For a quarter of a century, Helen Myers has provided a public library for the other 139 residents of this crossroads hamlet.
Yet not everybody here sees it that way. The mayor says that whatever the 10-by-14-foot shack housing Myers` books is, it doesn`t qualify for the adjective ”public.” In fact, he and the town council so ruled when Myers applied for a little help with the light bill a few years back. According to Mayor Bill Goldring, to be a ”public” anything you ought to have an elected board or at least a piece of paper showing some government agency chartered your outfit.
Myers had neither, even though she tried claiming her friends Linda Anderson and Thelma Bossort as library trustees. But the town fathers asked:
Who ever elected those two?
Myers had no answer. She also had to concede that nobody asked her to open the doors of the Ellisville Public Library in the first place. Rebuffed, she went back to the beg-and-borrow methods she has always used to finance her one-woman reading crusade.
”Every fall, during Spoon River Festival, tourists drive through here,” the 62-year-old Myers said. ”I bake cookies in the shape of Fulton County, with a squiggle of green frosting for the Spoon River and a red dot showing Ellisville, and offer them for a 25-cent donation to the library. Last year I made $20.”
She also has the power of the press behind her. Myers has long covered the Ellisville scene for the Canton Daily Ledger, and, in 1966, she put an item in her weekly column about the library she was starting. From time to time, other newspapers, near and far, have picked up on the story, and professional librarians` journals have saluted her efforts. In 1981,
”Ripley`s Believe It Or Not” gave its syndicated imprimature to Myers`
library, recognizing it as the tiniest public library (Mayor Goldring`s thinking notwithstanding) in the nation.
In response, readers have sent Myers contributions in money and kind. When she started, Myers lined the shelves of the Ellisville Public Library with 300 of her own books. Over the years, bundles of books from well-wishers across the nation have increased the collection to nearly 4,000 volumes. In fact, only half of the library`s books can be displayed in its cramped quarters on the town`s virtually deserted main street. The rest have to be stored in a building Myers owns, about a block away.
”Some folks make bequests in memory of a departed relative or friend,”
Myers said, gesturing towards a wooden plaque entitled ”Memories Board.” Two of its silver name plates are lettered in honor of deceased admirers, one from California, the other from Louisiana, who used to send an occasional check. The other was endowed by the family of a New Jersey woman who, years back, stumbled upon Ellisville, which sits in the Illinois corn fields about 40 miles west of Peoria, and was impressed by Myers` spunk.
She also has supporters closer to home. For a long time, the roof leaked, making the library`s collection vulnerable to every rain storm and snow fall. But two years ago, a fraternal group, the Modern Woodmen, raised $300 for new shingles, which Helen`s husband, Ken, along with a couple of buddies, hammered into place.
Theoretically, the library could also benefit from Myers` penny-a-day fines for overdue books. A sign in the front window holds 16 laggard borrowers up to public shame. Some of them, Myers explained, have kept books out since 1981.
”Of course, I`ve never actually held anybody to their fines,” she said. ”Heck, nobody around here`s got any money anyway. Half the town`s on social security or out of work.”
Fortunately, the library`s budget is stripped of fat. The building`s owner doesn`t charge rent and Myers donates her time. The gas bill runs $75 a month, electricity costs another $11 and Myers figures that she spends about $10 a year on supplies. Until recently, she brought freezer tape from home to mark the books` spines with catalogue numbers.
Helping a `Trojan Horse`
Saturday mornings at 9, Myers hangs a flag (a donation of the American Legion post) outside the library, whose doors she keeps open until 11 a.m. At one time, she opened on Wednesday evenings as well. But currently two hours a week of book-borrowing opportunity just about balances Ellisville`s reading habits.
That is enough time for 84-year-old Keith Sullivan, a retired factory worker, to check out one of the westerns he is so fond of. Grace White inevitably comes by. Her elderly husband is in poor health, so books are her window on the world beyond the Whites` farm. Jessica Wilson and Tiffany McKown also rarely miss a Saturday. Myers reports that the 7-year-olds are reading things way beyond their age level.
Once in a while, another school child will show up with a class assignment. Last year Matt Marinich, who attends high school, had to make a report on the ancient Greeks and Myers found some material on the Trojan Horse that helped get him an ”A.” Christine Powell has gone off to study archeology at Rockford College. But for years, she used to devour science books as fast as Myers could get them on the shelves.
”Every September, I reregister all our borrowers,” Myers said, holding up a hand-lettered library card, to which was pasted a cartoon marking the library`s appearance in Ripley`s. ”I expect to issue about the same number of cards as last year: Seven, maybe, eight.”
Ellisville is no different from other places, Myers explained. Television kills the appetite for reading. Last winter she tried fighting back with a story-reading hour for young people, but discovered that she couldn`t compete with Saturday morning`s TV cartoon schedule. A sign in the library window proclaims:
Warning!
Boob tubitis is habit forming.
Cure it free-Read a book.
”I`ll only watch TV if there`s an intellectual program on,” Myers said. ”I get a big kick out of knowing the answers on `Wheel of Fortune` and
`Jeopardy.` It`s a self-esteem kind of thing. I`m proud of how much I`ve learned from books.”
Converted card parlor
Back in 1966, Myers resolved to help her fellow townsmen find a similar joy in reading. She had long had her eye on an aged shack that once housed the town`s telephone switchboard. Afterwards, it had been a card parlor, than a make-shift dormitory where a local church put up circuit-riding ministers. It was standing vacant when Myers asked the owners what it would cost to rent.
”When I explained I wanted it for a library, they said: `Oh, just go ahead and use it,` ” she said. ”The property has changed hands twice since. But so far, nobody`s ever asked for a dime in rent.”
Her own love of books, Myers recalled, was inherited. Her earliest memories are of her mother reading to her from the Bible and newspapers. By the time Myers was 4, her mother already had taught her to read and, once having started, Myers never stopped.
”I must have read Jack London`s `Call of the Wild` four times while I was still in grade school,” Myers said. ”Steinbeck`s `Grapes of Wrath` was another favorite, and by the 8th grade I knew what I wanted to grow up to be. I had the ambition to become a teaching missionary and go off to do the Lord`s work in Africa.”
To get there, she needed a college degree. But to a coal miner`s daughter, a university campus seemed like the far side of the Moon. Myers did, though, get a chance to at least sample teaching. During the labor shortages of World War II, school districts accepted uncertified teachers and, right out of high school, Myers was hired by a one-room school in Babylon, about 10 miles west.
”I had ten kids-the oldest was two years younger than me-in everything from 1st to 8th grade,” Myers recalled. ”I carried water in from the well and chopped wood for the stove. I made $119 a month and loved every moment of it.”
Scratching Dewey`s system
At the end of 1945, Myers` teaching career ended as Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe came marching home. So, too, did her future husband, with whom she shortly moved back to Ellisville. For two decades she was preoccupied with raising their two daughters. Still, she always managed to squeeze in a few minutes a day reading books she got from a mail-order book club.
In 1966, her family pretty much raised, Myers carted those books down to main street and established the Ellisville Public Library. As she had rarely been in a library, Myers had to make up her stewardship as she went along.
”Once I was over to Canton, but I didn`t much care for the library there,” Myers said, sitting between teetering pyramids of books and unopened parcels. ”It seemed more like a hospital for books. Everything all antiseptic and neat.”
A few years back, someone sent Myers a handbook of the Dewey decimal classification, with which she started to recatalogue her holdings. Two months into the experiment, she reverted to her home-brew system.
”I don`t know if it was me or Dewey,” Myers recalled. ”But the darn thing almost drove me crazy, trying to figure out which book was supposed to go in which category.”
Actually, the Myers System seems to have a few advantages over more widely used competitors. In most libraries, ”fiction” is an all encompasing category. But experience has taught Myers that young people go through stages of wanting to read about this or that, as they discover how wide the world is. So she assigned a letter of the alphabet for each category, marking her books` spines with designations like: ”J L” (juvenile fiction with sports-related plots) and ”J N” (books about ships and the sea).
In fact, Myers herself would have liked to know distant ports-of-call firsthand. But after Ken got back from the European theater of war, he wasn`t up for much traveling. Once the Myers made a trip to Denver for a 107th Infantry reunion. Another time, they visited some army buddies in Detroit. Mostly, though, Myers has been confined to Ellisville.
Sometimes she gets just a bit bitter. Especially on the rare Saturday when nobody at all comes by the library and it can seem like she has wasted her life away here.
”I`ll get to thinking back and wonder why my high school teachers never told me there were scholarships I might have gone to college with,” Myers said.
Given proper encouragement, Myers might well have gotten a bachelor`s degree and become a teaching missionary. In some Third World country, there might be people reading and writing had Myers had come to live and work among them.
This much, though, is sure. Keith Sullivan and Grace White wouldn`t have the novels that keep their minds active. Matt Marinich wouldn`t have gotten an ”A” on his report. And Christine Powell might not be at Rockford College if she hadn`t cut her intellectual teeth on Myers` science books.
Besides, as Myers herself observes, once someone discovers the miracle of books, there is really no holding him back.
”If you can read,” Myers said, ”you can go anywhere and be anybody. Not physically, of course, but spiritually. With books, there is just no excuse for boredom.”
