I’m a nerd, and proud of it
All of us bibliophiles owe a debt of gratitude to the robber baron who built libraries across the country.
God bless Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish industrialist and philanthropist whose generosity built more than 2,500 libraries in the U.S., Great Britain and Ireland.
Thanks to Mr. Carnegie, I was able to spend long, hot summer afternoons in the cool, domed Dodge City Public Library, located on the western Kansas prairie. My child’s body rarely traveled past the stockyard and feedlot at the edge of town, but my mind was free to explore foreign countries, spend a season with a Bedouin in the desert, or see the world through the eyes of a French madame. My goal was to read every book in that little library.
I’m not the only child of my generation whose eyes were opened and whose course was set because of trips to a local library built with the help of this diminutive Scottish industrialist (he was only 5-foot-3). Born poor in 1835 in the town of Dunfermline on Scotland’s Firth of Forth, Carnegie became one of the richest men in the world and eventually gave away the bulk of his wealth. A huge chunk went to build municipal libraries in big cities and also in small towns, many of them out on the Midwestern prairies.
