Great Gainesville Sun Story About Alachua County Library District!

Library care packages offer soldiers morale boost

By Hailey MacArthur, Special to The Gainesville Sun
Published: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 6:29 a.m.

Army Sgt. Dana Messer was anxious. He was restless. He was waiting for mail call.

Messer, 29, spent 12 months anticipating mail call while in combat overseas. Would there be a package today? Would it be fat, or would it be thin? Would it rattle, or would it rustle?

"They all knew that they could count on my packages for the roasted peanuts and magazines," he said of the men in his division. "I couldn't tear those boxes open before soldiers were all over me."

The care packages were addressed to Messer but reached all the men in Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment. They were sent from Gainesville's Tower Road Branch Library through a Web site that connects civilians to soldiers.

It was just coincidence that a library so close to his home in Alachua offered him such a morale boost while he was stationed 62 miles south of Baghdad in Al-Hillah, Iraq - almost 7,000 miles from North Central Florida.

The library has sent more than 1,000 care packages since 2004 to U.S. troops like Messer through the Books for Soldiers Web site, but its days doing so may be numbered.
The site allows deployed soldiers with Internet access to request books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, board games and other items from volunteers who ship the items directly.

Susan Weimer, library specialist and Books for Soldiers member, said the Tower Road library comes from a tradition of outreach.

"We had the magazines, and the troops wanted the magazines," she said, matter-of-factly. "So it was sort of a natural for us to come together."

Weimer and several colleagues started by paying postage fees out of pocket. But each package cost between $7 and $10 to ship, she said, and the fees began to add up.

So Friends of the Library, a nonprofit organization that supports the Alachua County Library District, offered to cover the cost of postage. More than $4,000 was raised in April by collecting change during the semiannual book sale.

Weimer said she was hooked after the first, simple thank you.

"I sent a few packages out," she said, "and then I got my first postcard. It really kind of touched me that I would actually get a response from somebody on the other side of the world. It was amazing how appreciative he was."

The postcard was nothing much to write home about. It was short at just three lines long and concluded with "GO GATORS!"

Weimer displays that first postcard from Sgt. Johnson on her desk, which is ambushed by boxes of magazines and bombarded by yellow Post-It notes with the names and locations of soldiers. At any given time, Weimer said she is in contact with at least 50 soldiers.

"It does, in a way, become like having family members there," she said." You can't put the war on the back burner. It's always in the forefront of your experience, every day. So, no matter what you do, you're remembering that people that you have come to know and care about are there."

Weimer has binders, cardboard boxes and e-mail inboxes full of notes, some short and others long, from soldiers she has touched. They all know her as "infomama." She has received flags flown over bases, Iraqi money and even copies of election ballots from soldiers who gush about her generosity.

"It's nice to show people that a library is there for them, no matter where they are."

Sgt. Jerome Patterson, stationed in Ramadi, Iraq, for 15 months during his second tour of duty, estimates he received about 90 packages, or a package a week, from the Tower Road Branch Library.

"It kind of ensured us that there were people still on the outside world," he said.
Sgt. Messer, the Alachua resident who received packages from the Tower Road library, returned home from duty in November. He has since earned a degree from Santa Fe Community College and is now attending the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"It was always exciting, for me in particular, to get a little piece from home," Messer said of the packages from Gainesville.

Susan Weimer made sure to include a copy of The High Springs Herald or Alachua County Today in each package she sent to Messer.

"Everyone at the library really made a to ugh tour easier," he said. "It helped remind us it wasn't all hell-built; there was something to come home to."