July 1941 — The man who would not vote

Thursday, July 3 — four options

The committee went away and came back three weeks later with the options formally in hand, and the fourth site back on the list.

On the evening of Thursday, July 3, 1941, a special committee sat at city hall and empowered the grounds and buildings committee to take options on four possible sites for the north side branch: Gillette and Kane; Sill and Avon; George and Sill; and the three remaining houses in the Logan school block.

Gysbert Van Steenwyk spoke for the trustees. The board had already looked at Gillette and Kane and at Sill and Avon, and approved both. What the board did not want was the Logan school grounds. Libraries built next to schools, he said, had worked to the disadvantage of the library in other communities. They were dirtier, and they were noisier.

Jack Buchel, speaking for the citizens library committee, asked the council to build at both branch centers and to build adequately for the future; the plans the council had already approved satisfied both the trustees and the citizens.

The money had moved against them while they argued. When the plans were drawn in 1937-38 the estimate had been $43,092.57 a library. Construction costs had since risen fifteen percent, which put each building at about $49,000.

Then the two men who had been at this longer than anyone stood up. The Rev. H. R. Kinley begged the council, in a humorous manner, to get busy on the libraries, for they were badly needed. Prof. H. G. Hayden said there was great possibility for library work on the north side: almost three hundred books a day had gone out of the branch the previous year, and with a north side population of twelve thousand the figure was swiftly mounting.

Kinley and Hayden had been appointed to look into the north side library in 1933. It was now July 1941, and they were still standing in front of the council asking.

Mayor J. J. Verchota reminded the aldermen that in his inaugural address, not two months earlier, he had urged them to build the branch libraries that year, and recommended immediate action.

And then the City Attorney, Fred E. Steele, explained why the north side could not simply be given its building. The litigation over the south side branch site at 16th and Farnum streets might run another six to nine months, and until it was settled satisfactorily the city could not take possession.

Warren Smith moved that options be taken on the first three sites. Kempter, who had lost this argument in 1938, lost it again at the library board's hands in July, and was still not finished with it, secured a second motion to take an option on the Logan school block as well.

Tuesday, July 8 — a rising vote

Five days later the committees met again, and James Durland moved again that the city buy the Briebach property at Gillette and Kane for five thousand dollars. This time they took it as a rising vote — the aldermen standing to be counted, where no tabulation could go wrong.

It tied anyway.

Franklin Pamperin refused to vote. He had been absent ill on the thirteenth of June, when his missing vote had made the first tie, and he said now that he was not in a position to vote without further knowledge of the sites.

Twice in four weeks the north side's library came down to one man, and twice that man was Franklin Pamperin — once because he was ill, and once because he would not say.

Selection was held over again, to the Friday night council meeting.