A Mobile Oasis for Nevada Readers : Bookmobile Serves One of Country’s Most Remote Areas

The 30-foot van pulled by diesel cab rolled through northeast Nevada’s outback along the seemingly endless dirt road through desolate Ruby Valley.

It was Elko County Library’s silver and blue Nevada Rural Bookmobile on its lonely 4,000-mile monthly odyssey traversing one of the most remote slices of America.

Bookmobile driver-librarian Lorry Moiola, 57, loans an average of 5,000 books each month to 2,000 men, women and children scattered throughout the state’s never-never land of bone-dry mountains and desert.

Moiola’s route crisscrosses four counties and more than a third of Nevada. He delivers books to isolated ranches, tiny towns, one-room schools, mining camps, Indian reservations, to power line and highway maintenance crews, to prison camps and numerous other out-of-the-way places.

Until Sundown

As the first red bands of a new day flashed over distant snow-shrouded mountains, Moiola gassed up the big bookmobile at the County Yard in Elko, his home base. He would be on the road delivering his cargo of printed words until sundown, when he checked into a motel in Ely.

His first stop was Currie, population 15, an isolated wide spot in the road located 115 miles southeast of Elko. The bookmobile pulled up in front of Louise Garcia’s six-student, one-room trailer school.

Moiola had several volumes ready for the grade-school boys and girls, books they had ordered during his last visit two weeks ago. “Here are Milena’s books on Australia, Jennifer’s ‘Animal Doctors,’ ” says the librarian as the students pile into the bookmobile.

Milena Parker, 12, a seventh-grader, plans to be an exchange student in Australia. Jennifer Chandler, 11, a fifth-grader, wants to be a veterinarian. The children at Currie school live on ranches in the area.

Deanna McCall, 27, mother of fourth-grade twins Katie and Terri McCall, 9, notes that Currie had been without a school for six years before the school reopened this fall. “To have a school in Nevada you need a minimum of seven students in the beginning and four to keep it going. We had eight to start and two moved away (before it could be opened),” she explains.

McCall, her husband and their twin daughters live without electricity on a 75,000-acre ranch located 15 miles by dirt road from Currie.

Selects 10 Books

“I taught the twins at home their first three grades. It’s good for them to have a regular teacher like Louise Garcia, important for them to have contact with other children,” Deanna McCall says as she selects 10 books for herself--biographies, histories and best sellers--and 10 Westerns for her husband, David.

“We take the twins to Ely, the nearest town 75 miles from here, once a month just to expose them to the outside world,” she continues.

At Currie, the children’s favorite authors include Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Marguerite Henry and Walter Farley, who wrote the “Black Stallion” series. Books by these authors are popular in one-room and bigger schools all over the Nevada outback, says Moiola.

A half-hour later the bookmobile stops at Donna and Tom Korby’s Currie store known as The Best & Worst Place in Town. It is a grocery, gas station, cafe and bar with an old wooden wagon on the roof and jack-rabbit milk for sale by the can. It is also the only place in town. There are no telephones in Currie.

The bookmobile comes to Currie every other Wednesday.

“It is the biggest social event we have in this isolated corner of the universe. My children love it,” said ranch wife Kathy Lear, 32, a voracious reader like so many who live in this lonely part of America. She reads “everything so long as it’s clean. Most of the best sellers aren’t clean.”

Moiola, who has been a resident of Nevada’s outback all his life except for two years as a gunner’s mate on the destroyer Mansfield during the Korean War, knows just about every cowboy, Indian, miner, schoolteacher, bartender, store owner in the northeast part of the state.

Preston in White Pine County is on the map even though there are only 20 mail boxes lined up side by side along the road. When the bookmobile shows up at the assigned time every other week, ranchers are waiting by the mailboxes on horseback, in pickups, on motorcycles and three-wheelers.

At Boise Ranch the bookmobile pulls up in front of the cookhouse at lunch time and the cowhands pour out. In Baker bartender Al Genz is the library’s best customer. Genz checks out 20 romance books every other week for his wife and a like number of Westerns for himself.

Grateful Prisoner

Wells Conservation Center on the west side of Pequop Summit is another bookmobile stop. “Without Lorry we’d be sitting around in the evenings twiddling our thumbs,” volunteers one of the center’s 120 medium security prisoners.

He was a staff sergeant with the First Division 26th Infantry fighting in Germany during World War II, he says, and reads everything about World War II he can.

Every other Thursday the bookmobile remains in Elko. That’s the day Moiola washes it, greases it, changes the oil “and crawls under the son of a gun to see what’s falling off.”

The bookmobile is the only library for residents of tiny towns throughout sparsely populated Lander, Elko, Eureka and White Pine counties--places like Lages, Lund, Lamoille, Jiggs, Jackpot, McGill, Ruby Valley, Huckeley, Tuscarora, Contact, Carlin and Wildhorse.

“The bookmobile is our library. It is extremely important not only to the 315 children in kindergarten through 12th grade at the Duck Valley Indian Reservation Owyhee School but to all Indian families here as well,” says Geraldine Jones, 52, the Indian school’s secretary.

The reservation straddles the Idaho-Nevada line and bookmobile library card holders at Duck Valley are from both states.

Moiola is also librarian for many Utah residents. He stops every other Tuesday at Wendover, a town divided by the Utah-Nevada state line. Children from both sides of the border attend elementary school in Nevada and high school in Utah, and draw books from the bookmobile.

The wandering bookmobile is the library for Lehman Caves National Monument, for power line crews at Mariah’s Junction, for isolated highway maintenance crew families.

“It’s our only readily available source of reading material in this remote place,” said Beverly Roesch, 34, teacher at the one-room, 11-student school in Oasis. “The bookmobile is an invaluable aid for our school and for the community. We’re all voracious readers here.”

Purchased Town

Until three years ago, Oasis was the Nowhere Saloon. Now, it is the World Brotherhood Colony, home to 90 men, women and children. Most of the adults are graduates of UC Santa Barbara.

Disciples of Paramanhansa Yogananda, they bought the tiny town of Oasis and the ranch that surrounds it and live in trailers behind the town’s school, store, cafe and automobile garage.

They run 2,000 head of cattle, have studios where they do pottery, weave, knit, quilt, make leather goods and saddles. The land is held in common by members of the group.

“We came here because of the isolation, the clean air. We are linked together spiritually. We’re not drug users, don’t smoke or drink,” said the schoolteacher.

“And we love the bookmobile, one of our most important links with the outside world.”