It was some time in the early 1980's that I was invited to join the Board of Trustees of the Valley Falls Library. It seems the Board was short of members since 2 of the long-time members had passed away. I think there were only 4 women left, including B. , who may have been the one who submitted my name.
The VFL then was a stand-alone entity, a building with books and little else, and very short on income. One of the then-trustees would recount the times the library had insufficient funds to pay its fuel bill. There were other options for added revenue, such as expanding its area out of the Village but I was told that was not a possibility because our Charter limited our area to the Village of Valley Falls. Unfortunately, a copy of the Charter was not available, due to a housekeeping cleanout by an overzealous trustee some years before.
But I found out that high on the wall of the library was a framed copy of the original Charter. So one day I moved a table beneath that framed document, took down the vintage item and actually read it. The wording read the area was chartered to "The Village of Valley Falls and surrounding areas." That opened up a whole new world as far as increasing the library's population and therefore sources of income. I made copies of the Charter before returning it to its place on the wall. And we went on from there. Most likely, these findings would have happened anyway; that's if the library had been able to survive long enough.
Needless to say, this did not increase my popularity with the long-established provincial members. I didn't care, then or now.
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