Last Word


by Billy Winn


Te Muscogee County Library


Foundation is honoring the late, long-time Columbus librarian Loretto Lamar Chappell by estab- lishing an endowment in her name. Te endowment will be used to purchase books and other much-needed materials and equipment for the library system.


It is an honor that is long overdue. For those readers who did not know Miss Loretto, as she


was universally known among her friends and disciples, she was the city’s librarian for 46 years, during which time this wisp of a lady introduced thousands of children, and not a few adults, to the pleasures of reading. Had she given each of us a sack full of gold, she could have done us no greater favor. Most of us fortunate enough to have known Miss Loretto,


with her inimitable whispery voice, were turned into read- ers and book lovers by her Saturday morning story hours at the old Carnegie Library, which fronted on the upper end of Broad. In 1950, when the Bradley-Turner family made it possible for the city to build a new public library on Wynn’s Hill, Miss Loretto became just as much of an institution at the new location. It was at one of these two libraries—the old one down-


town or the new one on Wynn’s Hill—that most of us first fell under her spell. For me, it began sometime in the 1940s in the old Carnegie Library, with its brick façade, wide, steep front steps and woody, light green interior. I don’t really recall any particular story Miss Chappell read to us, or rather told us, but I do remember how she spoke those stories in that magical voice, which seemed to originate from somewhere outside her body and which of necessity forced her listeners to lean toward her as she read or spoke, drawing us in just to hear what she was saying. To me, she was very much like one of the characters in the stories she read to us, as wispy of substance as she was of voice, a fairy creature compounded, or so it seemed to me, of light and air. Although I knew her outside the library—we went to the


same church—I still remember her as she was in those early days, a sort of story sprite, looking for all the world as if she had stepped from the pages of Sir Thomas Malory’s tales of King Arthur or one of William Butler Yates Celtic folk sto- ries. I was so captivated by her personality and appearance that I once took her not one apple but two, an act she recalled to me many years later shortly before she died in 1987. In my younger years, any time I went to the Bradley Memo-


rial Library, it seems that books would magically appear on the table where I sat reading. It was as if they materialized out of thin air. I would be whiling away the time reading some adolescent tale of action and adventure—maybe one of Zane


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Grey’s westerns or the zillionth Hardy Boys book I read—and suddenly I would look up to find at my elbow Te Adventures of Tom Sawyer or maybe even Huckleberry Finn. Later when I was a bit older and was weaning myself from an obsession with Walter Farley’s horse stories or the grimly violent mys- tery novels of Mickey Spillane, some light-fingered individ- ual had placed by my elbow a copy of Albert Schweitzer’s Out of My Life and Tought and Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, both books that changed my life. Yet neither Miss Loretto nor any other librarian was to be seen. Somebody put those books there, however, because I was


still far too callow a youth to have pulled them off the shelves myself. This kind of thing happened so often I began to sus- pect the library was haunted by a book fairy, hiding amid the stacks and itching for the chance to improve my reading hab- its. I have heard other people in Columbus speak of a similar experience, and they all point to Miss Loretto as the culprit. So pronounced was this feeling for me that many years later,


I would be wandering the stacks in some faraway library— in Washington, D.C. or New York or New Orleans—search- ing for something worth reading, when my hand would be mysteriously drawn to a work by an author I knew nothing about. I discovered Zora Neale Hurston’s and John Henrik Clarke’s works this way. Again this sort of thing happened so often I began to suspect that Miss Chappell’s ghost really was looking over my shoulder, still surreptitiously guiding my hand. If it is true that we are often influenced by childhood expe-


riences we can only faintly recall, and by persons or even one person who appears at the right time in our life, and that that person’s influence becomes a sort of benevolent spirit that stays with us for a lifetime, then I think Miss Chappell had that effect on me and on many other children in this city. In passing on to us the love of reading and the reason to love reading—that it awakens the better angels of our natures and broadens our humanity—she left us a heritage that cannot be bought at any price or acquired in any other way. It must come through the human touch, the interaction with another caring human being who takes their time to show us a better path in life. For me, that person was Miss Chappell, and I have stood in


her debt for lo these many years. I know there are many, many persons who subscribe to


Columbus and the Valley magazine who are also in Miss Loretto’s debt. Let me urge you to help Muscogee County Library Foundation establish the Loretto Lamar Chappell Book Endowment by sending in a generous donation to the Community Foundation of the Chattahoochee Valley, 1340 13th Street, Columbus, 31901. In doing so, you may help some unknown child learn to love reading and thus continue Miss Loretto’s wonderful work. C


Columbus and the Valley August 2012


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