July 2

Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in the world, said, "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," and proceeded to give away 90% of his money.  My home town of Streator, Illinois, is lucky enough to have one of the most beautiful Carnegie libraries as its public library.  And I was lucky enough to live just a two blocks away growing up.  The blue dot in the lower left hand corner is my childhood home, and the green dot in the upper right is the library.

My aunt Audrey was one of the librarians.  She always looked so amazing behind the counter with her cardigan sweater around her shoulders, held in place with a faux pearl sweater guard, her glasses hung from an eyeglass chain around her neck.

The very best part of her job, in my opinion, was stamping the manila library cards with the pencil-held date stamper.  It was beyond cool, the way the librarians effortlessly lined up the stamp with the little boxes on the card that held the whole history in dates of your library transactions.

Alas, for the first time ever, Google image search has failed me.  After a dozen different search combinations, I cannot come up with a picture of the tiny metal stamper with changeable month/date/year that slid onto a pencil.  If the librarian held the pencil one way, she could write with the pencil, but if she rotated it around, the date stamp was in position to tap the ink pad and then mark the card.  Truly awesome....  Mary

 Streator Public Library

 Repairing the library dome