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

Chapter 13

A Great Library

A great library doesn’t have to be big or beautiful. It doesn’t have to have the best facilities or the most efficient staff or the most users. A great library provides. It is enmeshed in the life of a community in a way that makes it indispensable. A great library is one nobody notices because it is always there, and it always has what people need.

The Spencer Public Library was founded in 1883 in Mrs. H. C. Crary’s parlor. In 1890, the library moved to a small frame building on Grand Avenue. In 1902, Andrew Carnegie granted the town $10,000 for a new library. Carnegie was a product of the industrial revolution that had turned a nation of farmers into factory workers, oilmen, and iron smelters. He was a ruthless corporate capitalist who built his United States Steel into the nation’s most successful business. He was also a Baptist, and by 1902 he was deep into the pursuit of giving away his money to worthwhile causes. One cause was providing grants to small towns for libraries. For a town like Spencer, a Carnegie library was a sign you had made it not exactly to the top, but farther than Hartley and Everly.

The Spencer Public Library opened on March 6, 1905, on East Third Street, half a block off Grand Avenue. It was typical of Carnegie libraries, since Carnegie had mandated a classical style and symmetry of design. There were three stained-glass windows in the entrance hall, two with flowers and one with the word library. The librarian perched behind a large central desk, surrounded by drawers of cards. The side rooms were small and cloistered, with bookshelves to the ceiling. In an era when public buildings were segregated by sex, men and women were free to enter any room. Carnegie libraries were also among the first to let patrons choose books off the shelves instead of making requests to the librarian.

Some historians describe Carnegie libraries as plain, but that is true only in comparison to the elaborate central libraries of cities like New York and Chicago, which had carved friezes, ornately painted ceilings, and crystal chandeliers. Compared to the parlor of a local woman’s home or a storefront on Grand Avenue, the Spencer Carnegie library was impossibly ornate. The ceiling was high, the windows enormous. The half-underground bottom floor held the children’s library, an innovation at a time when children were often kept locked away in their homes. Children could sit and read on a circular bench, while above them a window looked out at ground level on a flat grass lawn. The floorboards throughout the building were dark wood, highly polished and very wide. They creaked when you walked, and often that creaking was the only sound you could hear. The Carnegie was a library where books were seen, not heard. It was a museum. It was as quiet as a church. Or a monastery. It was a shrine to learning, and in 1902 learning meant books.

When many people think of a library, they think of a Carnegie library. These are the libraries of our childhood. The quiet. The high ceilings. The central library desk, complete with matronly librarian (at least in our memories). These libraries seemed designed to make children believe you could get lost in them, and nobody could ever find you, and it would be the most wonderful thing.

By the time I was hired in 1982, the old Carnegie library was gone. It had been beautiful but small. Too small for a growing town. The land deed specified the town must use it for a library or return it to the owner, so in 1971 the town tore down the old Carnegie building to build a bigger, more modern, more efficient library, one without squeaky floorboards, dim lighting, imposingly high bookshelves, and rooms to get lost in.

It was a disaster.

Spencer is built in a traditional style. The retail buildings are brick, the houses along Third Street two- and three-story frame boardinghouses. The new library was concrete. One story tall, it hunched on the corner like a bunker. Its original wide lawn was gone, replaced by two tiny gardens. Too shadowed to grow much, they were soon filled in with rocks. The glass front doors were set back from the street, but the entryway was enclosed and unwelcoming. The east wall, which faced the town middle school, was solid concrete. Grace Renzig lobbied herself onto the library board in the late 1970s with the goal of having vines planted along the east wall. She got her vines a few years later, but she ended up staying on the board for almost twenty years.

The new Spencer Public Library was modern, but with a brutish efficiency. And it was flat-out cold. A glass wall faced north, with a lovely view of the alley. In the winter, you couldn’t keep the back of the library warm. The floor plan was open, leaving no space for storage. There was no designated staff area. There were only five electric outlets. The furniture, made by local craftsmen, was beautiful but impractical. The tables had prominent support bars so you couldn’t pull up additional chairs, and they were solid oak with black laminate tops, so they were too heavy to move. The carpet was orange, a Halloween nightmare.

Or to put it more simply, the building wasn’t right for a town like Spencer. The library had always been well run. The collection of books was exceptional, especially for a town the size of Spencer, and the directors had always been early adopters of new technologies and ideas. For enthusiasm, professionalism, and expertise, the library was top-notch. But after 1971, it was all squeezed into the wrong building. The exterior didn’t fit the surrounding area. The interior wasn’t practical or friendly. It didn’t make you want to sit down and relax. It was cold in every sense of the word.

We started the remodel—let’s call it the warming process—in May 1989, just as northwest Iowa was waking up and changing from brown to green. The lawns suddenly needed mowing, the trees on Grand Avenue were throwing out new leaves. On the farms, the plants were pushing through the soil and unfolding, and you could finally see the result of all that time spent fixing equipment, churning fields, and planting seeds. The weather turned warm. The kids brought out bicycles. At the library, after almost a year of planning, it was finally time to work.

The first stage of remodeling was painting the bare concrete walls. We decided to leave the nine-foot bookshelves bolted to the walls, so Tony Joy, our painter and the husband of staff member Sharon Joy, simply had to throw on some drop cloths and lean his ladder against the shelves. But as soon as he did, Dewey climbed up.

“All right, Dewey, down we go.”

Dewey wasn’t paying attention. He’d been in the library more than a year, but he’d never seen it from nine feet up. It was a revelation. Dewey stepped off the ladder and onto the top of the wall shelf. With a few steps, he was out of reach.

Tony moved the ladder. Dewey moved again. Tony climbed to the top, propped his elbow on the bookshelf, and looked at this stubborn cat.

“This is a bad idea, Dewey. I’m going to paint this wall, then you’re going to rub against it. Vicki’s going to see a blue cat, and then you know what’s going to happen? I’m going to get fired.” Dewey just stared down at the library. “You don’t care, do you? Well, I warned you. Vicki!”

“Right here.”

“You’ve been watching?”

“It’s a fair warning. I won’t hold you responsible.”

I wasn’t worried about Dewey. He was the most conscientious cat I’d ever known. He raced down bookshelves without a misstep. He intentionally brushed displays with his side, as cats do, without knocking them over. I knew he could not only walk a shelf without touching wet paint, but also tiptoe up a ladder without knocking off the can of paint at the top. I was more worried about Tony. It’s not easy sharing a ladder with the king of the library.

“I’m fine with the arrangement if you are,” I called up to him.

“I’ll take my chances,” Tony joked.

Within a few days, Tony and Dewey were fast friends. Or maybe I should say Tony and Dewkster, because that’s what Tony always called him. Tony felt Dewey was too soft a name for such a macho cat. He worried the local alley cats were congregating outside the children’s library window at night to make fun of his name. So Tony decided his real name wasn’t Dewey, it was the Duke, like John Wayne. “Only his close friends call him Dewkster,” Tony explained. He always called me Madame President.

“What do you think of this shade of red, Madame President?” he would ask when he saw me crossing the library.

“I don’t know. It looks pink to me.”

But pink paint wasn’t our biggest worry. Suddenly we couldn’t keep our polite, well-behaved cat off the top of the wall shelves. One day Tony looked across the library and saw Dewey on top of the wall shelves at the opposite end of the building. That was when things changed for Dewey, when he realized he could climb to the top of the wall shelves whenever he wanted. He had the run of the library up there, and some days he never wanted to come down.

“Where’s Dewey?” each member of the genealogy club would ask as they settled in for their regular meeting on the first Saturday of the month. Like all the clubs that met in the library—our Round Room was the largest free meeting space in town, and it was usually booked—the club members were used to the Dewey treatment. This started with Dewey jumping into the center of the table at the beginning of every meeting. He would survey the meeting participants, then walk around to each person at the table, sniffing her hand or looking into his face. When he had made a full circuit, he chose one person and settled into his lap. It didn’t matter what was going on in the meeting, Dewey never rushed or varied his routine. The only way to break his rhythm was to toss him out and close the door.

The Dewey treatment was met with resistance at first, especially by the business and political groups that often met in the Round Room, but after a few months even the salesmen treated it as a highlight. The genealogy club treated it almost like a game, since every month Dewey picked someone different to spend the meeting with. They would laugh and try to coax him into their laps, almost like the children at Story Hour.

“Dewey’s distracted these days,” I told them. “Ever since Tony started painting the library, he’s been off his routine. But I’m sure once he realizes you’re here . . .”

And as if on cue, Dewey walked in the door, jumped on the table, and started his rounds.

“Let us know if you need anything,” I told them, turning back to the main part of the library. Nobody said anything; they were too busy focusing on Dewey. “No fair, Esther,” I heard as the sound of the meeting faded into the distance, “you must have tuna in your pocket.”

When Tony finished the painting three weeks later, Dewey was a changed cat. Maybe he thought he really was Duke, because suddenly he wasn’t content with just naps and laps. He wanted to explore. And climb. And most important, explore new places to climb. We called this Dewey’s Edmund Hillary phase, after the famous mountain climber. Dewey didn’t want to stop climbing until he’d reached the top of his personal Mount Everest, which he managed to do not more than a month later.

“Any sign of Dewey this morning?” I asked Audrey Wheeler, who was working at the circulation desk. “He didn’t come for breakfast.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Let me know if you do. I want to make sure he’s not sick.”

Five minutes later I heard Audrey utter what around here was a surprising profanity: “Oh, my goodness!”

She was standing in the middle of the library, looking straight up. And there, on top of the lights, looking straight down, was Dewey.

When he saw us looking, Dewey pulled his head back. He was instantly invisible. As we watched, Dewey’s head reappeared a few feet down the light. Then it disappeared again, only to appear a few feet farther on. The lights run in hundred-foot strips, and he had clearly been up there for hours, watching us.

“How are we going to get him down?”

“Maybe we should call the city,” someone suggested. “They’ll send someone with a ladder.”

“Let’s just wait him out,” I said. “He’s not doing any harm up there, and he’ll have to come down for food eventually.”

An hour later Dewey trotted into my office, licking his lips from a late breakfast, and jumped into my lap for a pet. He was clearly keyed up about this new game, but didn’t want to overplay his hand. I knew he was dying to ask, What do you think of that?

“I’m not even going to mention it, Dewey.”

He cocked his head at me.

“I’m serious.”

Okay then, I’ll nap. Exciting morning, you know.

I asked around, but nobody had seen him come down. It took us a few weeks of constant surveillance to figure out his method of getting up. First Dewey jumped on the empty computer desk. Then he jumped on a filing cabinet, which gave him a long jump to the top of the temporary wall around the staff area, where he could hide behind a huge quilt of Spencer history. From there, it was only four feet to the light.

Sure, we could have rearranged the furniture, but once he became ceiling fixated we knew there wasn’t much, except old age and creaky bones, that could stop Dewey from walking the lights. When cats don’t know something exists, it’s easy to keep them away. If they can’t get to something and it’s something they’ve made up their minds they want, it’s almost impossible. Cats aren’t lazy; they’ll put in the work to thwart even the best-laid plans.

Besides, Dewey loved being up on the lights. He loved walking back and forth from end to end until he found an interesting spot. Then he would lie down, drape his head over the side, and watch. The patrons loved it, too. Sometimes when Dewey was pacing you could see them craning up at the ceiling, their heads going back and forth like the pendulum on a clock. They talked to him. When Dewey was pointed out to the children, his head just peaking over the edge of the lights, they screamed with excitement. They had so many questions.

“What’s he doing?”

“How’d he get up there?”

“Why is he up there?”

“Will he get burned?”

“What if he falls off? Will he die?”

“What if he falls on somebody? Will they die?”

When the children found out they couldn’t join him on the ceiling, they begged him to come down. “Dewey likes it up there,” we explained. “He’s playing.” Eventually even the children understood that when Dewey was on the lights, he was coming down only on his terms. He had discovered his own little seventh heaven up there.

The official remodeling took place in July 1989, because July was the library’s slow month. The children were out of school, which meant no class trips and no unofficial after-school child care. A local tax firm donated warehouse space across the street. The Spencer Public Library contained 55 shelving units, 50,000 books, 6,000 magazines, 2,000 newspapers, 5,000 albums and cassette tapes, and 1,000 genealogy books and binders, not to mention projectors, movie screens, televisions, cameras (16 mm and 8 mm), typewriters, desks, tables, chairs, card catalogs, filing cabinets, and office supplies. Everything was given a number. The number corresponded to a color-coordinated grid, which showed both its place in the warehouse and its new place in the library. On the new blue carpet, Jean Hollis Clark and I chalked the location of every shelf, table, and desk. If a shelf was put down an inch out of place, the workers had to move it because there were strict aisle width and ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements. If a shelf was off an inch, the next one could be off two inches. Next thing you knew, a wheelchair would be stuck in a back corner.

The move was truly a community effort. The Rotary Club helped move the books out; the Golden Kiwanis helped move them back. Our downtown development manager, Bob Rose, moved shelving. Doris Armstrong’s husband, Jerry, spent more than a week bolting 110 new steel plates onto the ends of our shelving units, at least six bolts per plate, and never complained. Everybody volunteered: the genealogy club, the library board, teachers, parents, the nine-member board of Spencer’s Friends of the Library. The downtown merchants pitched in, too, and there were free drinks and snacks for everyone.

The remodeling went like clockwork. In exactly three weeks, our Halloween horror was replaced with a neutral blue carpet and colorful reupholstered furniture. We added two-person gliders to the children’s library so mothers could rock and read to their kids. In a closet, I found eighteen Grosvenor prints, along with seven old pen-and-ink sketches. The library didn’t have enough money to frame them, so each print was adopted by a member of the community who paid for the framing. The newly arranged, angled shelves led the eye back into the books, where thousands of colorful spines invited patrons to browse, read, relax.

We unveiled the new library with a cookies and tea open house. Nobody was more excited that day than Dewey. He had been locked away at my house for three weeks, and during that time his whole world had changed. The walls were different; the carpet was different; all the chairs and tables and bookshelves were out of place. The books even smelled different after a trip to the warehouse across the street.

But as soon as people started arriving, Dewey dashed back to the refreshment table to be front and center again. Yes, the library had changed, but what he missed most after three weeks away was people. He hated being away from his friends at the library. And they had missed him, too. As they went for their cookies, they all stopped to pet Dewey. Some lifted him onto their shoulders for a tour through the newly arranged shelving units. Others just watched him, talked about him, and smiled. The library may have changed, but Dewey was still the king.

Between 1987, the year before Dewey fell into our arms, and 1989, the year of the remodel, visits to the Spencer Public Library increased from 63,000 a year to more than 100,000. Clearly something had changed. People were thinking differently about their library, appreciating it more. And not just the citizens of Spencer. That year, 19.4 percent of our visitors were from rural Clay County. Another 18 percent came from the surrounding counties. No one could argue, seeing those numbers, that the library wasn’t a regional center.

The remodeling helped, there’s no doubt about that. So did the revitalization of Grand Avenue; and the economy, which was picking up; and the energized staff; and our new outreach and entertainment programs. But most of the change, most of what brought the new people in and finally made the Spencer Public Library a meeting house, not a warehouse, was Dewey.