I’ve  always been intrigued by the Carnegie Libraries which turn up like little gems in small towns scattered across the country. They are often the most graceful buildings in towns that long ago left behind their pursuit of elegance. Constructed between 1886 and 1917 with grants from the Scottish born Andrew Carnegie, these libraries with every ounce of their brick and mortar sustain a connected to the past which more recent library buildings can’t support.

In my reckoning, the strength of that connection is usually verified by the way the building have been preserved and maintained. In some cities, these once sought after buildings have been torn down in the name of progress. In other towns, the building have been sold and gone to their individual ruin in the hands of modern day entrepreneurs. Yet in some towns, despite the fluctuations of the economy and the vicissitudes of the community, the Carnegie Libraries are still in use, well cared for and even cherished.

So I was heartened that February morning in the year 2000, while driving down South Liberty in Webb City, Missouri to find myself nearing a Romanesque structure of limestone boulders and Carthage Stone which turned out to be the Webb City Library. This Carnegie Library first opened for business in 1915.

My husband and I had been visiting the neighboring Midwest town of Joplin, Missouri. We were hoping to find some information about the turn of the century lives of my grandparents who grew up there. My grandmother’s family was in the building trades. Her father, C.A. Dieter, had built the Carnegie Library in Joplin in 1901. Her youngest brother August was working on plans for its extension when he died in 1916.  The day before we came to Webb City, my husband and I had walked around the outside of the once stately classical revival building which was once the Joplin Carnegie Library.  As a young girl my grandmother knew this building well. Now, having been sold by the city long ago, it is being used as a commercial/ residential space and it retains little of its former splendor. 

My grandparent’s three children were all born in Joplin. This included my mother the youngest who was born in 1917. In the six years before my mother’s birth, at two-year intervals, almost like clockwork, each of my grandmother’s three brothers died tragically. My research has shown me that they were all vibrant, vital young men. However, my mother, my grandmother and my great aunt never mentioned them.  I’ve had to find them and their stories on my own. It is lives of these women, which most interests me. Three generations  whose lives were surely molded by the power and the sudden absence o that power which the men around them wielded.  

The deaths of these three young men give me much to think about as I explore the past. Most profoundly, I wonder how their deaths impacted on the women who survived them. My great-grandmother, my grandmother and my mother, women whose lives were completely surrounded by tragedy.  

In quick succession, my great grandmother had lost three grown, promising sons. Her worsening pain must have impacted her daughters who throughout their childhood had learned many things from watching their mother. They learned the  usual things like cooking, sewing, tending to womanly and motherly business.  And now in their young adulthood, they would have also learned the immense possibility for sadness that motherhood offers. This lesson perhaps not articulated as consciously as earlier lessons was non the less clear to her daughters as they entered their adult years.

 Aunt Kate, the eldest of the two girls never married. She lived always with her mother. No doubt she tried to ease her mother’s pain and no doubt at the same time forfeited her own dreams. Dreams which today just like in Aunt Kate’s day, can only be imagined.  

My grandmother, Hattie, was herself becoming a mother in those sorrowful years. Within months of the deaths of Hattie’s first two brothers in 1911 and 1913, she herself gave birth to a son. It chills me to think of her in the early stages of her first and second pregnancies dealing with this loss. Her infant sons, my uncles, must have felt this family tragedy being born as they were in the midst of it. My mother the last child of this mourning generation must have been a ray of hope. She was named closely after her own father, Max Elsner who was the only left in his generation to inherit the family’s successful building trade.

On my very last day in the area, my search brought me to the neighboring town of Webb City. I was searching for yearbooks or annuals as they are called in that part of the country from Joplin High School where my grandmother was a student in the first years of the twentieth century. A search in the Joplin area had turned up no yearbooks from this early timeframe and finally it was suggested to me that Webb City might have the annuals I was seeking. 

There are a lot of possibilities here, I thought as we pulled around back into the parking lot of the lovely stone building which houses the Webb City Library.  From addresses on brittle telegrams sent long ago from my father to my mother, I had learned that my mother had once taught at the high school in this small town. Their stormy courtship was punctuated by these telegrams. These precursor’s of modern day emails trace my mother’s career from a Northwestern University theater major through her return after graduation in 1939 to Missouri as a teacher, on to her next job in Wichita Falls, Texas and finally to her last job as a single women in San Francisco, California.  These once dramatic, missives have in their turn left a spicy paper trail which evidences the vigor of my father’s affections and the transients of them both. It was more than likely that this library would also have the “annual” from 1940.  Perhaps there would even be a picture of my mother as a young faculty member, the same woman who saved so carefully all those noisy, vibrant telegrams. Telegrams which told of a relationship of which I had no first hand knowledge. From the beautiful way this library building was preserved, it was to me very promising that I would find history inside its walls.

Unfortunately, the library was already closed when we arrived. I met the departing librarian in the parking lot as she was getting into her cars on this crisp afternoon. Nevertheless, she was very friendly. I told them I was from out of state and searching for “annuals” from the Joplin and Webb City high schools and that I was leaving town the next day. She encouraged me to send a letter explaining what I needed. Her name she told me was Sue.

“Dear Webb City Librarian, Sue” I wrote four days later from my home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “Last Wednesday evening February 16, I met you in the parking lot just after your library closed.” Again, I explained my requests, mailed my letter and waited. Finally, I decided to call to call the library. I reasoned that phone calls are cheaper now than they were in my mother’s day and just because I was working in the past, exploring cities of past experiences, doesn’t mean that I have to limit myself to what was then the primary means of communications, the mail.

While talking to the first librarian who answered the phone, I described my letter and the information I was seeking. As I retold my familiar story, I imagined the librarian inside that lovely stone building. A building I knew my mother and my grandmother must have been familiar with long ago, a building I had never entered. Perhaps, surrounding the librarian as she listened to my tale, somewhere on the selves, were pictures of my mother and her mother that I had never seen, descriptions of their lives that I had never heard.  

The librarian was friendly and put me on hold. I waited at the other end of the line sitting at the kitchen table. This table is not unlike the kitchen table I grew up with in Forest Hills, New York. In both kitchens, there is no divide between the cooking section and the eating section which together make up onr large room. Both kitchens have generous windows and an inviting table with long views onto the yard. Here, I found myself waiting in probably much the same way as I had waited when I was a little kid for my mother to show up. Waiting for her then to start dinner or help with my homework. Waiting now, to hear stories about her life that she never had time to tell me.

The voice at the other end of the phone began with no introduction, “I remember Maxine Elsner. She was blonde and slim and beautiful. All the boys followed here around. She wasn’t like the other teachers.”   

 I was stunned. It has been years and years since I’ve heard my mother’s name mentioned with such familiarity.  In fact, it was probably at that kitchen table in New York where I last heard her spoken of with  such clarity. For a moment, the nearness to my mother was so palpable that I didn’t know which kitchen table I was sitting at. The library my mother knew so well in Webb City, the kitchen table of my childhood and the voice of a woman detailing my mother in ways I never imagined blurred anf for a moment , I lost where I was.

It has been 40 years since my mother died. In all that time no one has described her in such a way to me. Since, I was only 16 when she died, I had only thought of her as a mother. Certainly not as someone young boys followed around and other young girls were in awe of. I could still hear the awe in this woman’s voice. 

“You knew Maxine Elsner? I asked surprised.

“Yes” said the anonymous voice. She was a teacher at my high school in my senior year. All the boys were wild about here. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your letter sooner. We don’t have the Joplin annuals you are looking for but I can send you copies of the pictures of your mother in the Webb City annual of 1940.” A week later the pictures arrived. There was a photo which I had never seen before of my mother as a very young woman. Lined up right  next to her on the same page in similar head shots were four young men, the debating team which she coached. These must be I thought some of the young men who “followed her around”. 

Turns out, I was right to put my faith in the possibilities that this Carnegie Library, styled like a church, held out to me.