Always Rich
This blog post is generously provided in kind by Quest Lakes. The Double Down blog is also supported by Nevada Humanities’ donors.
By: Quest Lakes
When I was a kid, my dad would say, “I’m temporarily financially embarrassed,” which was his inside joke referencing Steinbeck’s famous observation that “we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”
Steinbeck was one of my dad’s favorite authors. He had access to every book Steinbeck had written because our tiny farm town had a beautiful library, one of the 1,689 U.S. public libraries built with money donated by capitalist Andrew Carnegie between 1883 and 1929.
Carnegie had a track record as a capitalist who accumulated wealth by forcing his employees to work 12-hour shifts for low wages. One of the results was the bloody Homestead Strike of 1892. Carnegie was the sort of man who Steinbeck was thinking of when he wrote that “the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed."
Yet Carnegie did seem to understand the long lasting public good that free libraries could bring to Americans and wanted that impact to be part of his legacy. He also understood that for those libraries to thrive and last, local support would be crucial. That’s why when he funded library buildings, he included a requirement for local governments to develop book collections and give library access to everyone.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as poor. This was partly because my dad always rhapsodized about our great fortune to live in a nation with so many public libraries, universities, and parks. ”
The Carnegie library in my hometown is still there, and it’s thriving.
Photo taken in Silver City in 2020 by visiting writer, photographer, and performer Kerry Rossow of Illinois. Photo courtesy of Quest Lakes.
That library, and many others I used later as an adult, gave me access to a world rich with ideas and concepts I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Although my family was indeed “financially embarrassed” during my childhood, we didn’t think of ourselves as poor. This was partly because my dad always rhapsodized about our great fortune to live in a nation with so many public libraries, universities, and parks.
My mom also loved public access to the humanities and education. She was a librarian who began college in her 30s, after her youngest child was in school. She shared her enthusiasm for universities and libraries, describing her college courses and professors, and buying discarded books for us at library book sales where the going price was 10 cents.
My siblings and I went on to attend public universities through a combination of scholarships, financial aid and work study jobs. I never lost my gratitude for the opportunity. Even today, anytime I walk around a college campus, I feel awe.
My parents said these public spaces belonged to everyone, and therefore, we were always rich.
After college, I moved from the Midwest to rural Silver City, Nevada, a historic Comstock community located a few miles from Virginia City. I was excited to find that public programming by organizations like Nevada Humanities was easy to arrange, even for a tiny town like Silver City, population 155. To name just a few examples, in 2006 Nevada Humanities funded University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor Sue Fawn Chung’s well-attended lecture on the contributions of Chinese immigrants to the Comstock; in 2010 they sponsored a living history portrayal of Margaret Bourke-White (the famous WWII-era photographer who was married in Silver City in 1939) performed by Western Nevada College professor Doris Dwyer, and in 2024 they funded a breakfast and book talk at the Silver City Schoolhouse by award-winning Las Vegas author Kim Foster. These events were attended not only by Silver City folks, but also by people from nearby Virginia City, Dayton, Carson City, Reno, etc.
Award-winning poet Gary Short of Guatemala gave a reading at the Silver City Schoolhouse in 2018. Photo courtesy of Quest Lakes.
Then about ten years ago, my husband and I co-founded an artist-in-residence program, offering a house we own in Silver City, Nevada, to visiting writers, musicians and visual artists from around the world for up to three months in exchange for offering public readings, exhibitions, and concerts.
A sign with the logo for the Resident Artist Program in Silver City on the deck of McCormick House, which serves as housing for visiting artists. The sign was painted by visiting artist Allison Rasmussen in 2019. Rasmussen based the design on the Nevada logo designed by University of Nevada, Reno, professor and artist Jim McCormick, who built McCormick House in 1972. Photo courtesy of Quest Lakes.
Among dozens of artists-in-residence, we’ve had the thrill of hosting scholars like Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and professor David Lee for multiple poetry readings, including readings from Mine Tailings — a book he dedicated “to the good people all of Silver City.” Manhattan-based playwright and opera librettist David Cote drafted his play “Saint Joe” during his residency in 2019. Writer Peter Krogh Anderson of Denmark gave an illustrated talk about his travels to places including Syria, Somalia, and Turkey, and he and his friend Christina Balsvardé shared traditional Danish foods such as pickled herring and homemade rye bread with locals. Multi-talented writer and visual artist Scott Macleod recently gave an illustrated talk on Serious Projects, his new catalog documenting his long career creating art in the U.S. and abroad. The catalog includes photos of some of his art projects with Silver Citians as well as many photos of his cultural exchange projects with folks in Czechia and beyond. Cultural researchers Sue Mark and Bruce Douglas of Oakland spent a summer talking with locals. The result was the development of a dozen postcards showing what the community holds dear, and the creation of a town podium made with local found objects such as sheets of metal from the 1800s.
Last year, I read Looking Backward, a novel published in 1888 by one of Andrew Carnegie’s contemporaries, Edward Bellamy. It’s about an American who has a dream in which he time travels from 1887 to the year 2000 and observes a utopian society where everyone enjoys an extraordinary public life that focuses on “well-being and social harmony.”
Bellamy’s book speaks to my own motivation for opening a visiting artist program. Explaining his culture’s easy access to books, public education, and the arts, one of the citizens of the year-2000 utopia explains that “no single thing is so important to every man as to have for neighbors intelligent, companionable persons. There is nothing, therefore, which the nation can do for him that will enhance so much his own happiness as to educate his neighbors.”
Indeed. Indeed.
Quest Lakes moved to Nevada in 1989 and fell in love with the state and its fascinating history, landscape, wildlife, and culture. She and her husband Theo McCormick co-founded the Resident Artist Program in Silver City, which provides a way for visual artists, writers, and musicians from other parts of the U.S. and the world to engage with the town and the region through the arts. Visiting artists reside at a geodesic dome known as McCormick House in exchange for offering free public performances, exhibitions, workshops, etc.