Nota Bene: Reports of my discontinuing this blog are premature! Christmas came and went with this essay lingering on my computer. Then the semester began in a rush. But, I am back to the blog-task and hoping to get one a week or two a month posted throughout this semester. Thanks for hanging in with your absent blogger!
I hope you enjoy.
“Libraries of My Life”
As an English professor, libraries have always been a part of my life. Fortunately for me, I work on a campus with a wonderful, recently-renovated university library and also live in a town that opened a brand new city-county library. They are gems open to all out here on our wind-swept prairie.
My earliest memories of libraries go back to the Ella K. McClatchy branch library in Sacramento, California. I went there for school projects and general library use from grammar school up through high school. Set in a neighborhood, this one-time mansion became a public children’s library in the 1940s. Recently, I looked at pictures of the building on Google and remember the long exterior stairs going up to the main door. I also remember the dark woodwork and the racks of books in salons and sitting rooms with marble fireplaces and gleaming mirrors, sentinels of times past welcoming and tolerant of the hordes of noisy children trooping through the stacks, often lost amid the Dewy Decimal System.
It’s ironic, but as a child I was slow to learn to read. Grammar schools, I am convinced, are designed to teach girls not boys. We are messy and energetic multi-taskers who find it hard to focus on neatness and the minutia of details. Reading, spelling, penmanship—beyond most boys’ ken. My lack of precision on 1950s drill sheets led the nuns to assume I wasn’t getting it. One spring in the 5th grade, the nuns tested me and said I read below a 2nd grade level.
Fortunately, my parents sent me to a reading tutor after school for a year and then a private summer school program to brush up on my reading after 7th grade. When tested again after completing that summer program, I scored high enough for my teacher to say I could get into West Point if I applied myself. (My goal in life at that time was a career in the Army.)
Taking standardized tests was boring. I quickly got lost in the rows of circles, and after a time, I didn’t care where I marked or whether I marked C
when I should have marked D. I wasn’t a slow learner, I was a bored learner.
Even so, I loved the McClatchy Library. I knew all those books were a treasure that only a genie could open for me. That genie was the force of will it took for me to concentrate and read carefully. I never marked up a library or school textbook, but once I bought my own books, I began marking them
and jotting notes in the back to force myself to concentrate and remember.
To this day, I still read with a pen in hand. For me, that became the key. But that key unlocked the
door when I was in college. Getting there was an anxious and frustrating experience, but I knew I
wanted to go to college and not seek my fortune as a grocery clerk as too many of my family and teachers suggested. Determination has always been a driving force within me not easily shut down. It also helped to have supportive parents who believed in you.
I learned early on as a college student to use a library as a quiet place to study. At Saint Mary’s College, that was St. Albert’s Hall. I seem to have a knack for being at schools with new libraries; St. Albert had just opened when I matriculated at SMC in 1968. I have one visual memory from those
evenings I spent studying in St. Albert’s. One quiet reading room had a common but expensive wall clock that shows the whole world on its broad face and a wave diagram passing over the surface of the planet to designate the edge of daylight or the coming of night. Although SMC had a European travel program, I wasn’t able to swing a trip during my undergraduate years. But that clock always reminded me of places I wanted to visit, especially
England. I finally made it, several times: alone, with
friends, with Marianne and Elaine, with students, with my brothers.
Sacramento State University, where I earned my MA, also had a new library. The North Wing, as it is now called, opened in 1975, two years after I started part-time there. (A South Wing was added in 1990.) Even after I went to Notre Dame to start my PhD, I used the Sac State library in the summer. There
in the North Wing, I mastered French—translation French that is. (As my colleagues in the SMSU French Department will tell you, my pronunciation of their beloved language comes out like horrendous French mixed with Klingon plus spitting and a soupçon of belching.) But, after that summer, I could sight-read French fairly well, even Baudelaire’s poetry, a much
more difficult form of writing than prose.
At Notre Dame, I started out regularly using the Hesburgh Memorial Library, the one with "Touchdown Jesus." At first, I had a locking cart which allowed me to check out books directly to it
instead of lugging them home. On quiet nights, like a Friday or Saturday after a game, when only grad students were trying to study, we did race on our four-wheeled carts, but mostly I was a serious student.
In time, I got my own study carrel, about twice as big as a phone booth. It had the same privilege
as my locking cart, which I surrendered in lieu of a private carrel. I graded papers, read, prepped for my comprehensive exams, actually took my comps and wrote my dissertation in there. I know it sounds a little like solitary, (after all, there is no room for a carrel-mate), but for the neophyte scholar, it was all the room needed. “The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell,” as Milton tells us.
In time, before my comps, I got one of the few study carrels with a window. Mine overlooked the quad facing west, allowing me to see the famous Golden Dome about a quarter of a mile away. It was under the Dome that one up-and-coming associate editor, Marianne Murphy, worked. Cutting to the chase, after we were serious, then engaged, then married, I knew when she was leaving work (before email or texting) and could watch for her crossing the library quad on her way to meet me for dinner at the end of the day. And I still got my dissertation done, her wonderful distraction aside.
Although a bit dingy when I arrived, the SMSU Library has always been a great place for me as well. I quickly found a window seat in the campus library and went there regularly over the years for reading or grading or prepping. My special nook was a corner which is now office space for the library staff. My particular window faced north across prairie almost as far as the eye can see.
Several years ago, the SMSU Library closed for 18 months for major renovation. Its grand reopening was a dazzling sight. New computer banks and labs, sleek circ and reference desks (always staffed by helpful librarians and perky students), quiet study areas, and its wonderful conference room on the top floor with its vista of the endless prairie (and now the new Marshall High School campus). There is not much to see on a prairie but wind and space; the Conference
Room gives you an unconstrained view of that endlessness.
Because of his generous bequest, the SMSU Library has been renamed the Dorothy and D. C. “Pat” McFarland Library. Mr. McFarland left the campus a cool $2 million, the largest single donation from an individual to the university to date. SMSU is coming of age.
Besides this treasure of a library, to Marshall’s credit, a second exciting and grand library has opened just across town. Entering the new Marshall-Lyon County Library is truly an “out of Marshall experience.” It’s hard to believe you are still even in Marshall once you cross into that welcoming, lovely place. It opened just a few months ago but I visit it regularly. The last time I had visited the now-closed, musty downtown library was seven years ago.
The new open and airy space invites you to sit, read, and enjoy your time there as you would savor a five-star meal in the Cities or Paris or San Francisco.
In a few months time, my five-year tenure as English Chair will end. I will get a short sabbatical and then return to fulltime teaching. I am looking forward to the change of pace, mainly, a change that will give me much more control over my time. It’s a heavy teaching load, but my days will be spent around my schedule and not other people’s meetings. (The creative way to avoid work is to have a meeting!) When that time comes, I am planning on scouring both the McFarland and Marshall Libraries for just the right spot to prep and grade and then sneak in a guilty pleasure of a sci-fi or military history on the side.
Life is good in a fine library.
I hope you enjoy.
“Libraries of My Life”
As an English professor, libraries have always been a part of my life. Fortunately for me, I work on a campus with a wonderful, recently-renovated university library and also live in a town that opened a brand new city-county library. They are gems open to all out here on our wind-swept prairie.
My earliest memories of libraries go back to the Ella K. McClatchy branch library in Sacramento, California. I went there for school projects and general library use from grammar school up through high school. Set in a neighborhood, this one-time mansion became a public children’s library in the 1940s. Recently, I looked at pictures of the building on Google and remember the long exterior stairs going up to the main door. I also remember the dark woodwork and the racks of books in salons and sitting rooms with marble fireplaces and gleaming mirrors, sentinels of times past welcoming and tolerant of the hordes of noisy children trooping through the stacks, often lost amid the Dewy Decimal System.
It’s ironic, but as a child I was slow to learn to read. Grammar schools, I am convinced, are designed to teach girls not boys. We are messy and energetic multi-taskers who find it hard to focus on neatness and the minutia of details. Reading, spelling, penmanship—beyond most boys’ ken. My lack of precision on 1950s drill sheets led the nuns to assume I wasn’t getting it. One spring in the 5th grade, the nuns tested me and said I read below a 2nd grade level.
Fortunately, my parents sent me to a reading tutor after school for a year and then a private summer school program to brush up on my reading after 7th grade. When tested again after completing that summer program, I scored high enough for my teacher to say I could get into West Point if I applied myself. (My goal in life at that time was a career in the Army.)
Taking standardized tests was boring. I quickly got lost in the rows of circles, and after a time, I didn’t care where I marked or whether I marked C
when I should have marked D. I wasn’t a slow learner, I was a bored learner.
Even so, I loved the McClatchy Library. I knew all those books were a treasure that only a genie could open for me. That genie was the force of will it took for me to concentrate and read carefully. I never marked up a library or school textbook, but once I bought my own books, I began marking them
and jotting notes in the back to force myself to concentrate and remember.
To this day, I still read with a pen in hand. For me, that became the key. But that key unlocked the
door when I was in college. Getting there was an anxious and frustrating experience, but I knew I
wanted to go to college and not seek my fortune as a grocery clerk as too many of my family and teachers suggested. Determination has always been a driving force within me not easily shut down. It also helped to have supportive parents who believed in you.
I learned early on as a college student to use a library as a quiet place to study. At Saint Mary’s College, that was St. Albert’s Hall. I seem to have a knack for being at schools with new libraries; St. Albert had just opened when I matriculated at SMC in 1968. I have one visual memory from those
evenings I spent studying in St. Albert’s. One quiet reading room had a common but expensive wall clock that shows the whole world on its broad face and a wave diagram passing over the surface of the planet to designate the edge of daylight or the coming of night. Although SMC had a European travel program, I wasn’t able to swing a trip during my undergraduate years. But that clock always reminded me of places I wanted to visit, especially
England. I finally made it, several times: alone, with
friends, with Marianne and Elaine, with students, with my brothers.
Sacramento State University, where I earned my MA, also had a new library. The North Wing, as it is now called, opened in 1975, two years after I started part-time there. (A South Wing was added in 1990.) Even after I went to Notre Dame to start my PhD, I used the Sac State library in the summer. There
in the North Wing, I mastered French—translation French that is. (As my colleagues in the SMSU French Department will tell you, my pronunciation of their beloved language comes out like horrendous French mixed with Klingon plus spitting and a soupçon of belching.) But, after that summer, I could sight-read French fairly well, even Baudelaire’s poetry, a much
more difficult form of writing than prose.
At Notre Dame, I started out regularly using the Hesburgh Memorial Library, the one with "Touchdown Jesus." At first, I had a locking cart which allowed me to check out books directly to it
instead of lugging them home. On quiet nights, like a Friday or Saturday after a game, when only grad students were trying to study, we did race on our four-wheeled carts, but mostly I was a serious student.
In time, I got my own study carrel, about twice as big as a phone booth. It had the same privilege
as my locking cart, which I surrendered in lieu of a private carrel. I graded papers, read, prepped for my comprehensive exams, actually took my comps and wrote my dissertation in there. I know it sounds a little like solitary, (after all, there is no room for a carrel-mate), but for the neophyte scholar, it was all the room needed. “The mind is its own place, and can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell,” as Milton tells us.
In time, before my comps, I got one of the few study carrels with a window. Mine overlooked the quad facing west, allowing me to see the famous Golden Dome about a quarter of a mile away. It was under the Dome that one up-and-coming associate editor, Marianne Murphy, worked. Cutting to the chase, after we were serious, then engaged, then married, I knew when she was leaving work (before email or texting) and could watch for her crossing the library quad on her way to meet me for dinner at the end of the day. And I still got my dissertation done, her wonderful distraction aside.
Although a bit dingy when I arrived, the SMSU Library has always been a great place for me as well. I quickly found a window seat in the campus library and went there regularly over the years for reading or grading or prepping. My special nook was a corner which is now office space for the library staff. My particular window faced north across prairie almost as far as the eye can see.
Several years ago, the SMSU Library closed for 18 months for major renovation. Its grand reopening was a dazzling sight. New computer banks and labs, sleek circ and reference desks (always staffed by helpful librarians and perky students), quiet study areas, and its wonderful conference room on the top floor with its vista of the endless prairie (and now the new Marshall High School campus). There is not much to see on a prairie but wind and space; the Conference
Room gives you an unconstrained view of that endlessness.
Because of his generous bequest, the SMSU Library has been renamed the Dorothy and D. C. “Pat” McFarland Library. Mr. McFarland left the campus a cool $2 million, the largest single donation from an individual to the university to date. SMSU is coming of age.
Besides this treasure of a library, to Marshall’s credit, a second exciting and grand library has opened just across town. Entering the new Marshall-Lyon County Library is truly an “out of Marshall experience.” It’s hard to believe you are still even in Marshall once you cross into that welcoming, lovely place. It opened just a few months ago but I visit it regularly. The last time I had visited the now-closed, musty downtown library was seven years ago.
The new open and airy space invites you to sit, read, and enjoy your time there as you would savor a five-star meal in the Cities or Paris or San Francisco.
In a few months time, my five-year tenure as English Chair will end. I will get a short sabbatical and then return to fulltime teaching. I am looking forward to the change of pace, mainly, a change that will give me much more control over my time. It’s a heavy teaching load, but my days will be spent around my schedule and not other people’s meetings. (The creative way to avoid work is to have a meeting!) When that time comes, I am planning on scouring both the McFarland and Marshall Libraries for just the right spot to prep and grade and then sneak in a guilty pleasure of a sci-fi or military history on the side.
Life is good in a fine library.
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