Richard Ostrander

Richard “Dick” Ostrander, the architect of the Yakima Valley library system, died Friday in Yakima at the age of 82. Ostrander arrived in the Yakima Valley in 1973 to accept the position of director of the Yakima Regional Library, said his wife, Connie, moving from Lincoln, Neb., where he was an assistant library director. Over the years, Ostrander became a trusted friend and adviser to many leaders in the Yakima Valley, particularly former City Manager Dick Zais, who called Ostrander “my closest friend.” Connie Ostrander recalled Friday in a telephone interview that people gravitated toward her husband. “It all came down to that word ‘trust.’ He listened to other people, and if they asked his opinion, he was very willing to share it,” she said. “Even sometimes when they didn’t ask.” Ostrander first worked as a page at age 10 in his hometown library in Holyoke, Mass. He graduated from Syracuse University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s in library science. His love of books and libraries came from his parents, Connie Ostrander said. “Going to the library was a regular thing the family did every Saturday.” Zais met Ostrander shortly after he arrived in Yakima in August 1973. “It was not long before we connected and become friends,” Zais recalled in a telephone interview. “It was a deep personal and professional friendship. He was an extraordinary man and one of the brightest men I’ve ever known. And one of the kindest men I’ve ever met.” Ostrander went to work to expand library services throughout Yakima County and to make those services accessible to every part of the population, including a special effort at the Southeast Yakima Community Center, in one of Yakima’s poorest neighborhoods. “He significantly expanded and diversified the entire collection, from books and videos to films and periodicals,” Zais said. “He set up children’s reading programs, bilingual programs, reached out to Native Americans, created new branches and brought libraries to the people, not for his career but for the public.” State Rep. Norm Johnson, R-Yakima, met Ostrander when he served on the Toppenish City Council in the late 1970s. Ostrander was part of a group pushing for the then-private Toppenish library to join the Yakima system. “He was one of the most learned men I ever met. It was wonderful to work with Dick Ostrander,” Johnson said. Zais said Ostrander jumped to action when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980 and the city manager found himself dealing with a major crisis. “He researched other communities who had dealt with such an emergency in the past, and he said, ‘I’m afraid to tell you Dick, you’re going to be the example for the future. That’s because no modern urban settlement had dealt with anything like this before. The last example was Pompeii, and that’s not a good one.’” Ostrander volunteered with many nonprofits around the city and was close friends with Cardinal Francis George, then bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Yakima. “He was devoted to his family and his faith,” Zais said. No one talked about Ostrander without marveling at his “voracious appetite for books,” said Glen Rice, assistant city manager under Zais. “He’d read two or three books a day and remember everything,” Rice recalled. Said Zais: “I’ve never known anyone who could digest that much information.” Ostrander, who retired in 1997, told the Yakima Herald-Republic at the time that he decided early that his life would flow through the aisles of books that promised new worlds for anyone willing to take a look. “I ran into a friend of mine (working at the library) and I thought he had the greatest job in the world,” Ostrander said at the time. Though he was instrumental in bringing the computer age to the library system, Ostrander never believed books would become obsolete. “I will never believe that,” he said in 1997. “It’s very difficult to take a computer home at night and curl up with it in your lap and turn the pages.” Ostrander had been in frail health recently, Zais said, but his death was still “a shock and leaves me with a painful heart.” Survivors include his wife, a son, Gary Ostrander, and two daughters, Elaine and Anita Ostrander. The rosary will be recited at Holy Family Catholic Church at 6 p.m. Monday. Mass of Christian burial is at 1 p.m. Tuesday at the same church, followed by burial at Calvary Cemetery and a reception at the Richard Ostrander West Valley Library, dedicated in 2011. • Yakima Herald-Republic reporter Rafael Guerrero contributed to this report. To order memorial trees or send flowers to the family in memory of Richard Ostrander, please visit our flower store.