Friday, January 7, 2005

Community Library celebrates half century


By DANA DUGAN
Express Staff Writer

Many of the Community Library's founders and early volunteers pose in 1956 at the ground breaking of the library in Ketchum at its first site on Walnut Avenue. Courtesy Regional History Department, Community Library.

The gift of books in this valley has been perpetual for 50 years thanks to the efforts of some reading starved women and generous donations from the community.

In 1955, an intrepid group of women, including Anita Grey, Jean (Lane) Moritz and Clara Spiegel, decided having no library in Ketchum was unacceptable. They each contributed one dollar to the treasury, and began raising money through a tiny shop they started in an old miner's cabin, the Gold Mine Thrift Shop, on Walnut Avenue. They also began scouring the community for donations, books and items to sell.

It was a simpler time, and the valley was a small and tight knit community. Funds were raised through bridge parties, home tours, and tea dances. The annual Community Library Home Tours is now the biggest fundraiser the library has each year, though it is being shelved this year for the 50th anniversary celebrations.

By 1957, the board had raised enough to break ground for a building. Two decades later the library was moved to its present site on Spruce Avenues between Fourth and Fifth Streets, and the Gold Mine Thrift Store permanently ensconced in the old space on Walnut.

The Community Library continues to operate today without funds from any federal, state, or local agency.

"The library has traditionally been totally run by volunteers," said Crystal Thurston, who has run the Lecture Room Programs for 14 years. "The town did not have enough population to support a tax base for a library, so they created the dream of a library supported only by the donations of the town. It may be the only library in America like that and that is why it is so special for such a small town."

A major celebration will be held this spring with ongoing events planned throughout the year. Upcoming events include "The History of the Community Library," a multi-media presentation by Regional History Director Chris Millspaugh, at 5 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20. He will use photographs, as well as video and oral tapes, in his presentation of the people involved in the library's creation.

The Oral History Collection contains over 750 tapes of narrators' memories, including recordings that relive the history of the sheep industry in South-central Idaho, the early history of Union Pacific and Averill Harriman, founder of Sun Valley Resort, author Ernest Hemingway, the U.S. Forest Service, pioneer life, early mining, ski instructors, employees of Sun Valley Company. Recently added are oral histories from business people of the last 30 years.

The Photograph Collection contains over 9,500 photographs, including many taken by the Union Pacific publicity department and by pioneer photographers Martyn Mallory, Eugene Antz and Lou Holliday as well as photos from many family collections.

Other materials include books, merchant ledgers, autobiographies, letters, journals, newspaper and magazine clippings, scrapbooks, mining reports and newspapers of microform, videos, cassette tapes of local events and ephemera.

On Wednesday, Jan 26, at 7 p.m., The Great Books Book Club discusses the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, led by Gary Hunt, owner of Iconoclast books in Ketchum and Hailey. The essays are available in the library, bookstores, and on the Internet.

A presentation of the Enduring Wilderness with Doug Scott is Thursday, Jan 27, at 7 p.m. Scott, the winner of the John Muir Award, is touring the country speaking on how to save disappearing wilderness areas. He has served on the board of the organizing group for the original Earth Day, worked as a lobbyist with the Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C., and was conservation director and later associate executive director for the Sierra Club.

In February, Millspaugh will resurrect his series "History of Skiing in Sun Valley." He'll screen the old films once a week in the Library's Lecture Room.

In March there will be a Literary Moveable Feast to mark the 50th anniversary of the library. Each room of the library will be transformed into another world inspired by the title of a book with food and decoration to match such as "A Passage to India" and "Under the Tuscan Sun."

For more information on events, contact the Library at 726-3493.




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