Irene Assaults the Arts, Too, at Venues Around the State

Pamela Polston, Megan James & Margot Harrison

...In White River Junction, students and instructors from the Center for Cartoon Studies, along with sympathetic neighbors, spent many hours Sunday through early Monday hauling out the contents of its Schulz Library as the nearby river rose alarmingly. They saved some 10,000 books and 4,000 zines, according to CCS cofounder Michelle Ollie. "We'd just finished cataloguing them a month ago," she says. " The majority of the books are graphic novels, reference and history books, rare instructional books." The boxes were relocated to the old Telegraph Building, which houses CCS' studio. It's unclear whether the Schulz site can be salvaged.

The library was housed in the same building - a former fire station - as The Main Street Museum, owned by David Fairbanks Ford. While the quirky museum itself was spared most of the ravages of the White River, the lower level, including its two tenants and a museum storage area, was not. Six feet of water ripped through the businesses and essentially destroyed everything. One renter, weaver Susan Thompson, lost "a very expensive, computerized loom," among other things, Ford reports.

He doesn't think the infrastructure of his building is at risk, but, as with so many buildings in Vermont now, the cleanup will be massive. Ford notes that the storage area included items that had survived the historic flood of 1927. "Never one to miss an opportunity," he quips with undampened wit, "I"m thinking of selling boxes of filth and bottles of floodwater" as a fundraiser.

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