Eight Directors - 123 Years

 

A few weeks after the new year begins, I will box up the last of my personal items from my office on the Morrill Memorial Library's second floor. The elegant 123-year old mahogany-lined walls, nearly floor-to-ceiling bookcases, leaded glass, and six-foot windows in the Director's office have been home to me for the past twelve years. When I lived closer to the library (in Norfolk until 2012 and Norwood until 2018), I would often drop in to the library to spend a weekend afternoon. I spent many more darkened hours on weeknights surrounded by urgent library work. Yet, any time of the day, I was satisfied in the interior light of an institution that has provided Norwood residents with vibrant library service for well over a century.

Many times over the past decade, I would rise from my chair in my quiet office, one in which I had just spent hours at my computers on spreadsheets and memos. I would glance around the entrance and tall wooden office door to watch the work of my peers – those librarians whose commitment and perseverance always astound me. I would smile at the morning gentleman or the group of afternoon mothers who surrounded our jigsaw puzzle table, finishing yet another 1000-piece challenge. I would hear captivated children sing and clap during yet another story hour in the Simoni Room. I would listen to our tired, but dutiful grandfather clock chime the hour. One of my favorite things to do was to lead visitors on a tour of the second floor, as I pointed out the beauty of the stained-glass windows, multiple fireplaces, and details of the 19th Century architecture. I never neglected to expound on the generosity of the Morrill family, and I could endlessly gaze at the beauty of this library given to the Town in 1898 in honor of a daughter – a young Sarah Bond Morrill who died at the age of 23.

In January 1898, when thirty-two-year-old "Jennie" Hewitt spent her first day in the new Morrill Memorial Library, she was accompanied by one assistant. Both of their salaries totaled a bit over $300 per year. Ms. Hewett came from Canton, MA, where she had worked at the Canton library. Many libraries did not require a master's degree in librarianship in 1898, and Hewett did not have one. However, the Norwood trustees were fully assured that Hewett would triumphantly lead the library through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th.

And she did lead – for three more decades. By the time she retired in 1939 in her seventies, her staff had grown to seven assistants. The library's holdings and circulation had increased by thousands, and the Morrill Memorial Library possessed what might have been the first Young Adult (Intermediate) Room in the Commonwealth. She was far ahead of her time, recognizing the importance of community involvement and her own professional work outside of Norwood. Norwood had weathered WWI, the Pandemic of 1918, and the economic crash of 1929.  Upon her retirement, the Daily Messenger, one of Norwood's newspapers, awarded Hewett Forty-One Gold Service Stars for her 41 years of service. The townspeople saluted her, and the trustees regaled her.

In 1939, Edna Phillips stepped into Ms. Jennie's shoes. Edna was, perhaps, the most professional and accomplished director the library has known. She started her career as a librarian near her home in Edgewater, New Jersey. Dutifully, she served in WWI from 1918-1919 in both France and Germany with the YMCA.  She returned home to continue her work as a librarian in East Orange, New Jersey. Obviously, both courageous and energetic, Edna was also intelligent and was awarded a Carnegie Fellowship at Columbia University.  She came to Massachusetts as the director of the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester.

 While working in Norwood from 1939-1962, she was professionally connected across the country. She served on the American Library Association Council and traveled to conferences in San Francisco, Chicago, and Florida. She spoke locally across the Commonwealth and regionally across New England at conferences and workshops. She contributed book lists on the cultural achievement of the North American Indian and led seminars on immigrant relations.

Unfortunately, the Massachusetts Legislature abandoned the practice of delaying mandatory retirement at the age of 65, and Ms. Edna was forced to retire at the age of 71 in 1962. In a tribute by the Norwood Woman's Club, it states that "for her graciousness and serenity [she] is a shining example of effective womanhood." Like Jane Hewett before her, Edna was a devoted public servant and beloved librarian. When she passed away in 1968, she left a sizeable portion of her will. In the library's renovation in 2001, the second floor's reference room was dedicated as the Edna Phillips Reference Room.

From 1963 to 1968, Charles Joyce was perhaps the most notorious library director, as library directors go. His directorship was marked by finishing a complete renovation and expansion of the library in 1964 – doubling the library's size and moving the front door close to Walpole Street. He hired a staff of master-degreed librarians who dared to move the library far into the 20th Century. In the winter of 1968, however, Joyce and all of his professional staff resigned over a controversy with the library board of trustees.

In September of 1968, Barbara Jordan from Pittsburgh, PA, was appointed director. She was originally a Norwood native, and upon her return to Norwood, she brought 35 years of experience to the library. Just two brief years later, she retired from the library. Her achievements were acquiring a lending library of art and a microfilm reader.

Virginia Pauwels arrived in the winter of 1971 from Texas. During her tenure, she published a short pamphlet which was a criticism of Henry Ward Beecher's "Norwood or Village Life in New England."

Norwood was a fictional town of 5,000 in western Massachusetts, written by Beecher in 1868. Whether or not the Town of Norwood was named after this fictional account is doubted by many. Pauwels retired in the winter of 1973 to take a position in southern California. Interestingly, she had just attended a conference there and missed the "vastness of the West."

Carl Himmelsbach succeeded Pauwels as library director in the fall of 1973. From New York state, Mr. Himmelsbach received his master's degree from the University of Rhode Island and lived in Franklin when appointed. He and librarians in Dedham and Westwood were instrumental in developing a library in the Norfolk County House of Corrections. Himmelsbach oversaw enormous technological changes in the 80s and encouraged the expansion of the outreach program. With trustee Eleanor Monahan, Himmelsbach developed the successful literacy tutor program that is a now shining example in the Commonwealth. In 1988, he retired after 14 years of directorship. 

Mary Phinney had come to Norwood as the Technical Services librarian in 1971, hailing from Amelia Island off the coast of Florida. To this day, Mary makes Norwood her home. When she was promoted in 1988 to the directorship, Mary quickly began work with the trustees to plan a major renovation project to the building, then nearly a century old in 1988. Mary, the trustees, and the Town's building committee took a modern 1965 addition, one that took away from the beauty of the 1898 building,  and planned a library that blended new technology and diverse collections with the library's original classic architecture. Mary led the library through admission into the Minuteman Library System. She retired in 2008 after twenty years of directorship.

I take enormous pride in the honor of having been the eighth director of the Morrill Memorial Library in the past 123 years. My twelve year term of service in Norwood was not the longest – nor the shortest. I followed seven other passionate and dedicated directors - all public servants. I know that others with that same passion will come after me. In a few short weeks, that new director will be chosen, and his or her personal books, artwork, and photographs will make the 2nd-floor director's office home to a new administration. I am assured that this new directorship will be with the same awe, passion, and dedication to serving the Town of Norwood.

2020 and A Year of Wonders

 Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the September 17, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

After the library closed in mid-March due to the Coronavirus, and when we were still in some disbelief of what was happening to life as we knew it, I immediately reached for my copy of Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. Published in 2001, it became one of my all-time favorite books. As I thumbed through the pages and thought about it and other books about plagues and disease and death, I outlined a column that I had due at the end of April. 

 

April was not a particularly emotionally healthy time for me. I missed my place in the library. I was energized only in fits and starts; I had seemingly comatose times when I merely stared into space. I couldn't watch the news. My attention span didn't allow for movies, series, or podcasts, let alone books. I rarely knit but nervously surfed the Internet watching COVID-19s numbers climb around the world. 

 

Working remotely, my husband and I navigated our home office spaces and our life as a couple. I baked bread and roasted chicken, while at the same time leading the library staff in daily (and sometimes hourly) Zoom meetings. I texted and called, preferring a personal touch. I updated the trustees and town managers via emails. Those missives barely spoke of the loss I was experiencing, communication that belied a deep and profound grief for my place of work, my co-workers, and my normal life. The only time I felt energized and happy were Tuesdays spent in my office in a cavernous, nearly empty library.

 

April was not the time for a column on a book about sickness and death. I abandoned the topic and wrote about the wonders of the library's virtual offerings. The staff had performed miracles from the days before we closed through March through May. We hoped to reopen, but we prepared to remain closed. It was a confusing, slightly schizophrenic time.

 

In the months that followed, I mused about other novels of plagues that I'd read years ago: Stephen King's The Stand, and Albert Camus' The Plague. I knew there would be another time when I could consider writing about these novels in my column.  

 

Stephen King's The Stand is a giant book – both figuratively and literally. The original I read was around 800 pages.* As a post-apocalyptic fantasy, it isn't a genre that I currently read. However, in the late 70s, I remember being intrigued, committed, and addicted to it. The story (or multiples of storylines) was initially set in 1980. King's novel follows numerous characters who are survivors of a pandemic. 

 

The US government developed a weaponized version of the flu, and its accidental release threatens the entire world's population. The fatality rate is 99.4% within one month. Small groups of survivors from various parts of the country form coalitions and new societies that confront each other. Scenes take place in Vermont, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska, and Maine. *Later, in 1990, King released the uncut version that was 1100 pages. I have one of those mass-market copies, a carry-over from when I distributed free copies as part of World Book Night in April of 2012.

 

There are survivors, and King's dark book ends with some hope in the first version. Hope is doubted in the extended version when crazy Randall Flagg survives an atomic blast. Interestingly, a second miniseries (the first was in 1994) completed production in March 2020 at the beginning of COVID-19 and will be aired this December. Whoopi Goldberg is cast as 108-year old Mother Abagail. Alexander Skarsgård plays Randall Flagg. 

 

Albert Camus' The Plague (1947) is usually required high school or college reading. At 300+ pages, The Plague is definitively shorter than The Stand. What it lacks in length, however, it is abundant in meaning. Camus' plague has a double meaning – both the pandemic that ravages the port city of Oran, Algeria, and the rise of Nazi Germany and the suffering that was unleashed as World War II. Camus' The Plague has many parallels in the Coronavirus pandemic, and it is an eerie read in 2020. 

 

The epidemic is denied as a hoax. Shortages and hardships are endured. Death is rampant. The inhabitants of Oran are quarantined for a year, emerging at the end, frightful and relieved at the same time. However, unlike COVID-19, the outbreak is contained to Oran. In fact, Camus' premise is that by working together, cooperation is achieved. 

 

           "What's natural is the microbe. All the rest — health, integrity, purity (if you like) — is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention." Albert Camus in The Plague.

 

In Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders, a similar tragedy struck an English town in the 17th Century. War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Brooks, visited the small English village of Eyam. While there, she was intrigued about a sign designating it Plague Village and learned the plague arrived in the countryside in 1665. After suffering a multitude of quick and sudden deaths, the village's residents agreed to self-quarantine for 14 months so as not to spread the virus. With little written record to go on, Brooks crafted a historical novel centered on one line in one of the village rector's letters. Her book is the intriguing story of how one bolt of fabric brought the bubonic plague and the horrors of death and desperation to the mostly illiterate English town.

 

In doing some research for my column this week, I found that NPR wrote a piece on April 20, 2020, titled "A Matter of Common Decency: What Literature Can Teach Us About Epidemics." Not surprisingly, the article included both Year of Wonders and Camus' The Plague. It also included a book I have not read. It is a science fiction work and was published just one year before our experience with COVID-19 began. By Karen Thompson Walker, the Dreamers is the story of an ominous sleeping sickness that sweeps over a fictional town in Southern California. While the book focuses on the psychological realism of the dreams of its victims (one sleeping a year through an entire pregnancy), there are prescient parallels to our own pandemic experience. The virus is airborne. A community is quarantined. Masks are in short supply. Perhaps most visionary of all is the description of one of the ways the virus travels from person to person. Before the town is locked down, one last wedding is held. The bride has the first signs of being ill:

"Whoever shares her lipstick that day, whoever borrows her eyeliner, whoever kisses her cheek that night or dances too close or clinks her flute of champagne, whoever touches her hand to admire the ring, whoever catches the bouquet at the end of the night — all of them, every one, is exposed. This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love." Karen Thompson Walker in The Dreamers

 

Our library has these books in print and digital versions. They all have messages that we need to hear in these difficult times. 

 

"Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can." 

Geraldine Brooks in Year of Wonders.

For a complete list of additional readings on epidemics and pandemics suggested by Colgate University's 2020 Summer Reads, click here.

 

Polio and the Race for a Vaccine

 Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the May 28, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

The Coronavirus not only took us by surprise in winter, but we seem to have lost the spring. It canceled weeks of our scheduled lives: vacations, business trips, conferences, weddings, and birthdays have vanished in the confusing fog that has become enduring COVID-19. We are fated to remember these past two or three months, and more that will follow. How we first processed the news, what we lost and grieved, and where we socially isolated, will be memories we share.

I was born in 1952, the summer that the notorious poliomyelitis epidemic approached its most significant number of cases – over 59,000. Of course, I recollect none of those first few years of life and how the terror of polio may have touched my family and friends. I have no idea if I received the Salk vaccine, by injection, in the 50s. I may have, instead, received the sugar cube vaccine in the early 60s. Polio only influenced my life minimally. My high school boyfriend’s mother was a 1952 polio survivor just after her youngest child was born. She walked with crutches due to paralysis caused by the virus. My stepbrother contracted polio around the age of 5 or 6 and had constraints of neck movement since surviving the illness.

Polio had been around for years before the 20th century. An outbreak of the epidemic in Vermont in 1894 resulted in 132 cases. In 1916 it struck with a vengeance, particularly in New York City, and specifically to children under the age of 5. Some New York City children with polio were isolated in sanitariums, away from their loved ones that year.

Outbreaks waxed and waned the next thirty years, striking without warning from June to September. Parents grasped their children close – the usual summer activities like birthday and slumber parties were abandoned if cases were prevalent. Playgrounds were sometimes empty. Movie theaters and swimming pools – normal activities for children of the times – were closed. Fear swept through cities, communities, and neighborhoods. In some towns, schools were closed in early June or remained closed in September.

At the end of WWII, US soldiers’ return and the baby boom brought a surge in polio. After 1948, cases rose each summer by 5,000. In 1952, the summer I was an infant, poliomyelitis cases crested with over 59,000 cases. 3,145 people died in the United States. Survivors of the disease suffered long-lasting effects – 15,000 people a year suffered some paralysis from polio. Some lived in iron lungs, while others endured only limited movements of the neck or extremities.

72% of polio cases produced little or no symptoms or resulted in full recovery. Accidental deaths claimed ten times more lives than polio, cancer three times as many. However, panicked and terrified parents, apprehensive for their children acquiring the virus, urged the government in the early 1950s to find a vaccine or a cure. Parents wanted to keep their children safe.

The story of the race to find a vaccine is genuinely astonishing and has parallels today in a rush to find a vaccine for COVID-19. And it involves the most prominent polio survivor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was 39 years old when he contracted polio on summer vacation on Campobello Island in 1921. He was paralyzed from the waist down and remained so for the rest of his life. It is debated that Roosevelt may have actually suffered from an undiagnosed auto-immune disease and not polio; however, what is not disputed is that President Roosevelt, in 1938 at the age of 56, founded NFIP, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

This private foundation became the March of Dimes Foundation and, with its 3,100 chapters, funded not only hospitalizations and treatments but rehabilitation for those struck down with the virus. The March of Dimes efforts raised millions every year in the late 40s and early 50s, eventually funding both the Salk and Sabin vaccine efforts. (Today, the mission of the March of Dimes is to eradicate birth defects.) Through NFIP studies, it was learned that there are three strains of the poliovirus and that it entered the body through the mouth and digestive system.

In 1943, the NFIP awarded a grant to investigate polio to Dr. Albert Sabin conducted parts of his studies of polio in North Africa. He returned home to develop a live or active vaccine containing forms of the poliovirus. This oral, or sugar cube vaccine was tested on millions of people worldwide, but it would take nearly 20 years to perfect. Eventually, Sabin’s vaccine became an effective one, but not before Dr. Jonas Salk developed the dead vaccine given by injection.

The NFIP pinned its highest hope and the most funding on Salk, a researcher at the University of Pittsburg. Americans desired a vaccine, and Salk focused on developing it quickly. Salk and his team worked around the clock on this inactive vaccine. In 1954, when I was just two years old, 1.8 million older schoolchildren called “polio pioneers” lined up for the trials of the vaccine (or the placebo) given by injection.

Less than a year after the experiments began, on April 12, 1955, highly anticipated news was announced to the world. It was the tenth anniversary of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Salk vaccine was a success. However, it was not without a considerable hiccup – tainted vaccines, produced by Cutter Labs in California, caused polio cases and deaths. The vaccinations were halted at once, causing alarm and confusion. Eight days later, the US Surgeon General allowed vaccinations to continue under more rigorous control of manufacturing. And parents clamored for doses for their children.

Efforts to totally eradicate poliomyelitis have taken more than a half century to realize the eliminate the virus across the world. Type 2 of the poliovirus was eliminated by 2015. On October 24, 2019, the World Health Organization declared that Type 3 of the poliovirus had been eradicated worldwide. Only Type 1 remains a risk. WHO hopes that polio will be totally eliminated by 2023.

The library’s streaming service, Kanopy, offers a 1998 documentary, A Paralyzing Fear, narrated by actress Olympia Dukakis. It is an insightful and comprehensive look at the virus and the rush for the vaccine. The American Experience series (available online at PBS.org) includes a one-hour documentary, The Polio Crusade. It chronicles not only the disease and the vaccines but the fear that gripped the town of Wytheville, Virginia, in the summer of 1950, a community hard hit by the virus. The Polio Crusade is partially based on one of the most acclaimed books on the poliovirus and vaccine – Polio: An American Story by David Oshinsky (2005). Both that book and The Vaccine Race by Meredith Wadman (2017) are available in Norwood and can be requested for curbside delivery as of May 26, 2020, during the COVID-19 closure of the library.

Delivery of physical library materials (books, DVDs, and audiobooks) in the Minuteman Library Network begins was halted in mid-March 2020. Until it begins again there are various other eBooks and documentaries about polio that are available online with your library card through Kanopy, Hoopla, and RB Digital’s Great Books.

The polio epidemic, spanning more than 40 years in America, was a fearful time, not unlike the recent COVID-19 pandemic that reached the United States this past winter. While polio mostly affected those under five years old before the early 1950s, no one knew who it would strike. Like today’s COVID-19 epidemic, the race to find a vaccine with give hope that families could finally wrestle successfully against the disease.

Heists: Feathers, Maps and Works of Art

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the April 30, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

Our library closed in mid-March due to COVID, but our librarians are still writing weekly columns for the Transcript. We directed our focus on writing about library services beyond the walls of the library building. In this unfamiliar, unprecedented time, we are reinventing our professional lives by working from home. We are committed to teaching our non-library users to sign up for a library card online.

We've shared our news about the Chat with Us box on our website that is staffed 9-5 on weekdays. (After-hours chats are addressed directly to our adult services librarian's email where they are responded to the next morning.) We are expanding our services with more robust 24/7 WiFi available in the parking lot. We are offering online book discussions, children's storytimes, and other innovative programs by way of Zoom, YouTube, or Facebook Live.

In addition, we are focusing on the library's digital collection - books, audiobooks, movies, magazines, and music available through our digital services – OverDrive (and the Libby app), Hoopla, Kanopy, Flipster and our newest offering, RB Digital.

If you appreciate non-fiction crime and intrigue, I have three excellent suggestions for you that are available as OverDrive Advantage ebooks – digital copies that are shared only with Norwood cardholders. You won't have to wait in line with other Massachusetts library users outside of Norwood to check them out.

Two years ago, in the winter of 2018, I attended the American Library Association MidWinter Meeting in Denver, Colorado. As usual, I registered for a morning session of Penguin-Random House book talks. At these events for librarians, we are offered a selection ARCs (otherwise known as advanced reading copies, pre-press copies, or galleys.) These pre-publication copies are incomplete in that they need a final proofread, and sometimes a final cover design. Reviewers are always given copies of ARCs – especially those who will write comments that will appear on the back of the final book. Publishers do, however, always want to get books into the hands of librarians who are going to suggest books to readers. They are hoping that we read them with a great recommendation.

Growing in a Fallow Time

Kirstie David is a Literacy and Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the April 23, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

The wisdom limned in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes – “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven” – is common enough to be known outside of religious circles. Through the thousands of years that mankind has been engaged in agriculture, we understand that there is a time when we plant seeds, a time to harvest, and even a time when the ground is resting, fallow.

Nobody I know put the precept of a time for every purpose into practice more than my mother. She was a science teacher and was deeply dedicated to the job. During the school year she would often follow a full day of classes by offering after-school help, then grade homework, tests and lab reports in the evenings. Yet she was also an outdoor person at heart who delighted in summer breaks when she could work in the yard, cultivating her own wonderland of florae. On rainy days when we were stuck indoors she made good use of her time, bustling around the house and getting chores done. All the while she’d cast glances out the window, waiting for her chance to resume playing in the dirt. If just one fraction of the gloom lifted, she would take notice of it and utter a favorite and oft-used phrase: “Looks like it’s brightening up out there.” This habit said a lot about her. She was the type of person perpetually waiting for things to get better so that she could celebrate that circumstance and share it with others.

Stranger Than Fiction

Nicole Guerra-Coon is the Assistant Children’s Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her column in the April 16, 2020 edition of the Transcript.

When I was going to college, I worked part time in an independent bookstore.  I loved being surrounded by books and meeting interesting people (like my future husband,) and most of my paycheck went right back into the store.  At the time, I was really only interested in reading fiction.  I spent most of my money on fantasy novels - anything by Alice Hoffman, classics I never read in school, young adult books, things suggested by customers and more.  I bought graphic novels, and huge art books (that I didn’t always read), pouring over the images with appreciation.  With a 35% discount, I felt like I needed to take advantage and stock up.

Books Take Me Away

Kate Tigue is the Head of Youth Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column in the April 9, 2020 edition of the Transcript and Bulletin. 

When this article is published, I will have completed nearly 4  weeks of staying at home during the COVID-19 global pandemic, all while working and parenting full-time. This time hasn’t been easy for anyone. These rapid changes in the way we live, while necessary, have left so many of us anxious, lonely, and pretty claustrophobic. I think I truly understand the sentiment of that old commercial where the overwhelmed woman cries out, “Calgon, take me away!”.

Your Library - Still Open for Business, Virtually

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the April 2,  2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

Although we may be reminded lately of the dystopian novel, The Stand by Stephen King, the world has been here before. The 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic (also called the Spanish flu) was the deadliest epidemic of the 20th Century. It spread worldwide during 1918-1919 and was ameliorated by World War I and the crowded conditions in the trenches on the battlefields of the Western Front. “The virus traveled with military personnel from camp to camp.”

Can a Book Heal the World?

Kirstie David is a Literacy and Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA. Look for her article in the March 26, 2020 edition of the Transcript &  Bulletin.

I recently read a remarkable book. Actually, it was an audiobook narrated by the author, and once I began, I found it hard to stop. While not all narrators are created equally I can confirm that this one is delightful; the soothing cadence of her voice is like a lullaby for the soul.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” should be required reading. I mention this to everyone I’ve told about the book, and nobody asks for whom it should be required. Maybe they assume I mean school children. I actually mean it should be required reading for anyone who wants to live on the planet. Hyperbole? Probably. Yet perhaps a universal playbook is just what we need to heal the fragile ecology of our world.

Falling Between the Cracks

Librarian April Cushing is head of Adult and Information Services at the Morrill Memorial Library. Read her column published in the March 19, 2020 issue of the Norwood Transcript & Bulletin.

I think I’m officially losing it. In this case, “it” refers to pretty much anything of importance I lay hands on. My mother called it carelessness. It’s not a recent affliction with me, but it may be getting worse. It’s definitely getting more frustrating. After my most recent episode, I realize I need to take action.

I come from a long line of losers. My forebears (by marriage) lost waterfront property on the coast of Maine by neglecting to pay the taxes. My immediate loved ones have misplaced everything from wallets to watches, cell phones to shoes, coats to cameras (remember them?). I managed to lose one of my few valuable pieces of jewelry—a single sapphire earring--at my daughter’s wedding in England last year. I beat myself up over that one for days.

Not long ago I got a call from a recycling company in Ohio. Had I left a laptop on an Amtrak train to DC last summer? No, but the daughter to whom I’d lent it had, I discovered. I couldn’t even be mad at her because it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d do. My new friend at the recycling company reset the password and mailed it back to her in Brooklyn, gratis.

A couple months ago I lost my keys. I lent them to one of my kids who borrowed my car and did, in fact, return them. Moments later I sped off to the Cape for the weekend in my trusty, keyless-entry Prius. When I pulled into the Harwich Stop & Shop and tried to lock the car containing my priceless (to me) pup, the key fob was nowhere to be found. I checked pockets, purse, on the seat, under the seat, around the seat. Nothing. But since I was able to restart the car by simply pushing the ignition switch, I wasn’t too worried. The key, with its proximity sensor, had to be nearby. When I got to the house I turned off the car, then immediately tried powering it back up. Upon hearing it purr to life I unpacked the Prius and figured I’d find the key in the light of day.

Finding a Treasure Trove

Nancy Ling is the Outreach Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts.  Read Nancy’s column in the March 12, 2020 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.

When someone you love is suddenly gone from your life, there are obvious things that you will miss—their captivating smile, their warm embrace, that goofy joke they told at every family gathering.

Not surprisingly there are other heartaches that we cannot anticipate or measure—things we never imagined that we would long for after a loved one passes away. This was the case with my father. This April it will have been two years since he departed and I am shocked at how quickly we have forgotten some of his character traits and idiosyncrasies. For a while, I couldn’t find any recordings of his voice, and I was distraught. Yes, I remembered exactly how he would say “Hello Nana-Banana” when he gave me a hug, but I wanted to remember more, each intonation. Thankfully, several friends and family members found recordings on their phones that they shared with me, one even highlighted his laughter which was a treasure to hear.

The Printers' Daughter

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the March 5, 2020 edition of the Transcript &Bulletin.

This past week, I was yanking some memento out of the bottom of a long-forgotten box, when a small metal plate slipped out of a booklet. It was a three by one-and-one-half inch engraved plate - a metal negative of a photo of my mother. I remembered the photograph well. It accompanied an article in a printed newspaper or newsletter published over a half-century ago. 

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Carolyn Fitzgerald had been elected to the office of President of the Women's Auxiliary to the Typographical Union in Oakland, California. I flipped the metal right to left and revealed an image of a beautiful, perfectly coiffed young mother in her thirties. Flipping it again, of the metal plate exposed the negative image of the same photo.

That day, I was reminded of the newspaper printing business that defined my childhood. In 1959, my soon-to-be stepfather left his job as a typesetter at the Worcester Telegram and Evening Gazette. He and his brother, Bill Fitzgerald, had heard there were plenty of printing opportunities, particularly typesetting, in the newspaper industry in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Like pioneers, they were the advance team, moving to the west coast, getting decent-paying union jobs, and setting up apartments to await their families. My mother, my brother, and I made the transatlantic journey from Boston to San Francisco on TWA and settled into that unique college town called Berkeley.

Dispatches in Sandpaper: Send 20-Grit

Liz Reed is an Adult and Information Services Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Liz’s column in the February 27, 2020 issue of the Transcript and Bulletin.

                When you buy a fixer-upper house, sooner or later you need to start fixing it up before it can feel like home. And if you’re fixing the place up on a shoestring budget, you find creative solutions and invest sweat equity wherever possible. You start by checking the low-hanging fruit off the punch list, tasks like spackling mysterious holes in the original window frames, replacing lightbulbs, and gingerly tucking the porch door screen back into its frame with a butter knife.

                Next you move onto jobs that are a bit more disruptive and take more time and resources, but that go a long way towards improving the look of the house. Painting is a great thing to do at this phase. Taping window frames and baseboards is a time consuming precursor to painting, but is very much worth it if the color of your paint is significantly different than the wood trim, if you’re trying to preserve the natural-wood look of that trim, or if you’re painting an accent wall.

Tomorrow’s Treasures

Brian DeFelice is the Information Technology Librarian at the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, MA and Anthony DeFelice Jr. is a retired U.S. Marine, antiques dealer, and accordion player in Plymouth, MA

My father recalls the time he was in the middle of an intense bidding war with another antique dealer over an item. He was in an auction house in Acushnet, Massachusetts and was sitting in the way back of the spacious barn that had been converted into an antique auction house. He was smoking a cigarette with the other smokers (it was the early 90s that was allowed back then!). Though he could not recall what the item he was bidding on was, he remembers he knew he wanted it for his antique store, but was being constantly outbid by another dealer who was in the front row of the auction house.

Meanwhile, I was in my usual stomping ground: the kitchen area, watching “Big Bill'' the auctioneer moderate the bidding war between my dad and the other bidder. I loved going to antique auctions with my dad because the people at the auction house treated me like a prince. Everyone was really nice and they would let me play with some of the (less valuable) antique toys, and Big Bill would let me have a cheeseburger on the house. To this day, my mom and I still talk about how good those cheeseburgers were. Big Bill was a presence. He was loud and totally in charge of the auction that night. I remember that for less valuable items, he would start the bid at $1 and would say “let’s start this bid at a bawk bawk bawk bawk” and start imitating and clucking like a chicken. I was seven at the time, and this silliness NEVER got old with me.

Tales from the Swamp

Charlotte Canelli is the library director of the Morrill Memorial Library in Norwood, Massachusetts. Read Charlotte's column in the February 13, 2020 edition of the Transcript & Bulletin.

           If you study a map of Florida, you'll see that most of the southern tip is a remote green wilderness with few roads or cities. Except for that significant development of cities and towns along both of Florida's southern coasts, there are just a few east-to-west highways that connect Boca Raton on the Atlantic to Naples on the Gulf. One of them, Highway 41, starts in a downtown neighborhood in Miami and veers north at Everglades City, bypassing Marco Island, skirts the Gulf Coast cities of western Florida, and then heads north to Michigan. This Tamiami Trail passes east from Miami to the west and north to Tampa. Along the Everglades, it is known as Alligator Alley, with one lane in each direction. Alligators, commonly seen in the waters near the highway, share this land along with hundreds of other animal and bird species.

           A more well-known highway, Interstate 75, skirts the northern parts of the Florida everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve. It travels through Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve before it, too, turns north through western Florida, before it reaches West Virginia forests and eventually crosses the land between the Great Lakes and ends at the Canadian border.
           Most travelers take either of these two routes across the vast glades of Florida. The hardier traveler, however, travels southwest from Homestead, passing through Everglades National Park along State Highway 9336 and deep into the swamp at the southernmost tip.  Those riskier adventure-seekers can then go to the ghost town of Flamingo, or travel along the 99-mile Everglades Wilderness Waterway. This watery land is also known as the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness. It is only accessed by kayak, canoe, and shallow-draft powerboats through a system of interconnected creeks, rivers, bays, and lakes. It is recommended that boaters relying on paddles plan eight days to travel – one of the passes is navigable only at high tide.
           The Florida Everglades was originally a 14,000-square mile expanse. Through a series of diversions, the Everglades has shrunk to 4,000 square miles. The 1.5 million acres known as Everglades National Park protects the 20% of the original area.
            While most of the America's national parks are established to preserve the beautiful and unique geography of the United States (such as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley) the Everglades National Park was created to protect a fragile ecosystem. Lake Okeechobee to the north feeds a river that flows through the glades into Florida Bay. I had always envisioned the Everglades as a dark and murky, wet and wild place much like a rain forest. Instead, I have learned it is a flowing river and provides a perfect habitat for the American crocodile and other reptiles such as alligators and snakes, the Florida panther, the West Indian manatee, 350 species of birds and hundreds of types of fish.
           In 1882 the first plans to drain these Florida wetlands began as somewhat well-intentioned uses for agricultural and residential development. At that time, Miami was merely an eastern outpost. Once a land inhabited by the Tequesta – a Native American tribe that occupied this area along the southeastern Atlantic coast – missionaries and colonists were attracted to the land and its long growing season.  When railroad tycoon Henry Flagler connected the Florida East Coast Railway to Miami, the population of the town was a bit over 300. After World War II, Miami's population soared to nearly 500,000, similar to what it is today. However, the northern and southern metropolis of Miami boasts over 6 million residents, the seventh-largest in the United States.
           Fortunately for Florida, environmentalists intervened well before this population boom to protect the vanishing Everglades. The foremost of those was Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
           Many of us are familiar with the name Marjory Stoneham Douglas. On Valentine's Day two years ago, a deranged gunman killed 17 children and adults at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. That school had opened on Douglas' 100th birthday in 1990. An elementary school in Miami-Dade County is also named after her, along with a municipal building, and a 15-minute orchestra piece, Voice of the Everglades. But, there is so much more to attribute to Douglas, including saving the Everglades.
           Marjory Stoneman Douglas has roots in New England that I never knew until my Everglades reading began. While she was born in 1890 in Minneapolis, after the divorce of her parents at age six she moved to her mother's family home in nearby Taunton, Massachusetts. At the age of 17, she won a Boston Herald prize for a short story. A stellar reader, writer and student, she left home for Wellesley College at the age of eighteen and graduated in 1912.
            Several years later, after the death of her mother, (and a failed marriage to a scoundrel named Kenneth Douglas) she moved to Florida. There she began writing for a newspaper that her father published – later to be named the Miami Herald. It was through her journalistic voice that Marjory began changing the history of Florida.
           Her early activism included women's suffrage and public health. Her efforts turned to environmentalism early in the 1920s when she was in her thirties when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee. In 1947, she wrote The Everglades: River of Grass, the essential book written about the Everglades.
           The story of Florida, the terrible mismanagement of natural resources, the Big Sugar pollution of Lake Okeechobee, the rampant abuse of the land, and the corruption of politicians, is a larger story than this column can begin to describe. Yet, the work of Marjory Stoneham Douglas has saved a portion of the Florida Everglades for generations to enjoy.    
           If you are interested in learning about this magical wilderness and its rescue, read The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise (2007) by Time correspondent Michael Grunwald.  In another great book, Liquid Land: A Journey through the Florida Everglades (2004), author Ted Levin describes his many journeys through the Everglades, with profiles of those who attempted to coerce or steal the Everglades for development - and those who have worked to win it back.
           If you want a serious, and sometimes hilarious, account, read Hodding Carter's Stolen Water: Saving the Everglades from Its Friends, Foes and Florida (2005). It's a great way to begin an education into the story of Florida and the abuse of its land, particularly the Everglades wilderness.
           Jack E. Davis' biography of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, An Everglades Providence (2009), is a 700-page tome dedicated to the virtues and actions of this amazing woman. In 1993, five years before her death at age 108, Marjory was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor granted by the United States. The citation read "Grateful Americans honor the Grandmother of the Glades by following her splendid example in safeguarding America's beauty and splendor for generations to come."

            A lovely children's picture book biography will be published this September. Marjory Saves the Everglades will be an important book to share with every young environmentalist. As Marjory and other preservationists cry, "The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we get to keep the planet."