Friends of Tacoma Public Library Initiative / Tacoma Public Library Foundation

Henry Haas, Dean Martin, Persis Shook
bow tie, stripes, white hard hat

Regarding the library:   Friends of the Tacoma Public Library Initiative is new, wishes to raise interest in helping Tacoma Public Library - Libraries should have Friends Groups, of course.  At the meeting Saturday a representative gave the news that a non-profit group to help Tacoma Public Library exists.  I believe it links to the past, when there was a re-model.

McCormick Branch Library

 For about a year in 1987-1988 the main library had a small version in a store front on Broadway, downtown, where library devotees waited for the remodeled library up the hill on Tacoma Avenue that would feature the reopened 1905 Carnegie as a permanant library wing.  A new building beside McCormick would become the McCormick Regional Library, and the old McCormick Library would become two meeting rooms.  Both the Main and the Anna E. McCormick Libraries opened successfully.

It was a year after my mother passed away, my father still lived at thehouse, and in 1987 I attended the ground breaking for the Anna E. McCormick Regional Library and took a few snapshots.  On the stage are (according to Brian Kamens, Pacific Northwest Room Librarian) Henry Haas, Dean Martin, and Persis Shook - bow tie, striped jacket, white hard hat.   Brian Kamens also identifies a person on the far left of the "digging" photo as restauranteur and high school teacher Mr. Stortini.  I wonder if in the other photo it is a representative, Art Wang, who hands a shovel over. 

Groundbreaking Souvenir Ruler

 

Digging

Tacoma Public Library Foundation began sometime in the 1980s or the 1990s (spearheaded by Marilyn Strickland before she ran for mayor). Meanwhile the Anna E. McCormick Library became two meeting rooms.   


At a Friends of the Tacoma Public Library Initiative meeting Saturday morning there was a representative who showed a copy of a TPL Foundation document which named the five-member board in September 1996.  Some names are familiar to me from a glimpse into a brochure in celebration of the library remodel, and familiar from the query I made of Brian Kamens:   Henry Haas, Molly Lane, Dean Martin, Persis Shook, and Tom Stenger.