Salinas Fund Drive Rescues Libraries

The Salinas Public Library, where Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck’s first literary study was nurtured, has been thrown a financial lifeline.

Fundraisers came up with $500,000 after local government officials said they could no longer afford to pay for the library system’s three facilities. The donations will keep the libraries in the financially strapped community open part time through December.

“The goal has been reached,” Jan Neal, administrator of the library system, said last week. “What it means is 26 hours of service per week.”

Salinas, with 150,000 residents, is nestled in a swath of rich California farmland 100 miles south of San Francisco, the setting for many of Steinbeck’s novels.

Neal said 1,200 people each day walked past the life-sized Steinbeck statue to enter the main library, which bears his name. The announced closure last fall produced “a shock wave that a community of this size would have no library service,” Neal said.

“That was perceived as an unthinkable situation for a community in this country. It’s a national bell ringing, saying, ‘You better pay attention. This could come to your community.’ ”

Neal said the fundraising group, Rally Salinas, reached its goal with a $75,000 donation from the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, a charity connected to the AT&T; Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament.

Since 2002, cuts in library funding have approached $100 million around the country, with more than 2,100 jobs eliminated and 31 libraries closed, according to the American Library Assn.

Steinbeck, who died in 1968, was born in Salinas in 1902 and lived there for 17 years, until he started attending Stanford University. Steinbeck often visited the library while he was growing up, said Susan Shillinglaw, director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University.

Neal said the success of the fund drive was a “philosophical and emotional” issue for people.

“They’re not just us saying that libraries have value in a community.

“People have told me that when they came here, one of the first things they did was to get a library card, because the library represents the community.... It makes people feel at home; it’s my sense of place,” Neal said.

She said Salinas expatriates were particularly moved to help their hometown.

“Agricultural communities do not exclude intellectual pursuits, that’s for sure,” Neal said.