Lawton, Oklahoma

 

With Cordell began a veritable avenue of Carnegies with four in a one hundred and sixteen mile stretch, the tightest bunch by far in Oklahoma.  Twice I’d had stretches of over one hundred miles between Carnegies.  And there would have been a fifth in this cluster if the town of Carnegie had fulfilled the requirements to earn a library. 

The community had hoped by renaming itself in 1903 as Carnegie that would suffice to earn itself a library, but it wasn’t, perhaps because it had a population of less than a thousand at the time.  It wasn’t the only town to rename itself to gain a Carnegie, as a town outside of Pittsburgh tried the same gambit, the birthplace of Mike Ditka, and succeeded. The name change may have caught Carnegie’s attention, but that wasn’t enough to win the town a library, as it was necessary to meet the strict guidelines Carnegie established for a grant, including passing a bond issue to maintain the library and to provide a piece of land for it near the town center. 

The Cordell Carnegie was now a historical society and museum.  The librarian at the library that replaced it said many suspect it is haunted, as windows were inexplicably found opened and books knocked off book shelves.  The ghost couldn’t possibly be a former librarian, she said, as no librarian would knock books off shelves, but it wss possible some disgruntled patron may have returned from the afterlife for some vengeance.  

She said there was a librarian in the 1940s, a Miss Annie Cardwell, who was a strict disciplinarian. People still talk about her, she said.  She once told a young mother cradling her child that she couldn't check out a book of romance saying it wasn’t appropriate for her.  She was also known to examine every returned book to see if any pages had been turned back.  Woe to the patron who checked the book out if she she found any.  She might have found the county jail just down the block from the Carnegie as just the place for such a person.  

Cordell with a population of just 2,700, less than a thousand more than when the Carnegie was built, was another town with a marijuana dispensary.  Many have clever names, but its could be the most catchy. 

The Hobart Carnegie, twenty-two miles south,  had an addition to its rear, so it could continue to serve as it was meant to, though the original entrance with 1912 and Carnegie Library above it was no longer in use.  There was no browsing on this day as it was closed for Valentine’s Day, evidently considering it a national holiday, as the door said it was closed on all national holidays, or else it was going along with the Cincinnati school board which announced a week ago that all schools would be closed on this day in anticipation of the Bengals winning the Super Bowl, a jinx if ever there was one.  

I fell twenty miles short of a three-library day, as a dastardly wind from the south stymied me from reaching Frederick, forty-eight miles to the south, until the next day. The wind continued even stronger for those final miles to Frederick the following day, which had me greatly regretting that I hadn't ridden further the evening before, as I uncharacteristically stopped riding before the sun had disappeared below the horizon. I was coming up on the town of Snyder as the sun made its final descent, and feared I might not get far enough beyond it before dark to find a place to camp, so seized upon an abandoned shed beside a cotton field as my campsite as I approached Snyder.  

There was a full-fledged abandoned farmhouse three miles down the road past Snyder that would have served me even better.  I was reduced to eight or nine miles per hour when I had been doing fifty percent better the night before.  When I got to within three miles of Frederick, I kept telling myself for the next twenty minutes that I would have been there already if I had kept riding the night before, another lesson not to quit riding when there’s still daylight, especially when there are limited amounts of it.

When I reached the Carnegie at ten it was thirty minutes until it opened.  If I had arrived twenty minutes earlier I would not have been inclined to wait for it to open, especially since one needed a password to use its Internet, so I had been wise to camp where I did after all.  I sat on its steps and added some chocolate milk I had just bought at a Dollar Store to the last of my shredded wheat.   Luckily the librarian showed up early at 10:15 and let me follow her in, though she had at first said she’d be opening in fifteen minutes.  I could have accepted that if she had given me the password to the WiFi , but she said she couldn’t give it to me until I had signed in.  

The last person on the sign-in sheet had been a week ago.  The password was Vermont14.  She had no explanation for it, as she said the head librarian was the one who chose it, which he regularly changed. 

The library had not been expanded and only minimally modernized, though a second rest room had been added in the basement and there was an elevator in the back for the handicapped.  The electric outlets were few.  There was a charging station, which I could use for my batteries, but I needed to intrude on a strip of outlets so I could charge and use my iPad at the same time.  I checked the weather to see if there had been any change in the prediction of a strong south wind all day.  That was still the case, which wasn’t all bad, as I was turning east from Frederick and angling a bit north to Lawton, forty-six miles away.

I wanted to reach Lawton with ample time for its Carnegie and also the first McDonalds in over a week.  There was still an occasional Walmart off in this sparsely settled region of Oklahoma, but not enough people for McDonalds to gain a foothold.  The afternoon temperatures had been in the 70s, warm enough for shorts, and I wanted to take advantage of the McDonalds self-service ice dispenser. I arrived by four, but it was the first McDonalds of these travels with drive-through only.  Fortunately the Taco Bell next door had inside-dining and also a self-serve ice dispenser, but no electric outlets for customers. 

Its Carnegie was now the town hall and the first of these travels with a corner entrance, Kirk’s favorite.  Carnegie Library remained on its facade over the new sign identifying it as the town hall.   A sign on the door gave directions to the new library a block away.  A plaque to the left of the entrance quoted Carlyle: The true university is a collection of books. 

Now it’s another long haul, ninety-eight miles, to the next and final Carnegie in Oklahoma in Ardmore.  Then it will be a quick forty-one miles to a Carnegie in Gainesville, Texas, one of five in the state that I have yet to visit.  I had previously  gotten to eight others in previous visits to the state.  Texas had thirty-three Carnegies, but has torn down twenty of them, by far the highest percentage of any state other than Nevada which razed its lone Carnegie in Reno.  So Texas, here I come.