In memory, they materialize on the library steps, framed by columns and classical arches. Half-cameo stills in ancient hairdos. Half-Charlie’s Angels silhouettes, taut, poised to fuel a child’s dreams, revive a trapped housewife, track facts. Lavilla in the middle, quiet; Flossie, to the right, leaning forward, hands out; Jessie crouched for action on the left—each brandishing a book. Old, quirky, wise, vigilant.
I follow their shadows inside through the symmetrical, paned door, into one of Kansas’s sixty Carnegie libraries. Launched on a wave of full-tilt community enthusiasm in 1915 and finished in 1918—never mind World War I or the Spanish flu epidemic– the diminutive Victorian Romanesque building gave McPherson residents literary stature. Big windows capped by fanlights, “chocolate tapestry brick,” white-terra cotta trim, a dignified portico for adults, a practical side porch for children.
When my sister graduated from high school in 1960, I inherited her job as library assistant—a fourteen year old, serious little reader tag-along, well-known in that Carnegie splendor. Forty cents an hour and grown-up work seemed a king’s ransom—a broad, open avenue to college.
Most school afternoons, I’d dash in for a two hour stint with Flossie Bell, the children’s librarian. Wife of McPherson’s rural mail carrier and mother of three young matron daughters, Flossie earned her post in an early teaching career. She buzzed around the tiled half-basement in sensible blouses, wool skirts, canvas flats– a perfect ship’s figurehead, face and enormous breasts canted well ahead of trim legs and tiny feet. No nonsense, never patronizing, tart, clear about rules (yes, they could wash their sticky hands before browsing, pay pennies for late returns to learn that other children needed the same storybook), Flossie trusted in the alchemy of reading. She listened and then matched book to little boy or little girl dreams.
For starters, I learned to re-shelve the picture books—arranged only by the first letter of the author’s last name. Then big kid fiction and nonfiction. I “read” library shelves, the meticulous volume-by-volume, one alphabet letter or one Dewey Decimal number at a time review–learning what we held, where it lay, and restoring proper order as I went along. When the room was tidy, I’d re-build magazines for public handling: neatly skinning cover from body and then reattaching the reinforced covers and gluey fabric-hinged spines. Or, scissor out big new bulletin board letters for the next season’s theme. Mend pages with special fabric tape—never the cello stuff. I could integrate catalog cards into the wooden file boxes—tentatively. Flossie reviewed my placement before she swept the brass spindle out and in to lock the cards down. I was a year tested before Flossie let me wield the yellow #2 pencil with its attached rubber date stamper, checking books in and out. She never did trust me with the electric lettering pen, tethered to a ceiling light socket by cloth cord, to inscribe catalog numbers on book spines.
As I grew up, I’d get Saturday or summer afternoon shifts upstairs in the high-ceiled, elegantly appointed adult reading room–which Head Librarian Lavilla Eastham ran from her private office and another century.
Tidy, edging toward upholstered, Lavilla wore voile dresses secured at her throat with a brooch and black low-heeled tie shoes. Wispy hair pulled into a knot, glasses askew, hankie in hand, she spoke in small hesitations and edits. We leaned in to catch her whispery voice, her tentatively recommended purchases or policies. Lavilla was sixty-four when I started and the dim tragedy of her past–brief sweet marriage brought to a horrible end when her groom died of lockjaw—framed her life. She stowed books that described or illustrated sex at her desk—and checked them out only to girls who could present an engagement notice. She spoke with graceful kindness to every patron, especially those ill-at-ease, unfamiliar.
Jessie Anson–Lavilla’s assistant and the library’s cataloguer– fetched those marriage manuals for anyone bold enough to ask. A divorcee (you can hear how we said that then), Jessie had earned her living at the University of Chicago medical library. She favored sensible dresses unencumbered by corsets that other women of her endowments employed. She wore her single gray-brown braid in a wrapped crown and darted around the reading room in rubber-soled wedge shoes. Passionate and exuberant in her reading pleasures and recommendations; impatient with protocol–in other words, often frustrated with Lavilla–Jessie loved her post.
Upstairs or down, demonstrated daily by Jessie and Flossie, the fun lay in listening to shyly-placed requests and wheeling off to hunt. Books about nurses? Well, the 610s, or the little orange Bobbs-Merrill biography of Clara Barton or better yet Sue Barton, Student Nurse, whose romance with young Dr. Barry recommended nursing as a professional field. Spiders? 595 for something graphic and practical or to the bigger kids’ alphabetized fiction “W’s” for E. B. White and Charlotte’s Web. Books of quotations for the women whose daytime, dress-up ladies’ clubs required a sparkling roll call reply? 808.882 or maybe just a Sandburg or Frost book of poetry, in the nearby 811s. Down the stacks to the alphabet end of adult fiction and Leon Uris’ Exodus for the young, single English teacher filling long weekends in a family town.
Amid mission and diligence, civility. An hour before we opened on Saturdays, the small staff of assistants and librarians gathered to celebrate each other’s birthdays—homemade cake, store-bought ice cream, little gifts each under a dollar. The youngest of us was sent out to Raleigh’s Drug Store for limeades on hot summer afternoons. Lavilla paid. Allowed to claim books too broken to mend, I couldn’t resist dog-eared, greasy Gone with the Wind and Peter Church Mouse. They are still on my shelves.
Lavilla, Flossie, and Jessie died in the 1980s, within five years of each other and a decade after the community replaced its Carnegie treasure with an accessible, stain-glass windowed sprawl. Of course I miss that original elegant library and its heady elixir of glue and good paper, hot ink, wood polish, damp coats, and pee forever festering under the single bathroom’s chain-flush toilet.
I miss my mentors more. They sent me off to college with far more than a savings account. In a land of public libraries, I knew that I’d never run out of great books, wonder, peace, next steps. So I celebrate their compatriots and successors.
Every part of our lives—our pleasures and occupations, our inspirations and our tools—are fashioned from patiently accumulated and organized stores of knowledge. From libraries, and more critically from librarians, from those who have saved, labeled, ordered, advocated for, and fought to make information available. If we’ve leapt from Alexandria’s half million scrolls to uncountable gigabytes in a flicker of cosmic time, we owe that swift accumulation to the rigor and passion of librarians. And their archivist and curator counterparts working in concrete and now electronic realms. Along the way, these someones—meticulous, curious, methodical humans—saved the poems, star charts, engine diagrams, memoirs, theories that other humans created. And so we get to live in a world whirling with accessible beauty and intelligence.
Idiosyncratic, archetypal, imperfect, my bosses were also true public servants and teachers. They wanted not just to shelve and hold our treasures, but to place them into patrons’ hands, to make us all adventurers into the land of thought and memory. Even Lavilla reveled in the moment of match, in the hour when a not-so-randomly found page captured a cool teenager.
The McPherson Public Library carries Jorge Luis Borges’ familiar quotation on its website, “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” Yes. And in that paradise, you’ll find Lavilla and Jessie and Flossie fighting for curiosity and possibility and a world fueled by ideas and information. ©
