Valuing the generosity of friends

Over the last three years, the Friends of the Delaware County Dis­trict Library have donated nearly $30,000 to the library, help­ing to pro­vide you with enhanced library pro­grams, ser­vices and prod­ucts. I think it is a remark­able achieve­ment, espe­cially when you real­ize that our Friends of the Library group was orga­nized only four short years ago. This group of ded­i­cated, hard­work­ing and enthu­si­as­tic vol­un­teers — more than 200, cur­rently — have held book sales, author and illus­tra­tor pre­sen­ta­tions, antique appraisal clin­ics and raf­fles to raise these funds, and they have been very gen­er­ous in shar­ing them with the library.

Since 2008, the library has relied on these funds to pro­vide T-shirts to par­tic­i­pants in the sum­mer read­ing pro­grams, gifts for our birth­day club enrollees, CD play­ers for home­bound patrons to enjoy audio books, books for the adult book dis­cus­sion groups, mate­ri­als for the Baby Bun­dles that are deliv­ered to every baby born at Grady Hos­pi­tal, sup­port for pro­grams such as the Finan­cial Lit­er­acy Series, music and refresh­ments for Hol­i­day Open Houses and break­fast for the staff at our annual in ser­vice train­ing day, just to high­light a few. With­out this sup­port, some of those pro­grams would never have hap­pened and oth­ers would have been much dimin­ished. Cer­tainly, the Library Levy Cam­paign would have been much less effec­tive and per­haps the out­come of the elec­tion much less positive.

I would invite you to become a Friend of the Delaware County Dis­trict Library to sup­port their efforts and to con­tinue for­ward­ing their good work. Mem­ber­ship lev­els range from as lit­tle as $15 to a life­time mem­ber­ship for $250. You can find out more about the group by pick­ing up its brochure at any library loca­tion, or by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org/friends, or click­ing on the “Friends” link on the library’s website.

Where did the expres­sion “cat’s paja­mas” come from?

I love these ques­tions! Accord­ing to Facts on File Ency­clo­pe­dia of Word and Phrase Ori­gins, “the cat’s paja­mas” was first recorded in 1920 as part of the typ­i­cal vocab­u­lary of Jazz Age flap­pers and was soon pop­u­lar­ized by car­toon­ist Tad Dor­gan in his comic strip “Indoor Sports.” It is one of dozens of non­sense phrases com­bin­ing an ani­mal with a part of the human body or an arti­cle of cloth­ing that was pop­u­lar­ized in those days. Here are oth­ers: the duck’s quack, bee’s knees, elephant’s wrist, eel’s ankles, elephant’s arches, bullfrog’s beard, and leopard’s stripes.

What are the 13 virtues that Ben­jamin Franklin lived by?

In the book Ben & Me: From Tem­per­ance to Humil­ity, these are the 13 virtues listed: Tem­per­ance — Eat not to dull­ness; drink not to ele­va­tion; Silence — speak not but what may ben­e­fit oth­ers or your­self; Order — Let all your things have their places; let each part of your busi­ness have its time; Res­o­lu­tion — resolve to per­form what you ought; per­form with­out fail what you resolve; Fru­gal­ity — Make no expense but to do good to oth­ers or your­self; Indus­try — Lose no time; be always employed in some­thing use­ful; Sin­cer­ity — Use no hurt­ful deceit; think inno­cently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accord­ingly; Jus­tice — Wrong none by doing injuries, or omit­ting the ben­e­fits that are your duty; Mod­er­a­tion — Avoid extremes; for­bear resent­ing injuries so much as you think they deserve; Clean­li­ness — Tol­er­ate no unclean­li­ness in body, clothes, or habi­ta­tion; Tran­quil­ity — Be not dis­turbed at tri­fles, or at acci­dents com­mon or unavoid­able; Chastity — Rarely use ven­ery but for health or off­spring, never to dull­ness, weak­ness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or rep­u­ta­tion; Humil­ity — Imi­tate Jesus and Socrates.

Who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance?

The Pledge of Alle­giance was writ­ten in August 1892 by the social­ist min­is­ter Fran­cis Bel­lamy (1855–1931). Bel­lamy had hoped that the pledge would be used by cit­i­zens in any coun­try. “I pledge alle­giance to my Flag and the Repub­lic for which it stands, one nation, indi­vis­i­ble, with lib­erty and jus­tice for all.” In 1923, the words, “the Flag of the United States of Amer­ica” were added. In 1954, in response to the Com­mu­nist threat of the times, Pres­i­dent Eisen­hower encour­aged Con­gress to add the words “under God,” cre­at­ing the 31-word pledge we say today. Check in the book by the same name for more details.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing delawarelibrary.org or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked!

Posted by Mary Santos on Jan 21 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.