At The Library
Since I am writing this on Mother’s Day May 11, 2025, I thought I would use the occasion to showcase my maternal grandmother (my mom’s mom) Florence Koetzle. She was born in Philadelphia in 1889, and was the second child of John Koetzle and Elizabeth Reilly Koetzle.
Florence married Clarence Wilbur Harley (he usually went by C. Wilbur) in 1913, when she was 24 years old. Their first child died when she was one day old, and their second (and last) child was my mom, Dorothy Mae Harley, born on May 1, 1918. So that’s just a little background to the story.
I knew my grandmother (we all called her Nanny) pretty well. We all visited her and PopPop often. They lived in a small town in the Atlantic City NJ area, which was just a three hour drive from where I was raised in northern NJ.
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| Nanny and me in Ventnor NJ in mid 1950's. The painting on wall is one she did. |
Nanny was a very smart and artistic person. In her younger days, she was a milliner, and that was very evident from photos of her. She always had a hat on. She was very styIe conscious. I don’t remember her having a job outside the home until the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. Before that time she was a full time homemaker, and she played a lot of bridge with PopPop and many friends. She also was a very social person. Her name was always in the paper for participating in and winning bridge tournaments. And later in life she took up oil painting, She was quite good, and I have a few of her paintings in my home.
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| Me (left), Nanny and my mom Dot in the mid 1960's. Could have been Mother's Day |
Since this week’s topic is “at the library” I better get on with this part of the story. In the late 1950’s (I believe) Nanny started work at the Atlantic City Hospital as a medical librarian. I have no idea how she got this job, or what training was involved, but she really seemed to enjoy it. Whenever we were visiting, she would be talking about the various doctors that she helped, by finding material and researching topics for them. Some of the doctors were so very nice, and some were a little brusk and even crabby with her. But overall, she really liked that job. Of course this was back in the day before computers. Everything would have been paper-based or on microfilm, etc. I’m thinking lots of card catalogues!
Nanny always loved to read, so it is not surprising that she enjoyed this job. When we visited them, I always slept in her bedroom, on a chair that folded out into a bed. She would always read in bed, and most of the time the book would fall out of her hands, because she fell asleep.
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| Nanny and PopPop at their 50th wedding anniversary. The newspaper article is below: |
I myself, love books, reading and research. I love visiting libraries that are new to me, as well as local libraries. I could (and have) spent hours perusing their shelves. I read a study a few weeks ago about the different ways our brain stores data. Turns out that reading the same information in a physical book is retained much longer than by reading the same thing on a screen. Even though so many books have been digitized, and we have access to so many books online, I hope that this mode never replaces actual paper books.
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| Press of Atlantic City, March 25, 1965 |
Nanny passed away at the age of 79 in 1968 while I was away at college. I never got to see her the in last couple years of her life, nor attend the services for her after she passed. I was very close to her, and miss her very much. She was a great lady!
As a closing note, I never thought I would get to use the word “fete” and its verb version “feted” in the same blog post! I even had to look up "feted," as I had never seen it used in that context before.