♪♪
[NANCY PEARL] When people clap before a program starts,
which everybody does because they're so such lovely people.
I'm always reminded what Bishop Fulton Sheen once said,
which was that when people clap before he starts his talks,
he's always sure they’re clapping out of faith and hope.
And afterwards, he's pretty convinced
they're clapping out of charity.
So but we take your clapping for what it is.
So we were going to, Karen, very diligently put together
the pictures of the book, you know, illustrations.
And we were going to read the book
to the accompaniment of the illustrations.
But because
what who knows what reasons,
the gods did not care for that.
Milo is going to show the pictures
and we are going to read.
Okay. Oh, Milo, good you stood up.
Okay. All right.
[KAREN HENRY CLARK] And I and I just want to say,
although I said Nancy, I think we should practice, she
said, oh, no, we'll just go with it.
So this is the first time through.
[READING FROM THE BOOK] Nancy loved reading more than recess.
Whenever she tried talking about books,
kids ignored her, or they shouted
-”Go away, library girl!” -This made Nancy sad.
-Why did they tease me about the library?
-She wondered.
The school library held Nancy's best friends,
all those characters tucked into pages.
She never felt lonely reading their stories.
So, of course the school library was Nancy's favorite place.
She visited after class to talk about books with Miss Glenn,
the librarian.
-I wish I could come here on Saturdays. -Nancy sighed.
-The public library is open.
There's one near you.
-Miss Glenn drew a map.
Hope fluttered like pages turning in Nancy's heart.
On Saturday, Nancy studied the map with her bicycle
that she'd named Charger.
She loved pretending he was a beautiful horse.
-This will be a big adventure, just like in a book,
-she explained.
As Nancy raced down
the sidewalk, her imagination soared.
When they arrived, Nancy stared at the library for a long time.
-Charger, this whole building is filled with books.
-The stone faces and owls winked.
Nancy thought she was dreaming.
Inside, two librarians greeted Nancy.
-Are kids allowed in here? She asked.
-They smiled.
Nancy felt certain the stone lions did, too.
-What do you like to read?
-Miss Whitehead asked.
-Horse books.
-Come with us, -said Miss Long.
They showed Nancy to a room with enough books
to build a bridge to the moon.
She planned to read them all.
The next Saturday, Nancy returned on Charger.
Beneath the stained glass window,
she found a stack of books with a note.
-Nancy, when you finish these, I have a new horse book for you,
Miss Whitehead.
-Nancy had to hide with these books.
Otherwise, kids might pick on her.
Then she saw the table surrounded by magic light.
-I'll be invisible under here, -she believed.
By closing time,
she'd read the stack and claimed the new horse book.
Every Saturday,
Nancy and Charger arrived when the library opened.
She read through rows
of fantasies, trilogies, diaries, anthologies,
dictionaries, histories, biographies and mysteries.
-I can be anything when I grow up, -she realized.
One day, Miss Whitehead asked
-Nancy, would you like to give a talk about horse books to other kids?
-No, -she answered.
-They'll make they'll make fun of me.
-You're an expert, -Miss Long said.
-What helps you feel brave?
-Miss Whitehead asked.
Nancy wasn't sure.
She was afraid, but she didn't want to disappoint
the librarians.
They believed in her.
Finally, she agreed.
Brave was never how she felt around other kids.
-What if I'm boring?
What if they laugh?
What if no one comes?
-The library had become the place where she belonged
and failure would destroy that.
The night before the event, Nancy couldn't sleep.
She thought about Miss Whitehead's question.
Charger helped her feel brave, but he couldn't go inside.
-But my toy horses can, -she realized.
The next morning,
with the toy horses in a box, Nancy climbed on Charger.
But managing both was too difficult.
She lost her balance, and over they went.
The neighborhood milkman rushed toward her.
-Nancy, are you all right?
-Yes, but Charger’s hurt.
I have to speak at the library,
and I can't walk fast enough to get there on time.
What should I do, Mr. Fishov?.
-Gather the horses while I put Charger on your porch to rest.
I'll drive you. -And they zoomed away.
When Nancy
faced the library audience, nerves nibbled at her.
But she had to be calm.
Horses could sense fear.
A stampede was the last thing she needed now.
-Let's make Charger proud.
-She whispered to her toy herd.
With her hand on a pretty Pinto, she began her talk.
All the kids listened, spellbound.
When she finished, they applauded.
Miss Whitehead and Miss Long glowed.
On that glorious day, when the audience was gone,
even the building celebrated Nancy's success.
Nancy Saturdays changed.
Kids circled her with questions about books.
She didn't need a magic hiding place anymore.
Nancy had found her own magic.
She knew what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Become a librarian.
And she did.
Because reading, Nancy knew,
helped people find dreams of their own.
With the turn of every page.
[APPLAUSE]
-Yeah, it was a good idea, Karen.
-Every now and then.
-Yeah, right. Right.
So. So, Karen, how did you
how did this idea besides my twisting your arm?
-No, no, no. I didn't do that.
How did this happen?
-Well, Nancy and I worked together
in a Tulsa bookstore a little less than 100 years ago.
And so, you know, we talk
we got to be friends, and we talked about our lives.
And I knew that Nancy's childhood had not always
been a wonderful experience.
So, you know, I thought about that.
And then we we left Tulsa and moved to Wisconsin
and then shortly after that, Nancy moved to Seattle.
So as you know, she became quite a success out here.
But I never really got to see that.
And then when we moved and lived in the Twin Cities,
the library system brought Nancy in there.
So I went with her and saw her success
live and in person
because she would pack those library auditoriums
and at the end the people would line up down the aisle
all the way out into the library to get her pictures
taken with her, get her to sign the books, and I thought, oh,
this this woman has made a success
out of herself, for sure.
And so I published my first book and thought,
well, maybe there's a story there.
So when I was in Seattle,
I mentioned it to her and she said, Well, okay.
And so I started interviewing
her, trying to find a story line.
And the long
and the short of it is it took ten years to do that.
But, you know, the story was in there.
I just had to find it.
I know it reads like, of course it happened just this way,
but the story went lots of different ways.
At one point, Nancy, we were asking Nancy
to remember her life when she was eight years old.
And it was a little sketchy at times.
And so I, I thought,
okay, well, I'll just have Nancy as a character in books.
And so I had her in a calico dress and a covered wagon,
you know, sort of “Little House on the Prairie” kind of.
And and so I created
these different scenes, and I and I wrote it in rhyme.
Somehow I thought I could, and I was in a critique group,
and they kept saying, Well, this is all very pretty,
but it's just like picture postcards.
What about Nancy?
They kept asking about Nancy, so I'd
write down their questions and I'd call her and ask.
And slowly but surely, we found the story.
For the longest, I mean, the people on Goodreads
talk about the dramatic moment with the milkman.
Nancy didn't even remember that for the longest time.
She knew there was something somebody.
So so we
sort of patched together what we thought might have happened.
And Sheryl patiently drew it perfectly.
And Nancy looked at the art and said,
this isn't how it happened at all.
And then she said, Mr.
Fishov, the milkman. So.
So, you know, it was a it was a process.
-We had it we had a grocer in there. -Yes.
It was the grocer that.
-Oh. Yeah. Well it was indeed, it was really Mr. Fishov,
and he really did drive me to the library.
He was our milkman.
I didn't know at the time that he and he
he and his wife were friends with my parents.
And this will give you a little insight into my childhood.
I honestly believed my mother was sending me off
with a stranger to go to the library
and, and I was terrified the whole way there.
So that but it was Mr. Fishov.
He did, he did indeed drive me to the library.
Miss Glenn, my school librarian,
though she introduced me to the first book
that she recommended was “My Father's Dragon.”
Some of you will surely remember that book.
And Miss Whitehead
and Miss Long were the librarians
at the Parkman Branch Library in Detroit, and Miss Whitehead
was the one that I ended up being, you know, very
she really was a mentor.
And I and as Karen, you know, sort of captured it in the book,
she really convinced not not even convinced me
it was Miss Whitehead
who made
such a difference in my life, who who opened the world to me.
And and I wanted to become a children's librarian.
You know, when I was ten years old, I wanted to be a children's
librarian, just like Miss Whitehead,
because I wanted to do for other kids what she did for me.
And and and and I did I did become a children's librarian.
And indeed, my first job after library school at the University
of Michigan was in the Detroit Public Library System.
And so I wasn't at the Parkman
Branch Library, which would have been
like magical to work with Miss Whitehead.
But I was her colleague, and that was just very, very,
very special.
So, Sheryl, could you talk could you talk about
like like you you got the manuscript somehow.
We're not sure how.
Sasquatch Books
published, I mean
got, you know, bought Karen's book.
And here, here they are with is it 500 words or less?
650? Okay, they have,
here's this book, here's this manuscript, 650 words.
And then they and we're and we're not quite sure how?
Are we?
[SHERYL MURRAY] No, we well, we have the editor and art director
in the audience and I never thought to ask, I mean,
or maybe I did and I've forgotten,
how I was originally found.
But I was found.
-Okay. Yeah, you were found.
-I was found.
-And then what?
And then you get the manuscript, right?
-And we have, if we are able to put this slide on?
Can you put those slides?
And these were Keynote ones.
Just a little something I threw together in like five.
I don't even know how long it took me.
So I get the manuscript
once I'm selected.
They there's quite a process from what I understand,
the art director, usually, my understanding
of the process, will
how have several illustrators that they're looking at
for that particular book
and they really do make a match to the book
that they feel like would tell
a different part of the story
for the book, but match the manuscript.
And usually I believe there's a meeting with the editor.
I might be making this up.
We're storytellers here.
So but and I was selected.
I know that Sasquatch
has an emphasis on books that happen in the Pacific
Northwest or about Pacific Northwest
subjects and featuring authors and illustrators, if they can.
So, I mean, here I'm a Portland artist
and originally from Chicago area, and
I know that there was one piece they saw in my portfolio
that was a watercolor of a vintage kind of a vintage
family in a station
wagon on a trip, which was actually my family
station wagon on a trip with
I think there were
seven of the eight kids in our family in that car.
And from that, that's how they found me, basically.
And then
once I get the manuscript, my,
there's a slide, but whatever I can tell you
too, I'm a visual person, but I usually it's somewhat
my responsibility depending on the on the book to
decide what goes on what page, like what part, which
where the page turns are, where the action might stop
or slow or speed up.
And so I spent a lot of time actually
staring at the manuscript, doing little doodles on it.
I actually have been known to cut the manuscript into
sections and lay printer paper on my floor
and put a block of text on each page.
Even though there's nothing
drawn on, it helps me and then I can move it around and
I finally will get to the point where I'll do thumbnails
and I kind of
sketch everything out and
I'm always looking for pacing, kind of
when to slow down and have a big spread.
Oh good. Maybe.
[LAUGHS] It’s okay.
And when to speed things up by maybe showing a bunch
of little spot illustrations in a while.
Oh, this is,
maybe we can come back to this one, if you don't mind.
Can you go to the one that's got my studio?
I think it's the third one, actually. I'm sorry.
Oh, there is only three or four.
Yeah, there it is.
Here's my process.
It's a little bigger than the screen, and I'm sorry for that,
but kind of what you're seeing is at the bottom left, those are
that's a thumbnailing page where literally they're,
you know,
the squares of this big and you're just kind of trying
to figure out how things flow visually from page to page.
And then from there, I'll usually move to like larger
pencils and I, you know, cut and paste things together.
I do a lot of things digitally now in that stage, as far as
I see, it's very technical.
I take a picture of the sketch I've done
and bring the photo in to Procreate,
which is a drawing program on my iPad.
And that's how I usually
do my roughs and I can pull text into
and then I send those off to the editor and art director
for comments and notes.
And I also got notes from Karen and from Nancy,
although we didn't talk at all during this process.
I didn't
I wasn't in communication with them until after
except through the art director and editor, because
one of the things that I love is the collaborative process.
But one of the things I also love is having my own voice
while I'm working on the process,
because it's kind of like bringing two art forms together.
And in order for me not to feel stressed about
maybe what the author wants
or what they originally visualized,
I'm kind of working on what I see in the same book,
so I don't know how much they want me to talk about.
-Well, and here, here I'll say this.
People people will say to me, well, did it turn out the way
you imagined?
And I'll say, Oh my gosh,
no, is a thousand times better than anything I imagined,
because when I'm writing, I see something in my head,
but I tend to see it literally.
What Sheryl does is bring
a brand new vision to it and it
and it turns out to be a much deeper
thing to
look at than literal what I say.
So that if you
if you turn the pages of this book
and you don't even look at the words,
you know what the story is, you can feel it.
And I have to say with this one,
children who, I've had mothers who say they've got children
who are nonreaders, they just zip right through
and they follow all the blue horses
and they start saying, why are the horse?
What are the horse?
Which my husband would say, well, there's an emergent reader
now, but now they want to know
what the words are that go with those beautiful pictures.
-And one of the things that that Sheryl did, which
I mean,
it was really interesting to me to think about like Sheryl
did this fabulous job of taking this one sentence,
which was she rode her bicycle, which she had named,
which she pretended was a horse and had named Charger.
She, Sheryl took that and made and
and somehow understood the,
like my imagination,
you know and and and drew those,
everything with the blue illustrations in the book are
are imaginary you know, are my imagination
and I and I just I it's hard for me to say
that another illustrator could have done that.
-They would have portrayed it differently.
-Yeah. Well, I think for me it was really important,
I really connected
with the story
and with the character of Nancy as a child,
your childhood, which obviously had never met you,
but I was that same kind of kid where, you know, in the corner
with a book, nose in a book and kind of
always being left behind places
because I couldn't be pulled out of the book,
or, they forgot me, I mean, you know, that did happen.
But another story for
another time.
But I did get left places
because I was reading or whatever.
-But there is, excuse me, let me just say there is a book
called “Walter the Lazy Mouse” about a mouse who was so slow, and
you know, he's the youngest in a big family.
I know you were not the youngest, you were the middle.
But Walter is so slow that he always gets left behind.
And and I think that's one of the books that I got reprinted
as a children's book. You should check it out.
-Oh I absolutely will, thank you. It was very good.
All right. Go ahead, sorry.
-No, it's totally fine.
I appreciate that insight.
And I think just
when I first got the project,
I was up for the project, I should say, for the book.
I'm sorry, client project, but I was asked
by Christy, the editor, to do a sample.
They want, they were,
they wanted to see if I they want to make sure I could
handle the historical reference.
I don't know what they wanted, but what I,
what I thought they wanted was to make sure
I could handle the architecture of this beautiful library and
kind of developing the character of Nancy.
And I was so concerned with the sample
of making sure the library was, you know, depicted well
and architecturally and there was a sense of light.
And I was ready to send the sample in
and at the last minute, I just kind of
was like it just felt a little too dry to me.
This is the sample was the page where Nancy is under the table
reading books and the horses are grazing around her.
The blue horses and kind of at the last minute
maybe I shouldn't say this,
but I was just like,
I just decided to put the horses in there,
kind of like bringing, you know.
So it was like an inspired moment for me.
I don't know where it came from.
It was just like I was always in my head.
I understood what that meant. I thought it was important
to show that part of your world too.
And that's where it started, is with those horses.
So, yeah.
And then I didn't know I was going to do it with more.
There's a bird,
the bird that lands on
Miss Glenn's desk actually shows up later
when you're riding your bike
through the map and shows up in front
of the library with you too and kind of,
I don't know, you just your imaginary friends.
-And Karen, how did you respond when you first saw?
Because the first picture
I saw was of the little girl with the two librarians.
The character study.
And I was just it just kind of, you know, blew me away.
It was so wonderful.
- The, I, I think the first art I saw was
Sheryl's attempt to capture Nancy at that age.
And so we see her on a bicycle and there's blue behind her
with, like, scenes from stories and
and because this happens in the 1950s,
Sheryl had to know, well, what did kids wear then.
And, you know, Nancy gave me a list of details
she could remember about the way these librarians dressed.
So they so they were different looking people.
And I saw that.
And then and
Sheryl had to work with one
black and white photograph that Nancy saved.
And and I think I understood something because it was Nancy.
It was it was Nancy on that bicycle.
And I thought,
this is the only picture she saves from her childhood.
And I started to realize...There, that's the one.
-And then up top is the actual picture.
Yeah, it's in the back of the book too, I believe.
-And that's when I started to realize...
-We we airbrushed my sister out of the picture.
-And so that's when I started to realize how important
that bicycle was to this little girl.
That was her best friend.
That was that was her sacred thing.
That horse that metal horse that she rode.
And I, I, I, I knew it, but I didn't feel it
until I saw Sheryl turn that
bicycle into that blue horse shape.
And then and then it made me
it made me cry when I saw that last double spread,
because there's adult Nancy, and I'll be darned.
There's Charger peeking out from behind the tree.
So, so, so the amazing thing to me about picture books
is, yeah, it's planned, but it's not, it's not.
None of, nobody walked into this thinking,
oh yeah, there's the bicycle and you know,
it'll be the blue thing.
And then we'll have the tree and it'll say “Books + N.P.” and
these things just literally happen like magic.
-And Karen did an enormous amount of research for the book.
I mean, she got in touch with the the like
with the Detroit Public Library, the archivist, I think.
And he dug up a picture of Miss Whitehead.
And oh, there it is.
There’s Miss Whitehead.
-And then above is the character.
Well, part of the character study.
This is the the character of Nancy.
And then that's Miss Whitehead and Miss Long.
Yeah.
-Miss Whitehead on the right. Miss Long on the left.
-When we really started to
look at the library itself,
Covid happened
and the Francis Parkman Branch Library was closed.
So I couldn't get in there.
So I just took a shot in the dark and poked around on
the internet,
you know, like you do for an hour and a half trying to
and found out the name of the,
Mark Bowden is the archivist for the Detroit Public Library.
And I said, you know,
we're trying to write this book and bless him,
the man believed me that it was really gonna happen.
So he went through and found these beautiful
black and white pictures of how it looked.
And then, find, so we could get the details
of the lions and the owls out front.
And then it finally opened up.
So I was able I live in northeastern Ohio,
so drive into Detroit was easy.
And that's that's when I stood in front of that building
and realized if you were a
tiny eight year old girl and you're looking at a whole,
all she'd ever known was a room in a school that was a library.
And she walked into this fabulous place
with the soaring ceilings and the stained glass.
I mean, I just, I get chills talking about it
and all the at the entrance all were those
every one of those faces underneath
has a different expression,
which you you have to stand there to see it.
And it would be beyond reasonable to have asked Sheryl
to draw every one, every one of those little...
-What do you mean? I did. They’re totally the same.
-But it's just a beautiful building.
And thank heavens Detroit saved it.
It was built in the 1930s and it's just exquisite.
And so once I could get inside, then
I was able to take pictures so Sheryl would know the colors.
-Yeah, that was farther along in the in the process.
I can't remember at what point,
but because all I had to work
from was the black and white photos
and it was also Covid, and kind of my palette,
the palette I had created was it had more gray tones.
And so then I had to go back
and pull in kind of a little bit more of the sandstone and
and the pictures of the owls saved me that you took
because I had no idea what they looked like.
And the pictures that we had from the archives,
they're like this big and you can't see anything.
So I wanted to at least I mean, it's
an interpretation of them, to be sure, but I wanted
because then they come alive and I want them to be able to be that too.
But it was it was really helpful to have those details.
I mean, this book, it's the library itself
is a character in the book and it needed to be represented.
-And, and I think when well
I mean I never thought that with I don't know how I don't know.
I just never thought that, that somebody who's writing
a picture book necessarily needs to do that much research.
You know, it seemed to me that it just would come somehow,
you know, and the research that Sheryl did and the research
that Karen did was just so, so amazing.
And it's just kind of humbling to me to,
you know, to have the book and everything like that.
Do you all have some?
Are there any questions? -Oh, wait, I want to.
-Oh, Karen, you...
-So we we didn't cover it here, but when you
turn the last page of the book, then there's an author's note
where I write more of the facts about Nancy's life
and list all the awards and all the recognition.
And and that Nancy being Nancy,
I had to keep shortening my essay
because she kept winning more stuff.
So I'm just tossing words aside in order
to honor her appropriately.
-Well, okay. It’s very... It’s hard, I have to say.
-Well Nancy and I've been together for a long time, we I mean, we,
it was in the late eighties
when we worked in that Tulsa bookstore, ‘85 maybe,
I don't know. We moved to Wisconsin.
So so let me tell the Susie Hinton part.
-Okay.
-So it's a slow day in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
You know, the tumbleweed is blowing past us out there.
-And the oil is running and, and, you know, there's
a lot of money flowing through Tulsa, Oklahoma, at that time.
-Yeah. So one day, Susie Hinton walks in, who is better known as
S.E. Hinton, author of “The Outsiders,” “Rumble Fish,”
“That Was Then, This is Now.”
And and Nancy and I are behind the counter
and I'm looking at the ceiling and she's poking me.
Look. Look. Look.
And she said, It's Susie Hinton.
And then we stood there just starstruck.
And Nancy, Nancy said to me.
[whispers] Oh, Karen, you can write a book. And I said,
-Can you hear that in the back? Okay, good.
-And I said, oh, no, Nancy, I couldn't, but I think you could.
And she said, Oh, I wouldn't know how.
So right then and there we sealed our fate.
You know, we both expected the other one to do it, and
we were clueless.
We didn't have any idea how and by golly, we did it.
Which I say tells you what two smart women can accomplish.
-Okay. Here here.
Okay. Questions?
Yes, Judith.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] What’s your favorite horse book?
-Oh, my favorite horse book.
Well, there's I have a lot of them.
I one of the books that I treasure is a signed
an autographed copy of Misty of Chincoteague that,
I met her. Detroit used to have every year
like a book fair downtown at the art museum
or the historical museum, I think, and sponsored by the
newspaper The Detroit Free Press.
So all the new books were there,
and there used to be some authors, too.
And so I loved “Misty of Chincoteague,” which is which
everybody's still still in print.
Most people who are horse people know about it.
But another horse book, you're
you're going to regret this question, Judith.
Another horse book
that I really loved is called “Ticktock and Jim,”
which is about a boy
who trades his father's wristwatch
for a horse and of course, gets into big trouble.
And they don't believe that he will ever get the the
wristwatch back.
And I'll leave you in suspense as to whether he does or not.
It was a children's book so that, oh, “Pennies for a Pony.”
Miss Whitehead was Canadian.
And so she really raised me on a diet
of British children's fiction.
And so, you know, she's the person who gave me
“The Hobbit” and then “The Lord of the Rings.” And,
you know,
now you can go into any bookstore here and pick up “The
Lord of the Rings,” all three volumes.
But when I read it,
we you know, we read “The Hobbit.”
And then a few years later,
the “Fellowship of the Ring” came out, the first book,
and then we had to wait two years
till the “Two Towers” was published.
And let me remind you that the “Fellowship
of the Ring” ends with Frodo and Sam
running away from Boromir, who has been turned evil by the ring.
So, you know, it was hard to wait.
Let me tell you. Let me tell you.
So, and the horse and dog books were in a separate
were pulled out
from the regular children's books and were in a separate
place in the library.
And if and if we could
go to the library today, I could show you
where those books were.
I mean, they meant so much to me. So, yeah, yeah.
Yes. Any other any question? Yes.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] Was the Parkland branch a Carnegie library?
-Yes, it was not a Carnegie library.
And when I wrote “Book Lust,” I was under the impression that
it was the Carnegie library.
Because in in Carnegie libraries, you because Andrew
Carnegie believed that you ascended to knowledge.
There was always stairs going up to the front door
as there were in the Parkman Library.
So so very, you know, very confidently in the introduction
to “Book Lust,” I say it was a Carnegie library.
And then, of course, you know, somebody writes to me
and says, well, actually it was not a Carnegie library.
It was built too late to be a Carnegie library.
It was something something something else library.
But one of the things about the library
that we couldn't fit into the manuscript
was that there was no public bathroom.
Yeah. Yes, no public bathroom.
And if you were a little
girl of eight who has packed her lunch and gone there on
Saturday morning at 9:00 and didn't ever want to leave,
not having a public bathroom was a little bit of an issue.
Luckily, there was a gas station
around the corner, so they got used to seeing me
use their bathroom.
-Glad that came out.
-Yes. Right.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] I don’t have a question, I have a comment.
I didn't know anything about
Nancy Pearl until Karen’s book came out.
And I have a young friend who is a children's
librarian [MUFFLED]she
writes back to me and say
yes, Nancy Pearl is the star in the library world.
I took a class in her
back in library school and then my mom and I traveled
to Paris after my graduation, I took the Nancy Pearl action
figure and photographed it around the city.
[LAUGHTER] A la the movie.
Amelia, I'm excited to see them celebrating with
this author.
[MUFFLED]
-Thank you. Oh, that’s great. And any other any other questions? Yes, Tom.
[AUDIENCE MEMBER] So, Nancy, the
the library is a character in the book, it's an amazing place.
But the pictures I see, it looks like a very big, dark,
gothic cathedral, almost structure.
It's hard for me to imagine a small girl feeling
comfortable in there.
Can you remember what it felt like to be in there?
Were you intimidated by it?
-I wasn’t intimidated. I don’t think.
I think that when you walk in again like a Carnegie library,
the first people that you see are at the circulation desk.
And they were very always smiling and always
very friendly.
And I do remember,
I mean, not people's names, but there was one young man
who was working there who was in dental school
at the University of Detroit.
And you know he was doing this to earn, you know, whatever?
So there was that friendliness and then you had to decide
whether you were going
to turn to the right to go to the children's area
or the left and go to the adult area. And.
Miss Whitehead, and so it was kind of a natural
I didn't feel it felt like a place where people welcomed you.
And and then there were all those books, you know,
it was just amazing.
-There was that big window in the...
-Oh, and then the children's room,
the children's section, there was like a rounded
like an octagonal?
It was like a rounded
end of the of the room.
-A gigantic bay window.
-Yeah. Karen knows all that.
-Window that just soars forever.
And there's a stained glass panel there that says
the Mary Conover Room for Boys and Girls.
And so Nancy would have been
on that window seat with all that light flooding in.
So that part of it is not dark and scary like.
-Yeah, right, right.
And Miss Whitehead wouldn't let me go into the adult area
until I was 13.
And then she took me there and and made a point of
introducing me to the librarians and then, you know, left me,
you know, left me to to find those books.
And it's pretty amazing.
I mean, yeah, it was just a I mean, it's just so wonderful
to have the library celebrated.
And you you two did such a marvelous.
It was just such a wonderful connection.
Thank you.
-And the three
of us have never been together until today, right?
-Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah.
-So we're sudden best friends out of out of nowhere, right?
-As it should be.
Yeah. If all goes well. I mean as it did go well.
Any other questions.
Comments.
Okay, well, thank you all again for coming.
You can clap if you want,
It’s okay.
[APPLAUSE]
♪♪