Monthly Archives: May 2008

Last summer, one of the little old ladies in the neighborhood left her house and moved into a nursing home. The rest of us stayed here and kept an eye on it for her. It’s no trouble, really.
Now it’s been like 9 months and she hasn’t come back. I’m thinking she’s not going to. I say this because last weekend there was an estate sale at her place and when I chatted up a few neighbors they said that the house was going to be rented for a while. So yeah, probably not coming back.
I went over to the sale and found some neat old posters hanging on the wall in the basement next to the furnace and the [still installed] well pump. ‘Morningside Village Service Directory – 1966′. She also had 1964. They weren’t priced, so I offered 25 cents each. Deal? Deal.
The stuff is a hoot. It’s not SUPER old, obviously – all the phone numbers are 7 digits – but it’s still neat to see stuff that’s even 40 years old.
One thing that caught my eye was the library hours. They’re shown in the photo above, right below the ‘Good Citizen Calendar’ (!!). The library was open from 1:30 – 5:30 M-F, reopened from 7-9pm on Mondays and Thursdays for evening service, and was open from 10-1 on Saturdays. That’s 27 hours a week total, which is an interesting number in the context of today’s omnipresent debate about cutting back library hours. For reference, here are the current hours for lots of local Twin Cities libraries, several of which have been subjected to cut backs in recent years. Did I say interesting? I totally did.
FD: pro-library, pro-reading, pro-old-posters-found-in-basements.
Neat.