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Miss Gale

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

Nearly all of us spend our lives working. Many of us are hired to fill jobs, some are offered positions; a very few are called.

Ellen Gale of Rock Island was one of those few, called and ordained into the ministry of books. Her sanctuary was the Rock Island Public Library.

Ellen's parents moved from New York to Rock Island in 1868, when Ellen was fifteen. She went to work that year as the librarian for the Young Men's Library Association. In 1872, when Rock Island became the first city in Illinois to organize a free public library, the Young Men's Association donated its collection of two thousand books to the city. It also donated Ellen Gale.

Miss Gale supervised the move of books to Room 17 of the Post Office Building. Soon, as many as four thousand patrons were using the library each month, checking out fifteen hundred or so books. Miss Gale added copies of Lorna Doone, The Canterbury Tales, Gulliver's Travels, and The Count of Monte Cristo to the shelves. By 1890 Miss Gale had assembled a collection of 33,000 books and fifty-four magazines, and the library moved into larger rooms.

As Miss Gale manned her library desk, Reconstruction came and went, as did the Spanish American War. Electric lights and telephones appeared. Miss Gale's annual reports to the City called for more books and larger quarters. The lumber baron, Weyerhaeuser came through with land and money for a new library. In 1903, Miss Gale again supervised the move to 19th Street and 4th Avenue. There were now 78,000 books.

The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk. World War I came and went. Faithful to her calling, Miss Gale ran the library as the Roaring Twenties whirled through town, followed by the Great Depression. "More books," said Miss Gale's report.

Miss Gale the librarian retired in 1937 at the age of eighty, after sixty-five years of service to Rock Island—a reminder that a true calling is one to which you give your life, not merely forty hours of your time each week.

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.