February 26, 2003 - Russell is a Republican

've always thought of myself as more of a cat person. I had two cats, brother and sister, that I adopted as kittens in the desert. Pookalure finally had an encounter with a coyote that he escaped from, but mortally wounded him. Watson, a small, black female cat, lived to the ripe old age of 20.

Some years later, we had two active kids looking for a more interactive pet. Through a series of steps that happened with amazing speed, we found ourselves with two large dogs: a Greyhound, and a border collie/Burnese mountain dog mix. We've had Cagney and Freddie for several years now.

This experience, I feel, uniquely qualifies me to weigh in on a pressing issue: the political affiliation of pets.

Recently, the Douglas County Republican Women presented the library with some copies of a children's book called "Russell is a Republican," by Franktown resident Deborah C. Gamec.

Russell is a cat. The book is beautifully summarized on the back side of the title page: "Russell demonstrates Republican attitudes and philosophy in absolutely exquisite illustrations."

The illustrations, by Roxanna Jo Alexander, ARE exquisite -- watercolors that capture the glory of an animal deserving of such tribute. In the words of Fernand Mery, "God made the cat in order that man might have the pleasure of caressing the lion."

Here's another of my favorite cat quotes: "No tame animal has lost less of its native dignity or maintained more of its ancient reserve. The domestic cat might rebel tomorrow." - William Conway, Archbishop of Armagh.

Russell, based on a real life story, is presented as a paragon of Republican values. Russell "does not question his Creator," "always looks his best," " employs all his talents and resources," and "loves his freedom." I got a kick out of this one: "Russell sees all equally, in shades of black and white."

Russell appreciates nature, but still hunts. He knows you sometimes have to fight.

All of that is well and good. One sees in the things one admires, the values one admires.

But the book does take something of a partisan turn when we meet Russell's friend, Benny, a dog. "Benny is usually looking for a handout. He has a tendency to whine and to moan and to sigh. Often he is anxious that he won't be cared for. He is a Democrat."

That made me laugh out loud.

However, in the name of interspecies fairness, I feel I should point out a few facts. There is no Kitty Corps in the Army, no stories of cats accompanying their people into combat or dragging them wounded from the battlefield.

There are no brave cats confronting and subduing gun wielding criminals. There are no cats rounding up and protecting the livestock. There are no search and rescue cats. If your house catches flame in the night, your cat makes for the cat door; your dog wakes you up and sees you to safety.

"Russell is a Republican" has a two page spread that says it all: there's Russell, with a slight paunch, stretched out on an American flag. The caption: "Some call Russell a 'fat cat.' That is because they are jealous."

I'll give the last word to John Weitz, author or another of my favorite cat quotes: "Even overweight cats instinctively know the cardinal rule: when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses."

February 19, 2003 - TV's

I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but suddenly I don't watch TV anymore. Not the news. No regular programs. Not talk shows.

I'm not being a snob about it. My family has a fair number of VHS videos, and a growing number of DVD's.

Many a night, we'll even plunk ourselves in front of the tube with TV trays and a pile of spaghetti. But we watch movies, not TV fare.

So why don't I watch regular TV?

There are two main reasons. The first is a matter of schedules. Even when I run across something I do enjoy, it's difficult to arrange my life around it. My life has a lot of evening meetings. We have children who need to be carted around to various activities. I have friends to see. There's usually something I'm tracking on the Internet. I have four or five books going.

The second is my absolute impatience over the idiocy and frequency of most commercials.

The last time I actually tried to watch something -- probably a Star Trek rerun -- I finally ran screaming from the room. First, the volume goes up when the commercial comes on. Then the thing they're selling you is ridiculous. Then the WAY they try to sell it to you borders on the insulting.

Who needs it? I thought. From now on, the only time I'll sit in front of a TV is when I have direct control of the content.

But there's the rub. Just a couple of weeks ago, my son and I stopped at a local restaurant for lunch. And we found to our initial amusement, then growing frustration, that it was impossible for us to talk to each other. Why?

Because everywhere you looked in this restaurant, there were enormous TV's. Some of them were loud (usually with sporting events in the background). The one just in my son's line of vision was a captioned news program.

Was he interested in the topics being discussed? No. But the ever-changing images, most of them chosen for splash and action and color, exerted a persistent tug on the eye. My son was incapable of carrying on a conversation, instead being reduced to a series of "look at that!"

So we switched seats, because I'm more mature, and have greater powers of concentration.

Except now I was the one who couldn't talk. "Lookee there!" I'd say.

Honestly, who goes to a restaurant so they can watch captioned news programs? I go to relish the act of eating, and to enjoy the company I keep. The TV flat out interfered with both of them.

Now I raise all this because I have agreed to allow a closed captioned TV in the new Philip S. Miller Library. It will be over by the new periodicals, turned away from the inside of the building. It is a direct request by some senior citizens in Castle Rock, who indicated their strong interest in finding, while they're at the library, how their various stocks are performing.

Frankly, for me it's hard to imagine that such second-to-second monitoring is necessary. Will I see seniors leaping to their feet, pulling out their cell phones and shouting "Sell! Sell!"? If so, those seniors will be asked to leave the library. (Don't get me started on cell phones.)

But we'll give it a try. When you ask for people's advice in focus groups, it seems to me that you ought to accommodate it when you can.

If it bothers you, too, though, don't hesitate to let me know. You'll probably find me in front of the TV. Wave your arms or something.

February 12, 2003 - The Pre-Overdue Notice

A good friend of mine, the director of another Colorado public library district, celebrated her 50th birthday with a "Jubilee." She took the year off. During that time, she made herself available as a volunteer. But she refused to lead anything. "I'll stuff envelopes," she said, "but I won't write the letters."

She said she needed to recharge her life, get back in touch with the things that mattered. She had a couple of life projects she'd been putting off. My friend is a committed Christian, and happens to be straight. But like many churches today, her own church was grappling with the issue of whether or not to welcome gay members. She wanted to spend the time reading and thinking through Scripture, then writing up what she learned.

And so she did. I even posted it on my personal website.

When my friend returned to librarianship, refreshed and reinvigorated, she made some fascinating observations. Most things hadn't changed much. There were a few new players, of course, and she was happy to meet them. The people, she said, was what she had missed the most.

There were some new political wrinkles -- but not many.

There was really only one area that took some time for her to get back up to speed. That area was technology.

At base, library services have an unchanging mission: librarians gather, organize, and make publicly accessible the intellectual capital of our culture. The means by which we do so is also easily summarized. Until, that is, the technologies of the 90s and 21st century.

With a great build-up like that, I should now unveil some huge new automated service, something that tops the World Wide Web, Internet-based full-text periodical articles, and even our new virtual reference service, which gives you a real live reference librarian, right through our website, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

So here it is: if you've got e-mail, we'll let you know the day BEFORE a book is due.

That's right. No more frantic digging under the bed and bathtub when the overdue notice arrives. Instead, you'll get a polite email reminder before a single fine has accrued. The notice also has a link to our website, where you can renew the item (providing, of course, that nobody else is waiting for it).

As I have noted in previous columns, I'm sometimes surprised by just how paranoid people get about library fines. Never mind that the Douglas Public Library District has the lowest fines around: a nickel a day for most materials, with a maximum fine per item that's a fraction of the item's cost.

So now, instead of guilt-ridden and fearful transactions at the circulation desk, patrons will receive a discreet message before any wrongdoing has occurred.

It's like the light and judicious hand of your spouse, who touches you lightly on your arm as you accelerate up a hill, with the gentle news, "There's a police car just ahead." And so forewarned, you observe the strict limits of the law, and enjoy the blithe confidence of the utterly proper.

Isn't technology grand? For those of you library patrons with long records, the "pre-overdue notice" is truly a cause for Jubilee.

February 5, 2003 - The Columbia

One of my first, most thrilling memories was watching rocket launches. They fueled my interest both in science and science fiction.

I admired the courage it took to be crammed into a tiny metal box, just a couple of feet away from the vastness of space. Or to walk in space!

I remember being glued to the TV, awestruck, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounded over the lunar landscape.

I've learned that there's another dimension to exploration: the encouragement, the hope, and the fear of the families left behind. It's the human condition -- whether they are waiting for the return of the hunter, the sailor, or the pioneer, there are always those who wait.

And the sad truth is, sometimes the explorers do not return. Hunters are overmatched, sailors are lost, pioneers fall victim to unknown peril.

We mourn them.

The loss of the Columbia, and its seven shining representatives of the human race, now seems to carry a unique poignancy. It has a resonance in the post 9/11 world, another national tragedy when it seems we have
already had more than our share.

But there is really only one way to honor them. We must keep the dream alive.

There will be some, as there were after the Challenger disaster, who call for an end to space exploration. "What a waste of time, talent and dollars!" they'll say.

They are wrong. The research that has gone into rocketry, into protecting humans from the rigors of space, into remotely monitoring all kinds of devices, have had countless applications on earth. Those advances include a host of medical breakthroughs that save lives every
day.

Space challenges us. Our response pushes back many frontiers of our understanding.

Maybe it's all the science fiction I've read, but I think there's another reason why we must continue to push for human exploration of space. I believe our survival as a species depends on it.

Comets and meteors have crashed into our planet before. That's the likeliest cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs, whose reign lasted far longer than ours has, and whose end came so suddenly. The collision of another such object with our planet might well wipe us out.

Not that we require outside help. The human race, since Hiroshima, is more than capable of wiping itself out. Or, we might be undone by some new disease, racing around the globe too fast for us to fight it.

It may be possible to head off celestial collisions. Diplomacy may triumph over self-destruction. Human beings are hardy.

But it might not be a bad idea to have a few of us somewhere else, just in case.

I've also been intrigued by something called the Gaia Hypothesis (look for the author "Lovelock" in the library catalog). Here the notion is that the planet earth itself is alive, is a consciousness, and is driven as are other living things to reproduce.

How does a planet reproduce? By sending parts of itself into space, to transform other places into look-alikes. If earthlings go to Mars, introduce more oxygen into the atmosphere, and begin cultivating Earth plants and animals (a process called "terraforming"), then Mars becomes
a sort of planetary "child."

We think of ourselves as great explorers. Maybe the real purpose of humans is to serve as nothing more than interplanetary spermatozoa.

All of that may sound fanciful. But this week seven brave and brilliant people died. Why? For the great adventure, for the triumph of the human spirit against everything that seeks to bind us, to hold us down.

They believed that this effort was for the betterment of humankind. So do I.

January 29, 2003 - Highlands Ranch, Part 2

I collect quotes. The first time I heard this one, I laughed out loud: "Everybody talks about the weather. But nobody DOES anything about it." (Attributed to Mark Twain, but probably by his "The Gilded Age" collaborator Charles Dudley Warner.)

For developers, "the weather" is strip malls and big boxes. The whole economic system is organized around a model: huge parking lots visible from the highway, cheap buildings on cheap land with the deliveries in back, lots of square footage. Banks know how to give loans for that kind of project. Construction companies know how to slap them together cheap and fast. Landlords know how to charge for the space and maintenance.

It is to the credit of Shea Homes that when they tackled the idea of the "town center," they actually tried to do something about the weather. Based in part on a Highlands Ranch Community Association survey about what people wanted to see (a pedestrian friendly main street, with smaller, local shops, something with individuality and character), Shea set out to see how close they could get to it.

They visited town centers that actually worked (meaning that people could make a living both working in such shops, and managing such properties). And Shea learned some things that hearkened to an earlier time: don't use minimum setbacks from the street, use MAXIMUM setbacks, meaning allow the buildings to have a genuine street presence. Don't put up huge monolithic structures, but smaller, more varied ones, where the facade of the building changes to reflect what went on inside of it. Downtown streets should be narrower. Use real sidewalks, with real trees between the street and the sidewalk.

There were some cautionary notes, too. What people say they want and what they actually do aren't always the same. People want pedestrian-friendly places ... that they can drive to. But some of those centers have figured that out, too: a different kind of parking, a different rhythm of traffic flow.

Shea, again under the work group management of Steve Ormiston, translated all this information into a genuinely interesting, people-oriented place.

After all of this good work, Shea then shopped it around to potential clients. And, at least to hear their sales staff tell it, they couldn't find any buyers. All the retailers were dressed for one kind of weather, and Shea seemed to be in a different climate altogether.

Then, after the round of new consultants I referred to last week, the plan got tweaked. That's too kind. It got compromised. The placement of the Home Depot is a good example. It repeats the planning error of the Safeway center: wide open to its football field of a parking lot, closed to its neighbors, another big, hulking suburban island that doesn't know how to play well with others.

Shea will say smaller retailers want an anchor store, something to generate traffic. That's true enough, of course, but who will drive to Home Depot, then walk around downtown? You can marry a big box to a main street, but are they compatible?

Let's be clear about the good news, though. Shea's commitment to the now very abbreviated main street is good planning, thoughtful, and even visionary.

But there are two reasons Highlands Ranch residents are going to wind up with mostly the same weather they always get. Both of them are business decisions made by Shea, which, of course, it has the perfect right to make. The first is the simple fact that Shea wants to retain ownership, and thus control, of the land. They are in business to make money, and so they want people who can pay the rent.

One kind of developer works with a lot of local startups. It's risky. A lot of new businesses go under. The profit margin is slimmer. The locals love it, of course, because such stores are unique, have character, and are tailored to their communities.

Another kind of developer works with franchises. Franchises are successful business models with good credit. They don't take as much handholding. They make rent. And of course, they EMPLOY local people. But nobody local owns anything.

In my opinion, Shea took a model designed for the first kind of developer (the nurturer of local business) and tried to pitch it to the clients of the second kind of developer (the lessor to franchises). Unsurprisingly, the clients weren't interested. Not their kind of weather.

Shea Homes is not a public entity, despite its many contributions of land and money to such entities. That includes the library, incidentally, whose response to Mission Viejo/Shea's generosity was a significant commitment of your tax dollars to a library building. We were proud to be the doorway to the new downtown.

That library has been in place for two and a half years now. While it is an undeniable success, it also sits next to a long neglected civic park. The library has the back of one big shopping center to the northeast, and will soon have the back of another to the southwest.

It's not quite the vision we started with, is it?

January 22, 2003 - Highlands Ranch

I often tell people: I thought I was getting into the book business. Somehow, I wound up in the business of community development. The clearest example I have is our library in Highlands Ranch.

A "master planned community," Highlands Ranch could only have come about as a suburb. The economic, cultural, and even civic life of the community belonged up north, to Denver, or to other suburbs.

Historically, cities began at the center and radiated outward. Greeley, Colorado is a good example: the downtown business district was laid out first, with pride of place given to governmental structures and parks. The scale was pedestrian. Then came the homes (all in a grid), then the ranches.

Highlands Ranch has been the story of development waves, in direct opposition to Greeley. First were the ranches. Then came the houses, rooftops popping up like mushrooms amidst the strangely organic swirls of cul de sacs, themselves spilling into roads so broad one cannot walk across them easily.

Then came the commercial development -- but not centralized. Instead, it was all about big boxes strung along the highway. But that too has its history: many American business sections once followed rivers, close to the byways of distribution.

There has been some governmental presence, but in an oddly decentralized, even minimalized fashion. The Highlands Ranch Community Association has many of the trappings of government, but a much smaller purview, primarily recreation. The Metro Districts of Highlands Ranch has most of the responsibilities of civic infrastructure, but has kept a relatively low profile architecturally.

The library stepped into the picture twice. The first time was when we rented a storefront (the ONLY storefront available in Highlands Ranch in 1991). The second time was when we built what was supposed to be the first civic building at the entrance of what Mission Viejo, now Shea Homes, called its "new downtown."

When we were still planning that second building, I remember a meeting with representatives of the developer. They looked at the map of the sprawling ex-urban community and asked, in all seriousness, "Where should we put the center?"

"Downtown," in other words, wasn't really the historic middle. It was a construct, a created place to serve what was really a psychological purpose. At what point do 80,000 people make the jump from housing development to community? Answer: when those people create or discover their community's heart.

I have been fortunate enough to participate in Shea Homes' "work group," a committee headed by Shea's always thoughtful Steve Ormiston, and involving members of HRCA, the Metro Districts, the library, the county, and several others.

Over the years (it's been years, now), Shea brought in a parade of consultants, and conducted several comprehensive studies. The intent was to come up with a good answer to a good question: What makes a downtown successful?

Along the way, we did indeed put up our library, at 9696 Ridgeline. On opening day, two summers ago, over 5,000 people came to celebrate with us. The thirst for community was and is real. And I believe that we've set some good standards for what civic architecture should look like.

As a participant in the process, I can attest that Shea Homes has done a lot of serious research. Close to half-a-hundred plans have been drawn up to show how the new downtown would work. All of them have been dissected and frankly evaluated by the work group.

Shea's latest plan is the one it has submitted for action. I would characterize it as follows: a main street married to a strip mall.

Next week, I'll write about what (in my opinion) the plan got right, and not just what it got wrong, but why.

January 15, 2003 - Phone Book Listings for Library

The new phone books are out AND ... the listings for the library are wrong.

Well, not completely. But despite our best efforts, year after year, we have yet to get it all to come out the way we've asked for.

Yes, we do give Qwest the exact information we want to be displayed. But somehow, by the time it hits the four phone books that serve the county (Denver, Highlands Ranch, South Jeffco and Castle Rock/Parker), that information has morphed in four different directions.


Here's what we were shooting for. In the business white pages our listing should refer to the government section. Under "government county," the Douglas Public Library District should be listed with all the phone number of our branches. We also requested that our listing under the "government city" section, which is where the special
districts are normally listed, be replaced with a referral to the county section.

A bit of background here. The Douglas Public Library District is in fact an independent entity. We broke off from the county in 1990. For the past dozen years we have been publicizing our name through countless columns, ads, fliers, bookmarks, posters, and brochures – not to mention
the tens of thousands of library cards floating around the county.

Nonetheless, the plain truth is that hardly anybody knows our right name. They look for us under Douglas County.

OK, so got that? Our name is the Douglas Public Library District. We put a listing under Douglas County to help people find us based on the way we know they look for us.

Here's how things came out: the Highlands Ranch and South Jeffco business white page and government county listings are fine. These two phone books also have a detailed listing under the government city section.

In the Castle Rock/Parker phone book, the business white pages refer to the government section. However, they also, inexplicably, list the Literacy Hotline and the Parker Library. Under the government county section, Literacy Hotline and Parker are missing. The other branches are
there – but listed in a peculiar order. (Librarians HATE it when people don't alphabetize.)

In the Denver phone book, the business white pages refer to the government section, with the government county section also failing to list Literacy Hotline and Parker. But then they do show up with a partial listing of numbers under the government CITY section!

In both the Castle Rock/Parker and Denver phone books' business white pages our maintenance facility is showing up as "Douglas Public." This number shouldn't have been listed at all, as it's for purely internal use. But we're used to that. Last year, the Administration number was the only one that showed up in somebody's book. I used to get, and still
get on occasion, calls from people asking me to renew their books. (I just renew them – it's easier than explaining.)

In the yellow pages I believe all the phone books display our ad correctly under "Libraries," except for Highlands Ranch, which fails to include the telephone renewal/hold number.

Oh, and as a consequence of listing the district under Douglas County, we just found out that the caller ID for the library is now identified as the county. This is, of course, very misleading to patrons. We have been assured that this can and will be fixed.

It would be easy to get discouraged, but I'm an optimist. I have confidence that all will be made right. For instance, I just know that the bill for our phone book listing will go to Douglas County. Or possibly Parker.