90-year-old a real Friend of the Library

Scott Swanson

Of The New Era

Madelene Battey sits amid the rows of books lining the walls and floor of the small used bookstore run by the Friends of the Library in Sweet Home.

“I love to read,” she said. “I love historical novels. I love mysteries.”

Battey, 90, loves books so much, she agreed a year ago to lead the Friends of the Library.

“I avoided it as long as I could,” she said, wryly. “I kind of worked into it.”

Sweet Home Library Director Leona McCann, who has known Battey about 20 years, said Battey would rather be “behind the scenes.”

“We just kind of voted her in,” McCann chuckled.

Battey, known to her friends as “Maddy Battey,” said she’s loved books since she was a child.

She was born Sept. 8, 1915 outside Battle Creek, Mich., but was raised mostly by her grandmother in Ontario, Canada.

“The story I get told is that my father died before I was born,” Battey said. “While we were visiting my grandmother, I got pneumonia. She kept me rather than making me travel as an infant in the wintertime.”

She attended a country one-room schoolhouse, that had a limited number of books.

“I read everything they had — numerous times,” she said. “When I got to the city, to a real library, I went crazy.”

She stayed in Canada until she was 13, then returned to her mother and stepfather.

Battey finished high school in the middle of the Great Depression and decided she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to attend college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but didn’t have enough money.

“I had to do something,” she said. “You know, you get that urge to get away from home.”

Battey spent a couple of years babysitting and doing housework, earning the funds she needed to pay for nursing school.

She said she decided on that line of work because she had an aunt who was one and she enjoyed her aunt’s stories of the nursing life.

“I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher,” Battey said, matter-of-factly. “Back in those days, there were really only two professions for women.”

She graduated from Michigan in 1939 and worked at the university hospital for three years. She met an electrical engineering student named Bruce Battey, who graduated in 1942. The day following Commencement, they were married and off to Massachusetts, where Bruce had a job waiting at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working on radar systems. After World War II, they moved back to Michigan, where Bruce worked at the Ypsilanti branch of the University of Michigan. The Batteys had two children by then, so Madelene’s nursing career was on hold.

Later, they moved to Kansas City, Mo., and then, in 1961, to Southern California, where they built a house in Malibu. Bruce got a job with the aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. With their four children, Robert, Dorothy, William and Margaret, old enough that she could work outside the home, Madelene went back to nursing and got a job at Santa Monica Hospital, in the obstetrics section.

“I figured that area had probably changed the least of all the fields during my time away from nursing,” Battey said.

She worked at Santa Monica until 1978, when she retired, shortly after her husband retired form McDonnell Douglas.

They sold their house in Malibu (“during Carter’s reign, when interest rates were so high”), stored their furniture in Portland, where their younger daughter lived, bought a motorhome and spent eight months touring the United States.

“It was wonderful,” Battey said.

When they returned, their daughter’s husband, Dave Vassar, who worked for the U.S. Bank, was named manager of the Sweet Home branch of the bank. So the family moved to Sweet Home.

The Batteys lived in Crawfordsville for a year and a half before moving to a home on Upper Calapooia Road, where they lived until eight years ago, when they relocated to their present home in Lebanon.

When she moved to Sweet Home, Battey said, she visited the library and “thought it was a very nice library for a town like Sweet Home.”

While living in Crawfordsville, she saw a notice in the newspaper about a meeting of the Friends of the Library, and she decided to check it out. Then she decided to get involved.

“The first book sale was such a mess I decided it needed to be better organized,” she said. “I started to go into the library once or twice a week to sort books as they came in rather than waiting till it was time for a sale.”

Three years ago, she and others were able to open the Friends of the Library used bookstore at 1242 Main St., after finding the vacant building and the landlord who was “willing to work with us.”

“We started with just one room and we’ve expanded,” she said, gesturing across the two-room facility crowded with neat rows of books.

Library Director McCann said that Battey is a “hard-working lady with a heart that surpasses anyone I know.

“She’s a doer,” McCann said. “I think she’s a reason why the Friends of the Library are so successful. There are many hard-working people in the Friends of the Library, but she prepares the way for others. She’s a wonderful person. Sometimes, all we need is a hug.”

Battey also enjoys crafts and likes to sew and crochet, she said.

Twice a week she babysit two of her four great-grandchildren.Her two daughters, Dorothy and Margaret, live in the Sweet Home area. She also has seven grandchildren, most in the area.

On Fridays she runs the Friends of the Library store.

” Obviously, she’s used the library all her life and she’s a proponent of libraries,” said McCann. “She puts her love of libraries into motion. She doesn’t rest on her laurels.”

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