Posts Tagged ‘smith college’

It’s National Library Week, and I’m forced to reflect on the importance and power of my favorite libraries and librarians.  Frankly, I’m well over most media portrayals of librarians as shushing, finger-wagging arbiters of old-school values.  Everyone else I knew when I was a kid wanted to do something daring…I wanted to spend every day, night, and weekend in a library and lusted over stamps, cards, and catalogs.  For me, librarians are personal heroines (and not just because I’m a library school dropout), and I’m lucky enough to count several employed and not-yet-there librarians among my closest friends and role models.  Here are a few of my favorite library memories:

Mrs. Walton:  When I was very small, my mom and I would walk to the Oak Park public library in San Diego to get my weekly dose of books.  Mrs. Gloria Walton (mother of the epic basketball star Bill Walton) was really tall and really friendly and really, really helpful.  She’s the woman who led me to the shelves with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Beverly Cleary books on them, and she’s one of the people I credit with the love of reading that has sustained and saved me my whole life long.

The Summer Suck:  The library in the suburban San Diego community where I spent my teenage years, frankly, sucked.  It was one room with a scanty selection of books, but I still visited it religiously, walking a mile or so to get there, loading up my backpack with as many books as it would hold, taking time to peek into the trashy novels I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading, and walking home, often reading the entire time.  It was a humble place, but I still remember it fondly because it felt like home.

The Coven:  When I was in college, I worked at the Sophia Smith Collection, an incredible archive housed in the former Smith College Gymnasium building where the first women’s basketball game ever was played, home of the collections of the papers of people like Margaret Sanger and Agnes deMille.  As I toiled over the painstaking work of preserving and cataloging the papers of Judith Raskin and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, I was consistently amazed by the collegiality, good humor, and grace of what my boss there called “the archival coven,” women who had devoted their entire lives to the preservation of women’s history and who patiently helped legions of students and researchers make their way through their impressive collection.  I am oh so jealous and oh so encouraged that Smith now has an entire archival concentration to offer students, and I can honestly say that the time spent in that library is among the happiest I can recall.

What about you?  What are your favorite library memories?