When I was president of the Downtown Lock Haven Rotary, my signature project was to create a system of Little Red Libraries for the Lock Haven community. Literacy has been a huge part of my entire life. I was a kid who regularly visited the bookmobile and local library as well as the school library where I grew up. I was always reading a book any time I had a spare moment in my busy spiritual, academic and athletic life.

The Downtown Lock Haven Rotary Club provided the money and then found a builder for the little libraries. Tom Brown and Sons accepted the assignment and built two of them based on a little red schoolhouse given to my mom years ago by one of her students. I created the interior design. I was so excited to see the first two built, set up and filled with books!

For the next few years, we added two more each year until we got to a total of eight. Tom Brown kindly donated his time to build all eight and set them up with help from the city. Woodward Township had a hand in the one in Riverview Park.

I was so excited to see my dream come true so that the people of Lock Haven could have access to books any time of the day and children could read the books and build their own libaries at home. Children who have their own libraries or access to books do become better readers and students. As a Reading Specialist, I always asked each student if they had their own books or libraries at home. I later asked my first graders the same question, as I did with the many students I taught in the summers at LHU.

Things were going so well at each of the Little Red Libraries. People used them, and when I went around weekly to put more books in each one, people stopped and told me how much their whole family appreciated them. The Little Red Libraries were heavily used during the pandemic. A woman from Renovo said she and her friends swapped books at the one in Hanna Park and the one in Triangle Park when they were in town. Other club members would also visit them to replenish the books. We had Little Red Library meetings when our club would split up and each group would cover a couple of the libraries, straightening them up and filling them with books. Then we’d meet up and have pizza afterwards while each library was discussed.

Things continued to go well, but then vandalism happened at the one in Hoberman Park. Each time the one at Hoberman was vandalized, it kept getting worse, until someone knocked the whole library to the ground using their vehicle. At that point, we decided not to put that library into service, as the city was about to redo the whole park.

Then the one at the Vesper Street beach entrance was vandalized by someone throwing all of the books on the levee and someone trying to break the plexiglass window. The little book building started to show signs of physical damage, until a group of wasps moved in. That was a good deterrent for vandalism but people couldn’t get books. Armed with spray and other, natural wasp repellent, we were “open for business” again.

Our book bliss ended when someone started to vandalize the Piper-Harmon Little Red Library. First a shingle or two were torn off the roof. Earlier this week it was reported to me that the plexiglass was removed from the door. The morning that I sat down to write this, it was reported that the door was missing and all of the shingles were gone.

Most clubs would just walk away after all of the vandalism, but not our club. We will fix the library as the need of the people in those areas for books is so strong. We haven’t replaced the library at Hoberman yet. We were waiting for construction to end. But now we may place that Little Library elsewhere, as another group has installed one there in the meantime.

What can you do? It would be nice to keep an eye on the one near your home. You don’t have to be like Mrs. Gladys Kravitz from the show “Bewitched”, but if you’d just check on them and let us know if the bookshelves need to be refilled or there’s been some vandalism, that would be very helpful. You can contact me at 814-571-5324 and leave a message during daytime or evening hours. (I take phone calls for a nonprofit that I’m the director of and don’t appreciate calls in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning, and I don’t know too many people who would like that either!)

You can put books in the libraries as well or call me if you have boxes of books to donate.

If we all work together, we can keep the magic of books alive for every member of our community. As you know it takes a village to raise a child, including one determined retired educator and her fellow Downtown Lock Haven Rotary Club members!

———-

Diahann G. Claghorn is Little Red Library chair of the Downtown Lock Haven Rotary Club, Area 3 Governor for Rotary District 7360 and a lifelong reader.