This Gift Is One For The Books
By DANIEL P. JONES | Hartford Courant Staff Writer
March 18, 2008 Reprinted

WEST HARTFORD - — His former co-workers at the West Hartford Public Library were stunned recently by news that the late Thomas Kilfoil had left $2 million to the institution he served and loved for more than three decades.

Now, thanks to the gift from the former reference librarian who died in 2005 at age 82, the library's foundation has invested the money and will spend a portion of the proceeds each year to enhance adult reference services and educational programs, as well as a new West Hartford history room that recently opened as part of a major renovation, library officials have announced.

It is the largest donation to the library from an individual, according to library board member Barbara Sergi.

"It was a shocker," Joe Cadieux, the library's community services director, said of the amount of the bequest, which is equivalent to half of the library's $4 million operating budget.

"I am surprised at the size of it," said Martha Church, a reference librarian who was Kilfoil's friend and co-worker for 25 years. "He was a very thrifty individual. He didn't have a car," she said. "The fact that Tom was able to save money was not a surprise at all. But he was also a very generous person, so the fact that he chose to give it to the library doesn't really surprise me, either."

Library staff said they didn't know how Kilfoil amassed his money. In 2004, Kilfoil and a sister sold a Newington property on Fenn Road for more than $3 million.

Kilfoil, who worked at the library from 1968 to 2002, walked to work from his Buena Vista Road home and back each day, a 2-mile round-trip, so he didn't spend much on transportation.

Typically dressed in a shirt and tie and signature tweed jacket, Kilfoil would arrive ready to greet library patrons and help them navigate the stacks for just the right reference materials.

The tall, lanky Hartford native once dreamed of becoming an actor. He had been a U.S. Navy officer during World War II, a drama teacher and a museum curator. Student radicals took over his campus building during protests at Columbia University, where Kilfoil taught theater and worked as assistant curator at the school's drama museum. He became infuriated when the protesters turned part of the museum into their field office and set small fires in the buildings.

He didn't agree with the demonstrators. It was 1968, he'd just finished earning a master's degree in library science. He decided to head home, and ultimately found a niche helping other people find what they were looking for in the library stacks, becoming a fixture at the West Hartford library as head of the reference desk.

The staff who worked with Kilfoil remember his confident, quiet professionalism, as well as his generous spirit and interests in subjects as varied as literature, theater, local history and naval ships. Thanks to Kilfoil, Church said, the library has amassed a deep collection of all sorts of reference materials.

"He was all over the map," she said. Church remembers a caller wanting to know what a Hoya was — as in the Georgetown University athletic team nickname the Hoyas. "Off he went to the stacks and came back with an answer," she said. Kilfoil had made sure the library had acquired a book on college nicknames, according to Church. (For the record, hoya is a Greek term for "what" or "such.")

"He seemed to have his finger on the pulse of what kinds of information might come in handy someday," Church said.

Cadieux credits Kilfoil with inspiring him to become a librarian years ago when he was working in West Hartford as publicist for the Science Museum, now called the Children's Museum. Cadieux would hang out at the library at lunchtime, and he noticed how Kilfoil went about his work.

"He recognized you, he greeted you, and he always had a pleasant demeanor," he recalled. "He had a kind of thespian quality about him, upright. He was someone that you trusted ... someone that inspired," Cadieux said.

"Even if he didn't give anything to the library," he said, "he had already left his legacy with the people he touched."

Contact Daniel P. Jones at dpjones@courant.com

[Back to the Kilfoil donation page]

[Video of Mr. Kilfoil from 2005]