Oh, How I Love Librarians! (Part 2)

One of the most boring jobs I'd ever had was at the Hiram College Library, fall 1962. It was also one of the most interesting jobs I'd ever had.  (Clue: It was the first job I'd ever had.)  The head librarian then was Thelma Bumbaugh; the assistant was Stuart Stiffler; another assistant was Helen Cline, an older woman who worked there early on Saturday morning--my shift.  I never addressed any of them by their first names--it was always Miss Bumbaugh, Mr. Stiffler, Mrs. Cline.  Always.  Miss Bumbaugh terrified me (she could fire me--and should have but didn't).  Mr. Stiffler gave me a very interesting job (in my "spare time"): typing cards on individual art prints in books he would set aside.  I learned a lot about artists and their works by doing that--and have, of course, forgotten it all.  And Mrs. Cline ... more about her below.

Let me say this: Until college, I'd forgotten there even WAS a Saturday morning.  Throughout high school I'd always slept very late on Saturday--as late as my farm-boy father would permit (he was always up at five, even though there were no cows to milk).  He could not understand why his adolescent sons seemed to find the arms of Morpheus so appealing, so impossible to escape.  He would tolerate it as long as he could, then roust us out and invent some chores for us.  This was manifestly not the behavior of my father that I recall most fondly.

"Old" library, Hiram College

Anyway, at Hiram College my parents wanted me to have a work-study job (such cruelty!), and so I went to work at the Hiram College Library, then housed in the "old" building now occupied by the computer center and other enterprises.  In those days, the tennis courts (all three of them) were adjacent to the library, and there I learned (from watching my coevals) that when you are angry about your poor play, you hit a ball onto the roof of the library extension.  I played poorly a lot, so I had to be judicious and not hit a ball up there every time I missed an easy return.  (By the way: I just remembered a bad tennis joke: What is the only tennis joke in the Bible?  ANS: Jacob served Laban seven years and got no return.)

My job comprised only a couple of tasks: working at the desk (checking books out and in, collecting fines--2 cents/day, checking out attractive co-eds: I was lonely, a frosh with no hope).  Occasionally--  rarely--hardly ever ... I would ... "borrow" ... a ... little ... cash ... from ... the ... fine ... drawer--money I always returned on payday (well, usually).  I do not write about this with pride, but it remains one of the guilty reasons I contribute every year to the Friends of the Hiram College Library.  I'm more or less paying back a debt.

Do you think less of me yet?  Is that even possible?

The far more odious task at the library was shelving books.  Lord, I hated that!  Alone in an aisle with a book cart, looking where to place some volume with 323.09192845 on the spine (in white ink).  The only good thing: I learned the Dewey Decimal System, which did me little good in grad school: KSU converted to LOC about the time Joyce and I were taking classes.

But the best thing about the job (besides, of course, the, uh, "interest-free college loans") was on Saturday morning--yes, those Saturday mornings.  I was living at home that first year, so I not only had to drag my Lazy Ass out of bed by 7:15 or so (on a Saturday!), but I then had to drag my Lazy Ass up the hill on Rt. 700 north of Hiram and arrive in time to check in at 8.  Supervising me on Saturday mornings was Mrs. Cline, whom I grew to adore.  She had a very laissez-faire management style (meaning I could goof off upstairs), and a little before ten (my shift was 8-12) she would give me a dollar and send me down to the Co-Op (the little Hiram grocery store) to buy four glazed donuts.  I would set a World's Record in Dilatory Errand-Running every time, shuffling my feet in sullen slowness, down to the store.  I'd buy the donuts, shuffle my way back to the library, where Mrs. Cline--who never commented or complained about my "speed"--had a tea kettle singing.  And we would drink tea and eat donuts (she had one; I had three).

I soon quit that job, though.  I could not stand those Saturday mornings, Mrs. Cline notwithstanding.  So I got a job in the dining hall, figuring I'd work in the kitchen at lunch or dinner.  Civilized hours.

But my assignment?  Breakfast, every day.  Deep sink.  (Meaning: I had to clean to big pots and pans, all caked with God-knows-what.)  I had to be there at 6:30 a.m.  What an improvement!

Oh, How I Love Librarians!

"Marian the Librarian" is a pretty funny song from the show The Music Man.  Remember the ending lines?

But when I try in here to tell you, dear
I love you madly, madly, Madam Librarian...Marian
It's a long lost cause I can never win
For the civilized world accepts as unforgivable sin
Any talking out loud with any librarian
Such as Marian.....Madam Librarian.

I actually knew a librarian named Marian.  And I was afraid of her--even though I never once entered her library.  She was the mother of one of my high school girlfriends and was also the librarian for a neighboring high school.  She was always nice to me--but that was irrelevant.  Throughout my adolescence the parents of my various girlfriends terrified me.  I was certain they could see right into my evil soul, view like sick movies the sordid stories unspooling in my imagination, read on my sweaty brow my carnal intentions, could ... you know ...

But I've otherwise had invariably wonderful experiences with the librarians in my life, from earliest childhood through this week.  I'll tell a few stories the next couple of days--just to give you an idea ...

Carnegie Public Library, RIP
Enid, Oklahoma

Okay, I was afraid of the librarians at the old Carnegie Public Library in Enid, Oklahoma, the first library I remember.  They brooked no nonsense, those prairie women (yes, all women), and since I had little to offer but nonsense, there were bound to be "issues."  But they were silent ones.  Silence reigned in that old library (razed in 1972--see my Kindle book about that library and numerous other things--Link: Turning Pages: A Memoir of Books and Libraries and Loss), and I was not about to Break Silence and bring down upon me the wrath of the goddesses.  Their sharp shussshhing was like a knife between the ribs, not that I know what that feels like.

Mr. Hickok--with elven ears?

They also acted as arbiters of taste.  My older brother, Richard, once had to go home to get permission from Mom and/or Dad (I'm guessing it was Dad) to check out I, the Jury by Mickey Spillane, which had a naughty cover and some naughtier language inside.  I remember fearing that they would not allow me to check out, oh, some children's biography of Wild Bill Hickok and even trembled a bit until she, looking over the rims of her glasses, clucked her tongue.  But stamped the due date.  Could I hear her sigh as I turned to leave?  The sigh and sign of resignation and despair for the Youth of America?  I think so.  Reading books about someone named Wild William!  Really!

When we moved to little Hiram, Ohio, in 1956, the Portage County Library still had a Hiram branch in an old house near the "downtown" (if you know Hiram, you'll understand the quotation marks).  It's now a private home--and seemed like one back then, too.  Regular rooms with lots of books.  My older brother worked there while he was in high school.  I used to help myself to some of his pay, which he foolishly kept beneath the little serape he draped over his dresser.  The bulge was a giveaway.  I saw to the takeaway.  A dollar here, a dollar there.  Every little bit helps. I remember one book I took out of that library, Henry Stanley's How I Found Livingstone,1872, a book I read because I'd seen on TV that old (1939) movie Stanley and Livingstone with Spencer Tracy.  It was from that book, by the way, that I learned the reply to the famous Dr. Livingstone, I presume?  The Dr. answered, Yes.

The Hiram Schools Library comprised some bookshelves up in front of the study hall.  Mrs. Alma Cook, a sweet woman (with nary a touch of Enid-Carnegie disapprobation about her), worked up there, organizing, checking out books, reminding us nicely when they were two years overdue, maintaining such order as she needed to (things were far less rowdy in Hiram High School than in the high schools I see in the movies these days--and movies don't lie, right?).  From that library I checked out and read what were probably the first "adult" books (no, not that kind) in my life: Martin Eden and Moby-Dick and--okay, I was still socially and psychologically retarded: The Iron Mistress, a Paul I. Wellman novel about Jim Bowie, a novel that has a sweet description of a thrown Bowie knife hitting a guy in the back of the head ...

BTW: I see today on ABE that you can get a signed copy of The Iron Mistress for $225!  Better snap that up!

IRON MISTRESS (signed)-see seller's description

The Clippery

The Oxford English Dictionary says there's no such word--clippery.  Yes there is.  I just made it up, sort of: There is a hair salon here in Hudson called The Clipperie (it's not a word, either.)

But my Clippery has nothing tonsorial about it--nothing save the scissors I use.  Let me explain ...

When I was a beginning teacher (fall 1966) and saw my first classroom (Rm 116, Aurora Middle School, 102 E. Garfield Rd.; Aurora, OH), I was both impressed and daunted by the space.  There were about twenty rectangular tables in there, two chairs (two hard chairs) with each table.  I had a little U. S. flag on a stick, a pull-down map of the Unites States, a pull-down screen, a large wooden desk (mine!), a PA speaker over one blackboard (which was green), a few bookshelves, and a file cabinet.

I went over to it.  Empty.  Just like the feeling I was having as I looked into it.

That first year I had nothing to pull from the file cabinet except air. And it wasn't much better the next year.  Making it worse: I had a  textbook my second year called The Uses of Language by Neil Postman and Howard C. Damon (Holt, Rinehart, 1967). The authors had settled on a narrative device to move the book along--the story of a kind of nerdy English teacher named Mr. Donahue and his interactions with his class at Ravenwood Junior High School.  (There were readings and assignments from Ravenwood that we in Aurora would emulate.)  Mr. Donahue was continually going to his files to withdraw some highly relevant documents that engaged his fascinated students in some absolutely perfect way.  As the year went on, I found myself more and more interested in punching Mr. Donahue in the face.

But I was also learning his lesson: file stuff you might want to use later.  And so I became increasingly like Mr. D. (as Benedick cries out in Much Ado: "There's a double meaning in that").

four in the Cabinet family

So I bought some file-folders and starting clipping and saving things.  And then I looked up one day.  It was forty-five years later, and I had six file cabinets full of stuff (some at home, some at school).  At last I was ready to teach!  The only problem: I was retiring.  And now I have cabinets out on the screened porch since there is no room in the inn for them.

And what, you ask, is in those cabinets?  Class handouts, files on just about every author who ever lived (jammed with clippings from newspapers and magazines), souvenirs from visits to museums and writers' homes (nothing stolen--I don't think), notes on books I've read, photocopies of every relevant document ever printed, postcards, brochures, DVDs, CDs, samples of student work, the kitchen sink ... you get the picture.

Now that I'm retired, I no longer clip, right?

Wrong.

The Dyer Clippery remains open, still working at full capacity, all employees (unpaid) still on the job.  Just today, I clipped some things from the New York Times that had appeared while we were gone--a note about a Philip Roth biography, a review of Christoper Hitchens' Mortality, some other clutter that we acquired on our recent sojourn in John O'Hara Land.

Why are you still clipping? you ask.

Because if I don't, I'll die is the simplest answer.

Ring Lardner(1885-1933)
(looking a little creepy)

I'm interested that the OED says that clipper was originally a sheep-shearer.  And so we have a family connection: a dyer was someone who dyed material (often wool).  And the second meaning of clipper--a hair-dresser or barber.  And I see in my little book The Uses of Language that among the literary selections Mr. Donahue assigns his students is a very famous tale by Ring Lardner, "Haircut."  It's a story you should read.  I have a copy in my files--but since you're not sitting in my classroom, I cannot impress you by walking to the cabinet and extracting a copy to show you.  So--read it online, the ultimate file drawer ..."Haircut," by Ring Lardner

Home Again, Where Chaos Waits

Vacations would be better if you didn't have to go home.

This is the principle that has been evolving in me for the last half-century or so.  When I was a lad, getting home from vacation invariably meant one odious thing: school.  So I was always hoping that, somehow, our family car would drive into another dimension, a dimension where school was a dark rumor perpetuated by conspiracy theorists bent on terrifying young people into behaving ... or else.  And that or else comprised sitting in hot rooms on hard chairs doing hard work with--at best--marginal relevance to the Real World.

But, of course, we never made any inter-dimensional leaps in our family cars.  Instead, we arrived home, usually late at night, had to unpack--right then.  And then find a way to sleep while our bodies were still thinking they were in motion.  And then, the next day to go buy ... school supplies and school clothes, those most dreaded of all childhood shopping trips.

I know, I know: I spent my adult life as a schoolteacher.  An apparent contradiction.  But, as you'll see--not really.

Once I became a teacher, vacations were in some ways an even more blessed relief than they were in my childhood.  When I was a kid, you see, I never had to do any schoolwork over Thanksgiving or Christmas or the summer months.  It was unthinkable.  And that Cruel and Unusual Punishment called summer reading had either not been invented--or had not drifted as far south as the Sooner State, at least during my childhood.

But I discovered all too quickly (and sadly) that for a teacher there is really no such thing as a vacation.  I spent many of mine grading papers, planning the lessons for the post-vacation weeks, catching up on paperwork, reading texts I was going to teach later--or reading books related to the texts I was going to teach.

And soon my curiosity became the fuel of my vacations.  Joyce and I invariably head out on the road to see sites related to writers and to their works.  We've done this from the very beginning of our relationship.  We honeymooned in New Orleans in late December 1969, but Joyce was already working on her dissertation subject--the writing of Kate Chopin, who, of course, had lived in New Orleans and whose classic novel The Awakening is set there (or nearby).  So we took a bayou cruise, walked around looking at Chopin sites.

Willa Cather

And driving home, we decided to go by way of Hannibal, Missouri (not exactly the quickest way back to Kent, Ohio, our home), where we visited the Twain sites (for both of us the first--but not--the last time).  So: Our nerdy honeymoon evolved into a long and lovely series of nerdy "vacations," during which we visited such places (a very partial list) as Grand Isle,Louisiana (Kate Chopin); Key West, Florida (Hemingway and others); Ketchum, Idaho (Hemingway); Montgomery, Alabama (Zelda Fitzgerald); Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick (Willa Cather); Amherst, Massachusetts (guess!?); Sauk Centre, Minnesota (Sinclair Lewis); Red Cloud, Nebraska (Cather); ... and on and on and on.

And just today we are back from our latest.  We visited many John O'Hara sites in New Jersey and Pennsylvania--and took a return visit to Imlaystown, NJ, for yet another look for the "lost" grave sites of the Imlay family.  (Gilbert Imlay, you may recall, was, for a time, the lover of Mary Wollstonecraft; he departed the scene not long after Mary delivered his child, Fanny, who later took her own life not long after her half-sister, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, ran off with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.)

Getting home from that, of course, was odious not because I would soon have to be teaching vocab and grammar and the like but because of the Everest of clutter that somehow accumulates while you're gone, even for only a few days.  Oh, does it take forever to deal with it all ...

I miss teaching in a lot of ways (paper-grading is not one of them), but one of the main ones is that I no longer have a captive audience to hear about our latest road trip.  I have a gazillion O'Hara slides I'm soon going to paste into a PowerPoint.  And then I will show it to ... ?

I will draw a line in the sand.  Step across it if you want to see the John O'Hara story flashing before your eyes in a dark room with a dull narrator ...



O'Hara and Dyer,
Pottsville, PA

Nerds on the Prowl

Joyce and I have finished up our final day in the Pottsville, PA, area, where I'm chasing down some locations important in the life and in the fiction of John O'Hara.  Soon, we'll be home, and it will be time to quit running around and instead to start writing.  But we had a great day today that began with a trip to a nearby country club.

This country club was the setting for some key moments in O'Hara's first novel, An Appointment in Samarra, a novel which many consider among his best.  (One reason: He rewrote it several times because of his editor's commentary; later, when he was famous, he would not allow editors to change a word of what he'd written--and what he'd written, in virtually every case, was what you and I would call a rough draft.  And the result?  His later fiction suffers--and often sucks.)

Anyway, we pulled up into the country club driveway, soared on into a parking slot (as if we belonged there), fired off a few pictures and drove off as if we'd suddenly remembered we were flying to Paris this very morning.

We headed then for Kutztown (rhymes with Rootstown), where adolescent O'Hara briefly attended what was then called the Keystone State Normal School (now it's Kutztown University).  Kutztown--unlike Hiram College (grrrrr!)--has kept its traditional "Old Main," the main classroom building where O'Hara attended classes before he was booted out for academic and disciplinary reasons (fighting, disobeying the Headmaster).  We spent some time on this very friendly campus, which featured a Starbucks in the student union, which they call the Academic Forum.  Sounds pretty good.

Back at our car--something not so friendly.  On the windshield, under the wiper: a warning ticket.  This vehicle is in violation of the Kutztown University ...  That was as far as I read.  Once I realized I had no fine to pay, I simply saved the ticket for a memento of an otherwise pleasant visit.

Then it was off to Tamaqua (tuh-MAWK-wah), where O'Hara worked briefly for the local newspaper, the Tamaqua Evening Courier in 1927 (he was in his early 20s).  This job lasted three months. Then he was fired for the reasons that cost him numerous jobs: late arrival, drinking problems, fisticuffs with locals.  The Courier merged with the current paper back in the 1970s, and the old Courier building is now ... a municipal parking lot.  More empty space in O'Hara's busy life.  But we had good chats with the local newspaper people and with the local librarian, who showed us some microfilm of the 1920s Courier.

Back to Pottsville then and the rectory at St. Patrick's, where they keep burial records.  There, we met Jane, a delightful woman who's been working there forty years and who knew the O'Hara family--and knew one of the brothers, Martin, very well ("Marty," she called him).  She dug out old burial records for the O'Haras (nothing is computerized), copied the record for Patrick O'Hara (the writer's father), and gave us a hand-drawn map of the very large Catholic cemetery so that we could find the graves.  And so we did.  We easily found (and photographed) the grave sites of his father, mother, aunt.

At the local historical society we didn't find much but a disgruntled employee, who called O'Hara "a spoiled brat" and complained that the writer had trashed Pottsville in his fiction, hurt residents by revealing their naughty behavior, made a fortune but sent not a single thing to the historical society.  As a result, he was not exactly brimming with information about O'Hara--nor with much goodwill.

But Pottsville has begun to recognize the significance of its prodigal son.  There's a statue on Centre Street, a "nook" devoted to him in the local library, a John O'Hara Street, and even the hotel where we're staying (Ramada Inn, right downtown) has conference rooms called The John O'Hara Ballroom, The English Room (Julian English was the main character in Appointment in Samarra), and The Lockwood Room (The Lockwood Concern was an O'Hara novel).  The visitors' bureau also has a John O'Hara Walking Tour of sites relevant to his life and fiction.

Last night, we were eating in a local pizza place (Roma's--we liked it so much we ate our three evening meals there), and we noticed a large group of middle-school kids eating at a nearby set of tables.  They were very well behaved (in case you're wondering), though the boys were at one end, the girls at the other.  Anyway, I approached them (carefully, carefully) as we were leaving, found out they were local school students, then asked: Have any of your teachers ever assigned any stories by John O'Hara ... the writer who grew up here ... whose statue is down on Centre Street?  Lots of blank looks and some questions in return.  One bright-looking young man said, Isn't he the guy who wrote about wife-swapping and stuff?  I thought that sounded close enough.  Sounds like O'Hara, I said.  My dad told me about him! the young man said. But the others seemed not to really recognize the name.

And so it is with fame, literary or otherwise.  Is anything more evanescent?

Of Novels and Hotels and Farms

In 1951, John O'Hara published a novella--The Farmers Hotel--that involves some travelers and passers-by stranded by a blizzard in a small hotel that was just in the process of opening.  I liked the book when I read it some months ago.  It's an unpretentious tale of love and ambition and race and how circumstances often alter our well-planned lives.

I had read in some of the biographical material that the building O'Hara had in mind (not an exact duplicate of the cover art) was on Beckville Road near the small town of Cressona, PA, not far from his boyhood home in Pottsville.  The O'Haras also had a farm they used for a summer getaway on Panther Valley Road, which intersects with Beckville Road.  When the O'Haras went out to their farm, they would have passed right by the building.

former home of Katherine Delaney,
mother of John O'Hara
Lykens, PA

Well ... even with MapQuest and GPS and a very smart woman beside me, I sometimes, uh, don't exactly end up where I thought I was.  We were coming from Lykens, PA, where O'Hara's mother had grown up (we found her house) and where his parents were married (we found it, too--and a kind secretary showed us the sanctuary, somewhat altered from the days of the 1903 marriage between Katherine Delaney and Dr. Patrick O'Hara--Dad was an M.D.).

Panther Valley

We eventually found Panther Valley Road and drove its lovely length--a narrow winding road among the hills, some old farms (which was theirs?) sitting here and there.

But we had failed to find the old hotel on our trip into town, and I was preparing to head back up PA 901 to a building I'd thought might be it when we entered town.  But when we turned left onto 901 from Panther Valley Road, we almost immediately saw the building--somewhat changed, now a private home--but still very clearly the place that had once been the Farmers Hotel of O'Hara's novel.

the "Farmers Hotel" near Cressona, PA

I wrenched the wheel, parking across Beckville Road (some annoyed drivers behind me--farmers in search of a hotel?--honked derisively; there may have been some unhappy words and sign language as well), came to a stop.  I hopped out of the car and fired off a few pictures.

And off we drove to our hotel in Pottsville (a Ramada, not a Farmers), feeling that euphoria we've felt for years, driving country roads together, searching for something we love, in company with someone we love.

What's a Metaphor For?

Princeton NJ
YMCA-YWCA

Regular readers (reader?) of this blog already know that I've been reading the works of John O'Hara this year--and visiting sites related to his life--and death.  I have actually finished reading his complete works and am now chasing down a few last things before I write a long essay about his life and career.

Among those Last Things was this: O'Hara lived his last fifteen years or so in Princeton, NJ, where he died in 1970 in his house ("Linebrook") on Pretty Brook Road out in Princeton Twp., a house I visited and photographed last fall (it's now occupied by a Princeton philosophy professor, who was very accommodating).  Anyway, when I got home from my Princeton visit last fall, I read some of the biographical materials about O'Hara that I'd never read before.  And one of them set my teeth a-gnashing and my lips a-cursing (PG-13, of course).

It seems that in the Princeton YMCA (59 Paul Robeson Place) is a bust of O'Hara that sits in the John O'Hara Reading Room.  So ... guess what that meant?  Another trip to Princeton.  (I also wanted to see the Princeton U Chapel, where they held the memorial service for him in 1970.)

So ... after helping my mom spend her 93rd birthday yesterday, we headed home via Princeton, found Paul Robeson Place, found the YMCA, which shares buildings with the YWCA (sounds cool to me!), and walked inside looking for the O'Hara Reading Room.

No luck.

I asked one of the secretaries.  A shrug.  A weird look.  What the ...?

Meanwhile, Joyce had found a young woman named Nicole who'd worked there awhile, and she remembered the bust but told us the Reading Room long ago surrendered its identity so that they could expand the teaching facilities.  She had an idea where the bust might be.  And--yes!--there it was ...

In the copy room.  The Xerox Room ... whatever you want to call it.  Perched up on a shelf with some copy paper and other supplies.  No one there was really sure who O'Hara was--or what to do with the bust.

I knew.

We got her to take it down from the shelf and were surprised to discover it's made of plaster, not bronze.  Very, very light.  I posed with it (see below).

Then Nicole showed us the room that used to be the Reading Room.  She said we couldn't take pictures, though, because children were there, and we didn't want to creep them out.  I understood ... believe me.

But when we went there, the children had not yet arrived.  So ... another picture!  Oh, and in another room was the original sign: John O'Hara Reading Room, still affixed to a wall for no apparent reason.

Driving away later, we marveled at the wonder of the metaphor: John O'Hara, a writer who once won the National Book Award for Fiction, a writer who still has published more stories in the New Yorker than anyone else, a writer whose stories formed the core of the Broadway hit Pal Joey, a writer whose novel Butterfield 8 became a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, who won an Oscar for her performance, a writer whose books soared straight from the printing press to the best-seller lists--for decades, a writer who, in recent decades, has pretty much vanished from popular awareness, a writer whose once-prominent bust turns out to be plaster and now resides on a high shelf in the copy room of the Princeton YMCA, where no one knows who he was.  Or where he is.

Perfect.

What a metaphor! And what a gift for yet another writer who will soon try to figure out what's happened to O'Hara--and why.

D & J