Support the library

By Bill Springer

Thank goodness for Andrew Carnegie.

Either from guilt or genuine philanthropic largesse, Andrew Carnegie endowed libraries all over the United States. Cape Girardeau was enriched by his generosity.

My grandmother was the circulation librarian at the Meridian, Miss., public library for nearly 40 years beginning with a temporary position afforded by the WPA. Miss Sallie was the face and the voice of the library and helped thousands learn to love and cherish Carnegie's dream.

I am but one.

Every summer I would ride the Greyhound from whatever city my daddy's job had taken us to Mississippi's Queen City to spend two glorious weeks with my grandmother in her upstairs duplex that was a half a block from her work.

Being an only grandchild and nephew, I was spoiled in the best ways.

During those weeks in the coal-and-soot-dusted city, I slept late and then went to the library to see my grandmother and all of my "aunts" who worked there. They were all spinsters in the most Southern, genteel way. I adored them, and they me.

I can recall vividly the smell of the library: musty paper, rubber cement, cigars and my grandmother's Chanel No. 22. That swirl of aromas will always mean that I was in a sacred place that held the knowledge of the ages. And, of course, she was there.

I was given free range of the stately two-story library, and I did things that I know other children would have been spanked for and sent to bed without supper. I played for a while every day with my boon companion, Tiberius, who was the janitor and resident comedian. I was always Mr. Billy, and I was the most precocious kid on the block.

Miss Jean Broach, my grandmother's archenemy and queen librarian who could shush louder than any person in east-central Mississippi and parts of Alabama, let me twirl in her large cracked leather chair that groaned with her 300 pounds but spun like a top for me. She let me endlessly make sounds in to her Dictaphone that sent gales of laughter all over the building. Never a shush.

Tiberius once loaded me into the dumbwaiter in the basement and let me ride up all the way to the second floor, where I opened the door and yelled "Boo!" at Miss Alofred, the children's librarian ruining her story hour. She thought it was a hoot, but she told my grandmother that if I did it again, she would whup my behind but good. And she would have. But never did. She always smelled like violets and gave me lavender mints.

Books? Millions of them. I wasn't too interested in children's books. The only way to keep me still was to let me peruse the oversized books of Holocaust pictures and famous artists (some in color), atlases and travel books. It was no secret that the "nekkid" pictures were my favorite. The bound National Geographics could keep me hunkered down for hours. I learned but thought I was having fun.

When a book's binding or pages became loose, Miss Sallie would get out the gallon jar of rubber cement, generously repair the problem and place the book in the iron screw-top book press to set. Tiberius and I squashed a lot of stuff in it besides books. That was another truly intoxicating smell in all of its glory.

But the best was making real rubber balls from scratch. Talk all you want to about store-bought balls and their bounceability. Mine were the best. And they were silent. Stand on the top landing and see if it can bounce all the way to the basement.

This year we are being asked to enlarge the Cape Girardeau Public Library. A library is so much more than books now. Technology seems to have changed its mission, but it really hasn't really changed it at all. To be an educated and viable society, we must read and go beyond who we are. We can all be more that we think we can. Andrew Carnegie knew what he was doing.

My problem is that I am a margin writer and underliner and, God forbid, a page-corner turner. Librarians do no like that, not even Miss Sallie.

Note: My daughter is a librarian. Is that genetic?

Bill Springer of Cape Girardeau is a teacher.