One evening when Danielle Désiré was small, about 3 or 4 years old, she was running around in the backyard. It was time to settle down for the night and get ready for bed, but Danielle was too busy watching birds flying in the sky.
Why, she asked her grandpa, were there birds flying at bedtime?
Those are nighthawks, her grandpa told her. And then, being the storyteller he was, he made up a story on the spot about the birds.
“Once upon a time, there was a king,” he began, launching into the tale of a quest featuring three wise men, a secret door in the Skokie Public Library, and a dusty book that held answers but would not give them up easily.
Preserving the moment
Danielle loved her grandpa and the story he told so much that, 20 years later, when she had a little daughter of her own, she sat her grandpa down on the couch to have him tell it again.
She recorded with a camcorder, preserving this cozy family moment from May 20, 2001, back when her grandpa was still alive and her daughter was small.
Danielle’s grandpa died in 2016. Until this September, when her mom found a box full of photos and an unlabeled VHS-C tape, she didn’t think she’d ever hear his voice again.
‘Does anyone have a working camcorder?’
Danielle hoped the unlabeled tape in the box was that video she filmed back in 2001, but she didn’t want to get her hopes up. Either way, she needed to find out.
So she put the question to the Oak Park Working Moms Facebook group: “This is a long shot, but does anyone have a working camcorder that I can use for 5 minutes?”
Multiple people suggested looking to the library for answers, so Danielle made her way there and found the Main Library Creative Studio.
The Creative Studio’s Media Stations, which allow users to digitize and preserve media such as VHS tapes, cassette tapes, and film negatives, were booked at the moment. Danielle eagerly made an appointment to come back.
‘I was sitting there crying’
On September 29, Danielle sat down at a Media Station on the Main Library’s third floor, and put the tape in. As the picture fuzzed and waved in the way that old home movies do, she watched her grandpa hugging her wriggly daughter on the couch, gently telling her a story.
“Once upon a time there was a little girl, and she was sitting on her great-grandpa’s lap…”
For seven and a half minutes, the tape played, Danielle’s grandpa telling his story about the king and the nighthawks, with her daughter bouncing on and off screen.
“I was sitting there crying,” Danielle said. “It gave me the chance to see him again and hear his voice again.”
At the Media Station, Danielle digitized the tape. She uploaded the file to YouTube, and sent it to her mom, sister, and daughter. “Everybody was crying,” she said. “We never thought we’d hear his voice again.”
‘Go to the library & see what you can find’
Here’s the story Danielle’s grandpa told:
Once upon a time, there was a king who wanted to know what nighthawks were good for. So he sent his three wise men out to find the answer. The king told them, “You go to the library in Skokie”—where they lived at the time—“and you look it up, and see what you can find.”
The three wise men went to the library, but they didn’t find the answer on the shelf the librarian pointed out. Instead, they found a secret door. “And nobody knew that door was there.” Behind the door were some creaky old stairs full of cobwebs. At the top of the stairs was a dusty book titled What Nighthawks Are Good For. They were sure to find the answer now!
“Nighthawks are good for…” they read. But the page was torn, and they couldn’t read the rest of the sentence.
Nighthawks are good for dinner? Lunch? The king didn’t accept these guesses (“Fools!”) and sent them back a third time, threatening their lives. “I only give you three chances, then off with your heads!”
On the third visit, the men brought a broom. They swept the floor and found the missing pieces of the page in a corner of the room. Once they put the page back together, they were able to read the full passage: “Nighthawks are good for eating insects, and they keep the mosquitoes away from people at night.”
Back at the palace, the king was satisfied with this answer: “I thank you, and your lives have been saved.”
And they lived happily ever after.
‘We told each other stories’
As a little girl, Danielle said her grandpa’s story “sparked my love of the Skokie Public Library. I was on a mission to find that door.”
And now, to rediscover her grandpa via the Oak Park Public Library? It’s come full circle, she said.
Danielle, an avid reader who currently has seven books on her nightstand, said that her grandpa “made me what I am quite a bit.” He was “an amazing man,” she said, an engineer and a talented storyteller who originally wanted to become a priest.
One memory Danielle cherishes is her grandpa sitting with her on the dining room floor, helping her make a book. They’re using a hole puncher and cardboard, putting contact paper on for the book cover, and threading yarn through the paper pages.
She doesn’t remember the story they wrote in that handmade book, but she did find a story she wrote to him later, in 1989, called “The Kids Who Were Never Seen Again.” It’s dedicated “To Grandpa Olson from Danielle Désiré.”
“He was so proud of me,” Danielle said. “That was our thing. We told each other stories.”