A family legacy in the library

My travels to the Chicago area from my childhood home back East revolved around family visits, train rides, and sightseeing. Stories were told of my great-great-grandfather William Deering, his sons Charles and James, and their impact on agriculture and industry. I knew of their combined involvement with and impact on Northwestern University but never had the chance to see and experience the Charles Deering Memorial Library until I was out of college and off on my career path.

Working in Colorado, I became involved with the creation and running of the Denver Earth Resources Library. When Northwestern asked if there was a family member who would like to serve on the Libraries Board of Governors, I happily signed on, now over 22 years ago. I’ve proudly served as board chair since 2011, and I have continued my family’s tradition of gifts to sustain the work done here. My son, Kammer, even chose to go to Northwestern, where he proudly took on a student job in University Archives, tending to the preservation of Wildcat history.

Deering Library is a beautiful monument to the man who stewarded our family harvester company in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After his passing in 1927, his children, Barbara Deering Danielson and Marion Deering McCormick, established a bequest to name the new library after him, and it was a natural choice. Charles had an enduring intellectual curiosity and a love of the arts, so of course his name would sit above a grand library.

But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to understand the magnitude of the honor. Deering Library is more than a postcard-ready exclamation point on a tree-lined meadow, and it is more than a background setting for every visitor selfie—though it is certainly both those things. More than that, it is a hub of knowledge where expert librarians collect and curate rare collections of distinction for humanities research. It is a temple to the discipline of quiet study. And it is a reminder how, when it opened in 1933, Northwestern proclaimed that the University deserved to join the world’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. No school could build something like this unless it was serious about its academic aspirations!

In this issue of Footnotes, we celebrate last October’s reopening of Deering Library after 16 months of renovation and restoration. It is still the same magnificent space, but it is now more accessible, more adaptable, and more modern (while giving up nothing of its picture-perfect Collegiate Gothic aesthetic).

I hope that each of you has a chance to visit this renewed Deering and that you take a moment to reflect, as I do every time I visit, about all the ways your own aspirations—academic or otherwise—are stirred just by stepping into this inspiring, iconic building.