For those wondering where all the good library stories are...

Ex-library employee awaits appeals decision

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Sometimes a pen name isn’t cover enough, Sally Stern-Hamilton has learned.

The publication of her controversial book, “The Library Diaries,” written under the pen name Ann Miketa, resulted in her termination as a Mason County District Library employee after 15 years on the job. She is appealing that firing.

Written in the first person and set in what she calls a fictitious Lake Michigan town of Denialville, “The Libraries Dairies” is a series of vignettes about mostly unsavory characters encountered daily at the library.

The Ludington Library is not the purported setting, however a small picture of the Ludington Library is on the cover. “After working at a public library in a small, rural Midwestern town (which I will refer to as Denialville, Michigan, throughout this book) for fifteen years, I have encountered strains and variations of crazy I didn’t know existed in such significant portions of our population,” “Ann Miketa” wrote in the book’s introduction.

Stern-Hamilton was notified of her termination in a formal letter from District Library Director Robert Dickson July 25. In that letter Dickson refers to a prior letter of “Suspension Pending Investigation” that he wrote to Stern-Hamilton July 15 in which he stated:

“The cover of your book includes a picture of the Ludington Library. Each chapter is devoted to a specific library patron or patrons. Your book portrays these people in a very unflattering manner. You describe individual patrons as mentally ill, mentally incompetent, unintelligent, and unattractive. You label several as ‘perverts.’ While you stop short of naming the individuals you targeted in your book, your detailed descriptions of their unique characteristics and mannerisms make them easily identifiable in our small community.”

Despite the picture in the cover collage, Stern-Hamilton is adamant that “The Library Diaries” — though it draws on her personal experiences as a library employee — is fiction.

“Most writers, anyone who writes something, some of it’s going to come from, be rooted in, your personal experience. I don’t think I could have come up with (the characters) on my own. They’re bizarre, idiosyncratic, so they are based on some real experiences, but of course there are embellishments,” said Stern-Hamilton.

She said she chose to use a picture of the Ludington Library because, “It’s a great picture. It looks just like a library. It epitomizes the American idea of a library. It’s a Carnegie library,” said Stern-Hamilton referring to more than 2,500 libraries built worldwide with money donated by businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie between 1883 and 1929.

Stern-Hamilton said she is unaware how Dickson came to learn about the 150-page book, which took three years to write. She said she decided to write “The Library Diaries” because, “I’m concerned about what goes on in public libraries everywhere.” She said she is particularly concerned that known sex offenders are given library privileges which allow them access to computers where they routinely view pornography— sometimes in close proximity to children.

“I don’t think they should be allowed in (the library) — these sexual predators,” said Stern-Hamilton, who claims that she had no intention of “pursue this as a commercial endeavor in Ludington.”

“Out of a town of 8,000, not many people were meant to know about the book. Publish America, my publisher, asked for addresses of people, and sent out announcements to people giving them a chance to purchase it. Publish America is a grassroots organization, and willing to publish people who are unknown, without charging the person thousands of dollars some self publishers charge.”

Publish America uses a business model known as publishing on demand which keeps costs to a minimum since books are only printed when ordered.

However, people in Ludington did learn of the book.

“I went for a hearing where I was able to respond to the letter of suspension that Bob sent me. I went to that meeting and spoke my piece and got a termination letter two days letter. I haven’t heard from any of my co-workers since.”

“The absolute irony is that the public library is a pillar of free speech, and leads me to wonder why the administration is so upset. It’s fiction,” she said. “If It hadn’t gone in the paper only a handful of people announcements were sent to in this area would have known about the book.”

Stern-Hamilton had contacted the Daily News asking for a review of the book, but before that happened, Dickson contacted the paper to report she had been suspended.

n his July 15 e-mail to Managing Editor Steve Begnoche, Dickson wrote, “As she is actively promoting the book I’m assuming that she has or will be contacting the Daily News to request help in promoting this book. The book is now in the hands of our attorney and we have undertaken steps to see what action we might take, including suspension and/or termination of her employment. While we recognize the difficulty for a library to undertake these actions against an employee who writes a book — the content of the book is such that we feel we have no option.”

The purpose of the e-mail, he said, was to request the library “be given an opportunity to provide a different picture, a more balanced view of ‘life in the library,’ than is offered in this book.”

That story ran July 18.

In the past week Dickson twice said he did not wish to comment at this time.

A call to the library board’s president went unreturned.

“In some ways I feel like my privacy was invaded since, after all, I did use a pen name,” Stern-Hamilton said of the brouhaha. “This is not Russia, this is not China. Apparently we’re not as protected as I thought.”

The surname Miketa is Stern-Hamilton’s maiden name, which may sound familiar to some because her father, Andrew Miketa, according to Stern-Hamilton, was a first string center with the Detroit Lions circa 1952. But Stern-Hamilton does not consider herself a Michigan native, as she spent most of her formative years in Chapel Hill, N.C., where she grew up and subsequently went on to study art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She met her husband, Keith Hamilton — a Ludington area native— in North Carolina and moved to Ludington with him.

“My pen name, Ann Miketa, was chosen because my acquaintances on the East and West coasts would recognize the name Miketa,” she said. “Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the book’s available at Book Mark, Blu Moon and Maude’s Gallery.”

Stern-Hamilton has submitted a letter of appeal. According to grievance provisions contained within the Personnel Policies of the District Library, the library director and board have 10 days to review that letter.

Come on Down!!!

I found myself on my long weekend off last weekend watching AM television. So I turn on the TV Friday morning to a classic I Love Lucy Episode guest starring a young Richard Crenna. Right after that for some reason I put it on CBS. You all know what comes on at 10 AM right? The Price is Right. I was enthralled. They had a game where the contestant won 10,000. I found myself standing, jumping around, and applauding when she won.
It then hit me that was the exact same thing I did as a kid watching TPiR at my grandma and grandma's house with my little sister. We would root for that wheel to hit 1.00, and then perhaps 1.00 in the bonus spin for an extra 10 grand. We would celebrate as if we were on the show, jumping, hugging, high fives. The family always wanted to go on that or the Family Feud, although now they are trying to convince me to go on Jeopardy. Great times, great summers.
It also brought to a moment of reflection when my grandparents lived with us in their twilight years. My grandma had dementia, Alzheimers, diabetes, and was unable to really talk, but on the days I didn't have college, I sat with her and watched Bob Barker and Rod Roddy work their magic. That was one of the few times my grandma would show any emotion. We would jump up and dance when a contestant would win, or both say ayyyye and have a mean expression when they blew it. It's funny how things can trigger certain memories!

I miss her.

I'm going to walk/run in a half marathon!

http://www.active.com/donate/sa08losangeles/Jeremyisgoingwalking

Can you please help me in my cause to find a cure for Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis?

There is more information on my homepage.

Thanks,

Jeremy

Obituary

I was somewhat shocked to read this on my lunch break. This guy was a legend in Lakewood.

John Sanford Todd, 89; his vision for Lakewood created the 'contract city' City of Lakewood

John Sanford Todd, reacting to Long Beach's plans to annex unincorporated Lakewood, came up with the idea of a city that contracts out for police protection, trash collection, firefighting and other services. That practice is commonplace today, but it was a revelation 54 years ago.

By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 4, 2008

In the annals of California municipal history, Lakewood of the early 1950s was David fighting the Goliath of Long Beach, a city intent on gobbling up its unincorporated neighbor parcel by parcel. The legal turf battles were exhausting Lakewood's defenders, most of whom were transplants drawn to the promise of this sleepy village-turned-postwar boomtown

Then along came John Sanford Todd, a struggling attorney and proud Lakewood resident, who dreamed up a way to preserve his community's independence without it going broke: It would become a new kind of city, one that contracted out for police protection, trash collection, firefighting -- just about every service a city provides.

That practice is commonplace today, but it was a revelation 54 years ago.

Todd's vision, dubbed the Lakewood Plan, became a model of local government that lighted incorporation drives throughout Southern California and beyond. Suburbia took shape in a rash of "contract cities," including Dairy Valley (now Cerritos), La Puente, Bellflower, Duarte, Irwindale, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs, which sprang up in such rapid succession that some observers began proclaiming the end of big cities.

Todd was the architect of this transformation, "the first to say, 'Let's form a new city, but let's not do it the old way,' " said Charlie Martin, the longtime city attorney of Temple City, which became a contract city in 1960. "A lot of people thought it wouldn't succeed, but it did. He started a whole new trend."

The so-called father of the Lakewood Plan, Todd died Saturday at Fountain Valley Regional Medical Center of complications from surgery following a fall, according to his son, Mike. He was 89 and retired only four years ago after 50 years as Lakewood's city attorney.

His unusual legacy forms an important chapter in the history of the region, as creator of a form of city government that also was, perhaps unintentionally, a social experiment, a mechanism for reinforcing the social and cultural values that shaped community identity.

Lakewood in the late 1940s was largely a collection of bean fields and hog farms. But as servicemen returned home after World War II, it became a magnet for young families. In less than three years, Lakewood's developers -- Mark Taper, Louis Boyer and Ben Weingart -- built 17,500 nearly identical houses, laid out in a uniform grid, with all streets meeting at right angles, each block containing exactly 46 houses, and each house planted on a 50-by-100-foot lot. It was the largest subdivision in the world, offering what cultural analyst and Lakewood historian D.J. Waldie called "a compass of possibilities."

Within that grid was a community that was 95% white. Later generations of historians would take note of this homogeneity and read an exclusionary motive into the incorporation effort. "It was part and parcel of a larger rejection of big cities and urban life" and contributed to inner-city unrest in the 1960s, said UCLA professor Eric Avila, an expert on white flight who teaches urban planning, history and Chicano studies.

But Waldie, an assistant to the Lakewood city manager, says otherwise. Lakewood today is racially and ethnically diverse, with whites making up only about half of its 83,000 residents. Fifty years ago, the identity that the city's fathers wanted to preserve was related more to age and class than racial identity, he said. Most of Lakewood's residents were just starting out. When they looked at their big neighbor to the south they "saw an older city. . . . They didn't see the mirror of themselves," said Waldie, whose memoir of growing up in Lakewood, "Holy Land," was published in 1996.

Of course, when they looked at Long Beach, they also saw a big-city bureaucracy that might regard Lakewood as "a sort of hinterland" and disregard the special needs of young families like Todd's.

Born in Grand Forks, N.D., on July 27, 1919, Todd moved to Los Angeles as an infant when his father joined the psychology faculty at USC. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at USC, then served in World War II as an Army Air Forces munitions specialist in Alaska and Guam. He married in 1943, finished law school at USC and moved to Lakewood in 1949, and by 1955 had two sons with his wife, Frances.

There was one other lawyer in town but, as Todd once noted, "the legal business wasn't exactly booming," so he and Frances began to get involved in civic affairs.

Soon Todd found himself arguing to close down Lakewood's hog farms on behalf of fellow residents, who regarded the farms as a smelly nuisance. In 1950 he was elected managing director of the Lakewood Taxpayers' Assn., the main civic organization.

In mid-1951, the city of Long Beach released a detailed report on the feasibility of annexing all or part of Lakewood. Of particular interest were Lakewood's country club and golf course. Todd became the legal advisor to a group of businessmen who wanted to devise a strategy to defeat Long Beach's plan. Petitions were circulated, and irate Lakewood residents showed up en masse at annexation hearings, but it was a long, expensive, wearying process and annexation appeared inevitable.

When Long Beach dangled a carrot -- a $10-million proposal to develop parks that would enhance Lakewood -- a county official told Todd, "You can't remain unincorporated, and Lakewood can't afford to incorporate."

That's when Todd saw a way to avoid a new city's costly capital outlays for municipal buildings and services.

Arguing for contracting with the county for essential services, he led a grass-roots incorporation drive that featured as its motto "Lakewood, Tomorrow's City Today."

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the proposed incorporation Jan. 10, 1954, with one member declaring that one day Lakewood would be "showing us a thing or two about government." On March 9, the people of Lakewood voted in favor of cityhood by a ratio of 3 to 2.

Lakewood became the first city in the county to incorporate since 1939.

It received national attention in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, even the Harvard Law Review. The incorporation movement Lakewood spawned was further bolstered by a legislative change in California that allowed cities to partake of sales taxes generated in their jurisdiction, which provided a revenue source.

Today more than a fourth of California cities -- about 130 -- are contract cities, including Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Clemente and Laguna Niguel in Orange County, as well as Elk Grove in Sacramento County, Camarillo in Ventura County and Solana Beach in San Diego County.

But "all cities now are contracting for something," said Sam Olivito, executive director of the California Contract Cities Assn. "John Todd was a tireless individual who believed in what he was doing for the community. As a result, other cities have taken up that mantle" and are saving money by contracting out all kinds of services, including tree trimming, street light maintenance and road repairs, Olivito said. "He deserves a tremendous amount of gratitude."

Described by colleagues as unassuming but intense when challenged, Todd survived a number of political storms, including a rocky period in the 1970s when some residents, including members of the City Council, perceived him as too powerful and tried to oust him.

"He demonstrated he was one of the smartest people in the room," Waldie said. "He outlasted them all."

Todd is survived by his sons John of Lafayette, Calif. and Mike of Eugene, Ore., and five grandchildren. His wife, Frances, died in 1988 and his second wife, Millie, died in 1997.

Services will be held at 11 a.m. Monday at the Centre at Sycamore Plaza, 5000 Clark Ave., Lakewood.

Donations in lieu of flowers may be sent to the American Diabetes Foundation.

just when you thought you had seen it all

A customer just walked in front of me rolling a fax machine, printer, and computer! Are you freaking kidding me?

UCLA 27 Tennessee 24 OT

more to come!