I’ll tell the story of Helen Myers, the woman who built a tiny town library and kept reading alive, then shift into a few other oddball memories from a long journalism career — a New York Public Library coincidence, a bizarre phone mix-up about Jack Kemp, and a Macy’s encounter with Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu that later gained a grim ending. These vignettes show how small acts and strange moments linger with you over decades.
I met Helen at a July 4th celebration in Ellisville, Illinois, when she was 60 and still fiercely involved in her town’s life. The parade was the whole town walking two blocks twice for extra applause, and Helen was one of the people who made the day happen. She saw community as something worth fighting for in places being hollowed out by time and economic shifts.
Alone, over twenty-five years, she turned an empty room in an abandoned building into a little library, cobbling together heat from a gas station’s propane donation and fixing the roof with money she tucked aside from Social Security. Official hours were two hours on Saturday mornings, but everyone knew she’d open the door if a reader called her line. She made books accessible the old-fashioned way: by being there.
It’s harder for kids to read now. It’s so much easier just to push a button and let the TV do their thinking.
It’s true, you know, if you read, you tend to do your own thinking.
I try to tell parents — carefully, of course — they ought to limit their kids’ TV. But they use it as a babysitter. That’s the way the world’s going.
She credited her mother for that love: her mother read to her every day, and Helen carried those hours forward as adventures she’d never physically travel to but went to in her head. She adored classics like Black Beauty, Treasure Island, and Call of the Wild, which she said she had read four times. Over nearly thirty years she collected more than 2,000 books, mostly used paperbacks, and she ran a story hour that ghosted on slow weeks but meant everything when a child did show up.
Helen measured success by one reader at a time. “I figure if in all these years I get just one person to read a book, my time’s not wasted,” she told me. When I wrote about her years ago, readers sent more than $5,000 and publishers added new books; she cried on the phone. We kept up a pen-pal friendship after she moved to a senior home and she devoured a book I sent her in two days.
Her letters stopped eventually and the phone in her room was disconnected, but I prefer the image of her running her fingers over homemade shelves and the boxes of books she loved. Ellisville’s population dwindled to 88 in the 2020 census and to 85 this year, but her small generosity probably nudged a few people toward reading who might otherwise never have picked up a novel. That quiet influence sticks with you.
Early in my career I was sent to do a feature on the New York Public Library, which I suspect was a test of whether I could make something of nearly nothing. I started with the information desk and asked about odd requests. The desk attendant told me about a day when a soaking wet woman and later a man both came hunting for Napoleon’s letters to Josephine, each thinking the other would show up at the same moment.
“Good!” the man said when told the coincidence. “I know her. Years ago, we agreed to meet there this afternoon.” He dashed off and, for a beat, I allowed myself to hope they found one another. That kind of small, human surprise is the stuff of life, and the library seemed to collect those moments.
Once I dialed a phone number I’d been given and reached a Peggy halfway across the country who was, by sheer coincidence, talking about Jack Kemp’s death at the same time I called. I had transposed two digits in an area code and still hit someone who happened to be musing about the same obituary. We laughed, and I told myself I’d wasted my luck on lottery tickets.
And then there was Macy’s during a holiday season when an editor sent me to look for the Communist head of Romania shopping the store. The Ceaușescus were impossible to miss with a security detail that cleared whole clothing sections, and the clerks later told me they’d sold enormous quantities of underwear and socks. My editor didn’t publish it then, so I kept the memory until later history filled in a darker epilogue.
Years after that mall visit, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu fled their palace during a popular uprising and were captured two days later. Accused of corruption and mass deaths, there was a brief “trial,” so to speak, and the couple was sentenced to execution by firing squad in a courtyard shortly after. I still wonder if they were wearing those Macy’s purchases when all of that happened.
Memories like these—from a woman who opened a little library to coincidences in big city stacks—accumulate into a career’s worth of strange, soft, and sometimes tragic stories. They don’t all fit neatly into print, but they linger, reminding you that small acts and odd encounters shape how we remember places and people.
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