They were already turning the pages.
A Chicago man tried to return an overdue book he borrowed from his hometown library 50 years ago, but they told him it was better to keep it at this point.
Chuck Hildebrandt, who borrowed “Baseball's Zaniest Stars” in 1974 as a 13-year-old boy living in a Detroit suburb, said the library told him to “just hang on.”
“Some people never go back to face music,” said Oksana Urban, director of the Warren Library in Michigan. “But with him and the book erased from our systems, there was really no music to face.”
Hildebrandt, 63, who grew up in the Motor City suburbs, returned to the city during the Thanksgiving holiday and decided after all these years to make things right and give the books back.
He said that on December 4, 1974, he pulled out a baseball book and just stared at it in a daze.
“When you’re traveling with a bunch of books, you’re not looking at every book,” he said. “I just throw it in a box and go. But five or six years ago, I was looking through my bookshelf and I saw a book with a Dewey decimal library number on it. What is this?”
The library's accusers decided that the 50th anniversary of his crimes would be the ideal time to return the books, but they were unable to do so because they ran out of space on the shelves for them.
Hildebrandt is now trying to turn the case into a charity project. He started a campaign to raise $4,564 for the nonprofit literacy organization Reading is Fundamental.
He got on track with a $457 donation, and said the fundraising goal is an estimate of the amount of late fees the library would pay if it collected “baseball's craziest stars.”
with post wire
