The Overnight Library

The Overnight Library

Several years ago, a group of newcomers agreed over coffee at the Smokey Bear Restaurant in Capitan, N.M., that it was high time their town had a library.

“We decided to just do it,” says Richard Rumph, one of the organizers. The group put a notice in the paper asking for volunteers, and “people just showed up.” Rumph plunked down the rent on a building that once was the town laundromat, and within a month, the town of 1,443 people opened its first public library Aug. 19, 1996.

Rumph, a blacksmith who resembles Santa Claus with his white beard and generous girth, had helped start a library in Edgewood, a mountain community east of Albuquerque. So he knew from experience that establishing a Capitan library would be hard, but rewarding, work.

“We borrowed boards and cinder blocks from the lumber company for bookshelves,” he says. Soon volunteers were stocking the library with history books donated by the historical society and reference books donated by a university. The Ruidoso Public Library—25 miles away and the only other library in the county—donated a trailer-load of books.

Best-selling fiction quickly found its way to the library. “A day or two after the book would come out, we would find copies, already read, piled in front of the library door,” Rumph says.

As enthusiasm mounted, the library outgrew the old laundromat. By 1997, the grass-roots library board was in the market for a new building and working to raise the $165,000 needed to buy and furnish it. Again, help arrived when an anonymous patron donated the down payment on a 3,000 square-foot former residence. The Capitan Public Library moved into its new building in April 2001.

The tidy, gray stucco library with its silver tin roof includes an addition with generous windows opening to a lush yard fringed in yellow daisies. Children sit on wicker chairs reading under a shade tree. “I like the feeling that you can sit down and read and don’t have to be in a hurry,” says Charlotte Pawlak, 13, one of the wicker-chair readers.

The library depends upon donations and a variety of fund-raisers to help with the monthly mortgage. “We raised $1,400 on the Fourth of July selling books and hot dogs,” volunteer library director Pat Garrett says. “Plus, we do a lot of asking.”

Other funding is coming in now that the library is established. The Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation donated computers, while federal funding helps pay Internet costs. The library gets $150 a month from the town, $2,000 a year from the county, and $3,800 a year for books from the State Library of New Mexico.

Raymond Schrup, one of the first in the volunteer corps that now numbers 20, says the library is reward enough for the many who helped start it.

And it’s a reward for Capitan residents, too. Kelly Newell brings her 2-year-old son nearly every day. “When I moved away from my family, I thought I’d become a hermit. But I wanted Christian to be with other children, so we come to the library,’’ Newell says.

Garrett, a former high school guidance technician, volunteered at the library to stave off boredom. With the efficiency of a schoolteacher, she now oversees a variety of offerings worthy of a big city library, such as a summer reading program for children.

Adult programming is ambitious and first-rate with writing workshops and lectures. Computers are a favorite with visitors checking their e-mail.

The Capitan Public Library volunteers don’t plan to rest on their laurels, though, Garrett says.

“We are saving books for a nearby town thinking of starting its own library.”

Linda G. Harris is the author of three books about New Mexico.

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