October 22, 1941 — "Right"

On the Tuesday night the committees had told the city engineer to telephone the priorities division and find out, plainly, whether La Crosse could build its library without the job being interrupted by other demands on the same materials.

John H. Barth made the call. He had been the city's man on this since 1938, when the council authorized him to represent La Crosse in preparing and submitting its projects to the PWA — the applications that came back unopened in September 1939. He reached a Mr. Tackmier, now in charge of the Milwaukee office of the Office of Production Management, and explained the local situation in detail.

Then he asked the only question that mattered.

"Your answer is, then, we can go ahead on these conditions?" he asked.

"Right," was the answer.

Thirty-six years, seven months and nineteen days after a crate of two hundred and twenty-five books was set down in a drug store on Caledonia Street, somebody in Milwaukee said right.

The telephonic confirmation went to the committees the following evening, on October 23, 1941, in a written report, along with the bids.

In 1937 a committee of this same council traveled to Milwaukee to ask the federal government about a swimming pool, and came home to be told the library money was gone. In 1941 the city engineer telephoned the same city and got one word back.