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SUBJECT: By 1910, she had books in what was called down at Bridge square in the abandoned City Hall. She installed a reading room so that-- what we would call now homeless living in these overnight rooms at hotels-- these were mostly men at that time-- they would have a place to sit and read. And she kept books down there. She the newspaper room of the library-- public library, which was down on 10th street, that also became a daytime shelter for the homeless and the transients in the city.

A fact that isn't in the book because I learned it too late from one of Minneapolis great ancient lawyers, [INAUDIBLE] Mendel. He was a paper boy in 1912 or so. Gratia came down the stairs into the reading room every day in the newspaper room and looked for new faces. And if she saw a new face, she brought a wrapped sandwich to the man and sent him on his way to some relief organization. If it wasn't a new face, well, she didn't bother with him.

INTERVIEWER: So there was that place within the library building itself?

SUBJECT: Within the library, as well as down in Washington Avenue.

INTERVIEWER: So people had a place to go during the day to read, to try to find work?

SUBJECT: And she started before The Depression, but it really got going during The Depression, the technical room. This is where people would go in. And they would look up the trades that either they were in or that they wanted to learn so that they could move on to a higher level. And of course, there were lots of people with time on their hands, which she tried to turn into times of education.

She started the branch-- the whole idea of branch libraries. She took over just at the time Andrew Carnegie had made all of this money available, and she used every penny and more the Minneapolis might be entitled to. I think six branch libraries came out of the Carnegie fund. She was there.

INTERVIEWER: Where else did she take books? Because clearly her-- another focus of hers was outreach. I mean, call it outreach now, but she really wanted to take books out to people.

SPEAKER: She was the inventor in the United States of bookmobiles, the first ones to go to rural areas, which are now suburban areas and have their own Hennepin County Library system. But at that time, that didn't exist.

INTERVIEWER: It was called a book truck, right?

SUBJECT: Book truck, yes. I don't know when the bookmobile word came out. She took books into factories, down at the phone company which employed many, many young women. She had a library down there that she kept supplied, also in some of the factory locations, in the fire departments.

INTERVIEWER: Right. That's the picture I saw, the firemen sitting up, with their feet up, reading library books.

SUBJECT: That's right. That was all Gratia Countryman. She just wanted the whole world to be uplifted and educated. And she believed in also community very strongly, in what community ought to be, and how people ought to work together. I think she was somewhat of an autocrat because she knew the direction she wanted to go. And miraculously, the community followed. She was the most popular speaker with all the luncheon clubs, the men's clubs, the women's clubs, whatever it was in her years.

INTERVIEWER: Let's go for a minute to the question of Americanization. Now, she very firmly believed that immigrants should be acculturated as soon as possible, as quickly as possible to American mainstream life. And so what did she do with regard to that?

SUBJECT: The Franklin branch, in the heart of the most concentrated Native American population in the country probably, in Gratia's time, that was a heavily Scandinavian immigrant population. She filled it with books in the Scandinavian languages, some of the Eastern European languages near Seven Corners, so that the new immigrants could gradually be integrated into American society.

And late in her last years were the first years of the Nazis in Germany. And she suddenly became aware through her staff. I give her credit always for the inspiration and the vision. Here were all these new German immigrants, who were actually, these early ones were really some of the best-educated Jews who left Germany first, who were in a position to leave, whereas others weren't in a position. She filled some shelves of the library with German-language books to start their integration into society.

INTERVIEWER: I understand also that during the Depression, she put a psychologist in the library, beginning at two afternoons a week, to help people deal with the loss of jobs and to find new ones.

SUBJECT: Yes. That was all part of her outreach. I become a little speechless to try to explain why it happened. It always seemed so easy for her. She knew what was the right thing to do. She had no hesitation. And she had a charisma that people followed her, be they male or female.

I mean, much of her, the most imaginative things she did were early in her career, when no one was doing anything. And she really started the whole concept of American public libraries was 20 years and 10 years before women even had the right to vote. And she was out there just changing society as best she could.

INTERVIEWER: What do you attribute that to? She was not a person who came from particularly upper class origins. It wasn't that she was moneyed and had a sense of entitlement from the start.

SUBJECT: Her father was essentially a failed farmer who had bought into Nininger, the ideal community near Hastings that some of our listeners may have known about. That's a story in itself. But he was a failed farmer, and he ended up being a salesman for threshing machines in the Midwest. He believed-- he had two sons and two daughters who grew up. The daughters were the younger ones.

And I think he so believed in them and so instilled in them the sense of self-worth and demanded of them. There are so many letters in the book that I included, simply to show the demands the father made upon his daughter and the way the daughter responded to these demands. I have a theory that a father who has absolute faith in his daughter will produce, can produce someone like Gratia Countryman. I have seen it happen in other research I've done.

INTERVIEWER: Was Gratia's life completely consumed by work?

SUBJECT: Not at all. She had the most wonderfully interesting personal life. I wouldn't have written the book if-- I believed that there was a wonderful personal life there. And so I went to it and discovered through her gracious grand niece, wonderful letters and diaries. And then I found Gratia's son. He was still alive.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, tell us the story about the son.

SUBJECT: Well, now we're back to 1917. And there is a children's room at the library. There was a small boy, was there almost every day of the week, when he should have been in school, in January and February. Gratia's friend and her life companion, Marie Todd, would see him in the children's room-- she too was a librarian-- and brought him up to Gratia's office. And she simply fell in love with the little fellow.

But it turned out that his mother, who was his only-- his foster mother was a recent immigrant to the city. And she had turned to prostitution for an income, for lack of any other skills. Gratia got the public authorities into the act. And suddenly, she was guardian ad litem. The mother had been deported to Canada. There were court cases. The Canadian government didn't agree to all this. But in the end, Wellington belonged to Gratia.

And he has lived-- he's still alive now. And when I went to see him, because unless I could talk to him, I wasn't going to write this book. He's met me at the airport, at '86, in his Buick. Because his mother always liked Buick, so he's always owned Buicks. Met me at the airport, and he said, I've saved everything, for I always knew that someday someone would write the story of my mother.