Gov. Tom Ridge handed a $1.6-million check to Elizabethtown (Pa.) Public Librarian Susan Bowser July 8 along with a tattered edition of Dickens “possibly borrowed by a previous governor when the library opened 38 years ago.” According to the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, Ridge had come to the library to make a funding announcement, but the way the check was presented came as a welcome surprise to library officials.
The money was not really to repay a library fine; rather it was a matching grant from the governor’s capital budget to be used to build a new, much larger library in another location downtown. “It was a lovely check,” Bowser told the paper. “I asked him if he wouldn’t like to take out another book, but he declined.”
Ridge made headlines in June when he signed into law a bill providing historic levels of funding to the state’s poorer public libraries.
Posted July 12, 1999.