Dewey's Nine Lives

Although I have never met her in person, I can picture her in her sophisticated business suit the night she accepted the Affiliate of the Year Award from the Matanuska Valley real estate community. She had won the award, ostensibly, for turning around a struggling mortgage lender in the town of Wasilla, Alaska. The office, on the verge of being closed when she took over, was now one of the most profitable in the state. More important for Vicki, she had transformed the morals and attitudes—the very mission—of the office. In a business plunged into corruption by a housing boom (in 1980s Alaska, not 2005 America, but history repeats itself), she had stood on principle. She refused to make loans if unethical side deals had been struck; she told borrowers when a loan was not in their best interest, even if it killed the deal; she threw real estate brokers out of her office for dishonest practice. She chose the twelve most ethical and trustworthy brokers, the ones who truly cared about their clients, and told them she would always stand by them in exchange for their business because she cared about their clients, too. And from that stand, the business had boomed.

She had arrived in Wasilla with nothing but hard-won experience. She had been distrusted by the local real estate community, simply because she had taken over an office they had grown to despise. Now she was a leader of the Rotary club and prominent in fund-raisers and food drives. She was on the board of the Christmas Friendship Dinner, which served a free feast to the needy for the holidays. During the darkest moment of her life, she had lost faith in God, but through her daughter’s example she was once again an active and enthusiastic member of a church. It was nice to have the Affiliate of the Year Award because it honored not only her financial acumen—her ability to turn a profit—but her service to the community. And there are few honors greater than the respect and recognition of your peers.

But Vicki never talked about the award. I had to poke and nudge her before I even learned about it. Instead, she talked about the people she helped: the mortgage brokers who lost their values chasing the dollar and who she was able to turn around; the young men and women she mentored; the clients whose dreams she helped fulfill. She worked with one woman, who didn’t speak English, for more than two years to help fix her credit and secure an affordable loan. A year later, that woman’s son came to see her.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ve gone to college,” he said, “and I want you to know that I’m studying finance because I saw what you did for my mother, and it changed our lives.”

That’s the recognition Vicki cherished. That’s the story that brought a tremble to her voice. That’s the mission that got her up in the morning and motivated her to work hard every day.

“I believe a house is a stabilizing factor,” she told me. “It helps create a healthy family life. That’s what I’m doing when I write a loan. I’m giving a family a better chance to succeed.”

I feel similarly about libraries. I think they are a stabilizing factor in communities. I think that, at their best, they bring people together like few public institutions can. That was always my focus: to make the library work for Spencer, by making it work for the individuals who lived there. I didn’t want money or fame; what librarian has ever gone into the business for that? But I believed, by working the right way and for the right reasons, that I could change my corner of the world. And so did Vicki Kluever. In the end, we both accomplished our goals.

And yet, for all our similarities, I remained skeptical of our sisterhood. We came from such different parts of the world; how much could we really have in common? Northwest Iowa, where I’ve lived most of my life, is spectacularly flat. The nearest ocean is more than a thousand miles away. We have frigid winters, like Alaska, but they are followed by ninety-degree summers. And while the vast fields of corn and soybeans are beautiful in their way, you are often hard-pressed to find anything more interesting than a few trees on our endless horizon.