The good and learned patrons of the Bainbridge library will perhaps excuse a breach of decorum that took place amongst the hallowed stacks this week.

The usually staid library environs saw an unusual disruption Wednesday and Thursday, when librarians attired in 1950s garb broke into extemporaneous song with such Eisenhower-era standards as “Davy Crockett” and the Mickey Mouse Club theme. The pageantry marked the 50th birthday of the Kitsap Regional Library, the countywide system with which our library is affiliated.

“Boy, it was an ugly era except for the glamorous movie star clothes,” library director Cindy Harrison said of her staff’s

sartorial getup.

Photographic evidence exists, and we plan to use it; in the meantime, let us pause for a moment to honor the Kitsap Regional Library system that serves so many local patrons each year. Actually – and this is hard to believe, given the prodigious reading habits of today’s islanders – when it comes to supporting a countywide library system, our forebears were well behind the curve. Back in 1961, even as a splendid new library building was going up at the corner of High School

and Madison, Bainbridge had yet to join the regional library network and had turned down public funding for such. As a result, islanders would be ineligible for bookmobile services and would have to pay a special fee to use their own library once it opened.

That led Review editor Walt Woodward, in the Aug. 16, 1961, edition of this newspaper, to chide the community for paying for a dog catcher but not a librarian. Wrote Walt: “This creates a most unusual situation. The town is pledged to contribute a monthly sum to the support of the (countywide) pet control program. Yet the town remains alone in Kitsap County in not contributing to the support of the Kitsap Regional Library. If supporting the common library system is a literal thing to do, then illiteracy, legally at least, flourishes once you step inside the confines of Winslow. The rest of Kitsap County pays our ‘dues’ to the library organization, but not Winslow.”

He went on to ask, “Isn’t it about time the Town of Winslow put library support in the same category it allows pet control?”

Winslow’s “Town Dads” took the hint, voting three weeks later by a 4-1 margin to earmark $2,900 for library support in the next year’s budget. (In other business that evening, the council delayed a permit for a fuel tank for a new marina, heard a report on plans to extend sewer up to the Village Shopping Center, and granted a 3-foot zoning variance for Eagle Harbor Congregational Church, which had been moved and was undergoing renovation.) That same week, the Bainbridge Foundation announced that a new “Bainbridge Library Maintenance Fund” would be added to the One Call For All drive, to pay for library building upkeep.

So was forged an arrangement that lasts to this day. KRL supports its operations through a modest property tax levy; islanders, meanwhile, maintain the library building itself through private donations. The system today boasts nearly a half-million books and other distinct materials, freely shared amongst the nine library branches and circulated five times over every year. A half-million of those 2.4 million checkouts are by Bainbridge patrons.

And to think we were slow to sign up.