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Lu Burke is now the immortal patron of the Southbury Public Library. I felt a little sheepish making a special trip to the library when I had not gone out of my way to visit Southbury while Lu was alive, but I was curious. The library’s address, 100 Poverty Road, is not indicative of its condition. The sign at the foot of the driveway says “Since 1776,” meaning that the town of Southbury has had some kind of library, and employed a librarian, ever since colonial days, but the new Southbury Public Library, with Palladian windows, a portico, and a railed roof deck, on six acres that used to be a pumpkin patch, opened in 2006. It did not even smell like a library yet. It was easy to see that Lu would have thought this was a good repository for her hard-earned cash, but also difficult to see what more was needed. All the appointments were in exquisite taste—there were Bill Blass reading lamps in the reference section, leather club chairs and a gas fireplace in a reading room, lots of large-print books and jigsaw puzzles for the geezers, a children’s library with two suits of armor, a dozen computers, free Wi-Fi, Kindles to borrow, a terrace, one of those stands that dispense plastic bags for wet umbrellas, and the ultimate luxury for a book lover: shelves that were still empty.
When the gift was announced, the library’s board, made up of nine volunteers appointed by the selectmen, began searching for appropriate ways to honor Lu’s intent. “We are great strategic planners,” Shirley Michaels, the head of the library board, told me. “Just to spend money frivolously is not our idea.” They decided to name the circulation desk for Lu—a magnificent thirty-four-foot-long dark-cherrywood installation that would not have been out of place in a cathedral—and to inaugurate a literary program, which they planned to kick off in May, with a New Yorker Fiction Night. It was canceled, however, and the order for the granite plaque was put on hold, when Southbury’s newly elected first selectman, Ed Edelson, no doubt attracted by the size of Lu’s gift, decided to look into the financial arrangement between the town and the library. He found that the town owns the library—not the other way around—and that the library’s funds, which, including Lu’s bequest, would amount to $1.8 million, belonged in a town account. He said on the phone, “To have town accounts managed by volunteers seems to me not to be the appropriate way to go.” The board was insulted. “For fifty years, we’ve never had a first selectman try to grab the money,” Michaels said.
Edelson said he was impressed by two things: Lu Burke’s generosity (actually, Lu was not known for that trait; a copy editor does not accrue a million dollars through generosity) and the fact that she hadn’t been involved in the library. As far as anyone knew, she never even had a library card. Nobody at the library knew who she was, so how could they know what she would have wanted them to spend her money on? Edelson went to the probate office and found out that Lu Burke had left the money for the “general purposes of the library.” His first idea was “Well, can we use the money to buy books?” He proposed that the town stop using taxpayers’ money to buy books—the town has budgeted fifty thousand dollars annually for library books—and use Lu Burke’s money instead, spending down the bequest over twenty years. The response to that was “No way.” “It would be as if it never happened,” Michaels said.
The press surrounding Lu’s bequest flushed out her next of kin. Stephanie Blansett, who worked as a school-nurse supervisor in Nashville, Tennessee, left a comment in response to an article about Lu in an online news outlet called the Southbury Patch. She identified herself as Lu Burke’s niece. Her father, John Seiter, was Lu’s half brother; he was nine years older than Lu. Stephanie divulged, shockingly, that Lu’s given name was Lulu. “Lu never was a Lulu,” Stephanie said, when I reached her by phone.
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