery series, the Scrappy Librarian mysteries, featuring intrepid Oklahoma librarian Juanita Wills, and the Deadly Past series, in which history buff Millie Kirchner investigates crimes involving American history.

The Stars Align... A Book Is Born

By Donis Casey, guest blogger


Did you ever wonder how an author comes up with story ideas? Sometimes the stars align...

I’m sitting in Pastimes Cafe in Enid, Oklahoma, with my husband Don and his sister Dolores.

It is October of 2006, and I’m on a book tour for Hornswoggled, the second novel in my Alafair Tucker historical mystery series. Enid is my husband’s home town, and I have been able to combine an event at the Garfield County Library with a visit to the relatives. Pastimes Cafe, one of Dolores’s favorites, is located in a refurbished old brick industrial building from the 1920s, and the walls are decorated with reproductions of historic photos of the town.

After a nice meal, the waitress brings the check, and Don and Dolores begin their time-honored fight over who is going to pay for our grilled cheeses. Dolores is the eldest of that brood of seven children, and Don is the youngest. In the decades that Don and I have been married, Dolores has never allowed her mother’s baby to drive all the way home for a visit just to pay for her lunch. Over the last several years, though, Don has decided that it is incumbent upon him to do the manly thing and pick up the check for his widowed sister.

I keep my mouth shut. During this particular check-wrestling episode, just about the time it begins to look like two Social Security recipients are going to end up rolling around in a tangle on the floor, I employ a technique I learned long ago. I detach from reality and enter a pleasant altered state until negotiations are completed.

I’m facing the wall, upon which is a large framed historic photograph of the Enid town square, taken in the middle of the 1910s. Still in my very special happy state, I’m drawn into the photo, and find myself standing on the sidewalk in the fall of 1915, looking down West Randolph Street. All of the shops along the street are covered with striped awnings, which provide a cooling shade for shoppers during pre-air-conditioned Oklahoma summers. An electrified trolley is paused forever in its tracks at the bottom of the picture. A young man in a straw boater stands on the corner, waiting to cross the street, as a woman with her arms full of packages emerges from Klein’s Department Store. Rather like a movie in which the opening scene dissolves from a static to a moving picture, the young woman begins to walk, and I realize that it’s Martha Tucker, Alafair’s eldest daughter. And right behind her comes Alafair herself, with her youngest, Grace, in her arms.

What is Alafair doing in Enid, I wonder? She and her husband and their ten children live on a farm outside of Boynton, Oklahoma, which is some 150 miles southeast of Enid. Perhaps she, too, is visiting relatives, and Martha and Grace have come with her. It’s early autumn, though, a bad time for a farmer’s wife to go gallivanting around. Something important must have brought her to town.

It could only be an imminent death in the family. Apparently a relative of Alafair’s lives here - her sister Ruth Ann, of course, since in my experience, people’s sisters live in Enid. People’s widowed sisters, so it must be her sister’s husband Lester who is dying. Yes, I believe Alafair is visiting her wealthy sister and her husband, who live in the huge 1905 Victorian mansion that Don and I walked by over on Elm Street that morning.

He must be an important businessman in town, this brother-in-law - a founding father, who made the Cherokee Strip Land Run in 1893. He must have quite a history, and some powerful enemies, like Buck Collins, who would love to do him harm even as he lay dying. And even rich and important and ruthless men love their wives and children, and might do shocking things to protect them.

There’s a murder here, I can smell it, and some deeply buried family secrets.

Don’s persistence has prevailed. He will pay the check, and Dolores will leave the tip. Another family ritual has been honored, and I have the germ of a new book.

It’s January of 2009, and I’m holding in my hand the hardcover first edition of The Sky Took Him. It’s a good thing that Alafair and her daughters happened to go to Enid. If they hadn’t, no one might have discovered what really happened to Ruth Ann’s son-in-law Kenneth, or why Martha won’t marry the man she loves, or why Lester has hated Buck Collins for more than twenty years.

Visit Donis's website at www.doniscasey.com for more information about the author and her books.