Tuesday, April 29: High-heeled Gumshoe
My UNCLE’S LIBRARY
by Melodie Johnson Howe
Deborah’s column on libraries and reading her first “adult” novel created some powerful memories for many of us. What I recalled was my Uncle Richard’s library. He and my aunt lived in Massillon, Ohio in a big brick house on a slope of lawn surrounded by a black wrought iron fence. My family and I were visiting for the summer. I was about eleven years old, and I remember that off their living room was a smaller room. One wall was lined with graceful windows. Under them was a built in window seat. The other walls were lined with books. I had never seen a room just for books in anyone’s house before. I was drawn to that room like the proverbial month to the flame. I felt comfortable in it. For a gangly girl to feel relaxed in an “adult’s room” was new to me.
At first I sat on the window seat and just stared at the books. Then when nobody was looking, I got up and began to read the names of the authors. It was the first time I had seen such names as Faulkner, Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Herman Woulk. Though I was taught never to move my lips while reading, I found myself whispering the more difficult names.
The titles of the books bewildered me. The Long Goodbye. What did that mean? How long can a goodbye be? Tender Is The Night. How can nighttime be tender? It could be scary. I was entranced
I slipped out a book titled, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Tolls meant rings. I knew that. Church bells rang for the glory of God. I opened the book and read: “Forget for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Jonathan Dunne. I was surprised and completely confused, but I sensed that book I held contained something sad in it.
It was then my mother came in and yanked the book from hands. She shoved it back into its place on the shelf and announced, “You’re not old enough to read these books.” With one sharp sentence she had made my uncle’s library taboo. And my curiosity had turned to fascination. I was taken by the hand, led out if the room, and sat down at the crocheted lace-covered dinning table where my mother and my aunt were drinking iced tea. I listened to their stories, their laughter at their shared childhood, and stared from the dining room into the living room and right into that library. What was taboo about For Whom The Bell Tolls?
I would spend the next day avoiding my mother and sneaking into the book-filled room. Sometimes I could hear my parents arguing. “Let her read the godamn books, nothing’s going to happen to her,” my father would snap. “There are things she shouldn’t know about in those books,” my mother would furiously reply. My uncle, a quiet droll lawyer, would sometimes peer in at me as I sat in his library. He would give me a sly smile and then go on his way.
I don’t know how it was decided or even who took me, but I found my self in the children’s section at the Massillon library. I searched through those books, but there was nothing like the ones that belonged to my uncle. Like Deborah, I didn’t want cute little animals on the cover. I didn’t want big print. But I knew I had to get the book I picked by my mother. I searched and searched and then I found it. It was a novel with small print and looked like it could be in my uncle’s collection. It didn’t have a dust jacket. The cover was a deep red with a faded gold imprint of a man leaning down from his horse and swooping up a woman up into his arms. It was called My Dear Wife. I had struck gold. My mother couldn’t take this book from me.
It was a historical, romantic, suspense novel that took place in the Revolutionary War. A young man and woman, madly in love, get married. But before they can go on their “honeymoon” the war between the colonies and England breaks out. The young man must leave his new wife and go fight against the king. She, the virgin bride, gets caught up in the war too. She becomes a spy for George Washington. The couple do not meet again until the end of the novel where he rides up on a white horse, sweeps her up onto the saddle, holds her in his strong arms, and mummers, “My dear wife.” Swoon.
I have never gotten over that book. The Revolutionary War came alive for me in away that no history book ever would. (And to this day I love reading about that time.) There was the young woman who put herself in danger to fight for her newly forming country. She used her wily intelligence to beat the British. And her husband, even while wounded, still fought bravely. But all he wanted was to get back to his beloved wife.
That book had transported me out of my own little world, my own fears, and into another place. A place I had never been and could never be. Maybe that’s what I had first sensed when I walked into my uncle’s library. The world wasn’t just my life. And words could be grouped in a way as to form phrases such as The Big Sleep and Look Homeward Angel.
I had never heard phrases like those before. I didn’t know you could arrange words in such a beautiful way. These words reached out and grabbed you. Words that had power. Is this how a writer forms? Is this how a reader forms? Or maybe you have to have a longing inside of you that yearns for these strong beautiful words? I don’t know. But I do know that people are reading fewer books. And young people are reading even less. This disturbs me deeply. Because it is only a good novel that will take them out of themselves, that will challenge their beliefs, break their hearts, and make them want to fight in the Revolutionary War. Or in Deborah’s case be a Velda to an ape-headed private detective.
The subject of libraries has stirred the caldrons of memory in many CB readers. Our experiences of books and libraries will seldom be repeated in the future. Children aren’t reading like we did. Our hours with books have been replaced by hours of television and video games. Parents used to fret when we eyed a shelf filled with books about drinking and shapely legs, while today’s nervous parents must deal with their kids getting shot at school, contracting AIDS, snorting meth and living on Ritalin. We’re hooked on books and wonder why it’s a dying love. While sitting in the waiting room, probably every one of us will be reading a book when they call our name for the next dose of chemo.
As far as I knew as a child, our modest, middle-class family of five in the late 1940s ran on $40 per week — my mother’s budget for groceries and whatever. When my father wrote her the check each Friday, she took him to work in our old green Dodge, and we had his car for the day to shop. As I remember, $20 paid for a week’s groceries and the rest went to the milkman, the bakery, the butcher, and for other household expenses. The highlight of our trip to the store was that mother bought me a new LITTLE GOLDEN BOOK every week. [I Googled the name and found a small history of the books.]
When Little Golden Books launched in 1942 at 25 cents each, they changed publishing history. For the first time, children’s books were high quality and low-priced. They were available to almost all children, not just a privileged few. Little Golden Books were designed to be sturdy (a new concept), delightfully illustrated, and to be sold not only in bookstores, but department stores and other chains (another new concept). Little Golden Books were an instant success story, even though WWII was on and paper shortages loomed. Five months after the launch, 1.5 million copies had been printed, and LGBs were in their third printing.
Since then, over two billion Little Golden Books have reached the hands of children all over the world. Who hasn’t heard of The Poky Little Puppy, star of the best-selling Little Golden Book of all? It has sold well over 15 million copies worldwide, in many different languages. Tootle the Train, The Saggy Baggy Elephant, The Shy Little Kitten, The Little Red Caboose, The Tawny Scrawny Lion, and Scuffy the Tugboat soon followed, to become household names.
My collection of those little books grew and grew, but not being old enough for school yet, I couldn’t read them. My parents tired of reading me the same books again and again, not sharing my enthusiasm for repeat performances. My father’s mother visited every Sunday, so I crawled into her lap the moment she arrived and begged her to read my books to me. She did, but only one day of reading per week was not enough reading for me.
We lived on a small island in Puget Sound with about 100 houses, so I roamed the neighborhood ringing the doorbells of my mother’s friends with my books in hand. When one narrator got tired of reading, I moved to another house. Today I can’t imagine what they must have thought — a little kid coming to the door every day with a stack of books he wanted read. “Doesn’t he have a sandbox?”
One childless wife, Laura Heffernan, was a member of the BOOK OF THE MONTH club, and her house was filled with hard-cover books. She was a talented pianist, and sometimes played her grand piano for me in solo performances. She was also a member of a reading club, where I was told women got together and read out loud to each other while they ate fat pills. Laura also subscribed to LOOK MAGAZINE, and we often red the cartoons and looked at the pictures together.
If this sounds strange to us today, be reminded that these were people’s lives before the tube. She had other books of poems and stories she read to me, thereby advancing my horizons of literature beyond the LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS. Her book of children’s poems by James Whitcome Riley was my favorite. If her husband Frank came home while I was there, she whisked me out the door pronto, telling me he was cranky due to having a leg amputated in an industrial accident. I saw him but never met him.
[Flash forward to adulthood: I later found out that her husband was an abusive drunk and beat her frequently. No wonder she didn’t want me around when the “beast” came home.]
The next big reading event for me came in the first grade with the DICK AND JANE books. I seemed to catch on to reading quickly. I wanted to make myself independent. Soon after DICK AND JANE entered my life, my grandmother came one Sunday as usual, and I crawled into her lap with a book as usual. But now, instead of asking her to read, I read my book to her. She was so thrilled and surprised, she reached into her coin purse, and gave me a 50¢ piece. At that time, the 50¢ coin was in wide circulation and worth about $500 to a first grader. It was my first reading prize.
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Fletcher, had a closet full of books. Her stimulus was a chart of our reading progress. on the wall She gave us an oral exam on completion of each book, and then made a tick after our name on the chart. The ultimate prize for reading 20 books was a “shiny paper ribbon,” as she deemed it, pinned on the chart after our name. It was my second reading prize, and I was on a roll.
My fourth, fifth and sixth grade teachers read to us every day, apparently from books they had chosen themselves. I think that because in sixth grade, Mr. Granlund read silently while we were studying or otherwise occupied. He would say it was the next book we were going to hear, and I think he must have been checking to be sure he wouldn’t be fired for reading it to us. Of those books I remember three from the LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRY series and one or two books about HEIDI. Others are now without title, but the plots still linger: a Georgian immigrant who is recruited to be a scab in a strike-busting campaign against unionized steel workers, and an Indian Agent named Tom Jeffords who befriends his charges on the reservation he oversees.
Melodie first experienced the Revolutionary War through a novel. My teachers had, without pedantry, introduced us to life on the plains in the late 19th century, the wisdom of having respect for elders, the cultural rape of the American Indians, and the nefarious workings of labor unions. Our teachers weren’t required to prepare us for a standardized test as today’s NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND policy dictates. They were teaching us how to learn and to love doing it. They introduced us to authors, genres and historical periods. As adults who love to read, we must rue our inability to thank them for the seeds of curiosity they planted in us.
I feel sort of left out, y’all learned real stuff on your childly ventures into big people books. I was drug out of my closet with a flashlight and a copy of Peyton Place. Mother said I couldn’t check it out, so my friend did it for me. Needless to say I didn’t finish it till many years later. Unlike Melodie I demanded to know why I couldn’t read it. Mother’s answer—because I said so.
Nice article.