Don't Ya Know: January 2017

From Manhasset Stories: More Baby Boomer Memories

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Ode to the Public Library

by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Early on I felt the silent power books command and it mesmerized me.

The world wasn’t so obvious to a child of the 1950s; its secrets weren’t spilling from newspapers, radio, television - or adults, for that matter.

When I read a book, I was met with answers to questions I hadn’t even formed.

I remember sitting on a tiny stool behind the librarians’ check-out area at the Manhasset Public Library in a small cubby-hole section carved out for tots

I listened to stories read by volunteers in whispered tones or sat alone, quietly, reading picture books while my mother looked for another John O’Hara or Francis Parkinson Keyes’ on the grown-up shelves.

The book I first loved reading all by myself had to do with a little girl named Kiki and her grandfather’s garden of sunflowers. That’s all I remember.

I can see the book on the “kiddie’s library shelf,” can remember it to be one of a series, and can imagine it, open in my little girl lap.

I’ve looked for Kiki in her original spot, as well as online, but can only locate her in my memory now - a warm and welcome guest among the hundreds of other characters from the powerful role books have played in my life.

I don’t recall the Manhasset librarian’s name, but I’ve never forgotten her kindness.

In 1957 my father suffered a severe heart attack, his first of two. I was nine.

Dr. Medd arrived at the house in minutes, followed by an ambulance that took my father to the Manhasset Medical Center. Since children weren’t allowed to visit ICU patients, I didn’t see my dad again for six weeks.

My mother managed a trip to the library during the chaos of that time, and my librarian found me wandering around the non-fiction stacks. In answer to her query about help, I told her I needed to know about heart attacks.

She reached up and pulled a black-covered volume from the shelves.

I read the slim and simple book from cover to cover. Its title was: Thank God for my Heart Attack. I read it to my dad after he began to convalesce at home.

When I was 10, I read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and never got over it.

At first, I took Francie Nolan’s oath and attempted to read all the authors on the fiction shelves, but soon my librarian - just like Francie’s - was making selections for me and leading me through Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and even to Michael Crichton’s The Citadel.

No challenge was too great because my librarian - again, like Francie’s - knew I was a reader of most everything: classics, comic books, MAD magazine, Boys’ Life, cereal boxes, and bubble gum cards. In fact I had a BFF who always made me promise not to bring any reading material when I spent the night.

In the early 60s, the Manhasset library adopted a new policy and stayed open until 9 p.m. on Monday nights. Talk about a gift from the gods for Baby Boomer teens. We were rarely allowed out on a school night without written permission from some ruling authority. Now, we HAD to go to the library. HAD to. There was simply no choice because, suddenly, every teen in Manhasset had reports to research.

We must have driven the librarians insane, and after all this time, let me apologize. During the school year, freedom after the dinner hour was a heady thing for the kids I knew, and we certainly weren’t on our best behavior.

For one thing, we showed up in droves.

There weren’t enough benches or carrels to contain us, so we stood around the reference section and pretended we were looking up interesting facts in the medical encyclopedias (a few of which were quite interesting indeed). When a librarian shushed a group too often, she shooed them outside and they congregated in the parking lot. It soon became the night version of the 3 p.m. scene outside Town Hall Pharmacy on weekdays.

In order to stay inside, students had to produce mimeographed assignment sheets. We had no trouble fulfilling the requirement, though I don’t recall ever completing any of those tasks.

Mostly, we just flirted with the other kids and accomplished some surface research about the mating habits of North Shore, Long Island Baby Boomers.

I was already comfortable at the library, so Monday nights were a pleasant, social experience for me. As a result I developed an even stronger bond to the library, spending countless quiet hours in the school libraries of my life as well as the public ones.

When teaching high school Seniors, I heard a student brag that he had never crossed the threshold of a library in his entire life. I had a visceral reaction and, on the spot, offered extra credit to anyone in the class who could produce a library card. It was a dismal showing which led me to extend my offer to all those who could produce one within the next two weeks. I received a thank you note from our local librarian at the end of the offer.

Libraries are man’s greatest gift to himself, the treasury of our ideas as long as we’ve been recording them. Ancient wars were fought over the possession of this kind of knowledge - it was wealth and power combined.

The etymology of the word library is in the Latin word “liber” which is a noun meaning a type of tree bark, thin shavings of which provided the material to make man’s ideas portable. This became a big business in 3 BC Alexandria which fed the papyrus trade with a pledge to collect all the knowledge in the world on scrolls in a building. They actually housed some of the country’s greatest scholars who contributed their work - subject to a strict editorial board - in exchange for lodging.

Of course, Alexandria’s library didn’t offer free circulation to the community at large. Consequently it became an attractive nuisance to pillaging potentates who were jealous of others possessing such wealth. Not surprisingly, humans have been burning books ever since. But somehow, through centuries of wars over ideas, libraries have survived.

I don’t want to imagine a world where I can’t reach for a book that attracts me by its cover, and without spending a dime, borrow it on the good faith that I’ll bring it back in one piece.

It’s this kind of trust that makes me love the library, still confident that somewhere on those shelves, I’ll find another answer - or at least meet friends for life like Kiki, Francie, and my librarian.

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Books by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser