Wealth Untold

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be—
I had a mother who read to me. 
—Strickland Gillilan

I've always loved this last stanza of a poem by Strickland Gillilan, because having a mother and a father who read to me was part of my childhood. Not only did they read to me, and to my sisters, they took us to the library. There they allowed us to pick out our own books. Then we went home and they read them to us in the early years before we were old enough to read them ourselves. Brave souls they were to face my very favorite, Dr. Seuss, week after week. I especially loved “If I Ran the Zoo” and “If I Ran the Circus”. Wikipedia says that most of the Dr. Seuss book were written in anapestic tetrameter. I am not an expert in poetry, but as a parent who has now read the books to her own children I know that Theodore Gisel wrote tongue twisters filled with made up words.

On December 13, 1907, the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming was granted $12,500 to begin building a Carneige Library. Carneige Libraries were built between 1883 and 1929 with money donated from the Carneige Corporation of New York, a philanthropic effort by its founder Andrew Carneige. Carneige, an immigrant from Dunfermline, Scotland; built his fortune in steel, but credited his success in part, to the opportunity to borrow and gain knowledge from the personal library of Colonel James Anderson. (Yes all of this information came off of wikipedia, but I did rewrite it in my own words.)

Perhaps some of the same desire and drive to obtain knowledge came to my family from our Spowart roots who also came from Dunfermline. In any case, our family went to the library every other Monday night for years. We'd walk in the front doors of the Carneige Library, turn to the left and head for the stairs. Mom and Dad going up and us girls stepping down into the lair of Irene Nakako, the dragoness of the library.*

She is smiling in this picture. She wasn't always smiling.



Andrew Carneige and the town's people of Rock Springs may have given the money for the public library, but as far as Irene was concerned, the children's collection belonged to her. During our early years at the library, in the 1970's, Irene sat steely eyed over the rows of patron library cards. Perhaps the librarians upstairs allowed the adults to keep their own cards, but Irene brooked no such 

autonomy. Children (and their parents) were completely incapable of responsibly handling a library card. So Irene kept them all in her clutches like the shiny loot in a dragon's lair.

She also had no compunction at judging each childish patron and checking out the proper book to them. I'm sure she was not thrilled by my continual Dr. Seuss fetish in the early years, and I know that she found the mystery jag I went on around fifth grade extremely trying. Fortunately my parents (and I as I got older) ignored her smoke and rumblings and check out what we wanted anyway. And I think that perhaps she respected us for that since she hired two of us girls to work as library pages on alternating afternoons and Saturdays as teenagers.

Some of her worst grumbling and fire breathing came over my middle sister's continual checking out of Peanuts and Family Circus cartoon books. Irene enforced a limit on cartoon books for every young patron and each week, said sister managed to find just enough cartoon books to fill her limit -often reading the same books week after week. Irene expressed the opinion that the girl's reading level would suffer and her ability to learn become limited. I paid little heed as I was busy reading every mystery novel in the children's section and on occasion sneaking past the dragon, upstairs to swipe Agatha Christie mysteries in the adult stacks.

The years have proved Irene wrong. Though I gave it little attention, the thought lurked in the back of my mind until one day I returned home from married life and found the book my sister had just finished sitting on the bedroom headboard. It had something to do with women and medieval times. Though I tried, I could not bring myself to sit still long enough to puzzle out the first sentence. Since then I regularly see my sister posting about reading books like The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Plutarch: The Life of Cicero. (Okay, sometimes she also reads about vampires, but hey we have to be well rounded.) Then I think to myself, “No Irene, Lucy and Linus really were instrumental in the formation of a good reader and a future librarian.”**

* In all fairness to Irene, although she often scared me, she really was a nice woman. She discovered that I loved cream cheese filled croissants and always saved me one from the treats in the break-room. She died on November 11, 2011 at age 86.

** My sister is currently enrolled in, and almost done with, a masters program in library science.