On a recent morning, one of those infernally windy autumn days when trees, dogs, rocks, trucks and people seem vulnerable to being suddenly borne aloft by feisty air currents like Dorothy’s farmhouse in “The Wizard of Oz,” Mary Dempsey, a member of her staff and a reporter were walking across the parking lot of the Chicago Public Library branch at 1101 W. Taylor St., one of the 78 locations that function as Mini-Me versions of the Harold Washington Library Center at 400 S. State St.
A bright blue plastic bag tumbled helplessly across the lot, tugged this way and that by the capricious breeze.
The reporter ignored it.
The staff member ignored it.
But Dempsey, 56, commissioner of the Chicago Public Library, a woman who oversees an annual operating budget of about $100 million and a roster of some 1,200 employees, the first woman to head the board of trustees at DePaul University, personal friend of Mayor Richard M. Daley, chased the bag for a few deft steps, leaned down, snatched it up, then marched off to find a trash can in which to deposit the peripatetic plastic.
It was so clearly an instinctive gesture, an act of pure protective reflex, that it serves as a perfect back-cover summary of the contents of Dempsey’s soul: This is a woman who loves the Chicago Public Library and wants it to be at its best, down to the smallest detail. And since 1994, when she took over the joint, Chicago’s library system has, by nearly all accounts and by virtually every measure, thrived.
Yet right now there is another kind of chilly wind blowing through public library systems across the nation. Many are in big financial trouble. As the recession bites ever deeper into municipal budgets — the vast majority of public libraries, including Chicago’s, are funded primarily by city, not state, taxes — library administrators are being forced to reduce hours, cut staff or close branches outright. Last month, to save money, the Seattle Public Library shut all of its locations for a solid week; its Web site was unplugged as well. Branches have been folding up in places such as Muncie, Ind.; Troy, N.Y.; and Chillicothe, Ohio. Systems in Denver, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., are under siege.
“It’s easy to be a great public library when times are good,” Dempsey says. “The real test is when times are difficult. And that’s when people need the library the most. People remember what the library means to them in their darkest hours.”
Indeed, a chief irony of the recession is that the very financial woes ganging up to assault public libraries also are causing people to lose jobs and hope — at which point they are turning, in increasing numbers, to those very same libraries. There they can find free computers and other resources with which to rebuild careers and, in some cases, lives — if, that is, they find those library doors still open.
This is a time of profound crisis for public libraries. In some library administrators, that might induce fear, panic or at least a period of serious fretting. But the woman who runs the Chicago system, a homegrown Chicagoan who worked her way through college, library school and law school and then became one of the city’s top attorneys before going into public service, is undaunted. She’s determined to push through — because libraries, she says, are simply too important to let go of.
“We’ll be tightening our belts,” Dempsey concedes. “We’ll be trimming hours. But we do it to provide good service. As tough as it’s going to be for the next few years, we’ll come out of this stronger.” When she speaks, she has a habit of looking you straight in the eye. Her manner is confident, forthright, without being overbearing or pretentious. Longtime staff members note that Dempsey runs meetings with efficiency, with a get-to-the-point crispness that keeps the conversation on target.
“Libraries can’t be static,” she declares. “You have to plan for the future. You have to avoid a sense of paralysis. When things come back — and they will — we’ll be ready.” Ready, she adds, with an ambitious program to continue converting older storefront branches into gleaming new ones with books, computers and spaces for community groups to gather. “We want to build welcoming, fully staffed branch libraries.”
Earlier this month Dempsey announced that, beginning in January, branches will shorten hours to ease the workload for staff members. A careful system of staggered opening and closing times will guarantee, she hopes, that if a particular branch is not open at a time to which patrons are accustomed, a nearby branch will be. No branch closings are planned, except for locations at which new branches are under construction.
Branch libraries, placed lovingly in Chicago neighborhoods like keepsake flowers pressed between the pages of a book, are Dempsey’s special pride. To ride around Chicago with the commissioner in her silver Toyota Solara, dropping in on branches, is to see a woman who knows many of these locations as well as she knows her 10th-floor office in the Harold Washington Library Center. She loves to tell stories about a branch’s history and flavor. “I thought I knew Chicago until I took this job,” Dempsey says. “I discovered neighborhoods I never knew existed.”
These journeys renew her pride in her Chicago roots. “I’ve traveled all over the world and I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” she says, zest in her voice. The statement is also a neat way to deflect the rumors that she might decamp for another job — say, one in Washington, D.C., courtesy of a certain president who also calls Chicago home. Dempsey says she’s delighted with her present position and has no plans to leave it.
She was born in the city, but her family moved shortly thereafter to the suburb of Hillside, “right next to the expressway,” she recalls with a smile, “so that went I went away to college in Winona, Minn., it was too quiet and I couldn’t sleep at night.”
The college was St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. She overcame the insomnia and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1975. A year later she graduated from library school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was a librarian in the Chicago suburbs for a few years and then enrolled in law school, graduating from DePaul in 1982. She practiced law for the next dozen years.
During that time a mutual friend introduced her to another lawyer: Philip H. Corboy Sr., the legendary personal-injury litigator and one of the most renowned attorneys in the nation. They instantly hit it off. “He is the most intellectually curious man I’ve ever met in my life,” Dempsey says of her husband. “He loves to read, especially presidential biographies.”
They make a formidable team. Last week, DePaul’s College of Law announced that Dempsey and Corboy had bestowed the largest single gift in school history — the precise amount of the seven-figure donation was not disclosed at Dempsey and Corboy’s request — to fund scholarships for needy students.
Asked how it feels to be part of a Chicago power couple, Dempsey laughs. “I wish people could see us walking down the street, holding hands and eating ice cream cones. We’re just two people fortunate enough to meet and fall in love.” They live in Streeterville.
The library commissioner’s post was not one to which she’d given much thought. “When I was in library school,” she recalls, “we were told that women might run library systems in middle-size cities — but men would always run the big urban systems in places like New York and Chicago.” Somebody forgot to tell Daley, because in 1993 he called Dempsey to offer her the job. Dempsey knew the mayor socially and professionally, having worked briefly in his administration.
That call changed not only Dempsey’s life, but also the lives of tens of thousands of Chicagoans who now take advantage of the library’s resources and programs, from lectures and readings by authors to initiatives such as One Book, One Chicago — the program in which, each fall and spring, library staff members pick a book they hope will appeal to the people of Chicago. Past selections include “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “My Antonia” by Willa Cather and “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. The current pick is “The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City” by Carl Smith.
There surely are people in Chicago’s literary and educational communities who don’t like Dempsey or the job she’s doing, but they’re hard to find. “The Chicago Public Library system is the envy of big cities everywhere,” says Sam Weller, author and assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago. “What Mary Dempsey has built over the years, with the unwavering support of Mayor Daley, has been remarkable and visionary. She is extremely cool and certainly she’s shown library directors how a behemoth of a library system can be run effectively and efficiently.
“Over the years there have been mutterings that she rules the library with an iron fist, but I didn’t see that,” Weller adds.
When the reduction of hours at branches was announced, the Tribune received anonymous e-mails from library staff members who were angry at the cuts and at what they perceived as Dempsey’s imperiousness. But given the outright closings to which other library systems have resorted, the changes in Chicago seem mild. And they come as Chicagoans can visit the 43 branches built or improved during Dempsey’s tenure and as construction begins on four new full-service branches being converted from storefront libraries.
Weller recalls interviewing Dempsey several years ago for a story he was writing. “I threw some oddball, quirky questions at her and she played right along. She was a good sport. What took my attention was how lovely and warm and really fun she was.”
Donna Seaman, the author and Booklist editor who often appears at library events, echoes Weller’s assessment. “Every time I pass one of CPL’s beautiful new branches, I feel proud and pleased. Our libraries are Chicago at its best,” she says. “Mary Dempsey’s obvious passion for her work flows from a profound understanding of the place literature holds in people’s lives — and of how reading and talking with others about stories and books contributes to the health and vitality of the city.
“What comes most vividly to mind when I think of Mary Dempsey is the afternoon I ran into her on State Street,” Seaman adds. “We walked up to each other from opposite directions and stopped in the middle of the hurrying throng — Mary smiling that bright, smart, curious, bemused smile of hers — and launched into a passionate conversation about some of the books being considered for One Book, One Chicago.
“Here she is, a major city administrator responsible for a huge, complex and growing library system, spontaneously discussing the subtleties of literary narration and the resonance of story,” Seaman says. “We’re lucky to have Mary Dempsey in charge.”
Along with One Book, One Chicago, other programs Dempsey has backed include the recently unveiled YOUMedia center in the first floor of the Harold Washington Library Center, a busy facility in which young people can learn how to use state-of-the-art computers and digital equipment to create videos and other multimedia projects; the Chicago Book Festival; the Popular Library, also on the first floor, at which patrons can quickly find the hottest books, videos and CDs; and the assignment of two reference librarians to the main lobby of the Washington library to answer visitors’ questions.
But it’s not the list of programs alone that defines Dempsey. It’s also the passion. The intensity. When she talks about books and libraries, you can sense the fire that burns just below the surface, a conviction that books and ideas are forces of light that help citizens find their way in challenging times. It helps, of course, that she knows that Daley has her back.
“I’ve heard him express horror at what other big cities are doing to their libraries,” Dempsey reports. “He’ll say, ‘Why are they doing that?’ He believes in us. The City Council has become believers.”
In her speech accepting the 2006 Public Humanities Award from the Illinois Humanities Council, Dempsey called the Chicago Public Library “an instrument of civilization,” adding, “We must state unequivocally that ours will be, must be, a city of readers.”
Her own reading, she says, includes writers such as Toni Morrison, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, P.D. James and William Trevor.
Her favorite author may very well be Cather — a longtime passion that led, in fact, to one of the few times that anybody can remember in which Dempsey used her clout as commissioner to seek a personal favor.
“When we were choosing One Book, One Chicago (in 2002), they picked ‘My Antonia,'” Dempsey recalls with a guilty smile. “And I think it was because the general feeling was, ‘It’s the only way to shut Mary up.'”
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Number of books in the entire Chicago Public Library system (as of September): 5,548,415
Most popular (as of Oct. 22):
Fiction:
“Best Friends Forever,” by Jennifer Weiner
“Swimsuit,” by James Patterson
“The Time Traveler’s Wife,” by Audrey Niffenegger
“Finger Lickin’ Fifteen,” by Janet Evanovich
“The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros
Nonfiction:
“The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City,” by Carl S. Smith
“Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man,” by Steve Harvey with Denene Millner
“Outliers: The Story of Success,” by Malcolm Gladwell
“Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen,” by Julie Powell
“Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously,” by Julie Powell
Check out the lists on the Web site (chipublib.org, under “Most Popular Fiction” and “Most Popular Non-Fiction”)
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Typically asked reference questions
*Can you help me find what I need to do my school assignment (science project, history project, Science Fair submission)?
*What can I look at to learn how to write my resume? Can you help me figure out where to go online or in a business database to look for a job?
*How can I reserve a book/CD/DVD?
*How do I find this book I’m looking for?
*I just read this book — what can you recommend that is like it? (Tip: Look at the Reader’s Advisory list on the Web site)
*Can you help me figure out how to do this online?
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8 cool things you can get or do at a Chicago library
1. Check out a fishing pole (at 11 branches).
2. Browse the catalog at 2 a.m. in your pajamas; reserve the book, movie or CD you want; tell us what branch to send it to and wait for us to e-mail you that it is ready for pickup.
3. Practice your piano (or other music) in one of the music practice rooms on the 8th floor of the Harold Washington Library Center.
4. Check out a Museum Passport for free admission to one of 13 Chicago cultural institutions.
5. Hear nationally known authors (Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon, Michael Pollan) speak — for free.
6. Download an audio book from the Web site.
7. Check out a Playaway, a preloaded audio book, complete with an extra battery and ear buds.
8. Check out the sheet music for songs by Crash Test Dummies, John Lennon, Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins, Coldplay, etc.
SOURCE: Chicago Public Library
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jikeller@tribune.com
