Jesse Stuart
(edited
from the much longer “Jesse Stuart, The Bookmobile, and Me”
which won the 2007 Emma Bell Miles Award for
Essay)
Come Saturday,
I will be speaking in Greenup County at the Library
District’s 40th
anniversary
celebration. They have invited me to talk, I think, because
I will. Greenup County, however, is a place I love, my home
for three decades. During those years, I served a term or
two as chairman of the Library’s Board of Trustees, a
position first held by the well-known Kentucky writer,
Jesse Stuart.
Truth told, I’ve been bumping into Stuart’s long shadow
most all my life. I would even say he changed the course of
my life – though I never spoke more than a dozen words to
him.
Straight out of college, I was offered a teaching position
at a high school just down the road from Stuart’s W Hollow.
In short order, I moved from Owen County and took up
residence in Jesse Stuart country.
When I came across one of Stuart’s stories anthologized in
our Harcourt & Brace textbook, I startled my sleepy
students with my excitement. How could I explain to them
that the inclusion of our neighbor in such a book had
knocked the breath out of this wanna-be writer? If Stuart
could write about his place, then maybe, just maybe, I
could too.
That same year, I stood in line in downtown Ashland to have
Jesse Stuart autograph a copy of his masterpiece,
The
Thread That
Runs So True. It chronicles
his first year of teaching, but I was too intimidated to
tell him that I, too, knew what it was like to be a young
teacher. I was so nervous, I could barely stammer that it
was a Father’s Day present. It was the only gift I ever
gave Daddy that made his eyes light up. Daddy earned his
living as a tobacco farmer, but he lived to read. I’ll
never forget his fondling the book, and saying in a quiet,
near reverent voice, “I’ve never owned a book signed by the
author before.”
I wish I’d had sense enough to write Jesse and tell him how
much Daddy loved that gift. From what I know now of
Stuart’s generosity, I think a friendship with my famous
neighbor could have been established. But I was too timid
to do that. He was old and famous; I was young and
insecure.
Then, last
summer, talking with longtime Greenup County librarian,
Dorothy Griffith, I learned that many believe Stuart
literally talked Kentucky’s modern bookmobile system into
existence. Again, I felt like I’d had the breath knocked
out of me.
One of the first of those funny looking mint green bread
trucks stuffed with books had sputtered to a stop in the
rocky parking lot of my country schoolhouse. Afterwards, I
was never the same. Maybe I would have gotten to college
anyway. But I can’t imagine that I would be the same person
without the hundreds – maybe thousands - of books I plucked
from the bookmobile’s shelves during my growing up years.
How had Jesse Stuart known I was hungry for books? There
simply weren’t any at New Columbus Grade School except for
our textbooks. The nearest library was fifteen, crooked
miles away, and no one I knew owned more than a few
volumes.
The world had navigated curvy, old Highway 330, then bumped
down graveled KY 607 to stop and pick me up for the ride.
Never mind that we had no cafeteria, no central heat, no
indoor toilet. With books – Jesse knew – we could go
anywhere.
While the bookmobile concept traces its roots to several
early efforts, former Kentucky State Librarian James Nelson
gives Jesse Stuart much of the credit for Kentucky’s modern
bookmobile system.
“There is no question,” Nelson writes, “that the real
genesis of the state’s famous fleet of bookmobiles occurred
at the organizational meeting of the Friends of Kentucky
Libraries in 1952. It was at this meeting that Kentucky
author Jessie Stuart made an inspirational speech about the
reading needs of rural families, and his comments got the
right people motivated in the way that movements need to
succeed.”
Louisville businessman, Harry Schacter, president of the
Kaufman-Straus Department stores, was sitting in the
audience that September day when Stuart stepped to the
platform to speak. The contrast between Stuart’s rural
Kentucky and Louisville’s neo-European Seelbach Hotel could
not have been more stark. More significantly, the access to
books and education available to the children who populated
Stuart’s stories was vastly different than that enjoyed by
the privileged Kentuckians gathered in the Seelbach’s
gilded ballroom.
Unfortunately,
the text of Stuart’s speech that day has not survived. But
we know from newspaper accounts that he told his audience
80 percent of rural Kentuckians did not have assess to
library service – a situation shared by 60 percent
of all
Kentuckians. We
know that Stuart, the teacher, would have reminded his
audience of Kentucky’s shameful illiteracy rate. We know –
because this was Jesse Stuart – that he talked as if the
future of the state depended on what he said that day. We
know that when he finished speaking, Harry Schacter was an
inspired man. Jesse Stuart had set him on fire.
Schacter had both the means and the connections to move
mountains. In this case, he set about moving mountains of
books to the rural areas of Kentucky. Within less than two
years, over $300,000 dollars were raised to purchase
bookmobiles, and hundreds of thousands of books had been
donated. Eighty-four bookmobiles – reportedly they
stretched along the route for a solid mile – were presented
to the Library Extension Service at the State Fair in the
fall of 1954. One of those came to Owen County. Kentucky
has been the national leader in bookmobile service ever
since.
There’s a granite monument
dedicated to Jesse Stuart in the courthouse square in
Greenup. But the vibrant fleet of Kentucky bookmobiles is a
living memorial that will echo throughout all time, as
Jesse once wrote, “telling men’s hearts of the hearts of
men centuries dead.”
© 2009 Georgia Green Stamper