Thank you, Librarians and Chicago Public Library!
A member of Friends of the Edgewater Library reflects on the librarians who influenced her and how Chicago Public Library has enriched her life for more than 80 years.
Friends member, Betty Fashingbauer, at the Edgewater Branch Library.
Chicago Public librarians of my youth were Englewood librarians in the ‘50s, and 79th and Halsted librarians in the ‘60s, and what is now the Chicago Cultural Center in the early ‘70s.
They took me from a beginner reader to a pre-teen whose mother had to sign some paper for the librarian to choose my books for me that I would eventually have to read in high school. They opened a world of places that someday I would travel to ─ to become a Chicago Public School high school history teacher looking for resources for her classes.
I was asked recently what some of the greatest influences were on my life. I would have to say that my very hard-working parents who one Sunday would take their four daughters to one grandparents’ house, and another Sunday to the other grandparents’ house.
Dad worked as a Chicago fireman after leaving the steel mills, and on the fourth Sunday we visited the Chicago museums for FREE every month. We went on an unheated or unair-conditioned streetcar with my mother carrying the lunch. My dad, the two youngest sisters, and I usually had the thermos of water.
Betty finally visited Gibraltar 73 years after the librarian at 79th and Halsted gave her a book about it and its history. Here she is with a Barbary macaque, a species found on the Rock of Gibraltar.
Before our museum visits, the librarians were often the ones who told my mother where to go or why. Some museums we visited were the Museum of Science and Industry and the Art Institute. My dad had to figure out the best way to get there. Notice that the library is in every part of my life.
My membership and donation to support the library are insignificant compared to the enrichment I have had from my Chicago Public Library branches. I only wish I had the presence of mind to thank those librarians decades ago. But at 85 years this summer, the chances of any of them hearing that thank you are pretty slim. Okay, non-existent is a better choice of words!
If my appreciation gives one librarian a sense of accomplishment today, it would be worth it from my point of view because, in retrospect, I certainly did ask a lot of questions and really seemed to know nothing of the world. Sometimes it takes us a long time to realize what we have had and have always taken for granted.
— By Betty Fashingbauer
Friends Member since 2021