GIDGET FUENTES

Staff Writer

CAMP PENDLETON -- Marsha Carney was moved to tears as she looked around Tuesday in the airy, sunlit new library that bears her late husband's name.

"This is grand," said the Oceanside resident. "I love it. Patrick would have been really pleased."

For 40 years, her husband, Patrick J. Carney, had put his heart and soul into the main library at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base, rising from a cataloguer to become the library's director.

Over the years, the Marines outgrew the library that was most recently located in a building near the 1st Marine Division headquarters in the base's "mainside" area. So base officials decided to expand the facility to create a comfortable, inviting place for Marines, sailors, family members and others.

The result: an 11,000-square-foot building is 3,000 square feet larger than the old building nearby, giving more elbow room and space for the library's 100,000-plus collection of books.

"This is an important facility. It is important to the Marines and what we do today," Marine Lt. Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the I Marine Expeditionary Force commander who oversees all West Coast-based units, said during a ceremony Tuesday.

Hagee said "today's warfare is complicated, and it's just not the normal tactics" that Marines are required to know. The only place to get that knowledge, he said, "is in a facility like this."

Patrick Carney, an Army veteran who came to Oceanside in 1959 as a college graduate, died at age 64 in 1999. Last year, the Marine Corps dedicated the old, small library in his honor, making him only the second civilian to have a building at the large training base bear their name.

"We were very crowded in there," said Ariel Gasper, the supervisory librarian and one of 18 who work at the base's three libraries and bookmobile. "There just wasn't enough space for people."

Base workers renovated the new building, which was a "hostess house," and Marines from the 1st Assault Amphibian Vehicle Battalion helped box and move the books, magazines, bookshelves, computers and other equipment there.

Near the entrance, high ceilings and large windows in the "warrior" reading room look out on the tall trees at the hillside location. "We love the ceiling," Gasper said. "The room is almost like living in a lodge."

The room has computers with Internet access and a set of bookshelves offering titles that are required reading for all Marines. The room features a glass bookcase of rare military books and several original papers and medals of the late Gen. Joseph Pendleton, after whom the base is named. "These are the most important papers in here," Gasper said.

The new building exceeds the family's expectations, said Kathy Arciero, Carney's cousin. "I just didn't expect this," she said. "I'm just blown away by their generosity."

"He really was a special man," Marsha Carney said. "It's just nice to have so many people say that."

To those who knew him, Patrick Carney put his heart into his work.

"Everybody knew who he was. He helped everybody," said Marine Col. G.I. Wilson, the Reserve Support Unit commander.

Wilson recalled that when Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait 10 years ago, then-1st Marine Division commander Walt Boomer asked him: "What can you tell me about the Arab mind?"

Off he went to the library, where Carney led him to the book, The Arab Mind. "He knew what I was looking for," Wilson said.

Books were a passion of his as much as gardening and family activities, said Marsha Carney. "He was hooked on World War II books and mysteries," she said.

For the library workers who knew him, the new library is a more fitting tribute to him than the older building.

Said Gasper: "To us, the library is now a place."

Contact staff writer Gidget Fuentes at (760) 901-4072 or gfuentes@nctimes.com.

3/21/01