They had already turned the page.
A Chicago man tried to return an overdue book he checked out to his hometown library 50 years ago — but they told him he could keep it this time, too.
Chuck Hildebrandt, who checked out “Baseball’s Zaniest Stars” as a 13-year-old schoolboy in a Detroit suburb in 1974, said the library told him to just get on with it.
“Some people never come back to face the music,” said Warren, Michigan, library director Oksana Urban. “But there wasn’t really any music to cope with because that and the book were wiped from our system.”
Hildebrandt, 63, who grew up outside the Motor City, was back in town during the Thanksgiving holiday and decided to try to make things right and return the book after all these years.
He said he took out the baseball book on December 4, 1974, and just made space for it.
“When you’re walking around with a bunch of books, you’re not checking every book,” he said. “You throw them in a box and walk away. But five or six years ago, I was looking at the bookshelf and there was a Dewey Decimal Library number on the book. What is this?”
Library Scofflaw decided that the 50th anniversary of his crime was the ideal time to return it – but it didn’t happen because there was no longer room for the book on the shelves.
Hildebrandt is now turning the event into a charity — she’s launched a campaign to raise $4,564 for the nonprofit literacy group Reading Is Fundamental.
He moved the ball forward with a contribution of $457, and said the target fundraising figure was an estimate of what the overdue fees would be if the library were to turn away “baseball’s zaniest stars.”
with post wires
(TagstoTranslate)US News(T)Books(T)Chicago(T)Detroit(T)Libraries
