I camped a little early Thursday so I wouldn’t arrive in Osborne before its bike shop, Blue Hills Bikes, opened, which I presumed would not be until ten, and hopefully not later. I was lucky a bicycle shop popped up on my GPS out in small town Kansas, as I was in need of tires and tubes, and bike shops are almost as rare as bison. The tread was beginning to wear through on my rear Shawlbe tire and my front was approaching 5,000 miles and thinning too. Though my spate of flat tires wasn’t entirely due to the diminishing tread on my tires, it was a contributing factor for some of the tiny thorns of those bristly goat’s heads penetrating through.
I guessed right on the shop’s opening time, though my first thought when I arrived at its front step at 10:10 was that it was no more, as it’s sign was terribly faded and there was a closed sign in its window. It’s hours of operation, 10 to 5, were still posted on its front door and peering inside I could tell it was still in operation. Below its hours was the phone number of the owner with the note to call in an emergency. I jotted down the number hoping the librarian would be willing to give the owner a call.
I was so eager to go to the bike shop, I had gone to it even before checking on the town’s Carnegie. It now served as a research library with the new library next door. When I walked into the Carnegie, still wearing my helmet and clutching my handlebar bag and a water bottle, the librarian enthusiastically greeted me with “My husband owns the bike shop in town if you’re in need of anything.” That was as good of a greeting as I’ve received in any library.
“I just went by it and it wasn’t open.”
“Yes, he said he would be late, as he was going to trim his beard. It was down to here,” she gestured placing her hand in the middle of her throat. “He’s going camping this weekend with his youth cycling team and he wanted to tidy himself up. They have their first race of the season on trails in a state park.”
She was equally enthusiastic telling me about the Carnegie and presented me with two thick scrapbooks with every article that had been written about the library since it opened in 1913 and rededicated as a research library in 2001. The opening was a huge community event with a band and speeches and invocation from a reverend. The town newspaper said the reverend “touched a responsible chord in every heart and all joined him in his prayer for wisdom in using wisely the powerful tool placed there for the betterment of not only the present but coming generations.” The article also noted, “Miss Martha Hatfield never sang better.”
The transfer of books from the old library to the new was also a notable community event, a bucket brigade of high school students lined up between the two libraries passing books from one to another.
The library didn’t have the standard Carnegie portrait, but had another and also a montage of Carnegie photos as a 16 and 27 year old along with portraits of his mother and wife and a photo of his Scottish home before his family moved to Pittsburgh when he was 13.
When I ventured to the bike shop the owner was there with a neatly trimmed beard. He was as friendly and talkative as his wife. He was such a likable fellow that this town of 1,300 had made him its mayor when he accidentally, he said, raised his hand when serving on the town council and they were trying to decide who should next be mayor. He said the secret to his success was knowing that there are three kinds of people—doers, those who with a little impetus can be made into doers and those who bitch about everything. He has learned to pay as little attention as possible to those who bitch and try not to antagonize them.
He didn’t have exactly what I wanted, but I made do with a 700X28 folding tire for my rear and a 700X25 wire beaded tire for my front. He provided me with a bowl of water so I could check on my three spares. One was fine, one showed two more pin prick holes and the third had a puncture by the valve, which rendered it kaput.
As I swapped out my tires on the sidewalk in front of his tiny shop he kept up a conversation telling me about starting his shop at the instigation of his wife who thought he needed more space for doing bike repairs than their garage. His customers come from over a hundred miles away. He had a map of Kansas inside the door of his shop with pins in towns all over the state of his clientele. He gave me a trick for forcing my front tire on without using tire irons pushing in on the tire starting a few inches away from the final insertion. I always thought it took stronger wrists than I had, but that wasn’t entirely true. We used his compression tank to inflate the tires, much easier than a floor pump or my mini-hand pump. He told me if I didn’t have a gauge to determine the pressure in my tires when I was using my mini, I’d know they were up to 70 or 80 pounds when my eyes started popping out. That’s about right.
He, like a gentleman at the library, recommended a couple of county roads to the next Carnegie in Downs, just twelve miles away, both saying it was flatter than state highway 24 I had been riding since Goodland and would also have considerably less traffic. I was enjoying a strong tailwind and was eager to take full advantage of it but the talkative husband and wife kept me in Osborne for three hours, when I had hoped to keep it to less than half that, and it would have been twice as long if I had allowed it or if there had been a headwind I didn’t want to get back into.
They were not unique, as the Downs librarian sat me down in a rocking chair alongside hers and gave me a thorough history of her library and much more. It preceded Osborne’s by eight years, even though it was a smaller town, as it was a railroad town. It’s town newspaper also hailed the arrival of a library declaring, “There are few things, aside from the churches, that tend toward the moral growth of a city more than a good library.”
The library had the standard Carnegie portrait by the circulation desk and a portrait of the town’s first librarian, Mrs. Chatty Allen, over the fireplace. Her nickname could have applied to quite a few people I’ve met in Kansas, including the woman beside me. The Chatty over the fireplace was also known as Miss Lavender, as that was her favorite color. She was a charismatic figure. The present librarian is a member of a group called The Legends putting on performances celebrating significant figures in the area’s history. Chatty is among their subjects.
The present librarian follows a family tradition. Her sister was the town librarian and also her daughter. Usually daughters succeed mothers, but in this case it was the opposite. She was working as a dental assistant when her daughter left town and convinced her mother to take up her position, which she gladly did. Among her many innovations have been teas and also a “Reader Feeder,” such as a bird feeder, putting out books on the two benches in front of the library for people to take.
One of the biggest changes since she began her tenure has been the popularity of DVDs. When she started they took up a small shelf. Now they fill a whole wall of shelves facing a collection of pie tins that can be checked out. Hardly anyone uses the pie tins any more.
The Osborne and Downs Carnegies were part of a string of three Carnegies all on state route 24 that began the day before in Stockton. I didn’t arrive to it until just before closing so there was no time for conversation with its librarians, as there were two on hand in this library. Unlike the Carnegies in Osborne and Downs it had an addition that now provided the entrance to the library. The Carnegie portion was now used merely for meetings and small gatherings. It had pretty much been cleared out, though the Carnegie portrait remained. The most notable feature of the library was the bison out front.
Janina and I will have to make 24 our route to or back from Telluride later this year, not only to drop in on Gary in Edson and to revisit these Carnegies and the bike shop, but for several other attractions, including the world’s largest ball of twine and the Cottonwood Ranch, an exceptional state park of an early homesteader and also the town of Nicodemus, a post Civil War settlement of Blacks, that is now a National Park and still home of 24 residents, mostly Blacks.
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