For half a century, Katie Ellen Yoder did nothing more than operate a small bookstore in a small m…

By Mary Zielinski (free-lance)

For half a century, Katie Ellen Yoder did nothing more than operate a small bookstore in a small midwestern town. Yet, when she died Sunday, the 89-year-old woman had touched more lives, provided more services and made more friends than anyone could count.

A genuine institution, her Greene Center Bookstore survived in an era of instantaneous internet connections, faxes, cell phones and books mass marketed like disposable dishes.

She had a telephone, stacks and stacks of files and a memory that made a computer unnecessary. When you did business with Katie Yoder, you weren’t simply a customer—a potential source of income—but a person who needed something.

As a religious bookstore, Greene Center stocked Bibles in virtually every language, as well as Biblical commentaries and related volumes.

But there also were cookbooks (sales of the Mennonite Cookbook were such that Katie referred to it as her “bread and butter”), travel books, occasional novels, local history books and even a full collection of the poems of Archibald MacLeish. Exquisite coffee table books, such as one about the Holy Land, were not uncommon in the store. There were greeting cards for occasions many of us never thought about, and she stocked Christmas cards that offered more than saccharine verses and suspect sentiment.

Of course, when you stopped at the store, you didn’t just shop, you visited. Katie loved to talk with people about events, ideas and, naturally, books. She asked about your children, offered congratulations when they or you had achieved something, condolences when you had lost someone and, except for the government, never spoke critically about people.

She had had more than a passing acquaintance with government, the federal one, that is, since during World War II she was a cook in the civilian public service camps in Belton, Montana and Dennison. She also had been employed as a cook for the president at the University of Iowa and briefly for artist Grant Wood when he lived in Iowa City.

But it was the bookstore that was her vocation, her hobby, her life.

Started in Katie’s mother’s home in Wellman in 1949, the Greene Center Bookstore was named for the Greene Center School in Greene Township that had stood near the West Union Mennonite Church.

At the time, Katie had $100 in capital, a 1937 V-8 Ford and a small Royal portable typewriter. With that, she launched her business with an advertisement in the Wellman newspaper.

Her first customers were John and Effie Miller and their four children who came over that July evening, asking if she was open for business. She was and continued to be for 50 more years, closing for the last time Wednesday, July 14.

As stores go, Katie’s was unique. And no one but she would have made a go of it. It prospered simply because it was indelibly stamped with its owner’s personality. She and Greene Center were a fixture at conventions, conferences, and were part of the Kalona Fall Festival since its inception in 1972, just two years after the store moved to its new building on Kalona’s 5th St. Her house had arrived three years earlier.

Honored by the Kalona Chamber of Commerce last September (for her 89th birthday), Katie said she had no plans for retirement, that she would continue as long as she could.

And she did.