TRIVIA FOR LIBRARY LOVERS

Around New York City, all the public libraries of a certain age like St. Agnes in my old neighborhood tend to look alike and no wonder. In 1901, the year he retired, Andrew Carnegie gave $5.2 million to the city to build dozens of branch libraries to bring books to the people. That same spring Alton in Southern Illinois became one of the few cities in the country to turn down his largesse, because of strings attached. A Carnegie library would require yearly taxation. Alton had had a free library since 1852 thanks to some civic-minded ladies and a grieving widower.

It was the ladies who really got the library off the ground in 1866 when they bought the original Alton Library Association at auction, having raised enough money to pay off the library’s $165 debt and buy $300 worth of new books. Believing it was the library’s mission to contribute to the city’s social and intellectual life, they invited speakers like Ralph Waldo Emerson to the river city. The library thrived. By 1888, it had outgrown its corner room in the City Hall.

When Jennie D. Hayner, a Library Association director, died that year, her husband John decided to underwrite a library building in her memory. Hayner, who had come to Alton in 1848 from upstate New York, was no Carnegie, but he had prospered, moving up from cashier to stockholder in the First National Bank. He commissioned Theodore Link, later one of the architects of the St. Louis World’s Fair, to design a redbrick building with a modest tower. It was completed a decade before Carnegie decided to fund libraries. The German-born Link liked turrets and towers, which he incorporated into his designs for the Monticello Seminary in nearby Godfrey in 1889 and Union Station in St. Louis in 1894.

The library did seem like a castle to me when I was growing up. In grade school, I could walk down Christian Hill to the corner of 4th and State and enter the children’s library through the lower door. I worked my way through the biographies, learning about Sibelius before I ever heard his music, and children’s novels with gutsy female heroines. Being a visiting nurse captivated me until I read The Silver Pencil and knew I wanted to be a writer as well as a reader.

I don’t remember when I first was allowed to creep up the backstairs to check out books in the adult library, but I do remember the first book borrowed – The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which was decidedly racier than the visiting nurse novels. That’s what I told Ms Buck when I interviewed her decades later for the Miami Herald. She wasn’t impressed.

It was in the arched interior of the Hayner library that I learned the Dewey Decimal System to find books on the id and super ego and researched Francisco de Miranda, a dashing Venezuelan who fought in the French Revolution and romanced Catherine the Great. Wherever my curiosity led, the library provided answers.

I hesitate to go back to that temple of my childhood, now housing genealogy and local history, but I already have my card to the main library in a storefront down the block. The quarterly newsletter just arrived, alerting me to new books. Was it a sign that near the top of the list was Fergus Bordewich's The Great American Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas and the Compromise That Preserved the Union? When I see Fergus next week at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism reunion, I will remind him that Douglas and Lincoln had a go at it right here in Alton in the 1858 Senate race, which Lincoln lost.

But now to the Hayner Library website. I just got an email alerting me that an e-copy of Massie’s Catherine the Great is ready to download to my Kindle. Maybe de Miranda is mentioned.

TRUCKS DON'T GO TO THE MIDWEST

That sporty little Honda my son Nicholas is passing on to me still sits in the front yard in Key Biscayne, FL, waiting pick up by an auto transport. It's stranded because two different brokers have tried to find it a ride to Illinois for three weeks and failed. In this cut-throat business, the second broker lured me away from the first by saying he had a driver in the area who would pick up the car last Monday, Tuesday at the latest. It's now Thursday at the latest, and Tyler just cut me off while I was holding on my daily call. He was quick enough to charge my AmX card with a $150 deposit a week ago today. Now I'm waiting to hear from the 1-Shot Express customer service man, who rather than put me on hold while dealing with another client, promised to call me back in 15-20 minutes. That was two hours ago.

Okay, so maybe it's the Snowbird Effect when it comes to moving cars north and south. Maybe there aren't any free spots as winter residents and tourists head home. But might there be if I were shipping from Miami to New York instead of into the Heartland?

That's a north/south question, but then there's my piano and boxes and boxes of my earthly possessions that were picked up two weeks ago tomorrow with delivery promised last week. Where are they on their westward journey? In a Moving Man warehouse up on 135th Street in Manhattan. Or so I hope. Brendon says no trucks headed this way by next Thursday when I'm headed back to NYC on business. Maybe after May 1, he ventures. It's been a rough moving season, he explains on my umpteenth call.

You're telling me! I had to go out yesterday and buy six pairs of shoes or go barefoot in Manhattan. On the bright side, it was an incredible sale at Von Maur, a family-owned department store founded by German immigrants in Davenport, Iowa, in 1872 and recently expanded an hour away from me near St. Louis. Ah, not just another Macy's.

PIONEER? NOT ME

I’d like to cast myself as a trendsetter, out there ahead of the curve, but I’m not the first down this path. Since buying the Alton apartment, I keep running into people who have come back after spending most of their adult years in places like Tahoe, Virginia Beach and – yes – New York City. For Penny Schmidt, whose father had been an art professor at Principia College 10 miles upriver, the impetus was 9/11. She shuttered her art gallery in mid-town Manhattan, encountering the same disbelief from her friends as I did mine, and sought sanctuary in Alton. In no time at all, she was a partner in the development of Mississippi Landing, Soho-style lofts in an early 20th century building with 12-foot ceilings, exposed brick and incredible river views.

When I interviewed her in 2007 for a New York Times story -- Residential Conversions Revitalize River Town, I was tempted to follow her lead. The sale of my Lincoln Towers studio apartment might have even bought me two luxury lofts! But once the article was completed, I went on to the next assignment, this one in Panama, and imaged what it would be like to live in one of those lovely old Canal Zone houses.

GOING HOME IT ISN'T

“Ah, you are going home,” nod my friends as though that could be the only explanation for trading New York after so many years for some unheard of destination west of the Hudson. But going home it isn’t. There’s nothing nostalgic about this decision to move to the historic Illinois river town where I grew up, no yearning for old comforts. If anything, it is a leap into the unknown, as much an adventure as anything else I’ve ever done. The leap surprised me as much as it did my friends. All I planned to do that January Sunday was a little recreational real estate shopping with my sister and niece, checking out an open house at Loretto Towers, a 19th century Catholic orphanage turned condo in the early 70s. For nearly a half-century in-between, the Sisters of the Precious Blood had operated a Girls' Home for unmarried "working girls" like my sixth-grade teacher Miss Christian. I had always wanted to see inside, but live there? Hardly.