Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

Chapter 3

Dewey Readmore Books

Dewey was a fortunate cat. He not only survived the freezing library drop box, but also fell into the arms of a staff that loved him and a library perfectly designed to care for him. There were no two ways about it, Dewey led a charmed life. But Spencer was also lucky, because Dewey couldn’t have fallen into our lives at a better time. That winter wasn’t just bitterly cold; it was one of the worst times in Spencer’s history.

Those who lived in larger cities may not remember the farm crisis of the 1980s. Maybe you remember Willie Nelson and Farm Aid. Maybe you remember reading about the collapse of family farming, about the nation moving from small growers to large factory farms that stretch for miles without a farmhouse, or even a farmworker, in sight. For most people, it was just a story, not something that affected them directly.

In Spencer, you could feel it: in the air, in the ground, in every spoken word. We had a solid manufacturing base, but we were still a farm town. We supported, and were supported by, farmers. And on the farms, things were falling apart. These were families we knew, families that had lived in the area for generations, and we could see the strain. First they stopped coming in for new parts and machinery, making do with bootstrap repairs. Then they cut back on supplies. Finally they stopped making mortgage payments, hoping for a booming harvest to set the account books right. When a miracle didn’t come, the banks foreclosed. Almost half the farms in northwest Iowa went into foreclosure in the 1980s. Most of the new owners were giant farming conglomerates, out-of-state speculators, or insurance companies.

The farm crisis wasn’t a natural disaster like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. This was primarily a financial disaster. In 1978, farmland in Clay County was selling for $900 an acre. Then the price of land took off. In 1982, farmland was selling for $2,000 an acre. A year later, it was $4,000 an acre. Farmers borrowed up and bought more land. Why not, when the price was going up forever and you could make more money selling off land every few years than you could farming it?

Then the economy took a downturn. The price of land began to drop and credit dried up. The farmers couldn’t borrow against their land to buy new machinery, or even new seed for the planting season. Crop prices weren’t high enough to pay the interest on the old loans, many of which had rates of more than 20 percent a year. It took four or five years to reach bottom, years with false bottoms and false hopes, but economic forces were pulling our farmers steadily down.

In 1985, Land O’Lakes, the giant butter and margarine manufacturer, pulled out of the plant on the north edge of town. Soon after, unemployment reached 10 percent, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the population of Spencer had fallen from 11,000 to 8,000 in just a few years. The value of houses dropped 25 percent seemingly overnight. People were leaving the county, even the state of Iowa, looking for jobs.

The price of farmland plummeted further, forcing more farmers into foreclosure. But selling the land at auction couldn’t cover the loans; the banks were stuck with the loss. These were rural banks, the backbones of small towns. They made loans to local farmers, men and women they knew and trusted. When the farmers couldn’t pay, the system collapsed. In towns all across Iowa, banks failed. Banks were failing across the entire Midwest. The savings and loan in Spencer was sold to outsiders for pennies on the dollar, and the new owners didn’t want to make new loans. Economic development stalled. As late as 1989, there wasn’t a single housing permit issued in the city of Spencer. Not one. Nobody wanted to put money into a dying town.

Every Christmas, Spencer had a Santa Claus. The retailers sponsored a raffle and gave away a trip to Hawaii. In 1979, there wasn’t a vacant storefront in town for Santa to set up shop in. In 1985, there were twenty-five empty storefronts downtown, a 30 percent vacancy rate. No trip to Hawaii was offered. Santa barely made it to town. There was a running joke: the last store owner out of downtown Spencer, please turn off the lights.

The library did what it could. When Land O’Lakes skipped town, we set up a job bank that contained all our job listings and books on job skills, job descriptions, and technical training. We set up a computer so local men and women could create résumés and cover letters. This was the first computer most of these people had ever seen. It was almost depressing how many people used the job bank. And if it was depressing for an employed librarian, just think how depressing it was for a laid-off factory worker, bankrupt small business owner, or out-of-work farmhand.

Then into our laps fell Dewey. I don’t want to make too much of this one turn of events, because Dewey didn’t put food on anyone’s table. He didn’t create jobs. He didn’t turn our economy around. But one of the worst things about bad times is the effect on your mind. Bad times drain you of energy. They occupy your thoughts. They taint everything in your life. Bad news is as poisonous as bad bread. At the very least, Dewey was a distraction.

But he was so much more. Dewey’s story resonated with the people of Spencer. We identified with it. Hadn’t we all been shoved down the library drop box by the banks? By outside economic forces? By the rest of America, which ate our food but didn’t care about the people who grew it?

Here was an alley cat, left for dead in a freezing drop box, terrified, alone, and clinging to life. He made it through that dark night, and that terrible event turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. He never lost his trust, no matter what the circumstances, or his appreciation for life. He was humble. Maybe humble isn’t the right word—he was a cat, after all—but he wasn’t arrogant. He was confident. Maybe it was the confidence of the near-death survivor, the serenity you find when you’ve been to the end, beyond hope, and made it back. All I knew was that, from the moment we found him, Dewey believed everything was going to be fine.

And when he was around, he made others believe that, too. It took him ten days to get healthy enough to explore the library on his own, and once he did it was clear he had no interest in books, shelves, and other inanimate objects. His interest was people. If there was a patron in the library, he’d walk straight up to him—still slow on his sore feet but no longer hobbling—and jump into his lap. More often than not he was pushed away, but rejection never deterred him. Dewey kept jumping, kept looking for laps to lie in and hands to pet him, and things started to change.

I noticed it first with the older patrons, who often came to the library to flip through magazines or browse for books. Once Dewey started spending time with them, they showed up more frequently and stayed longer. A few seemed better dressed, with more care given to their appearance. They had always given the staff a friendly wave or good morning, but now they engaged us in conversation, and that conversation was usually about Dewey. They couldn’t get enough Dewey stories. They weren’t just killing time now; they were visiting friends.

One older man in particular came in at the same time every morning, sat in the same big, comfortable chair, and read the newspaper. His wife had recently died, and I knew he was lonely. I didn’t expect him to be a cat person, but from the first moment Dewey climbed into his lap the man was beaming. Suddenly he wasn’t reading the newspaper alone. “Are you happy here, Dewey?” the man would ask every morning as he petted his new friend. Dewey would shut his eyes and, more often than not, drop off to sleep.

And then there was the man at the job bank. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his type—proud, hardworking, resilient—and I knew he was suffering. He was from Spencer like most of the men who used the job bank, a laborer not a farmer. His job-hunting outfit, like his former work outfit, was jeans and a standard-issue shirt, and he never used the computer. He studied the résumé books; he looked through our job listings; he never asked for help. He was quiet, steady, unflappable, but as the weeks passed I could see the strain in the hunch of his back and the deepening lines on his always clean-shaven face. Every morning, Dewey approached him, but the man always pushed him away. Then one day I saw Dewey sitting on his lap, and for the first time in weeks the man was smiling. He was still bent, and there was still sadness in his eyes, but he was smiling. Maybe Dewey couldn’t give much, but in the winter of 1988 he gave exactly what Spencer needed.

So I gave our kitten to the community. The staff understood. He wasn’t our cat, not really. He belonged to the patrons of the Spencer Public Library. I put a box by the front door, right next to the job bank, and told people, “You know the cat who sits on your lap and helps with your résumé? The one who reads the newspaper with you? Who steals the lipstick out of your purse and helps you find the fiction section? Well, he’s your cat, and I want you to help name him.”

I had been library director for only six months, so I was still enthusiastic about contests. Every few weeks we put a box in the lobby, made an announcement on the local radio station, offered a prize for the winning entry, and tried to stoke interest in the latest bit of library news. A good contest with a good prize might draw fifty entries. If the prize was expensive, like a television set, we might scrape up seventy. Usually we got about twenty-five. Our Name the Kitty contest, which wasn’t mentioned on the radio because I wanted only regular patrons to participate, and which didn’t even offer a prize, received three hundred ninety-seven entries. Three hundred ninety-seven entries! That’s when I realized the library had stumbled onto something important. Community interest in Dewey was off all our charts.

Lasagna-loving Garfield was at the height of his popularity, so Garfield was a popular choice. There were nine votes for Tiger. Tigger was almost as popular. Morris was another multiple vote-getter, after the Nine Lives spokescat. Even cultural blips like ALF (a cuddly alien puppet with his own television show) and Spuds (after Spuds MacKenzie, the hard-drinking party dog of beer commercial fame) received votes. There were a few mean-spirited entries, like Fleabag, and some that tripped over the thin line between clever and weird, like Catgang Amadeus Taffy (a sudden sweet tooth?), Ladybooks (an odd name for a male cat), Hopsnopper, Boxcar, and Nukster.

By far the most entries, more than fifty, were for Dewey. Apparently the patrons had already grown attached to this kitten, and they didn’t want him to change. Not even his name. And to be honest, the staff didn’t, either. We, too, had grown attached to Dewey just the way he was.

Still, the name needed something. Our best option, we decided, was to think of a last name. Mary Walk, our children’s librarian, suggested Readmore. A commercial running during the Saturday morning cartoons—this was back when cartoons were only for children and shown only before noon on Saturdays—featured a cartoon cat named O. G. Readmore who encouraged kids to “read a book and take a look at the TV in your head.” I’m sure that’s where the name came from. Dewey Readmore. Close, but not quite. I suggested the last name Books.

Dewey Readmore Books. One name for the librarians, who live by the Dewey decimal system. One for the children. One for everyone.

Do We Read More Books? A challenge. A name to put us all in the mood to learn. The whole town was going to be well-read and well-informed in no time.

Dewey Readmore Books. Three names for our regal, confident, beautiful cat. I’m sure we’d have named him Sir Dewey Readmore Books if we had thought of it, but we were not only librarians, we were from Iowa. We didn’t stand on pomp and circumstance. And neither did Dewey. He always went by his first name or, occasionally, just “the Dew.”