The old library was nice, but new one looks
great
A number
of years ago, I wrote an editorial for the Moore County newspaper
I was working for at the time critical of the Southern Pines Town
Council’s plan to build a new library.
More out
of a youthful desire just to be contrary than from any heartfelt
stance, I gently expressed the point of view that while a new,
bigger library would be nice, the old library was just fine.
The mayor
took me to task for this, especially a line I wrote saying the old
library was good for, among other things, "doing a little
research." A little research, the mayor countered, was precisely
all you could do in the cramped, inadequate old facility.
After the
mayor himself gave me a guided tour and pointed out – at nearly
every turn — exactly why a new library was needed, I wrote a
follow-up editorial to say the mayor was right, because he was.
I took
from the experience an important lesson: no matter how attached I
may be personally to a building, nostalgia for a piece of
architecture isn’t necessarily the best basis for an argument
against progress.
Which
brings me to another new library.
Soon, the
new Chatham Community Library will open, replacing the much
smaller Pittsboro Memorial Library.
In no way
am I critical of the new library. Though I haven’t seen the inside
of it yet, I’ve heard it’s a wonderful new facility and the
photographs I’ve seen only reinforce this.
And even
if I was inclined to write a piece, as I did years ago in Southern
Pines, critical of this new facility, I don’t know how I’d manage
to do so since it’s obvious to anyone who has used the old
Pittsboro library in recent years that it simply is no longer
sufficient to meet contemporary needs.
But as
patrons prepare to begin using this nice new library and as
library staff make the switch (Pittsboro is temporarily without a
library now through September 12 while the switch is made) I’ve
got a nostalgic library itch I’d like to scratch one more time.
Simply
put, I love the old Pittsboro library, a facility I’ve used and
enjoyed for many years beginning in the mid-Seventies when my
father took me and my siblings there on a handful of summer
evenings to watch the free movie screenings they had there at the
time.
I don’t
know if libraries do that sort of thing anymore, but between the
library in Chapel Hill (which has also since been replaced by a
bigger one) and the one in Pittsboro, I got a decent education in
silver screen classics. I’ll never forget seeing the eerie silent
film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" projected onto a small movie
screen in Pittsboro. It was a fun night.
I
mentioned this a few years ago to librarian Pat Rounds and she
pointed to the wall to show that the screen, so many years later,
was still there, which I thought was cool.
A couple
of decades later when I came to work in Chatham County, the
Pittsboro library was like an old friend and, being new to the
area, I naturally gravitated to it.
The
library quickly became a hangout for me. It’s where I went when I
needed to get out of the office for a while. I made friends there.
I read the daily newspapers there. It was there I caught up with
the crazy doings of the rich and famous through my weekly People
magazine fix.
I checked
out many books there and there’s no telling how many books I
bought there during the twice-yearly book sales conducted by the
library’s very dedicated Friends group. But even those book sales
outgrew the small facility and have long since been conducted in
the Pittsboro Kiwanis Building.
Those
dedicated Friends, by the way, were enormously helpful in getting
a new library built, raising more than $700,000 for the new
building.
I could go
on, but the point is that the old library has served us well all
these years.
But things – libraries
included – change, which is as it should be, and I’ll be among
those welcoming the new library when its official ribbon cutting
is conducted at 5 p.m. on Monday, September 20.
Movin' Around
by Bob
Wachs
|
I wrote a
story last week about the walkout of employees at Hill Forest Rest
Home in Bear Creek and the subsequent removal of the residents by
the Department of Social Services.
I drove to
the facility last Monday to check the story out, not knowing what
to expect when I got there. But what I didn’t expect was what I
found when I walked into the building, which is set at the top of
a long driveway off northbound US 421.
The best
way to describe what the home looked like inside is an abandoned
elementary school, dingy and cheerless. It was not a place I’d
want to spend an afternoon, much less live in.
The next
day, I learned that the owner, Warren Gold of Rocky Mount, had had
his license to run the facility revoked in March.
My
immediate thought: why was the rest home still in operation?
The answer
is because Gold has appealed the decision to revoke his license
and, as explained to me by the director of Chatham County
Department of Social Services, when a business is in appeal status
to keep a license, "everything must be kept the same until the
appeal is heard and there’s a decision at the appellate level."
So despite
the license being officially revoked, Hill Forest remained open.
This makes
no sense to me. A business owner certainly has the right to appeal
a decision to have his license revoked, but why does he also have
the right to maintain his business despite the decision to shut
him down?
The North
Carolina Department of Health and Human Services sent Gold a
letter detailing the reasons for the license revocation, with more
than 50 pages describing both the way a rest home should be and
the violations noted at Hill Forest.
Just a few
of the issues with Hill Forest that resulted in the revocation of
the license: lack of privacy in the bathrooms; ant poison stored
in the food pantry; thick buildup of dirt on all floors in the
facility; mold and mildew covering the floor of the shower and
roaches and other bugs crawling freely throughout.
Since
March, this facility has been allowed to remain open and people
have lived and worked in this environment for the five months
since.
It’s bad
enough this is the case with one facility. But there could be and
probably are others operating under similar circumstances.
Many of
the now-former residents of Hill Forest are mentally disabled and
were unable to stand up for themselves and many, likewise, have no
families to stand up for them.
As a
community, we need to take care of those who cannot help
themselves, and the appeals process doesn’t seem to allow this to
happen in the timely way it should.
The silver
lining in this case may be that, while it will be a hard
adjustment for the former residents to make, they have been moved,
hopefully to better places to live.
