The following is the text of the Oregonian article, written by Steven Amick, published June 30, 2003.

Donor hopes Molalla readers wear the covers off of his gift

06/30/03

Written by STEVEN AMICK, Oregonian, June 30, 2003.

 
MOLALLA -- Longtime Molalla residents remember Dr. Charlene Wyland as the little girl they often saw walking home from the city's public library with armloads of books.

Wyland, a physician specializing in internal medicine, died in 2001 in Milwaukie, where she lived for more than 20 years. She was 48. Wyland did not leave a will, but she did leave a collection of about 8,000 books her husband, Daniel Wyland, said she would have liked her former hometown to have.

"We both grew up in Molalla," said Daniel Wyland, owner of Molalla-based Ridgeline Tree Farms. "And pretty much as soon as she was old enough to get out on her own -- which was pretty young -- the library was the center of her universe."

Probate of the estate was completed recently, making way for release of the collection to the Molalla Public Library.

It's not the collection's size or its dollar value that makes it worth so much, said Randy Collver, who left the Molalla librarian position earlier this month.

"These are 'Wow!' books," he said -- history, art, art history, children's books, poetry, novels, world literature, world religions, travel, science and more.

"They're the books that start you on a subject and help you grow," said Collver, now at Clatsop Community College in Astoria.

"If something happened and all life was wiped out on this planet and all that was left was this collection, I think an alien visitor could look through it and get a pretty good idea of what life here was like."

Collver said the Wyland Collection contains more books than the Molalla library usually adds in one or two years.

Delving into some of the 18 large boxes and 79 smaller ones in which the collection is stored, Collver pulled books at random: "44 Dublin Made Me," by Peter Sheridan; "Abiku," a suspense novel by Nigerian author Debo Kotun; "All the Names," a 2001 novel, translated from Portuguese, by Jose Saramago, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature; and "A New History of India," by Stanley Wopert, published by Oxford University Press.

Most of the volumes are hardcovers in new or nearly new condition, their original dust jackets intact. The others are mostly full-size trade paperbacks, also in good condition.

"She had to have known books," Collver said. "This is the kind of wealth that's impossible to put a value to, because it's intellectual wealth. There is a book on Zoroastrianism," the religious system of the Persians before their conversion to Islam.

"How many people even know what Zoroastrianism is?"

Daniel Wyland said most of his wife's books were kept in a ground-floor library in their home, with more on shelves upstairs. She liked her books to be handy, he said.

Loved discussions "She loved heated discussions on virtually anything," he said. "I don't know how many times over the years we'd have friends over and the conversation would become intense and she'd get into it and she'd just up and run out of the room and come back with a reference" book.

"Intellectually, she was light years ahead of everyone around her," Daniel Wyland said.

She also was a hard-working, down-to-earth woman who cared little about money: "She was one of those people in her trade who, if it was needed, would have worked for chickens and eggs," he said.

She cared even less about status. A former chief of staff at Providence Milwaukie Hospital who often treated patients there and at Willamette Falls Hospital in Oregon City, "she rarely used 'Dr. Charlene Wyland,' " her husband said.

Instead, even when awakened by late-night phone calls from a hospital, her habit was to say, "this is Wyland."

Because his wife had a special interest in geriatrics, Daniel Wyland said, the calls often were about elderly patients in crisis. Many were literally matters of life and death that would have him wringing his hands nervously as he listened to her coolly instruct the hospital staff about what needed to be done.

Although she loved her work, it was demanding -- keeping her either working or on-call to the extent that the couple did not do the kind of traveling they would have liked. They never visited most of the countries overseas that were the subjects of many of her travel books.

"She went to Italy," he said, "but as far as extensive trips, she really didn't live long enough to do that kind of traveling. And that was kind of unfortunate -- no, not kind of unfortunate; tragic."

Charlene Wyland struggled for years with depression, her husband said. She committed suicide Aug. 6, 2001.

Collver said her legacy will live as long as one of her books remains in circulation.

It is his hope that as the collection is slowly absorbed by the library; each volume will be labeled with a bookplate identifying it as a gift from the collection of Dr. Charlene Wyland.

Daniel Wyland said his wife tended her book collection much as she cultivated the plants she grew in their yard, pruning the books that fell out of favor and replacing them with new ones that caught her eye.

In making the decision to give Molalla the books that meant so much to his wife, Daniel Wyland said he hoped they would be checked out often and used avidly -- engaging, informing and inspiring new readers.

"My hope," he said, "is that the whole collection will wear out."

Steven Amick: 503-294-5915; stevenamick@news.oregonian.com