Just this past week over on Facebook, the newly elected mayor of Wilmington, Ohio asked, “Do kids still gather on the Library lawn, or was just a 60’s thing?”
He was referring to the Library Corner in Germantown, where he grew UP.
You can tell Randy has grown UP. It was the Library Corner back then, not the lawn. And, you can’t do it any more. There’s an ordinance against it.
But yes, there was a time, in the late 60s and early 70s when kids did indeed hang out on the library lawn.
Everyone in town referred to them as hippies.
Quite frankly, I doubt that anyone in Germantown had seen a real hippie, at least not in person, maybe on the news.
They were local teens, doing what teens do, drinking, smoking weed, fornicating having a good time.
You know, camaraderie.
And although hanging out on the Library Corner was fun, it’s not the real story behind the Germantown Library.
It’s a Carnegie Library, one of only 1689 in the United States.
There were 2,509 built by the industry giant Andrew Carnegie from 1883 through 1929 world wide. And Germantown’s Carnegie Library is no longer the library, it houses the Historical Society of Germantown. A new library was built across the street where the Royal Electric Building stood. You might remember it as the building that all those “hippies” painted their drug-induced fantasies on adorned it with 1960s art; peace signs, flowers, and the like. I think that infamous hell-raiser/trouble-maker/hippie, Sally Ann Moyer may have been the ring-leader, and some sources say her Aunt, DL er Delores Grunwald of the Germantown Press bought the paint. Ah, the liberal media!!!!
Yes, it was a scandal.
To get a library from Andrew Carnegie, the city, village, or town requesting it had to follow the Carnegie Formula. The formula was simple, just like the man. The community had to demonstrate the need for a public library, provide the building site, annually provide ten percent of the cost of the library’s construction to support its operation, and provide free service to all. Germantown did and does still today. The Germantown Library was built in 1904 with a $10,000 grant.
My very best memories are not of the Library Corner, but of the library itself.
Miriam Kindig in her jersey dress, cardigan sweater, old-lady-comfort shoes, and pearls guided me to literary heaven as a Jr. High kid and well into High School. She suggested the “right books” every time I darkened the door.
Which, I might add, was just about every day.
It was a great place to hid out from some of the people in Germantown I’d rather not remember. You know who you are.
The tall stacks of books, the high ceilings, the tall wide windows, creaking floors and the wonderful smell drew me in along with thousands of other kids over the years. I remember the first time I saw the bust of Andrew Carnegie in the foyer of the old building, and honestly being truly grateful and a bit awed that any one man would care enough to do what he did.
Once inside, Mrs. Kindig would guide me to biographies, novels, poetry, and steer me from books she knew might not be so well received at home.
She was a smart lady, and a wonderful one. My library card number was 1941. I know, it’s weird to remember that, but I do so because of Mrs. Kindig. I mentioned that 1941 was the year WWII started, and she said, “Not really, Canada and the rest of the world went to war in 1939.” It may have been the very first time I connected the rest of the world with a real living breathing person, and realized that there was more out there than Germantown, Ohio or the USA for that matter. Mrs. Kindig was born Miriam Kern in 1895, her husband’s name was Paul, which she reminded me off often, and she lost a son, Roger in on March 31, 1953 while he was serving in the Air Force. Valley View’s highest scholastic honor is the Roger E. Kindig Memorial Award. The Roger E. Kindig Squadron at the University of Georgia is named after her son as well, allowing a closer than you think connection, and causing me to believe more and more in that six degrees of separation thing.
Mrs. Kindig was a great lady who dedicated her life to reading, literature, and Germantown.
Andrew Carnegie had a vision: literacy world wide. There are 109 Carnegie Libraries in the State of Ohio, built from 1899 through 1921, they cost $3,239,928.64 to build, and include the Libraries at Miami University in Oxford, Cedarville, Oberlin, and Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.
Andrew Carnegie spent over $45,000,000.00 on the project; in today’s money, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,029,186,363.65.
Yes, Andrew, Mrs. Kindig, and the library corner – they all had an impact, and Germantown wouldn’t be Germantown without them!
So, if you drive by the library corner anytime soon, don’t expect to see any hippies on the corner, but you could say a little prayer of thanks for Andrew and Mrs. Kindig.
