I grew up in Philadelphia in a neighborhood that was mostly Jewish and Catholic. It was on the northern edge of Philadelphia and most of the homes, all row houses, had been built in the decade before my birth. We were slow to get things like department stores and we took a bus and a subway downtown for most major shopping until I was a teenager. We were also missing a real library, which was a great loss for me.
A bookmobile was our only library until I was ten. The problem with the bookmobile was it circulated between sections of Philadelphia so access to it wasn’t a daily or even weekly thing. And you had to know what book you wanted when you stepped up to the window. Browsing was half the fun of a library, and we didn’t often get to enter the bookmobile. If you weren’t quick to come up with a title the woman in the bookmobile would hand you whatever book was at her fingertips.
My family did not buy books except for Christmas and birthdays and not even often then. My father did not read anything but newspapers, and my mother wasn’t much of a reader either. So most of the books I read before we got a real library were ones the neighbors passed on. It was mostly boys on our street, so I read a lot of books about horses, cowboys, desert islands and trains. The other type of book that came my way was books of fairy tales and I did not have much appreciation for those either. I wanted books about girls like me.
But about the time I was ten, the West Oak Lane Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia finished its construction on Washington Lane. The neighborhood was booming by the late fifties and an outdoor mall with a Gimbels Department Stores and a library suddenly turned up. The library was a magical place for me. Every Friday after school, I walked to the library and took out the five books we were allowed. I read exactly the sort of books you would expect, stories about girls who became nurses or teachers or detectives.
Mrs.
Robinson was the children’s librarian, and unusual for the day, she was Black.
I had seen so few Black people in my life that I didn’t even realize she was black
until my mother told me. She was a wonderful mentor for me as she tried
mightily to move me away from the very pedestrian books I was drawn to and onto
ones that had some literary or historical value. She was especially eager to
promote biographies. To this end, she even allowed me to wander in the adult
section. The adult section was physically blocked off at that time and she
checked to see what I had chosen and checked it out for me. Since I was ten by
the time the library was finished, it was not long before I could take out
adult books without her permission (and up to 12 at a time).
I hope that I went back to see Mrs. Robinson to tell her I appreciated her interest in me, but I am not sure that I did. I have had a lifelong love affair with libraries and books and I credit much of it to that vibrant and enthusiastic young woman I met in 1958.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FIRST LIBRARY EXPERIENCES
18 comments:
Wonderful story, Patti! My first library was a bookmobile too! When we lived in Queens (not far from where Megan lives now, I think), it was a new area. In fact, we were among the first tenants in our apartment building (135-05 Hoover Avenue, Apt. 1A, Kew Gardens). I have no idea where the closest library was. I know it was a long walk if you missed the school bus to get to school. The bookmobile came fairly regularly. We were allowed inside to look through the books.
We moved to Brooklyn (what is called Midwood now, just part of Flatbush then) when I was 9. Two blocks away was the HUGE seeming (two very large floors) Kings Highway Library, at Kings Highway and Ocean Avenue. The children's section was upstairs, but I don't remember spending much time there, but rather browsing the fiction shelves (mostly) for hours sometimes (especially on Saturdays). I remember finding I MARRIED ADVENTURE! by Osa Johnson about her and her husband Martin that way, also THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. We were allowed to take out ten books for the summer in June - returning them in early September - as long as they weren't new books, and that was when I read the Dumas.
I've loved libraries ever since, though what with online reserving, I rarely browse the shelves any more. For years, though, I would drop Jackie off at school and spend one morning a week in the Main Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. I'd quickly go through the New Books, grabbing up anything I saw from my list (new mysteries, mostly), then leisurely roam the Mystery and Fiction sections, occasionally going upstairs to one of the non-fiction sections.
We were part of the postwar building frenzy for all the returning soldiers, I think. I never once got to the main branch of the Philly library but I was often in the NYPL on 42nd street in the eighties and nineties. Phil and I saw there for weeks in the special documents room working on one of his books. His subject wrote many letter a day to his wife (who lived in the same house) and I carefully transcribed them with yellow pencils and wearing gloves. Phil got the meatier correspondence.
I rarely browse too.
My father did not read books and felt the best fiction for kids were the novels of Zane Grey. My mother read the at-the-time best-selling histopricals and romances. My older sister (by three years) was, as with so many young girls, in love with horses, so I got to read her Walter Farley BLACK STALLION BOOKS. I stayed with comic books until I was about nine years old, when I discovered the Hardy Boys. Our local library was open two days a week and did not issue library cards to anyone under ten. When I reached that glorious age, I was given library card #1048 and I was allowed into the children's section, where I devoured juvenile biographies. The head librarian was Mrs. Ball and the assistant librarian was Edith Pickles; they soon allowed me into he adult section where I tore into the mystery selections, beginning with Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason mysteries. I was also allowed into the library's basement where I hunkered down on the dirt floor and indiscriminately read the magazines that had been stored there without any order. I spent a lot of tme at that library. (It was the Adams Library in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, later to gain fame as the model for the Springfield Town Hall on THE SIMPSONS.) When I was first married, we lived in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts. The library there was a large, multi-floored monstrosity. Until shortly before we moved there, it operated on a "call" system -- patrons would write what books they wanted on a piece of paper and a page would would go into the stacks and retrieve it (if they could find it). By the time we lived there, however, patrons could explored the stacks. Unlike many libraries today, this one did not discard older books, so the selections were amazing. When Jessie was an infant, we built a house in the North section of Chelmsford, where a private residence had been converted to a small adjunct library which offered a large selection of mystery fiction. It was around that time that I discovered the ILL system, which allowed me access to books all over the
United States (plus one that somehow came in from New Zealand; ILL also once sent me the first edition of Charles Dickens's HUNTED DOWN). Kitty and I helped start a mystery book club at that library. (We also started one in Virgnia, as well as joining another in Virginia.)
Today, my local library in Florida is just over ten years old and its selection is meager. I pay $50 a year to use the library across the Bay in Pensacole; that library is much larger and is celebrating its 50th year. The selection is still not up to standards of other libraries I have used up and down the East Coast. The ILL system in Florida has been altered so that many titles available through ILL in other states are just not available in Florida (thank you Governor DeSantis). I support a strong library system and sincerely hoipe my local libraries (as well as libraries everywhere) will continue to improve.
The Fayette County (WV) bookmobile visited my old home town every other week, and I was a regular visitor from elementary school through high school. When I got a little older (early teens), I realized you could ask to reserve books. That's how I was able to read a couple of the old Gnome Press Conan books a couple of years before Conan returned in paperback. The county library itself was small, so the staff there must have reached out to others through ILL to find those obscure titles. Librarians are some of the best people in the world. We take our granddaughter to a "books and babies" playgroup at the branch libraries in Austin. It sickens me to see libraries and public schools under attack by the self-appointed moralists, no doubt well-funded with dirty money from the likes of the Kochs and Mercers.
These people started out by infesting school and library boards 30 years ago. Too much like THE HANDMAID'S TALE for me.
I didn't realize book mobiles were so widely in use in our joint childhoods.
And I never heard of ILL. We do have MELCAT in Michigan. I need to look into it. I have an excellent library in Birmingham, but I see people running for the board and wonder what their agenda is.
My parents always had a fair amount of books in the house (though their stashes of fiction magazines, EQMM and some others of my mother's and mostly sf magazines of my father's, and books and more were destroyed by the 1967 flood of most of Fairbanks, AK), along with the beginner's books they bought to teach me to read, successfully, by some time in the next year. I didn't experience a library (as far as I can recall) till elementary school, the John E. Burke School in West Peabody, MA, beginning in 1970 and 1st Grade, where I found my first anthology of horror fiction and poetry, Wilhelmina Harper's (1936! but several times reprinted) Ghosts and Goblins: Stories for Hallowe'en and Other Times, among other items of interest...in both Fairbanks and W. Peabody, my best friends were girls, so by the time we moved to Hazardville, CT, in 1973, and I discovered the Enfield Central Library (and my folks learned I could be left there for hours on end on a Saturday), my horizons broadened (also by the small school lib at the now-vanished Nathan Hale ES, and the rather-good classroom selections of mostly Scholastic and Dell Yearling and Laurel Leaf paperbacks, augmented by some Scott-Foresman hardcover selections, and Scholastic's Arrow Book Club circulars, and what other purchases I could make, not least from the discount book tables at Grant's department stores)...my reading took in novels about girls as well as boys, and preferably both (such as the Henry Reed and Midge Glass series by Keith Robertson, among my favorites in those years), women and men, short fiction of all sorts but most keenly novels, radio drama and spoken word recordings (available in the school lib but vastly more in the public library), even issues of AHMM in the kids' section (for no obvious reason) and checkable, along with a solid stash of horror fiction and related titles in kids' and adults' stacks (the librarians had no problem with my venturing into the adult section at age 9 to find the Dell Laurel Leaf edition of Joan Aiken's collection THE GREEN FLASH, oddly/arguably misfiled, any more than they were to check out HAUNTINGS, edited by Henry Mazzeo, oddly/arguably misfiled in children's probably because of the illustrations by Edward Gorey, and even more key to refining my tastes.
Re Jerry's comment: my father didn't seem to read when we were young, but as he got older he read a lot more - non-fiction (like WWII stuff), spy novels, then stuff like Lee Child and Michael Connelly. He was more likely to go back and read all books in a series. My mother was always a voracious reader. I remember her getting Readers Digest Condensed Books when we were kids (some of the first adult books I remember reading were in that collection, like THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, THE YEAR THE YANKEES LOST THE PENNANT, THE DAY LINCOLN WAS SHOT, ANDERSONVILLE - they excerpted a section, and I later went back and read the entire novel, as well as various Perry Mason titles). There was NEVER in my life a book that she told me that I couldn't read. By the time they were in Arizona, she was on a first name basis with her local librarians, and they would call her on the phone when a new book came in that they thought she'd be interested in. She read a LOT of bestsellers - Danielle Steel, David Baldacci, Daniel Silva, etc. It always amused me when she discovered a mystery writer I'd been reading for years and called to ask me if I'd ever heard of Lee Child or Michael Connelly or the like. But she would just go on to the next book that came out, and never went back to catch up on past series books the way I would have.
(Continued so as not to exceed word limits here.) So, I was spoiled by the ECL library selection, so when we moved to Londonderry, NH, in '76, the tininess of the Londonderry Leach Library (haven't ever determined whom Leach was) was a bit of a shock, as was the awfulness of the librarians employed there (presumably poorly paid, as was NH's wont at that time, and upset by the Londonderry JHS I was attending being across the street so that Pesky Kids would congregate after school regularly)...nonetheless, somehow they made some interesting choices in their collection, and I was able to find and read Damon Knight's memoir and multiple/group biography THE FUTURIANS there in 1978, when I became aware of it, as it was Not in the rather decent junior high (and eventual junior/senior hs, by the time my class was ready for 9th grade) library, nor in the otherwise rather good Nashua public library my father lied my way into getting a card for, by claiming to work in Nashua rather than Boston, in early 1978. In Kailua, HI, where we were living by 1979, the Kailua public library was small but functional, but I was commuting into Honolulu anyway, mostly via Oahu's good bus system (yclept TheBus, no less), so had access also to Punahou School's good Academy (the HS campus) library, the rather impressive UH Manoa library (with limited checking out privileges), and the Hawaii State Library's Central Library, where the only notable design defects were a reading room with a browsing collection also a central courtyard (so the browsing collection titles were constantly exposed to Oahu humidity) and the bulk of the collection in air-conditioned indoor stacks (only with the a/c having to also fight, not completely successfully, that same humidity, so that the stacks were cool but the atmosphere was slightly cool-humid; the climate control at the two primary UHM campus libraries, and for that matter Punahou's Cooke Library, was better).
I was shown, I think in W. Peabody, a bookmobile (with our class), but don't remember choosing to use it very much, if at all (nor the public libraries there)...and in my adult life, I ended up working, for some months, in the Fairfax County Library System, Fx Co being my next home-base after several locations on Oahu...
That's quite a memory you have, Todd. You could write a memoir on your life with books (and magazines)
After a certain age, I think you are less likely to go back and read an entire series. And, in fact, a long series puts me off, thinking I have missed too much to begin at Book 27. That's why I am much more likely to read standalones.
Hah..."most keenly horror fiction and related material", my first comment should read, instead of "novels", though no lack of them, either, across the genres including the contemporary-mimetic, as I was a great fan of the Newbery Award winners and shortlisters, at least most of them, by the time I discovered them by age 8.
And my parent's post-flood home library. like Jeff's, included the odd RD Condensed Book, since they occasionally would sub to RD and would buy the C-Book volumes or be given them from time to time...I read Paul Gallico's THE BOY WHO INVENTED THE BUBBLE GUN and THE TOWER by Richard Martin Stern in those abridged volumes as a kid (still haven't yet read Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson's THE GLASS INFERNO, the Other novel bought by Irwin Allen to dumb down together, from Stirling Silliphant's script, for THE TOWERING INFERNO...despite Scortia and Robinson being also notable fantastica writers for most of their careers, and Robinson also working with Harvey Milk and editing in various ways at PLAYBOY, to his amusement as a gay man, among other notable work...and my reading their follow-up disaster novel THE PROMETHEUS CRISIS when it came out).
That is a lovely tribute to libraries and the librarian in your childhood, Patti.
Throughout my childhood I used the neighborhood library, and when I was old enough I would walk there, about a mile and a half walk. I was the only real reader in my family; neither my parents or my siblings did much reading. My parents read to us and my mother took us to the library a lot, once we had a car.
I did use the downtown library in Birmingham because I was in an advanced class in my late elementary years. We were taught to write research papers with proper footnotes by that teacher, and I did my research at the downtown library. I never learned that skill in high school and most of the students I encountered in college did not know how to write and document research papers. That still amazes me. My father also used the downtown library regularly because he worked downtown. He took the bus to work and brought several books home on the bus if he had visited the library. I said he did not read and he did not read much fiction at all, but he would get books about subjects like history or art and take them home and look a them at night.
When my first husband went into the military (pilot training, then flying B-52s) there were decent libraries at both of the bases we were stationed at (one in Selma, Alabama; the other in Riverside, CA). And I used the Riverside Library a lot.
Like Jeff, my mother never censored my reading. Once a friend of hers wondered if I should be reading the Perry Mason books, and she mentioned that to me, but I still read them.
Written words definitely seem to have stuck with me, Patti, when they made an impression at all, even given my difficulty in recalling names when only heard and my even more lifelong need to think about Right and Left (but no great or even small dyslexia).
I, too, will at times wait to Finish a series of novels, even if I like or love them...so many, such as the FLETCH novels by Gregory Mcdonald, can be wildly uneven (as in his case) even when not merely more tired as they conTinue. But even the consistently good ones one might want to keep On Deck...
And, echoing Tracy's comment, Yes, I was clearly waiting for this stimulus (as my blog as a whole tends to demonstrate), and your own clear memories, and everyone else's, have been very interesting to read!
My folks never tried to censor my reading much, as their copies of the likes of FANNY HILL and Harold Robbins's THE BETSY were on their shelves (their mutual interest in auto racing led to that latter purchase, I suspect, but the book's stupidity, even down to its sexual passages being obviously dumb to me even as a pre-adolescent, were probably why it was the only Robbins novel they ever bought). Mom was put off by my purchase of a NATIONAL LAMPOON once, from my fave comics-rack sundries shop, when I was 10yo, however.
Another of Jerry's comments struck a chord, that of the "call" system. When I was in college (Hunter College, CUNY) I spent a lot of time in the library. One of those years I was in Jerry territory, reading 333 books. I took several drama courses and read through all the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Noel Coward one years, dozens more the next. I was also taking out scores of books for papers on the slave trade as it affected Bristol; the Southern writer Ellen Glasgow; things like that. The librarian who took my call slips thanked me for upping their circulation figures.
Yes, I used the call system at the Boston Public Library when I was in college. Very frustrating because you could only give them three titles at a time and often all three books were out and you had to start again.
My parents did not censor my reading until a very strange day when my father saw me reading FROM THE TERRACE and tossed it out the door. I can't imagine how he had heard anything about it in the circles he traveled in.
Phil was not allowed to read any comic books except classic comics, which was frustrating because his father had a newsstand in his luncheonette. My grandparents read more than my parents. We had one small bookcase in our house but all the books were from years earlier.
My brother did a rather heroic thing as a teenager and took the money he had from delivering newspapers and bought a complete set of encyclopedias, which doubled our library.
Good on him!
My first library was the Cornish Library within walking distance from where our family lived in the third floor of my grandparents house in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I can remember my mother taking my sister and me there when we were very young. That building is still there and a few years ago I went back for a look. When my father got transferred to The Pas in northern Manitoba, we had moved to a town of about 4,500 with no community library. The school did have a very small one and the only books I remember were the Tom Swift series. Bought my magazines and paperbacks at a tobacco store that had a small newsstand. Once I moved back to Winnipeg, I immediately became a library member and visited the main branch in downtown on a regular basis. These days we have a brand new neighbourhood library about five minutes from my home so I pick up my holds there. Usually there two to three times a week. The Friends of the Library had its annual large sale on the weekend and my library now has 30 more books.
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