Harrington Children’s Library

This September I drove across the northern US, choosing the route partly so I could visit my 48^thstate, North Dakota. (Now only Alaska and Hawaii remain.) Another reason was to stop in Missoula, Montana, because I wanted to check on the progress of the new Missoula Public Library, future home of the Hank and Nancy Harrington Children’s Library.

The new Missoula Public Library, under construction (9/12/19)

            In the 1960’s Hank Harrington and three hundred or so other guys – including me – were classmates at Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts. Hank was a delightful fellow, enthusiastic, funny, extraordinarily bright, a motorcycle enthusiast. He and I were English majors, both book lovers. One day he introduced me to his pet goldfish:

“His name is Frodo.”

“Huh?” I murmured.

“You mean you’ve never read Lord of the Rings?” Amazement, tempered by a dash of pity, filled his voice. I knew this was something I had to read.  Eventually I met the hobbit Frodo, as opposed to the piscine one.

After graduation I invited Hank and a couple other classmates to our summer house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. We swam in Thorndike Pond, where he wore baggy, bright-colored swimming shorts, which he identified as “surfing jams,” a term that reduced my mother to helpless hilarity. (He came from a Chicago suburb, far, far from surf.)

Then in 1970, four years after Williams, I came to Palo Alto on a year-long odyssey driving around the United States and Mexico.  I stayed with Tom Jack, my Williams roommate. Hank was doing doctoral work at Stanford, and he came over.  “Any good books?” I asked him.

“Yes, indeed,” he replied.  “I’ve got one, and if you like it, I’ve got eight more.” For each of the next nine days I lay on Tom’s floor reading a volume of Anthony Powell’s massive series Dance to the Music of Time.At this time Powell was three-quarters through his duodecology. Eventually I left Palo Alto to see Baja California and the rest of Mexico, returning in February before I headed back east to Maine.

By this time Powell had published the tenth volume, Books Do Furnish a Room,and Hank let me borrow it. Then we had to wait two years for the eleventh and two more for the twelfth. In later years I wrote several papers about this series, and Hank looked some of them over, offering succinct and useful criticism before I offered them to Powell conferences.

He also described the MLA meat-market for college professors, the Modern Language Association conference, where young Ph.D. hopefuls might interview for university positions. “I don’t want to spend my life in a pressure-cooker world that demands publishing papers and clawing my way up through departments,” he said. “I want a place where I can work and live happily.” So he turned down an offer from Cal Tech, and went joyfully to spend his career at the University of Montana, surrounded by lakes and mountains and Big Sky. (Of course he published papers, too, one an early, prescient discussion of astrological influences structuring Dance to the Music of Time.  Later in a used bookstore I discovered that essay in a bound copy of Contemporary Literature, which I bought and still own.)

In 1976 I rode a ten-speed bicycle solo across the country. At Stanford, Hank had married Ann “Nancy” Robison, an assistant to the dean, proposing to her on a motorcycle ride. When I crossed Montana, I stopped to spend a few days with them in Florence, about 20 miles south of Missoula. Hank showed me how to milk a goat and took me canoeing on the Bitterroot River. He told me Anthony Powell had invited him to read the manuscript of the last volume of Danceto check the Americanisms. (I was jealous.) He and Nancy raised two daughters, Emily and Sarah, as well as their goats and dogs.  No question, they were happy.

And now comes the awful part:  the Harringtons owned a cabin on Whitehorse Island in Flathead Lake.  On Sunday, January 6, 2008, they were canoeing to the cabin with both dogs. Somehow the canoe capsized in the icy water; the dogs made it to land, but Hank and Nancy died of hypothermia. He was 64, she was 62.

Now, ten years later, Sarah and Emily have committed $750,000 to create the Hank and Nancy Harrington Children’s Library, which will occupy the entire second floor of the new Missoula Public Library. In constructing this facility, the Library is collaborating with the Families First Children’s Museum, the University of Montana spectrUM Discovery Area, and Missoula Community Media Resource. The floor will include expanded collections, exhibits, technology, and a suite of community and family programs. Plans describe a climbing structure, a water table (whatever that may be!) and a Tiny Town Art Room. I do hope the books survive the water table.

I learned of this project through a fundraising effort by Sarah and Emily and immediately sent off a contribution. Now the library is taking shape, albeit somewhat skeletally at the moment as the photo makes clear. I guess I’ll have to come back next year to see the final result, all smooth and cheerful, and maybe I can play a bit at the water table. If anyone reading this post feels moved to join me in supporting Sarah and Emily’s efforts, you may send a contribution to MISSOULA PUBLIC LIBRARY FOUNDATION, 301 E. MAIN STREET, MISSOULA, MT 59802.  Be sure to mention it’s for the Harrington Children’s Library.