The Founding Fathers Won't Leave me Alone (PART 1)

 Yesterday, not too long into my shift, I took a phone call from an older gentleman who wound up making our day far more perplexing and frustrating than we could ever have anticipated.

He said, "Hello. I think I spoke to you earlier. Is this ROB?"

"No, this is JUICE," I replied.

He said I sounded just like a ROB at another library he had spoken to that morning. I later deduced that he must have meant Mr. Rob from the community college.

The gentleman, let's call him Grandpa Sam, said he was calling to see if we had copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

"Sure," I told him. "We'll have those in several books here."

"But can I get a copy of them?"

"I don't see why not," I said. "We can photocopy them for you , or if all else fails I can pull them off the internet and print them out. We would charge 10 cents per page for the prints, but it would be no trouble."

He seemed suspicious of the truth of this, though. He then said he'd been phoning area libraries all morning and none of them had copies of these documents nor could they give him any. This seemed highly unlikely to me, as they're all found in Encyclopedias and some of the federal document books we and the other area libraries have. At least, the public libraries do. I assured him that we had them in numerous forms and could print or copy them for him.

"Are you sure?" he again asked.

"I have no doubt whatsoever."

He asked where we were located and I gave him directions.

"And this is the TOWN-A library?" he asked.

"No, this is the TRI-METRO County Public Library. There is no TOWN-A library, though we are located in TOWN-A."

The man said he'd see me later in the afternoon and hung up.

This call seemed very odd to me from the get go. I told Mrs. A about it and we talked about which books would be the best ones to use for finding these documents should he come in. True enough, there were quite a few to choose from. She thought it very odd that he would claim no other area library had them or was willing to give them over. Particularly if he'd spoken with Mr. Rob, who is one of the most service-oriented librarians around. Something was fishy.

She told me not to worry about it, because she didn't think he would come in at all. Mrs. A figured he was just testing us to see what we'd say to his request. I was sure she was right about his testing, but I thought he was likely to come in.

And he did.

Mid-way through the afternoon, Grandpa Sam arrived. He was a tall man of at least 70 years, I'd say. He asked if I was JUICE and said he'd spoken with me earlier. Mrs. A happened to come into the room at that moment, so I introduced him to her, explaining that this was The Guy. He asked once again if we could give him copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Mrs. A told him we sure could and that we had them available in several sources in the library which we could photocopy for him. She did explain that it would be cheaper for him if we were to just print them from the internet, as we charge .25 cents for photocopies but only .10 for prints. He said that sounded fine, but he needed to know how much because he was on a fixed income. While they were chatting about this, I'd gone over to our on-line OPAC and found all three documents from us.gov websites, cut and pasted them into a Word document and tallied up the pages to 23, meaning it would cost $2.30. He said that was much less than he was expecting, he had that on him so he would go ahead and take it.

While I was fixing the pagination for the documents, so that each section would begin new page numbering, he chatted amiably with one of our other patrons. He explained that he was an associate pastor for a local Baptist church where he also drove the church bus. He then gave both the other patron and Mrs. A a Christian tract with his church's address on it. The lady he was talking to was already a Christian, however, so he dropped out of missionary mode and back into amiable chat mode. During the course of their conversation, he explained that he had once been given a copy of the Declaration of Independence at a local library and it was a nice parchment reprint of the original document. Mrs. A explained that several years back some state-government agency had sent a box of these around to each library as a one-off deal, but she doubted if anyone had any more of them.

Soon enough, I had Grandpa Sam's documents all printed out and stapled together. He handed over $2.30 and thanked me very much for my time and help. He thanked Mrs. A too, asking her name once again. Then he departed. He came back a minute later and asked if we could three hole punch his documents for him. I said, no problem, removed the staples and three hole punched away. He offered to pay me for this service, but I said that we didn't charge for it. He was good to go, so he went.

Two hours later, Mrs. A received a phone call from the office of a senator from Arkansas. She didn't remember the name of the specific senator when she told me about this later, but said that he was definitely from Arkansas. According to the person from the senator's office, they had just received a phone call from a man from TOWN-A who claimed he had just been to the TOWN-A library and had been refused copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Furthermore, this person had claimed to have been to and/or to have contacted libraries all over the area and been turned away by them all. The guy from the senator's office said that he found these claims nearly unbelievable and he was just calling to confirm.

Mrs. A told the senator's office guy that we had indeed been visited by this gentleman, but that we had provided him with a copy of all the documents he had requested and he had left with them in his hand. She explained that the man's claim of being turned away by other libraries was also highly suspect as all of the area libraries do have the documents he wanted from multiple sources. She wasn't sure why this man would phone an Arkansas senator and make these claims, but we had not only given him precisely what he'd asked for and gone out of our way to accommodate him, but he'd seemed more than pleased with our results.

The guy from the senator's office suggested that the gentleman must have been doing this as some sort of ploy to make it seem as though the Bush Administration was somehow suppressing access to these documents. If this was his agenda, however, he was going about it in a completely dishonest way.

After hanging up with the guy and telling me about what he'd said., Mrs. A and I discussed what should be done next. We didn't like Grandpa Sam going around misrepresenting his experience at our library nor of libraries in the area. I asked Mrs. A if she still had the church tract the man had left, because I would be glad to phone him up and confront him about it. Unfortunately, only the church's contact information was printed on it and we found we could not remember the man's name. My fear was that if this guy was going to the trouble of calling a senator from Arkansas and he really was an associate pastor, he would most likely start spreading his tales at his church as well. As a Baptist church-goer myself, I know if a well-respected older deacon or associate pastor made such claims at my church, the congregation would be inclined to at least listen to what he had to say. Hopefully, we'd start calling to confirm things ourselves, but humans aren't always so careful. Granted, it didn't exactly make sense to us that a Baptist would be stirring up false accusations against Bush, but stranger things have happened.

After a bit, I decided I would phone the church and speak to the minister there. If Grandpa Sam truly was an associate pastor of the church was doing this and potentially spreading false rumors, I wanted someone on the inside there to know the truth. I phoned the church Tuesday afternoon, but no one answered. Meanwhile Mrs. A was able to talk to several area librarians, some of whom had also spoke with the gentleman by phone earlier. The one's who had talked to him had invited him to come on by and they could print copies of the requested documents, because they had sources for them available. However, despite their invitations and his telling them he was on his way, he had not been to any of them.

So after all this, I left work yesterday feeling frustrated and unhappy with the day.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)