"Mason City's home," June 6, 1969

8 June 6, 1969. Globe-Gazette Mason City, Iowa. Mason City's home "Your roots are in Mason City, Iowa." That's what Mrs. E. S. Walls told her daughter, Esther, when she came home from her first trip to Africa and said "My roots are in Africa." This incident introduces an article about the former Mason Cityan (not completely uprooted) in the current Christian Science Monitor. Miss Walls gives Mason City and her family full credit for starting her on a successful career that led her to the distinguished Franklin Books Program, where she is director of books and library services and African Consultant, according to the article. Miss Walls is quoted as saying that it was a librarian in Mason City who gave her the work she needed the summer she came home from the State University of Iowa jingling her Phi Beta Kappa key, and found no teaching jobs in the city for a Negro. She is speaking of Miss Lydia Margaret Barrette and she said, "That librarian was the first person who eagerly took me in. At the time it was just a job, but as I worked with her, there grew in me a concern for putting people and books together, a deeper sense of public service. It meant I was more ready to grasp the scholarly opportunities available at Columbia when I got the tuition grant I was waiting for. Miss Walls worked in the New York Public Library to help pay her expenses while getting her degree at Columbi. In 1965 when she retired to join the Franklin Books organization, she was director of the North Harlem Countee Cullen branch, the highest ranking Negro in the system. Describing her visits to Africa, Miss Walls speaks of the special sense of relationship which seems to come to her. "I kept seeing faces that made me think of a face at home, a face of an aunt or a cousin, and I found myself thinking, 'Could this possibly be where I came from? Might this be the tribe which my mother's or my father's ancestors were drawn?" University of Iowa. Iowa Women's Archives