Mister Carnegie’s “Libary” (February 1970 | Volume: 21, Issue: 2)

Mister Carnegie’s “Libary”

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Authors: Caroline E. Werkley

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February 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 2

When I was very young, I thought Andrew Carnegie lived in Moberly, Missouri (population 12,000, smack dab between St. Louis and Kansas City), because he gave Moberly what we natives called the “Libary.” Possibly he lived in the big red brick house at the end of Fifth Street, the one with the tennis court and the curved drive, or perhaps in the yellow stone mansion with tall white nillars on West Reed Street. They were both immense solid buildings similar to the library, and certainly appropriate as a dwelling for a man of Mr. Carnegie’s importance.

When I was older and wise enough to know that Mr. Carnegie would sniff at anything under a sixty-six-room castle, my mother, one of Mr. Carnegie’s high priestesses, and my two sisters and I went to New York. From behind a tall iron-spike fence we gazed respectfully for a long while at Mr. Carnegie’s Fifth Avenue mansion, noting with pleasure the handsome pink brick, imposing enough for one of his own libraries. We half expected to see Mr. Carnegie’s ghost peering out at his Moberly librarian from one of the windows of his walnut-panelled study. But no Mr. Carnegie appeared, just as there had been no Nicholas Murray Butler all summer at the Butler residence on Morningside Drive. Mother had rented rooms for herself and three daughters right across the street, sideways, from Mr. Butler’s house, there being nothing available near Mr. Carnegie’s. And besides, Mr. Butler was the president of Columbia University, where she was taking a library course while Helen and Eloise went to Teacher’s College. I, being only thirteen, was experimented on in education classes by budding teachers.

Each of us was expected by Mother to look out the window once a day in hope that we could glimpse Mr. Butler—“just to say you’ve seen him.” And just as Mr. Butler was never at his windows, now there was nothing but plain glass in Mr. Carnegie’s, not even a ghost or anything alive.

“I simply don’t believe it,” Mother said suddenly, with an alarming vehemence, and I knew exactly what she meant. We didn’t believe it when we read it in a book, and we certainly didn’t believe it now, looking at the fine respectability of Mr. Carnegie’s house.

“Imagine Mr. Carnegie being called a robber, an octopus. I never heard anything so ridiculous. There wasn’t a crooked bone in his body. That fine man, the Giver of Libraries.”

Mother’s—and Mr. Carnegie’s—library was a square, solid gray stone building with pillars and pigeons decorating its front. The pillars Mother was proud of. I am not sure whether they were Doric or Corinthian or just plain Moberly in design, but they were stout, impressive columns of stone giving a proper dignity and tone.

The minute you entered the library you knew you were in some place absolutely different from anything else in Moberly. It was not only the rows and rows of