Making History, Shaping Tomorrow
Library Enthusiasts Alan and Gail Fields Give Back
By Jeri Zeder
As a boy living in Brooklyn, New York, before the era of television, Alan Fields remembers visiting the Kings Highway Library with his mother every week and borrowing six books at a time. “The library was the first place we were entertained and educated. Even in high school, we would go to the library to get information to write book reports and papers,” he says.
Growing up in Williamston, North Carolina, Gail Fields also has fond memories of reading all the time in a home without television. But in the 1950s and 1960s, her small town of fewer than 6,000 residents was part of a segregated and reluctantly changing South. When faced with the prospect of integrating Williamston’s public library, town leaders decided to shut it down. Gail’s mother, Sylvia Levy Margolis, was the chair of the library’s board of directors. “It was my mother who worked and worked to make sure it became an integrated library,” Gail says.
“It was a ‘Profiles-in-Courage,’” Alan says.
“It really was,” Gail agrees. “I look back now and think she really put herself in a very dangerous position.”
On a trip back to Williamston recently, Alan and Gail visited the little town library, which has now become a vibrant resource for the entire community.
With their palpable affection for public libraries, and their appreciation for the community support that libraries depend on, Alan and Gail have become members of the Maria Hastings Cary Legacy Society, an initiative of the Cary Memorial Library Foundation. The Legacy Society recognizes donors who have provided for Cary Library in their estate plans. Alan and Gail joined the Legacy Society last year, when they named the Library Foundation as a beneficiary of their IRA—a quick and simple way to establish a planned gift to Lexington’s library.
“I think a lot of us do our estate planning early on, and then maybe do a little bit of adjusting. I’ve noticed as I’ve talked to people our age how many seem to be reworking things at this point. We decided this was a good opportunity to say, ‘Let’s let the library be part of our legacy,’” says Gail, who serves on the Planned Giving Committee of the Library Foundation.
Leaving an inheritance to their children is their first priority, but, Gail says, “I think that sitting on that committee got Alan and me thinking about our estate planning and how important it would be to think about the institutions that really mean a lot to us.”
Alan, an investment manager by profession, is a long-time member of Lexington’s Trustees of the Public Trusts, and serves as their chair. As a trustee, one of his responsibilities has been to manage Cary Library’s endowment. When it became clear in the late 1990s that the library building needed renovation, Alan was part of the initial group that established the Cary Memorial Library Foundation, a nonprofit corporation, as a fundraising entity. Gail joined the Building Campaign’s Steering Committee. The campaign raised $4.2 million of the $15 million renovation costs from generous Lexington citizens and businesses. When the building reopened in 2004, the Foundation transitioned to annual fundraising, a transition that Gail and Alan helped to shepherd as members of the Foundation’s board.
Voracious readers—books can be found in every room of their house, with stacks of them cued up on their family room coffee table (“I’m always about four books behind,” Alan confides)—Gail counts To Kill a Mockingbird as one of her most beloved books, while Alan cites the authors Herman Wouk and David McCulloch. They both love reading history and historical fiction.
Alan and Gail met when she was a student at Duke University, and Alan was living in the area as a young graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We ran into each other on the streets of Chapel Hill and had one of those what are you doing this summer conversations,” Gail recalls. She was looking for a summer job at the time and was planning on attending a conference in Pennsylvania. “And the next thing I knew, Alan had arranged for me to have a ride to the conference with him and a friend of my family’s. And then he had gotten a summer job for me. And then he sort of planned my life from there on,” she says, smiling.
After Gail graduated from Duke, they married. She taught high school English at Durham High School while Alan got his MBA at UNC.
The world has certainly changed from those earlier times. From card catalogues to microfiche to digital resources, Alan and Gail have been witnesses to, and agents for, change in the world of public libraries. Public libraries today are still important repositories of books. But they are also—and here is where Cary Library shines—institutions that do so much more. They make the indispensable internet available to all. They offer access, for free, to targeted, tailored, reputable information that’s otherwise paywalled and unavailable through Google. They provide bespoke reference services remotely as well as on-site. They bring communities together through imaginative programming and opportunities to create and learn. They broaden our cultural horizons. And they teach us how to navigate bewildering new technologies.
“Gifts like the Fields’ will make something possible for Cary Library at some moment down the road. With the way libraries are evolving, it may even be something that we can’t fully imagine today,” says Cary Library Director Koren Stembridge. “Alan and Gail’s gift speaks to their faith that Cary Library will continue to be essential to the intellectual, creative, and social life of Lexington. I am reminded of the wording of Mrs. Cary’s original gift to the town, ‘having regard for her native place and being prompted by a desire to increase the opportunities for culture among its inhabitants.’ The Fields’ gift reflects this spirit perfectly.”
Gail knows first-hand how Cary Library makes a difference, even to the point of changing lives. When she returned to graduate school in 1979 to become a social worker, just a few years after they had moved to Lexington, she relied on Cary Library for her studies and research. After graduation, she worked for Concord Family Services for twenty-two years, advancing from intern to executive director of the agency. “It was such a perfect fit,” she says.
Alan, meanwhile, has used his skills as an investment manager to found or further some of Lexington’s most beloved institutions, including, besides Cary Library, the Hayden Center and the Lexington Education Foundation. “I guess I basically have an entrepreneurial bent, and I extended that to organizations that I’ve been involved in,” Alan says. “I’ve used my skill set to really give back in a way that was easy for me to do.”
“One of the things that we feel very proud of is that our children have picked up on this idea of giving back,” Gail says. Their daughter Jacquelyn is active in her children’s schools, and their son Michael helped establish “Most Valuable Kids,” an organization that distributes unused sports-events tickets to underprivileged children.
“I grew up in a family where the dining room table was always covered with envelopes,” Gail says. “My mother was on every committee that there was. She was designated by the governor as a humanities awardee.”
Gail and Alan continue carrying these lessons forward by giving back to Lexington and to other communities that have touched their lives. Legacies, indeed.
Willing a Thoughtful Future
Legacy giving to Cary Library is a wonderful way to share your good fortune, fulfill your philanthropic goals, and enrich the life and culture of all the people of Lexington. Contact Kat Macdonald at the Cary Memorial Library Foundation, 781-862-6288 extension 322, or cmlfoundation@carylibrary.org, to find out how you can leave a legacy gift through your will, IRA/retirement accounts, life insurance, or donor-advised fund. Or ask about establishing a charitable gift annuity to benefit Cary Library.