Liz Allen: What price can we put on our public library's Erie values and heritage?

I fell in love with public libraries at an early age. My passion has never flagged.

Libraries have shaped me as a reader, reporter and newspaper columnist.

That's why the current furor over Erie County Council's decision to lease space to Gannon University at Blasco Library and Erie County Executive Brenton Davis' determination to cut 12 library jobs has me worried about the future of the Erie public library system.

I'm fortunate that my parents introduced me to the immense joys and practical benefits of having a library card at an early age.

In first grade, my mom took me to the library at Perry Square to get my library card and I checked out "Gulliver's Travels." I was too young to appreciate the bite of Jonathan Swift's satire but I liked the illustrations.

By fourth grade, I had discovered that in addition to storybooks, including Newbery Medal winners, the library had a reference section with city directories.

I'm guessing that my dad introduced me to the utility of city directories, based on what I wrote in the front page of his new "Saint Joseph Sunday Missal," a Christmas gift from my mom in 1960. If he ever lost that prayer book, I wrote, the finder should "look up Daddy's name in the city directy." (Yes, I misspelled "directory," but I was only 9.)

That same year, I also became a diehard baseball fan after I bet a kid down the street a dime that the Pittsburgh Pirates would beat the New York Yankees in the World Series.

Still, it wasn't until 1966 that I grasped that baseball is a cerebral game. I attribute this insight to the downtown library, which is where I borrowed "The Glory of Their Times. The Story of the Early Days Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It," by Lawrence S. Ritter.

I suspect that golfers also consider their sport a brainy game and I was touched when my friends John and Judy Guerriero donated a golf novel, "The Rub of the Green," to the Erie County Public Library in my late husband's name after Pat died in 1994.

But I don't fret about our library's future for personal reasons. I have the resources to buy books, download them to my Kindle, stream movies and use Wi-Fi on my phone and laptop.

Many others don't have that luxury, including those who are poor, the immigrants who come to Blasco to practice their English and library patrons in the city and rural areas who rely on the Bookmobile to borrow new DVDs, best sellers, children's audiobooks, Wi-Fi hot spots and puzzles, according to erielibrary.org/calendar.

Bookmobile stops in December include senior housing complexes, the Pennsylvania Soldiers' & Sailors' Home, Grover Cleveland School, Summit Heights Mobile Home Park, the Wattsburg Volunteer Fire Department and the Federated Church of East Springfield, to name a few.

You may wonder how squeezing out space at Blasco for Gannon's new Great Lakes Center for Research & Education could possibly affect patrons who use the branches, the Bookmobile or the six independent libraries in Erie County.

Gannon representatives and the five county council members who approved the 25-year lease have asserted that Gannon's facility won't hurt public access. But because the vote was rushed, without any public listening sessions, other than the night when council voted, many questions linger about how far-ranging Gannon's footprint will be at Blasco and what the ripple effect might be in Davis' plan for job cuts is approved.

I saw a number of red flags at the Oct. 17 meeting where county council OK'd the Gannon lease. Councilman Tom Spagel, District 3, said he had toured the library with his colleagues to view Gannon's plan but otherwise, he hadn't been to the library since his children were little, he said. "There’s plenty of space," he insisted.

One tour doesn't make you an expert on how the library is used.

More worrisome is what Doug Smith, Erie County's director of administration, said about the future vision for the library. "Physical space will be less important than electronic data," Smith predicted.

Smith glossed over the fact that public libraries, including Erie's, offer many more services to patrons than hard-cover books. From my two terms on the Erie Library Advisory Board, I know that e-books aren't cheap; licenses from publishers expire and must be renewed. Does Smith have a projected budget in mind for those costs, especially when Davis, his boss, wants to slash library jobs to save money?

But I object to the Gannon lease not just because it allows a private institution to encroach on public space. Rather, letting this lease go forward sends a message that elected politicians don't care that our public library tells a story itself about our Erie values and heritage.

Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire and a friend from j-school, enlightened me in that regard when he commented on a photo I posted on Facebook from a quote engraved at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library in North Carolina, which I visited on vacation. "Without libraries, what do we have? We have no past and no future," reads the quote from Ray Bradbury, author of "Fahrenheit 451."

The local library is "my first stop whenever I go on the road for a story," Charlie wrote. "I haunt the local history sections for details that will help me kick open interviews. Once, I spent an entire afternoon in the library in Warroad, Minnesota, reading about the town's legendary hockey history in front of a roaring fire in a huge stone fireplace. It was snowing just enough outside to create a zone of peace so thick I could wrap myself in it."

More: Brenton Davis wants to eliminate Human Relations Commission, library staff. Is it legal?

In July 2001, I wrote a column about an Erie man who visited his wife at a nursing home to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. She had dementia and I wanted to know more about that, so I read Charlie's book, "Hard to Forget: An Alzheimer's Story," about his father's dementia, his mother's inability to cope with it, his fear about inheriting the disease and scientific advances to prevent or beat the disease.

Naturally, I borrowed the book from the Erie County Library.

Liz Allen, a retired Erie Times-News Sunday columnist, is a freelance writer whose work includes writing for Emmaus Ministries. 

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Liz Allen: What price can we put on the library's Erie heritage?