BOOKS!

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Hailie had a lifelong love affair with reading, she adored reading.  Being raised in a very small town in Wyoming, books were hard to come by.  However the people who liked a certain style of book would find each other and swap books.  Hailie's dearest friend Jimmy Richards and she hit it off the day she arrived in Jackson Hole at 7 years of age in 1930, they remained close all through school bound by books. Jimmy however went to WWII and as a pilot was shot down in the Pacific. There was also book club but for adult readers, Dr. Huff was one of the members and had the biggest collection of books. When he passed away, his friends gathered all of his books and their books and any that others would donate and created the Huff Memorial Library.  Later, when that Library joined the state run library system, the unfortunately had to change the name to their county name to be in keeping with all the other state libraries, henceforth The Teton County Library.

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When she married, they lived in an outlying area of Jackson Hole, Moran WY.  Those groups again would trade books and when someone got a new book, it was a big event for small towns only had catalogs to purchase things from.  It was an era of transition from people making their own clothes to buying clothes. Most retail shops in the town of Jackson were essentials, lumber, nails, tools and foodstuffs. Treats such as fresh fruit was more than difficult to come by.

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Finally when the Tomingas family moved into the town of Jackson, Hailie had access to more books at the library and she landed a job at the Jackson Hole Courier, one of the oldest newspapers in Wyoming.  Their shop was located near the town square, to the north and right side. The building sat on quite a slope, to it was sort of a two story affair.  The business offices upstair on the street, and the typesetting machinery located downstairs. It was always a jumble of lead pieces all over the floor from splatter or used type.  There were several huge machines, one for creating the lead sheets with the printed text on them. Another for pressing the lead to the ink and then onto the sheets of paper.

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Later, about 1959 she was offered her dream job, of being the head librarian for the Teton County Library.

 

She won many awards and expanded the library for a decade, as President of the State Library Association she hosted the tri-state Library convention in Jackson, meeting many significant authors and publishers. She won the Dorothy Canfield Fisher award, expanded the library and brought many local historical books into the library before going back to school to finish a degree in Library Science. When she finished her degree, she had an offer at the San Diego Library and the Elko County NV library. She moved to Elko and took the Directorship of the second largest county library system in the United States. She built a new library building, brought the library system into the computer age with an AS400 Main Frame which provided computer connections and services for the college and library as the town of Elko grew. She built several branch libraries, setup a bookmobiles and other services. She was honored at the Nevada State Fair as the Grand Marshall of the event.

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