[Publib] Whoopi is sitting at an OPAC in Bartonville, IL

[John]

Well, it's Friday afternoon, and I haven't contributed anything to this list for awhile (wife had major surgery; planning for a fall referendum heating up, etc.), but I would like to report that there is a woman who looks just like Whoopi Goldberg using one of our OPACs.  I want to go hide behind a pillar to get a better look, but that could present potential legal problems.

Meanwhile, on the Mel Gibson front...we still have an ALA "Read" poster with Mel on it.  About five years ago, when we began to weed out the posters, several women (I am not being sexist, but it really was women who wanted this) declared that if Mel Gibson and Sean Connery went, well...so might they.  So old Mel hangs on a wall in the staff work room behind the circ desk, separated from patrons by a mostly glass wall/window.  He is visible to people checking out materials.  At least two people, and perhaps more, have been highly offended that Mel is hanging out on our wall, given his (Mel's) indelicate--I'm trying to be nice here, give the guy the tiniest benefit of a teeny-weeny doubt--statements regarding the Hebrew people.  Somehow I'd not thought about that happening.  On the grounds of freedom of expression (ostensibly), Mel is staying, though I'm wondering if we shouldn't take him down for awhile.  The walls in the public restrooms are mostly bare....  Yet I do not want to arouse the wrath of female employees.  What to do, what to do...an administrator's lot is not an easy one (with a tip of the hat to Sir William S. Gilbert there).

And, finally, there's the restraint chair from the old Peoria State Hospital (closed circa 1972--it was in *Bartonville*, but it was the PSH...a sister-in-law reports that when she was a kid, her mother, when exasperated, would say, "If you don't stop driving me crazy, you'll send me to Bartonville," which my s-i-l didn't understand *until* she discovered what was *in* Bartonville) which we inherited from the State of IL.  We have a collection of PSH materials and documents related to a reforming director of the PSH, Dr. George Zeller, who thrived in the early 1900s.  I don't think we should be a museum, BUT the State gave us this restraint chair, complete with leather restraint bands in place.  I thought we should put it out with some identifying plaque, info, etc., though without letting people sit in it.  Turns out staff have been getting complaints from patrons because, to use my nine-year-old's language, it "creeps them out."  Well.  So much for history.  I see it as *unique*...*unusual*...but I suppose that to be anti-creepily-correct, we'll have to hide the chair.

Well, back to referendum planning.  Haven't raised the General Fund levy rate since 1975--I wasn't even in liberry school then--which seems like reason enough for the voters to say YES to our referendum question, but I'm having a new suit of armor commissioned, the better to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous taxpayers.

John D. Richmond, Director
Alpha Park Public Library District
3527 So. Airport Road
Bartonville, IL 61607-1799
Ph: (309) 697-3822, x. 12
Fax: (309) 697-9681
E-mail: jrichmond at alphapark.org
________________________________________________________________________
"The past is never dead.  It's not even past." 
Wm. Faulkner, REQUIEM FOR A NUN