After our conversations yesterday, I changed the heading for today’s post. Bookmobiles are libraries, and some of you might want to talk about school libraries, so I just made it libraries, rather than public libraries.
This is the Huron Public Library, my hometown library, although it looked nothing like this when I was a child or the Library Director. The library was renovated and expanded in 2000, years after I moved away. But, I still visit when I’m in town. It’s still a beautiful inside and out. My mother lives just a street away, and we can cut through yards and easily walk there.
The library was founded in 1933, and moved to its present location in 1943. It was in a building that had been a school. That’s the library I remember. I got my first library card there when I was in the first grade, and I still have it. I loved that library. I’ve said before that my ambition was to read every book in the library until I realized there were new books added all the time. I don’t remember how old I was when my parents moved us into a house a block north of the library for a week during the summer so they could housesit and take care of three boys who were the sons of the owners. What a glorious week! I walked to the library every day, checked out a stack of books, and returned to the house to lie in the hammock on the screened in porch and read.
I was sixteen when I was hired as a page at the library, to shelve books. I loved that job, and spent two years and subsequent summers working with some of the best library staff I ever knew. I learned so much from them. The Director allowed me to do a little of everything to get a taste before library school. I had a second ambition at this point, to return home as Director of my hometown library.
My first job out of grad school was at the Upper Arlington Public Library, outside Columbus. But, don’t worry. This isn’t a resume. I was lucky enough a year later to return home as Library Director. I met my late husband at the library, and even married him there. The staff tied used paperbacks to the back of my car.
Over the years, I worked at public libraries in Florida, Arizona and Indiana. I could tell you amazing stories about my two years at the Captiva Public Library on Captiva Island. The best part of all those years in libraries, along with the books, was always the library staff I worked with. With a few exceptions, people who work in libraries are wonderful, fun, intelligent, and dedicated to serving people and sharing books.
I’ve worked at libraries I loved, and I like the one I use right now as a customer, The Canal Winchester Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. But, when I look back at a long love affair with public libraries, it’s still the Huron Public Library that has my heart.
Now, what memories do you want to share about libraries or bookmobiles? I love those stories.
One of my best memories as a child was the bookmobile. And during junior college I had a job at my local library shelving books. I must admit I was slow at that job because I was so curious about every book on the cart!
Believe it or not, Karen, I slowed down in the children’s department because I loved to read picture books about mice!
Great jobs, weren’t they?
When our youngest daughter was small, her favourite books were the Angelina Ballerina books, about Angelina the dancing mouse. She remembers them to this day.
Oh yes Lindy! We had those too, and my elder daughter, who took ballet and tap classes for some years, absolutely adored them.
Lesa, my absolute favourite part of your post about libraries is what you shared about your late husband and the wedding. So funny about the paperbacks. No wonder you love libraries so much. They gave you not only a career, but some beautiful personal memories to treasure. Lovely.
For myself I have three times in my life that libraries were of particular importance. The first was when our local public library in Calgary, where my family lived at the time, became a lifeline for me and a refuge from a dysfunctional home life when I was in my early teens. I spent many hours and days there soaking up the quiet and the books. Saved me, I think.
The second was when David and I had our three children. SO many trips to the library and so many fabulous books for our children to grow up with. We would never have been able to afford to buy even the tiniest fraction of the number of books the three of them had such fun choosing and reading. I’m sure that library is why they still love reading now.
And the third time a library entered my life in a big way I’ve written about before; but in case some of you haven’t read it, for about ten years I worked in a high school library. The library itself started out as part public library (and where I took our children when they were very small) and part school library, but by the time I began working there it was a dedicated school library, because a brand new public library had opened a mile or so up the road a few years prior.
I loved my time there even though my job was mostly clerical, with added lunchtime crowd control duties for 100+ adolescents on any given day. I had been looking forward to ‘working with books’ but of course there was a lot of mundane work to do – creating book displays, processing newly arrived books to get them ready to go on the shelves; typing up cards and entering the exactingly correct cataloguing info and then filing said cards in the physical drawers of the card catalogue (seems so dated and labour-intensive now!); cutting plastic sheeting to size and covering hardcover books; stamping each book as the property of the library on three specific set pages; etc.
And of course I’ll never forget my first day on the job, when at lunchtime, the Grade 12 grad class prank was to release hundreds upon hundreds of live crickets in the library. They were everywhere! I was finding crickets (dead by then) behind and under shelves for years afterwards. Still, I do look back on those ten years with great fondness.
What great memories Lindy.
Libraries also saved me. The peace and quiet was such a contrast to my home life, and to this day that’s one of the things I love most about libraries, though I’m always happy to see them full of children, and glad the rule of silence no longer exists.
So I suppose what I really mean is a kind of personal peace and quiet; the knowledge that this is a space, full of books and kind people, in which I can just ‘be’.
Glen has good memories of the Main Library in Dayton, Ohio, where he grew up. The first building used for the library was built in 1888 and occupied a portion of a city block. The rest of the block was a park. Photos of the original building are very impressive. In 1960, work began on a new building on the same block and that was the building Glen used. That building had several renovations and additions after Glen moved out of Ohio and is still actively used today.
Interestingly enough, both of my favorite memories also have to do the main branch of the Birmingham (Alabama) Main Library. My father worked in downtown Birmingham all of his life. He was a shipping clerk for a small department store chain there. As far as I remember, he always took the bus to get to and from work. Every two or three weeks, he would walk from his workplace to the Main Library on his lunch hour and choose 5-8 books to check out, usually art books or history books about World War II, all nonfiction. He would bring them home, on the bus, and read or look through them and then return them on the next visit and replace them with new books. I don’t think I ever saw my father read a fiction book, but he was a good role model for using the library as a resource.
When I was in the last two years of elementary school, my teacher would assign research topics for each student in the class. We may have gone as a group to the main library first, to learn the process; I don’t remember. I only remember that I often worked by myself at the Main Library where I used the card catalogs to look for articles in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. I loved that; I was a born researcher. I was very lucky to have that teacher; I learned to do research papers with a bibliography, properly formatted references, and footnotes at around 12 or 13 years of age, a skill that I used later in college.