You might consider her a Christmas elf — at least a woman with a spirit of giving.
Every year, Charlene Scott crotchets 100 colorful caps using donated yarn and gives them away in the Onalaska community, as she did for years in Ocean Shores where her family owned a vacation home.
During the coronavirus pandemic, with schools and libraries closed, when a little neighbor girl said she wasn’t a reader, the words triggered the former library worker into action.
“I just freaked,” she told me as we sat at I-5 Toyota while our cars were being serviced. “I think the best part of my childhood was finding a book that was mine, that I could keep.”
Scott, who retired after nearly a quarter of a century with the Pierce County Library System, urged her husband to construct a Little Free Library. Robert Scott, who designed yacht interiors before retiring, built the sturdy elevated library at the corner of Flicker Lane and Gish Road, and his wife stocked it with books.
She collected donations from friends in Puyallup, where she used to live, and even Enumclaw and Raymond. Many book donations come from families cleaning out the homes of deceased relatives. Others are donated by people who purchase them at bargain prices and give them away.
Charlene set up a library in her Onalaska home, sorting books into age groups on folding tables and organizing them into tubs, plastic storage bins, and banker boxes along two walls of her den. She cleans each book, making sure nothing has been left inside. At the public library, workers found the strangest things used as bookmarks — family photos, slices of bacon, sanitary napkins and even a throwing knife! She sanitizes each book — especially those for babies — before putting them into the library for others to take.
“I’m having a lot of fun with this and hopefully supporting the community,” Scott said. “For now, this is my way of pitching in to support Onalaska and to keep families and kids reading.”
This past year, Charlene said, she distributed at least 50 bankers’ boxes of books from the Onalaska community. Specialty books such as language or World War I history books she gives to schools, homeschool groups, or military museums. She traded a collectible for a stack of Dr. Seuss readers.
Bobbi Barnes said she loves the Little Free Library. She helped Charlene haul an old bench to the library box for those who want to sit while perusing the books.
“It brings me so much joy to watch my granddaughters get excited about going to see what’s new in the library,” said Barnes, whose partner, Lewis County Commissioner Gary Stamper, died in September 2021 of COVID-19.
Since the Scotts erected the first library, a second — and busier — Little Free Library has been put up outside Zippity Do Dogs at 1814 state Route 508, which also has a box where Scott obtains donations of yarn she crochets into caps for kids and adults.
“There’s always somebody in need,” Charlene said. “It’s a way for everybody in the community to support everybody else.”
She and Robert, who have been married 53 years, have two grown sons — an iron worker in Seattle and a Camas police officer — and five grandchildren.
“They all told me they have too many hats,” Charlene said with a laugh. “That’s when I started making them for everybody else. I only crochet one thing, so I just make the same hat over and over again, just different sizes and different yarn.”
The couple moved to Onalaska seven years ago after selling their Puyallup home to their youngest son. Why move to Lewis County? It’s much more affordable for retired people to live than Pierce County, she said.
“Our taxes for our place in Ocean Shores and our place in Onalaska added together are less than our taxes for the house in Pierce County,” she said. “Also our insurance rates went down so we saved a lot there.”
Besides, her husband’s childhood friend from Port Townsend, a fellow Vietnam era Navy veteran, Jim Tyner, lived in nearby Toledo.
After crocheting, Charline would hang two or three of the clean colorful caps in freezer bags each day from Halloween through January beside the Little Free Library at Zippity Do Dogs. She gave away 130 last winter.
“There was a rush on when I first started last year,” Charlene said. “I found out the school bus driver was stopping on her lunch break every day, and she was taking hats for the kids on the bus.”
After speaking with the driver, she crocheted a cap for all the children who needed one. At Christmas, she uses red, green, and white yarn to create the caps, if she has it. Otherwise, she crochets using whatever yarn has been donated.
With the first library, which didn’t receive a lot of traffic, Charlene would stock the shelves once a week. But now she rotates the books in both libraries more frequently — and even takes books to Little Free Libraries in Chehalis.
She’s not alone in giving to the free library. While I snapped photos at Zippity Do Dogs, Cathy Acevedo of Onalaska tucked books onto the shelves for others to read.
Before the Onalaska Apple Harvest in early October, Charlene stocked the shelves with new books for middle and high school students. Before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, she filled the shelves with volumes of holiday stories.
But running a free library isn’t without challenges.
“We had a little problem with garage sales,” she said.
After discovering people took books to resell at garage sales, leaving kids who needed the books empty-handed, Charlene invested in a “Not for Resale” rubber stamp that notes the book is a free gift donated by a community supporter in Onalaska.
“It was really hard to get donations of children’s books,” she said. During the initial startup, the library received books from the South Sound Reading Foundation. “I would guess that half those books were brand new and a lot of early reader books.”
One of the men she met at the Little Free Library said he picks up books there after finishing his shift at midnight and appreciates the light on the building. Public libraries aren’t open that late, and smaller communities don’t even have a library.
“I can’t believe how far people are coming to use this little free library,” she said. “They’re coming from Cinebar, Morton, and Glenoma.”
Some donations she quarantines to make sure they don’t have spiders or mites. Others she buries in a tub of dried lavender to remove any stale odors.
“I work on it every day at least an hour,” she said.
Mikki White-Rupprecht of Zippity Do Dogs appreciates Charlene’s efforts.
“She is the most amazing lady and so knowledgeable and thoughtful when putting out these books,” she said. “I really can’t praise and thank her enough for all the work, time, and energy she has put into this little library.”
In a few years, Charlene said, she may put out a call for a replacement and post the pattern for the hats.
Here’s hoping someone else with a heart for giving steps up to crochet caps and clean books to serve others.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
