Duluth library recognizes centenarian for her generosity

The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, a famous funder of libraries - developing about 2,500 around the United States - once gave Duluth $75,000 for library construction.
On Monday, 101-year-old Duluth resident Katharine Coventry put her name on the Duluth Public Library’s exclusive wall of Carnegie Level Donors.
“I like it when we come full circle,” said Duluth City Council President Linda Krug during a ceremony honoring Coventry, “and we’re full circle here.”
Coventry blushed her way through three speakers before taking the podium.
“What a lovely crowd I’m with,” she said, referring to the 16 other Carnegie donors, a status reserved for those who have given $10,000 or more to the library. “It’s just marvelous. It’s quite overwhelming. I’m glad to be with some good friends.”
Coventry’s donations have come consecutively over the past 17 years, said Dan D’Allaird, president of the Duluth Library Foundation. She earmarked all of her donations to be used exclusively on the library’s videography collection.
“It was part of our culture,” Coventry said. “I wanted to focus on visuals.”
Her donations helped build the library’s collections of feature films, documentaries, how-to and language videos and more. She left her funding open enough to allow the collections manager to choose what the library needed most.
Her generosity “helped supplement the budget for those materials enormously,” D’Allaird said.
Coventry was born in New York City in 1912 and came to Duluth more than 50 years ago as a daughter-in-law to Dr. William A. Coventry. He was a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist who began practicing in Duluth in 1901 and later founded the Duluth Clinic.
In the early 2000s, Katharine Coventry started work on a book of her own, “Growing Seasons: A Twentieth-Century Memoir.” There are three copies of the book at the library, two of which are available for check-out.  
Thus, one of the speakers said, “Ms. Coventry has contributed to the shelves and coffers” of the library.
In 2003, Coventry told the News Tribune, in a story about the Lake Superior Writers, that she worked best on a deadline.
“When my back’s against the wall,” she said then as a 90-year-old.
On Monday, she recalled her book being “extracted out of me,” by the peer group that taught memoir writing. In the process, she said they developed strong bonds with one another.
She ended the ceremony with a flair for a good payoff common to the best writers, “Let’s eat cake,” she said.