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
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Books by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser
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