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1674-2 Helen Muir TUE OCT 18 1988 ED: FINAL SECTION: LIVING TODAY PAGE: 1C LENGTH: 19. 38" MEDIUM ILLUST: photo: Helen MUIR SOURCE: JANE WOOLDRIDGE Herald Staff Writer DATELINE: MEMO: SPIRIT OF EXCELLENCE HELEN MUIR: A CHAMPION OF BOOKS AND LIBRARIES. Helen Muir describes herself as a leaf in the wind. "I think life is very chancy. Like this library thing. I didn' t plan to do it, " she says. "This library thing" has turned out to be the most public achievement in a life that has included countless causes, two much-celebrated history books --Miami, USA (Banyan, $4 . 95 ) and The Biltmore: Beacon for Miami (Pickering, $9 . 95 ) magazine articles, and stints as a columnist for both The Miami Herald and The Miami News writing about society, children' s books, celebrities and theater. Muir has been a driving force behind the move to create the county-wide library system that now includes 29 branches (two more are on the way) and is the largest in the state. Over the past 40 years, she has served on (and often chaired) library boards in Coconut Grove, Dade County and the state; created the Friends of the Dade County Public Libraries; founded a series of author- dinners that have been copied throughout the state; lobbied legislators in Tallahassee. In the ' 60s, she took to the streets to urge voters to include libraries in the Decade of Progress bond issue. She has been honored by numerous organizations, including the city of Miami and Florida Women' s Hall of Fame. In 1984, she received the National Trustees Award from the American Library Association. Now 77, she has scarcely slowed. The new main library may be open and the branches flourishing, but she is still deeply concerned. "We must have money to buy books. " "I always felt libraries were like churches -- sometimes more like churches than churches, " says Muir, who is an Episcopalian. "Libraries are supposed to be there, like mothers. But they cost money. People don't really understand that. " She came to Miami in 1934 as Helen Theresa Eucharia Flaherty Lennehan Hansl, a high-school graduate from New York City sent down by a public relations firm to promote the Roney Plaza Hotel. (She never has gone to college, and she regrets it, she says . ) She had written for newspapers in her hometown of Yonkers and in Manhattan, and so it was no surprise when The Miami Daily News offered her a job. She didn't plan to stay, but the late William Muir, who was then attorney for Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher, changed her mind. Helen Muir has loved books since her grandpa John Henry Augustin Flaherty taught her to read the Gold Soap wrappers in the kitchen when she was 4 years old. To this day, she considers Ralph Waldo Emerson one of her closest friends . Along the way, she made friends with some of the authors she admired. She interviewed Robert Frost one year when he wintered in Coconut Grove; the two became fast friends. "I should write about him before I die. I keep pulling back from it. I still have a prescription bottle of pills the doctor gave him. " Philip Wylie came to the Muir' s house to die. William McFee spent two months with the family, sipping tea and martinis. Her formal involvement with libraries grew out of a tragedy. When her second daughter, Melissa, was killed by a truck in 1944 at age 4 , Muir created a memorial of words: a children' s book collection for the Coconut Grove Library. (She also founded the Honor With Books program, which encourages people to donate books in someone' s memory or honor. ) Then she joined the Grove library' s board, and then she was appointed to the city' s library board, and from there things snowballed. "I was just one person doing what came naturally, one step at a time, " she says, slightly embarrassed by the attention. "You want to do something with your life. Everyone has the need to develop as a person. I was trying to get a shape, to understand who I was. Whatever degree of assistance you can give -- surely it matters deeply in the scheme of things. You have to work at life. I feel sorry for people who don' t know that. " Marguerite Carden, assistant director of Dade ' s library system, says, "Four million books were checked out of Dade libraries last year. Each one of those homes has been directly affected by what Helen has been committed to. She didn't do it single-handedly. But if she hadn 't hung on, things would be different. " Though she insists she is fundamentally a traditionalist, Muir often ignored the mores of her generation. She was a working mother when others of her generation and social status stayed at home. She traveled alone in Europe. She spoke out determinedly on the issues that mattered to her, writing as early as the 1950s that television would ruin children' s minds. Years ago, an acquaintance asked snidely whether she really had to work. She answered: "I would have died if I 'd had to play bridge all the time. " ADDED TERMS: biography helen muir mh award END OF DOCUMENT.