Sally's Story

​What am I most proud of? I think the fact that I was very instrumental in establishing a public library and little township where we lived this township that we moved to had five little village. Just collections of houses, 30 miles outside of Philadelphia. And there was no center of town really, except the elementary school and then the library right next door.

And then the township building across the street. So we were in the center of town and we felt that role strongly so that we tried to have community events there, sector and so forth, immediate community projects. Up until 1958. And we moved there in 1960. There had just been five little one-room schools in the township.

And in 1958, they put a consolidated elementary school in, but they say they sold off for the one room schoolhouses, but saved one, hoping that somebody day that would be a library. I had never lived where there wasn't a good library and it really bothered me that there was no library. And so I got involved right away and ended up being the librarian there for 20 years.

Once I started having children at that age, those days, you didn't work. As soon as my youngest child was Liz in preschool, then I was working in the library pretty much full. It made for quite a very involving job. Certainly, the thing that comes to mind fastest was the day I was training a volunteer because we always had a volunteer on the desk and this little one-room library had no running water.

I unlocked locked the door and we went in and the first thing we discovered was a mouse that had gotten trapped in the wastebasket. And we had to dispose of that. And then a little boy came in with his mother and threw up all over the children's corner and with no running water and quite to the school, getting, finding the janitor to get a bucket mop and clean it all up.

And I have to say that volunteer never came back when you were in a small, rural library, anything can happen. And so it's been fun to watch it now grow.