Edna Liggin

The Bernice News-Journal

“Down with the old, up with the new,” is a slogan that expresses the exciting activities at Bernice these Mondays as the high school moves into a wing of the new building and preparation begins to demolish the old one, where so many Bernice men and women spent so many years of their youth.

As the Bernice Garden Club progresses into its third month, we receiving request for books on flower arranging, roses, making corsages, and garden pests and diseases. Other requests from here have included “Chanticleer” by Rostand “Caine Mutiny,” by Wouk; and for information on Southern surnames and genealogy. “I want something about old fossils” we were asked and this we found is called paleontology.

We carried part of our publishers exhibit (now on display at the Farmerville library) to Marion for the high school library. Marion boys are still checking out books pertaining to activities of boy scouts and cub scouts, and also requests coming from their mothers who are trying to work as leaders with them. “The Cub Book of Boy Scouting” has a world of information in it. Other requests here were for books in our U. S. Foreign policy and McVoy’s “Louisiana in the Short Story”.

As we see boys and girls eagerly reach out for the Zane Grey books, we wonder if we need worry too much about these young people’s ideals character and morals. Thoroughly clean and uplifting, the author skillfully weaves plot and characters with a western background into such good stories that a Zane Grey book seldom sets on the shelf, but rather somebody, young or old, is always reading it.

A lady sitting in a car at Truxno showed us a piece of beautiful crochet she had recently made, and it brought to mind the fact that there are books on the bookmobile for women with talented fingers. One reader pleaded to keep her crochet book a “little longer” until she finished her doily, while a reader at Litroe said, “I got a lot of good out of that book on hook rugs”.

We are always glad when a seemingly lost book becomes a found book, not only for the logical reason that we need the book to keep circulating, but the child may be like little Eddie Ward at Rocky Branch. He refused to get another book to read until he found the lost book, and this defeats the purpose for which we have our traveling library.

We were glad to go back to Downsville after an absence of seven weeks, and found it time to plunge right into the announcing of summer stops and helping the children plan where they could meet us. Many of our readers are like Mrs. Redden, busy with vegetable canning and freezing and gardens, but not neglecting their church work. But all this activity calls for some rest, and why not, as she does, rest, and why not, as she does, rest and read together and it all makes for a well-balanced day of living.

Last Friday at Spearsville was our first time to pick up books for the closing of schools, but many of the children plan to meet us at Watson’s Store, Terral’s and Spear’s and up at Lockhart and Laran.

Mr. R. O. Love, veteran photographer of Union Parish, visited the bookmobile at Linville to request Hubbards “Journeys to the Homes of the Great”, and gave us a fascinating glimpse into the work he has been doing for the past 58 years. Here is excellent material for a book that would equal and excel many books that are on have been best sellers.

We already have a book in our collection about a family whose descendant lives in Union Parish. This is Young’s “So Red the Rose”, about the McGehee family, ancestors of Mr. Bob McGehee of Downsville.

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