Loutit District Library has deep roots in the community we serve, and the stories you share with us about all the ways you use and are invested in your library move, inspire, and motivate us. You have told us how you use your library not only to borrow materials but to find employment, reconnect with long-lost friends and family, learn new skills and spend time with those you care about. Those stories should be told. One of our patrons wrote:
My mother loved to read and would regularly bring me to the library on Saturdays. She had a terminal lung disease, and I think reading helped her to cope and she encouraged me to read also. My mother has been gone for 40 years now, but I love to read and now bring my daughter to the library regularly. Thank you, Loutit Library, for the gift of books!
Click on Comment below to read what other library users had to say or to tell us how Loutit District Library has influenced your life. Share your memories, communicate its importance to you, your family, and our community! Your stories help us advocate for public library funding with elected officials and prove what an important asset the library is to the citizens of our service area. We want to hear from you!
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When I was young, I wasn’t a very good reader and didn’t like to use the library. I didn’t understand how to find books in the library and the quiet was intimidating. But my mom always read to me and I loved the books we brought home from the library. In high school, she helped me understand the card catalog. Mom always wanted to be a teacher or librarian but stayed home to raise four kids instead. Then I went away to college and took a part-time job in the library there and found that libraries weren’t so intimidating after all! I enjoyed helping people so much that I changed my major and decided to get a Master’s degree in library science. Now I’m a librarian, thanks to my mom and libraries everywhere.
In grade school I remember attending free movies at the library during the hot summer months. It was a magical place to find books. My friends and I used to get stern looks from the librarians for riding the elevator up and down. We also climbed the brick wall and messed with the crab apple trees. I guess I was one of the “kids from the hood”, but always felt as though the library was a welcoming place to be, better than home. It continued to be a peaceful refuge through my teenage years and into adulthood. Later, my own child found life long friends at the library teen programs and I was able to introduce her to some of the same books I had read there. Then she expanded her world of reading to discover her own favorite new authors. I like to think the library will be a favorite place for my grandchildren someday.
Growing up in a medium town our family had the convenience of a nearby library to find and research anything that was needed for homework..later, in my travels, I remember always knowing that libraries were places to rejuvenate our weary highway minds and check out the stacks for whatever may be the interest of the day. During the early seventies, while in Boulder, Colorado I remember being in the library, finding the Bob Dylan Song Book and copying down words and music for later ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’… (long before copy machines were so everywhere) and comforting works of literature. What a good memory of that library in those days; rather dark and tucked away at the heavy table you could spend hours and just read. Librarians not minding our long hair and bluejeans….. a great place to write letters to friends and family back home. Libraries were and still are a refuge of being for me. I will forever appreciate these buildings with what is in them and am also glad that others feel that way.
I grew up living only a few blocks from the library. At least three times a week I would walk to the library with my friends or my grandma, and come back with a large brown paper bag filled to the brim with books. I remember a shelf on books labeled “Third Grade Readers”, and thinking that I couldn’t wait to get into third grade to be able to read those books! The library has always been a refuge for me, and I loved that I could go and find books to read, records to listen to, and a whole new world was available to me, at no charge. I’m so glad that my children are now falling in love with the library, just like I did when I was younger.
I am so very grateful for the use of the library computers. As a struggling single parent, I was unable to repair my computer during a time I was writing my autobiography of poems. Nearly the entire book was typed and edited in your computer lab. Because of this great service, my book “A Scarlet Rain” is being published and slated for release in December. I couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.
Reima LaDell