Some of you already know these stories, but here are a few highlights of my nearly lifelong love of libraries.
1) It starts with books. Of course, right? Pretty much every day (that it wasn't raining) on my walk to school, all through the first through eighth grade, I read a book while walking to school.
2) In middle school (seventh and eighth grades) I volunteered in the school library. I had a contest in the seventh grade with another library volunteer to see who could read more books (in a quarter, I think?), as proven by our library checkout cards. Which were paper, with handwritten titles and authors, and a date stamp. It was tight for a while, but I pulled ahead and ultimately won by reading the entire
Louis L'Amour collection. Yes: our little library absurdly dedicated nearly an entire bookcase to spaghetti western, and we had nearly all ~100 L'Amour books that had been published.
2a) I didn't know it until just now, but L'Amour died that June as I was finishing the 7th grade. This apparently wasn't sufficiently newsworthy for the
Sacramento Bee, or the
Sacramento Union (a shitty little reactive
right wing rag of a daily newspaper that I delivered as a kid, which
one journalist described as “a mouthpiece for
the fundamentalist Christian right, preoccupied with abortion,
homosexuals and creationism.”)
3) I first started hanging out at the
Belle Cooledge branch of the Sacramento Public Library during that time as well.
3a)
Belle Cooledge was Sacramento's first female mayor, elected in 1947. That's pretty cool that my first public library was named after her. She was also an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a historically racist organization that denied membership to otherwise eligible women because they were African American until 1977. That's not cool. Well, at least they sneaked in just ahead of the
Mormons admitting African American men to full "Sainthood" in 1978.
3b) But let's not stray too far afield here. Even though I do, as my readers know, consider public libraries to be temples of freedom, this is about libraries, not the denial of basic liberties and freedoms. Hmmmm... Wait just one damn minute.
4) I was a Boy Scout, of course also a famously bigoted institution, denying membership to LGBTQ youth until 2013, and LGBTQ adult leaders until July 2015. I know, you're thinking hey, wait, they're solid now, right?
Don't clap just yet.) There I go again, ranting about freedom. But, hey, my first Boy Scout troop was housed in a Mormon church, so...
4a) Anyway, as a Boy Scout, I helped with another scout's
Eagle Scout Service Project, which was moving every single book from the existing branch of the Belle Cooledge library to the newly built branch a mile away. I loved it. I genuinely loved just about every minute of it.
4b) I later quit the Boy Scouts after a rather contentious summer camp experience where I exacted revenge on the scoutmaster's son and his best friend. They had been consistently bullying a developmentally delayed fellow scout, in really cruel ways. That's a story for another time. Here's the teaser epilogue: from what Creepy Uncle Google can tell me, the best friend doesn't exist anymore (or changed his very unique, very google-able name) and the scoutmaster's son made Eagle Scout, and is now a lighting technician.
5) Forward to high school, where I spent only typical kid amounts of time in the library. Well, that;'s probably not true: a lot of fellow students at my high school, which had a dropout rate of 40-50%, and football team stars and Student Government members openly smoking pot and dropping LSD in the gym bathrooms, probably spent less time in the library than I did.
6) In college, I spent many long hours in the library hanging out with our fantastic college archivist, an assistant director of the library, talking about the school's history. (I also spent many hours hanging out with the director of the facilities and buildings department. Hey, I
was
am kind of a nerd, okay?) It's a bit of a strange story, but I also had access to the library after closing hours. Kinda. And made good use of it.
7) In law school, I had a work-study job in the law library. It was great. In my first semester I realized that I didn't have to buy the outrageously overpriced textbooks since the law library kept a single one on reference for every course, so I did most of my course reading in the library from there on.
8) That I can think off of the top of my head, I have had public library cards in at least eight different states, and at least twelve different cities.
9) I LOVE LIBRARIES.
10) I LOVE FREEDOM.
11) LIBRARIES = FREEDOM.
