I want to emphasize that this was a hardscrabble town, rich in natural beauty but short on ways to make a living. Then some regulars at movie night started a play-reading group. We began showing movies and having different members of the community lead a discussion afterward. Then some library patrons started a book group. Before long, our library had a preschool story hour cosponsored by Head Start. But, of course, once you put books into the hands of children, once you provide a warm, comfortable place to sit and read a newspaper or a magazine, once you put people in close proximity to each other, the story goes on and writes itself. If the story ended there, it would be inspiring-a box office hit, with Kevin Costner as Arnold Stevens. By year’s end, fifteen hundred people had library cards. We went through those in the next six months. Three weeks after we opened, we had to order five hundred more. There were around two thousand residents in the township’s six hamlets, and we expected that it would take a year before those five hundred cards had been handed out.
In anticipating opening our town’s first library, we had ordered five hundred library cards.
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