Here’s a glimpse of some of the fun stuff that was happening in Carmichaels – and Flenniken Library – in 1997.
That’s longtime librarian June Kim on the left, linking arms with a merry band of community organizers who are, from the looks of their shirts, involved in Carmichael’s second Annual Halupkie Festival. That’s Paul Lagjoda on the right, arm in arm with Pricilla Biddle, standing beside the late Janice Jefferies. The woman hugging Mrs. Kim remains unidentified so if you recognize her let us know.
I found this blast from the past on May 1, while looking through a photo album on display during the library’s 60th anniversary open house. They are standing in front of the ten by five-foot mural of coal barges at Shannopin Mine on the Monongahela River, by Robert M. Robinson. It hung on an office wall at Shannopin Mine until the mine closed in 1982. Former mine supervisor Alfred Smalara donated it to the library and it is still brightening the children’s library room above the computers and bookcases. What better place to hang original art than where children can grow up contemplating its every colorful brush stroke and know it was painted by a real person just like them?
I hadn’t thought about June Kim for years, so it was sweet to see her smiling at me, helping me remember the 1990s as Greene County and the rest of the world were beginning to imagine the 21st century. She represents that time when cultural tides were turning from books and magazines to video games and Internet learning, and libraries nationwide were finding their way in this new cultural shift.
The fact that Mrs. Kim came to Greene County in 1986 with a MLS – masters in library science – would become a game changer for how the county’s library system would be operating going forward. With Mrs. Kim in charge at Flenniken, the responsibilities of managing the Greene County Library System could be shared between Flenniken and Bowlby libraries. Things weren’t quite so rule oriented back in the 1940s when it was the community at large that put their civic minds together and got to work gathering books and gathering funds to start a library for their home town.
Every small town library has its backstory and Flenniken Public Library at 102 E. George St. Carmichaels is no exception. The center of its present day annexes, ramps and side door entrances is a stately old home that once belonged to Werner Lund, who owned the movie theater in town. When the Carmichaels Cumberland Women’s’ Civic Club started a library in the basement of First National Bank, now Community Bank in 1946 they had no idea their library was destined to move next door.
But when Earl T. Flenniken died, the frugal bachelor with family roots stretching back to the earliest settlers left a tidy endowment to support a town library named in honor of his parents. The Lund family’s handsome yellow brick house was purchased in 1960 and named William and Mary Flenniken Library.
It’s hard to read the design on those shirts from this little snapshot – the word halupkie is faded but it is one of the many ethnic words for a dish made from Europe to the Middle East and China that wraps ground meat stuffing in any number of leaves, from cabbage and grape leaves to Swiss chard, then cooks them in any number of sauces. When men were recruited from Europe to work in the mines along the Monongahela River, they brought their families and their love of this historic food with them.
Sarma is from the Turkish word sarmak – to wrap and holubki is the Slovak name for the same delicious made from scratch dish that is the heart and soul of graduation parties, weddings, funerals and whatever other celebration calls for a side dish that is complicated but well worth the effort. When I called up longtime Carmichaels resident Paul Legjoda for more information, he brought the first and second annual festival tee shirts to the library for me to see, neatly hanging in plastic protectors and told me about the festival celebrating what I grew up calling pigs in a blanket.
And there, in his collection of shirts I found one with two pigs snuggling under a star spangled blanket. It seems there were two shirts to be had for the cook-off billed as a festival in Carmichaels on October 4-5 1997. From the looks of it, there was some question about what to call this dish that has nourished most of the world for the last how many thousand years. It suggests that there were plenty of cooks on the street that day with electric warming pans full of their favorite food of whatever name, challenging the judges and those who came to eat to choose the best of the best.
Who won? Paul doesn’t remember but he does know “when the people who bought our shirts took them home and showed them to their relatives, we got orders coming from out of town and we sold out.”