One hour after the Glen Ellyn Public Library (GEPL) closes on Friday, January 27, 2012, a miniature golf course with eighteen book-themed holes will open in the stacks of the two-story library building at 400 Duane Street in Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60137. The Swinging thru the Stacks miniature golf fundraiser will be held between 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.
The Glen Ellyn Park District is lending the GEPL the golf balls and putters from its miniature golf facility. The Holes & Knolls Miniature Golf Course, located at 845 Pershing Avenue in Glen Ellyn, is closed in wintertime.
The fee is $5 per person to play. The organizers believe it will take forty-five to fifty minutes to play a round, and they can handle up to 300 golfers.
At last year’s event, as mini-golfers played through the Music Department, they were serenaded by three staff members. This year, mini-golfers will find the Snacks in the Stacks booth after the ninth hole.
This fundraiser will benefit the GEPL’s Butterfly Garden, which is located between the north end of the GEPL’s parking lot and part of the Illinois Prairie Path. The Friends of the Glen Ellyn Library and the Glen Ellyn Public Library Foundation are sponsoring the event.
They hope to raise $10,000 for Phase II of the Butterfly Garden construction project. Last year, 175 people played miniature golf and the GEPL raised $9,700 for the Butterfly Garden.
Dawn Bussey, the Executive Director of the GEPL, told Bob Smith “It will be an educational area as well as a good place to sit and read,” full of butterfly-friendly plants, benches, and signs that inform visitors about the kinds of flying animals they may see there. He wrote about this in the DuPage County edition of the Daily Herald (“Hardly par for the course”) published yesterday, Tuesday, January 10, 2012.
Each hole in the miniature golf course will be inspired by a different book. Last year, one inspired by the Jules Verne classic Around the World in Eighty Days featured a globe. Another, inspired by Julie and Julia, featured cookbooks and pots and pans, and a third, inspired by Alice in Wonderland, featured a white rabbit.
Last year, Executive Director Bussey introduced Swinging thru the Stacks. She introduced it after hearing about miniature golf fundraisers at a few other libraries across the U.S. According to Smith, “Bussey wrote about the success of last year’s tournament in a trade publication and has gotten responses from librarians across the country picking her brain for ways to make the same thing work at their facilities.”
For more information, check out www.gepl.org or call (630) 469-0879.
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Steve Darnall, host of “Those Were the Days” on WDCB-FM and “Radio's Golden Age” on yesterdayusa.com and publisher of Nostalgia Digest will speak about the Golden Age of Radio at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, at the West Chicago Public Library (www.westchicago.lib.il.us), located at 118 West Washington Street. For more information, call (630) 231-1552 extension 4.
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