LIBRARY ENCOUNTERS

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

            Modern libraries consist of much more than books, but it is still logical to assume that reading plays an essential part in the use of a library. I learned to read in the last month or so of my first grade year. This is late; it seems to me, in the light of experience with my own children who tended to read early on, and with little difficulty.

            One-room school education was still the norm in rural South Dakota when I was in first grade, and my older sister and I were sent to a Lincoln County one-roomer. She finished first grade, and although technically I was not old enough, my parents let me try first grade so that I would be only one year behind her. There was no possibility of kindergarten in these old one-room schools. My fellow first-graders were Margy, who was kind of a dim bulb, and Wayne, who was much smarter -- smart enough to wind up with a PhD and become head of a college speech department.  Neither of us had any trouble staying ahead of Margy, and I thought I was just a bit ahead of Wayne, so there was little incentive to charge on ahead and learn to read. But then the axe fell.

            Traditional moving day on the farms of South Dakota was March 1st. My dad decided he wanted to move to a different, larger farm, and since it was available to rent, the family moved, only about a mile and a half from the first farm. That was an important distance, as it meant going to a different school in Turner County. There was only one other first-grader in this school, Lucile, and she could read. I had a few words down, like "Dick", or "See", or "Spot", or even "Jane", but I couldn't begin to read as well as Lucile. This meant getting down to business; I learned to read in the short time left in the school term, passed Lucile and never looked back.

            This school, like all the other one-roomers, had a book-case in the back of the room, the "library." There were books for maybe third, fourth grade and on up to eighth, but no little kid books that I remember. Probably the Child Story Readers were supposed to suffice. These Child Story Readers were a good series of books, but they were not library books, they were textbooks. The library was small, probably fewer than 100 books, plus the "reference library" which consisted of the World Book Encyclopedia and a huge dictionary. With the exception of these last two, it was possible to read through the entire library. You would read as much as you could in the first grade, more in the second, and so on, and perhaps by the time you were at the end of the sixth grade, you could have gone through every pleasure book there. This was a matter of great pride to me, and to my cousin Luverne. He was in a different school, but the quantity and quality of the libraries were about the same.

            But then the axe fell a second time. The county decided to circulate books from one school to the other, and even buy some New Books! So it became a challenge to stay current, to brag to your cousin that you had again "read the library". We read as much as we could get by with, to the detriment of our regular assignments, as it took time to keep current, but after all, some of the new books were quick reads, and it was not hopeless.

            Then came the next blow, high school. This school was a traditional big brick building with concrete arch work over the main door with the words Lennox High School embedded in the concrete. There was, of course, a library. It was a whole room to itself! The room was probably not as large as the one room in our previous school, but it was good-sized and had full shelves of books on three walls, with study tables in the middle of the room. And there were no little kid books to skip over. How in heaven's name was a person supposed to read his way through all that? This was a disheartening thought, and to this day I enter a large (or small) library with a kind of dismayed feeling that I will never ever get through it all. Greater shocks were to come, of course, in the various college and city libraries that I was to encounter later.

Here are some libraries that I have encountered since high school.

The first one, which I did not encounter at all, was the Lennox City library. People tell me it was not much of a library, occupying a small room in the city hall, and I never went there while attending Lennox High School or at any time since. My excuse is that I was much too occupied in my attempts to read the high school library. Next would be the large library at South Dakota State College. This was not quite so horribly overwhelming now, as I was getting the idea that one shouldn't even try to read all the books. There were probably fewer than a hundred thousand books, but it was very impressive, occupying one of the largest buildings on the campus. Students were not allowed in the stacks, but there was a smaller side reading room that I loved, and I remember reading through a collection of books of O. Henry stories. If we needed books from the main collection, we consulted the card catalog (real cards in drawers, remember them?), brought the call numbers to the library student assistants, who then went down into the stacks and brought the books up to the main desk for you. That system worked OK, but there was no browsing in the stacks.

            I can't say I did a lot of reading while I was in the Army, but now and then I would drop into a Service Club and find there were some rather good books on the shelves. I ran across War and Peace in one of the collections and I read it, mostly to say that I had done so. Tolstoy was to make a much deeper impression on me after I had had a second and third go-round with that great book.

            My first teaching job, after I got out of the Army, was at Jefferson School, grades K-9, in Winona, Minnesota. The school building was more than twice as big as Lennox High School, and it had a library that was perhaps two to three times the size of our old high school library. I never spent much time in the Jefferson library, as the librarian was a dragon. Her name has long been forgotten by me, at least. She evidently thought her job was to make the place so forbidding that no kid wanted to enter it, and no kid did except when a class, accompanied by the teacher, was required to come in. When a few reckless students entered without being compelled, her main aim, it seemed, was to catch them at some fearsome act, and then forbid them ever to enter the library again. This woman embodied everything a school librarian should not be. She might have done better at the Vatican Library or the Bodleian Library where all the books must be protected at all costs.

            Next came the library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis campus. This was BIG, who knew how many millions of books in how many different locations? The main library was run like the one at South Dakota State, you got one of the librarians to help get the book from the stacks. I was shocked when I was informed that we grad students could actually go and prowl around in the collection. Since I had never done this before, I had no idea how to proceed, so I took the easy way out and got the library helpers to get what I needed. Since most of what I needed was located in the Music Building I made sure to be on the good side of Katie the Music Librarian. In l953-54 and again in l959 the Music Library was overflowing the totally inadequate music building, and much of the holding was piled on the floor, only Katie knew where. She was a wonderful help to us music students, both grad and undergrad. When the new campus was built across the Mississippi, the School of Music got a new large building with fine space for a library. I don't know if Katie was still employed there at that time, but I do hope she got a chance to work in a place where you could actually find things. The new campus was built several years after my time there.

            My next teaching job was at West High School in Green Bay Wisconsin. The actual music scores were stored in my rehearsal room, and I did not have much occasion to enter the school library. My recreational reading was done mostly in the Green Bay City Library. There must not have been much remarkable about it, as it is all dim in my mind. The one horrifying fact about the Green Bay experience was that I found that the dragon librarian from Winona (Jefferson School) was now employed as librarian in one of the Green Bay junior high schools. I can't understand how she got that job, as the Superintendent who hired her had been the super in Winona previous to that time, and he should have known what sort of dragon she was.

            University of Washington library comes next, first of all in the Music Building, and then in that great Gothic and neo-Gothic Suzallo Main Library. By this time I was more used to wandering around in the stacks, and was able to find things fairly well, except when they started changing from the Dewey decimal system to Library of Congress cataloging. Even the librarians were mostly confused. But that was in the main library. At the music library we had a new librarian, a Mr. Wood, who had just gotten a degree from Harvard, and was, for the most part, impossible. He rarely talked to anyone and none of us grad students could figure out what he did locked up in his office. The music library had lots of wonderful material, but I have to say that I probably would not have done so well if it had not been for the magnificent collection of music scores that the downtown Seattle Public Library had. And those scores were not on reserve either; you could check them out. Ultimately I got my degree, with the usual travail, tears, vows of revenge on recalcitrant committee profs, oral and written tests, dissertation and the works.

            So now let us briefly back up, to the South Dakota State College library and the helpers who fetched the books from the stacks. One of them was the red-haired Barbara whom I had met in a college production of "You Can't Take it With You". At the time I paid little attention; there were said to be seven men to each woman on the campus in those post-war years and I had little hope, I thought, of ever getting a date. One day she brightly announced to me that she had broken up with her boyfriend, Bill, and implied very strongly, I thought, that she was available and willing to go out with me. So we did "go out" and after Korea we were married for 23 years before she called it quits.

            Comes now my next job, at Skagit Valley Community College in Mount Vernon, Washington. The library here was a bit heavy on subjects like welding, auto mechanics, real estate, and the like, but it did have a respectable collection of books on just about anything. The music section of the library was certainly sufficient for a college that leaned toward the vocational. There was an excellent collection of LP records, and new ones came in regularly until about the time that compact disk records became available.

            Compact disks were a development that exacerbated the running feud between the Head Librarian and the audio-visual assistant. I think the audio guy had a fancier title than that, but titles did not mean much when it came to disagreements between the two. I had been given a convincing demonstration of the superiority of the CD by one of the Mount Vernon electronics stores, and came to the library brimming over with enthusiasm for ordering CDs, and stopping the LPs except when they were the only available recording of a wanted item. The audio man was immediately persuaded, but unfortunately had to have the OK of the Head for what could have been a lavish order of CDs. Since he was for it, she was against it. When she switched sides much later, he was against it. What happened was that no new records were ordered from that time until I retired from teaching. On several subsequent visits to the campus I found no CDs in evidence. LPs were getting extremely scarce, not being in production anymore, and I wonder what my successor in the music department was doing for new records. The feud, for all I know, is still going on.

            Barbara and I and the two daughters came out to the West Coast as the result of my having gotten a John Hay Fellowship in the Humanities to study primarily in history and philosophy at the University of Oregon the summer of l964. While there, I looked at the 59 other participants from all over the United States, about half Masters and half Doctors, and thought "These guys with their doctorates are no smarter than I am." And so after a lot of applications and filling out of forms, I was accepted at the University of Washington, was awarded a Teaching Assistantship in music education which meant resident tuition, for me, also for Barbara, preference in student housing, and of course a small stipend for my teaching activities. Barbara was hired by one of the Seattle Library branches for part-time work. She enrolled in the UW graduate school of what else? Library Science. Ultimately she wound up as Head Librarian for the Northshore school district in Bothell. We lived in Everett, as it was about half way between our jobs.

            The Everett City Library was OK in many ways, but they had a head librarian who did not believe in ordering many new books, and did not seem to encourage his staff to serve the public, or it seemed to me, to even talk to them. He had to have been trained in the same library school as the dragon from Jefferson School.

            After Barbara left, and after a delightful courtship and marriage to Margaret, we lived in several different places with libraries that deserve at least a mention.  In Stanwood, there was a nice little library with friendly, helpful librarians.  In LaConner, a tiny library not open enough of the time, but having a lady librarian who, seeing me at a local bookstore looking at the latest Bernstein biography, asked me if I would like the book. I said I would, and so she bought it right then and there for the library, gave it to me, and said I could bring it to her for cataloging when I was done reading it. Let's hear it for small-town libraries!

            After I retired from teaching we were in LaConner for four years during which we made some trips up the Inside Passage to Alaska by sailboat. The Ketchikan Library: nice, and unexpectedly packed with people, probably fishermen, on a rainy day. It was a great place for Margaret and me that day, as we had just walked out and back from Saxman Village to see the totem poles in a heavy rain. We dried off with the rest of the library denizens. Petersburg library: spent quite a lot of time there, waiting for the fog to lift so we could go on. Nice library, but not much to look at, as it is on the top floor of a municipal building. Juneau Library: built over a parking garage, but good-sized with a nice view over Gastineau Channel. It has lots of books, and a helpful staff. Sitka library: The greatest view in town, next to the concert hall, looking out over the water. My first impression of it was that they had a nice collection of classical CDs. A very attractive place which almost persuaded me that Sitka was the place to settle in. Skagway library: very homey feeling, good small library and open a good bit of the time. And last of all we come to Haines, which was to be our home for the foreseeable future.

            The first time we saw the Haines library was in January when we flew up to see just what Southeast Alaska was like in the winter. The library was not open when we were in Haines, but there was a lot of new snow on the ground, untouched, and John and I ran around in a huge circle to make a "fox and goose" track. This is a game of tag, where the fox tries to catch the geese who must run anywhere on the circle or the various spokes that intersect it. I suppose we must have noticed the sign on the left of the library, "Dedicated Site of the New Haines Library". The old library was small, heavily used, and the reading room had to double as a community meeting room. The Head Librarian was continually hampered by lack of office space and the difficulty of getting things done when interruptions were many. Anyhow, this promise of a new library intrigued Margaret and me, and was a factor in our decision to make Haines our home.

            Some person on the Haines library staff must have heard, not long after we were settled in town, that I had been a music teacher. At that time there was a lot of fund-raising activity going on for the projected new library building, and they asked me if I could get a singing group together to perform for one of these fund-raisers. This was the "Sweet Themes" music and dessert show on the Chilkat theater stage, and I wanted to do it. Matt Davis was known to me as a willing first tenor; he and I had talked about singing before, and I had also talked to the high school principal, Darold Kludt. Darold had been the music teacher and was a fine musician. Those two, with me as baritone, made up three-quarters of a quartet that had potential. But we needed a bass, and I finally asked Steve Thomas, who had a great voice, but was not so proficient at reading and learning music. So we agreed to meet and rehearse in the high school band room. We had hardly started to vocalize when Bob Krebs, who now had Darold's old job as music teacher, started singing along with us. So the quartet became a quintet, and we performed at the "Sweet Themes" fund-raiser. As a result of that performance, we picked up several more singers, and the "Gentlemen of Note" became a reality. Later we figured "Men of Note" would be good enough.

            After about six years had passed, holding our breath, waiting for money grants for the new library, the Men of Note sang at the ground-breaking ceremony. In the breath-takingly short period of less than a year, our gorgeous new 2.1 million dollar library was complete and the Men of Note sang at the grand opening. This was a proud day, with the library, huge as it was, jam-packed with people all talking at once. There was some speech-making, award-giving, and thanking of everyone and his dog, but little of this was heard over the hubbub of the crowd. No PA system. When it came to the turn of the Men of Note, I do not want to claim that the crowd became dead quiet, but most of them did stop yakking and we were heard by just about everyone that had any interest in listening. We felt very proud that we were the only group that the audience shut up for.

            The actual library building is somewhat strange because it is built in an X form. There is a part parallel with the street, and the part that crosses this part is set at a 55 degree angle instead of the 90 degrees you might expect. This allows the huge glass end of the crossing part to be aimed squarely at the beautiful Cathedral Peaks of the Chilkat Mountains. There is new furniture throughout the building, meeting rooms, plenty of room for computers, stacks for the books that are not hopelessly jammed, and the lighting is so good that we now can see all the titles on the lower shelves. The lighting in the old building was a major complaint, as it was nearly impossible to read the titles on the small collection of videos they had at that time. This is such a wonderful place, so inviting, that I told the head librarian that since we lived close to the library, I would sleep at home and eat at home, but the rest of the time I would just live at the library.

            Margaret is a volunteer helper at the library, daughter Holly is now children's librarian, and I, along with a greatly increased number of Haines citizens check out books and use the library in a number of ways that the dragon in Winona would never have dreamed.