Editor’s note: Mel Allen, longtime Yankee editor and author of “Here in New England, Unforgettable stories of people, places, and memories that connect us all,” gave the following presentation at an event hosted by the 1833 Society at the Peterborough Town Library on Oct. 7. The event was held to thank the nearly 1,000 donors and supporters of the 2021 renovation and Peterborough Town Library Endowment Fund.
Mel Allen shares his words:
I want to thank Corinne (Chronopoulos, Peterborough Town Library director) and the staff of this wonderful library for the invitation to speak to you this evening.
And I want to thank all of you here and the hundreds of donors who are with us in spirit—because without all of you this lovely library we meet in now would likely not have happened—at least not now and not like this.
I have thought a lot about libraries these past few days as I was preparing this talk and it occurred to me that no other place I have ever known offers what a library does. It is a unique concept to unto itself.
Not only books and magazines and newspapers and all sorts of digital material–really any information of any kind you can ever want lives somewhere here—but also meeting places for almost any club and interest group you can imagine.
Want a talk on UFOs. Got it.
A sing-a- long—Coming soon.
I imagine if any group can come up with a good idea for an event, Corinne will likely find a spot.
There are days when I walk into the main room, and I see every computer used—all ages. Sometimes school kids all clustered close, like birds on a wire, playing computer games quietly—just being together.
There is a man I know who comes in often to use the computer to see the play list from a recent Bob Dylan concert.
I realize as a society many have moved on from print—from the sheer tactile happy feeling of holding a printed page in our hand—but as someone whose entire life has been about the print on a page, I am grateful that libraries remain the keeper of that flame.
One week on the shelves, I see a highlighted theme of football when the football season began—several books on Bill Belichick among them.
A week or so later, on the same shelves, I now saw books with the theme of love and forgiveness. A follow-up only a librarian can create.
I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that no building holds as many opportunities for people to find what they want than a library.
If we were starting civilization from scratch and wanted a place where people could converge and feel a sense of community, which is essential, I think to most of us, I think we would need to imagine a library.
And here is one more analogy.
Imagine this. You go into a store, maybe a bakery, maybe a shoe store. Any store. And you ask if they have a special kind of croissant you read about, or a certain style of shoe, or a certain style of clothing. Or you go to a hardware store in search of a tool.
Whatever you are hoping to find.
The shopkeeper says, sorry, we don’t have it, but we will check around at every bakery or shoe store or clothing store or hardware store in New Hampshire—and we will let you know when it arrives.
And when it does, just come and pick it up.
And it is all free.
Because, well that is just the way it is.
In the library universe, we call it Interlibrary loan. And New Hampshire libraries will do their best to find what you are looking for if our Peterborough library does not have it.
And we sort of take it for granted. But when you think about it, this is a wonder.
And there is also this:
The library is ours. It belongs to us. In a country now where we feel hopelessly divided between the other—whoever the other may be—the library knows no other—only us. All of us belong.
That is one of the most beautiful things about a library and I feel lucky I call this one home.
I came to Yankee in October 1979, 46 years this week—and I have had numerous commutes—none longer than 15 minutes. All on pretty country roads.
All of my drive to work days would be the envy of anyone who endures the everyday struggle with traffic while worrying about being late to work, only to know the exact same struggle, and soul killing hour or more on the way home.
Now I have my favorite commute: on foot.
A five-minute walk south on Concord Street, past a few churches, and I am at the door, almost always when the library opens at 10. Then I walk home at 1 o’clock.
We have had this long-extended summer so Annie and I still jump into Cunningham Pond for what people might call an “invigorating” swim.
Then I return a bit after 2:00 and usually stay until Rory or another staffer closes up.
I tell people my office now holds over 24,000 books, it is neat, uncluttered.
Not like mine at Yankee was, so piled with stuff it became a stop on any visitor tour with Yankee’s President, Jamie Trowbridge. He’d pause in the doorway, almost afraid to step inside. He’d assure the visitor that “Mel knows where everything is.”
And I never let on that in fact I did not.
Here at the library, I set up in the sunlit “quiet” area. I have gotten to know some of the “regulars” who also use the quiet room. We nod in greeting, and we all settle in to work.
I know one man is researching his family genealogy; another is writing a memoir to one day leave to his grandchildren to learn about his life; a young woman is taking college classes, and I see her work spilled out across the table.
I have read that people do not come to libraries anymore to just “read.” Well one young man, I think early 20s, sits many days for several hours at the table adjacent to where I usually sit.
In his hand is a book. A really thick book. And then he simply reads, head down, not a sound or restless movement. He comes to read in a quiet place. His place.
The newspapers are stacked neatly against the brick wall between the Kelly Room and the Staff Room. I see the same folks who come in, take a Ledger-Transcript or the New
York Times, or the Wall Street Journal and they bring them to a comfy deep chair and simply read.
On Wednesdays by noon, the quiet room tends to see a few more faces. This is when Tim Brezovec, the town’s I.T. specialist arrives and patiently works his way down a sign up list, as a line of let us say folks born at a time when we did not grow up with computers and smart phones, ask him to rescue them from some perplexing computer snafu—and he always does, patiently, one person at a time.
And I am usually at the top of his Wednesday list.
For me it has become the perfect office. And in our town, if I need an afternoon pickup, I simply cross the street to Roy’s Market where it seems everyone knows your name. Who could want more?
Susan Orlean is one of our most gifted writers. I always include some of her stories when I teach my MFA in nonfiction class. In her 2018 book titled “The Library Book,” she writes about the Los Angeles Public Library: She calls it “A place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.”
The writer and historian, Ann Fabian, reviewed “The Library Book.” And she wrote: “There is a promise in ‘The Library Book.’ All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here is my story, please listen; here I am, please tell me your story.”
Recently I was interviewed by Portland, Maine’s most popular TV show, “207.” The show’s host, Rob Caldwell, said that Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, one of the most important TV news shows of our lifetime, once was asked what was the key to the show’s success. He replied in 4 words: “Tell me a story.”
So that is what I want to do this evening. Tell a story about libraries and me—but I am certain many of my memories and ties to libraries will be ones you will also know as your own.
Right now I am in the midst of something completely new to me: a book tour. And at the start of each talk, I tell the audience that I would not be here with my book if it were not for Yankee—because all the stories come from my decades of writing there.
But here I am going back further.
I would not be here tonight to talk to you without libraries.
Many of my best early memories come from inside a library. And they never stopped for the rest of my life.
From age 4 to almost 12 I went to Friends School, a small Quaker school in West Chester, Pennsylvania. A town of about 15,000 people 25 miles west of Philadelphia.
From first grade on, we went every Wednesday to the public library. It was a 19th-century stone and brick building just across one street from the school.
We lined up with a teacher in front and followed like ducklings across the street and up the path and waited outside for just a moment. The library had a tower that seemed to soar into the sky and then we entered one by one into what I remember feeling was a world of wonder.
I was a precocious reader—always at least a grade ahead in school and eager to leap into the rooms filled with books. By second grade each Wednesday I loaded up an armful of books and could not wait to get home.
The librarian would see me come in and say— (not a surprise to anyone here who has seen me walking in town) “Oh here comes bouncy.”
I wish I remembered her name. I called the West Chester library this week and spoke to the director. I am sure it was one of the more unexpected calls she has received—a man calling from New Hampshire asking if she could find the name of the friendly librarian from the
1950s. She could not.
But here is what I do remember. The feeling of climbing stairs to enter the magical world of the stacks, filled with the odor of old books, even if they are filled with the new. I think the spirits of old books stay on somehow.
And who will forget the thrill of the first library card? The rite of passage that to an 8-year-old boy, was the greatest thrill, not to be surpassed until eight years later with a driver’s license.
And do you remember when you signed the books out? There in the sleeve on the back was the card that showed who had taken it out before you and when, and there was the signature to prove it. And at the end you now wrote your own.
The librarian friend encouraged me, pointing out books to captivate me. They set in motion a curiosity about the world that has led me on the path to become the writer I wanted to be.
These days when we are young and discover the promise of libraries are among those shared memories that connect us.
Here is how my dear friend, the wonderful writer, Edie Clark, Yankee’s much-loved columnist who died last summer once wrote about her childhood library: “This early experience exposed me not only to books but to a feeling of flight. My mother always left me off at the entrance to the children’s room. I was about 9 or 10 at the time and I would walk right past the children’s room into the so, for a few wonderful hours, I was on my own in a huge building full of books, which in itself gave me a sense of freedom but, I also learned that the books that rested on those mahogany shelves could take me just about anywhere.”
We all feel what she means: Could and still can take us just about anywhere.
I wonder if any of you read “The Shy Steasaurus of Cricket Creek”?
Or the baseball books of John R. Tunis who wove social justice and human dilemmas into his stories.
She led me to the Bobbs Merrill series of “Childhood of Famous American Series;” there were over 100 titles. Probably as much fiction as history, but I devoured them. Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, and so many others. I read every one of those small orange books.
And then there was one: “Ernie Pyle: Boy From Back Home.”
He became my first true writing idol.
I carried Ernie Pyle’s words through junior high and high school, certain I was destined to be a war correspondent, then in college I found his early writing, the columns he wrote for years while he traveled the country in an old Ford, finding stories that lay hidden with unknown people and places.
They were collected in a book called “Home Country.”
When I read that, I knew that is what I want to do. And that is what I was able to do for my life at Yankee.
I began my professional writing life in Portland, Maine as a freelance writer mostly for the Maine Sunday Telegram. During that time, I practically lived at the library poring through old magazines, searching for new story ideas. This is in the day when the titles of all major
magazine stories each year were bound into a single book: “The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature.”
The thick book that held the stories of an entire year became my indispensable window for researching stories.
That is where I first found Yankee in 1975.
Now fast forward oh, let’s say 50 years. It is February 2025. I have been retired for two weeks. Steve Lewers, who owns Earth Sky & Water, a company based in Wilton which sells beautiful nature cards and folding nature guides in bookstores everywhere, has heard me give a talk about my life at Yankee and thinks the stories could be a book.
He comes from the book world at Houghton Mifflin years ago, but does not publish books. Mine would be his one and only.
I am at Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort. The biggest in North America. It is an annual ski trip I take with my two grown sons who live far away. Once a year we meet. On this trip every morning I walk to the ski lift with them at 8 a.m.
Then.
Well then I take a backpack full of index cards and a big stack of printouts of my stories, and I go the library in the village and until the lifts close 6 hours later, I work on a book. Every day, until we pack up and I go home. Not once do my skis touch snow.
And the book is published.
And now and in the months ahead, nearly all my talks are going to be in libraries. The people who come to my talks there love their local library, and they want to hear stories. Because libraries, more than any place I know, are the keepers of stories, of our memories, and when so many institutions are under attack today, libraries are our defenders too.
No place in our town, or any town or city, deserves to be cared for and supported more than the public library. We must be their guardians, just as they are ours.
Thank you for being here tonight to support this wonderful library.
Mel Allen’s book, “Here in New England, Unforgettable stories of people, places, and memories that connect us all,” is available at Toadstool and wherever you buy your books.
For Mel’s upcoming event: https://ledgertranscript.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=98934&action=edit