When I was a little girl, I played with dolls sometimes but usually I ran around with my brother building forts out of blankets and sticks and creating Lego castles on the basement’s gray cement floor. But my favorite childhood game was library.
Playing library was easy. I lined up my stuffed animals and selected books for them to read. There is a picture at home somewhere of me sitting behind the massive typewriter with a blackboard proclaiming, “Free Library Cards!” Even at six, I knew a bargain when I saw one and couldn’t believe it when my little friends told me they didn’t like the library.
Many people simply react to the word in terror, thinking of stuffy buildings, snooty librarians and big, boring, books. I can’t remember the first time I went to the library, but something about that place made my mind race and my heart leap.
Summer evenings, I could be found walking hand in hand with my father down Grove Avenue to the Main Branch of the Oak Park Public Library. He browsed the nonfiction section while I attended children’s storytime upstairs in the Veterans Room.
Make no mistake, I spent most of the time outside playing, but if I was inside it was with a book in my hand and another place in my mind. After all, the only thing almost as good as playing softball was reading Babe Ruth’s biography–which I did over and over again.
During sophomore year, when I could finally get a job other than babysitting, I told my friends I was thinking about working at the library. They tried to dissuade me, saying the library wasn’t cool, and I’d become the biggest dork ever if I worked there. All my chances of boys talking to me–especially cute, older boys–would evaporate. Instead I should work at the Gap, they said, which would provide them with discounts, enhance my wardrobe and therefore my popularity.
We were in the library working on a project when they told me all this. Defiantly I said I didn’t care and walked up to the desk to ask Jean for an application. Her eyes sparkled, and she squeezed my hand. “I hope you get it,” she said, leaning across the counter.
I walked home with my friends feeling as though the die had been cast and my fate as a dork was sealed. But more than that, I was excited to fill out the form and glad Jean thought I had what it would take to work at the library among my heroes, the circulation employees.
My interview took place in the Scoville Room a few weeks later, and I knew this was where important, grown-up meetings took place. At the end of the interview, we went downstairs and Keri opened the door to the back room. “You mean I get to go in there?” I asked. This was too good to be true; I was entering the inner sanctum of the library on my first interview!
My interviewers show showed me the dirty gray desk and grimy computer and phone surrounded by piles of books waiting to be checked in.
“This is where you’ll be working,” Keri said pointing at what looked to me like a throne but could easily be described as a swivel chair with crusty red upholstery, and I stopped listening.
“Wait, you mean, I got the job?” I asked hesitantly. I couldn’t believe they would hire me even for the job of Telephone Aide. Weren’t there lots of people pounding down the gates to work where knowledge and fun intersect?
Because I wasn’t 16 yet, my guidance counselor and parents had to sign a work permit, and the library wasn’t allowed to let me work more than 10 hours a week. By 4 p.m. everyday I was in my little throne answering the phone with a cheerful, “Oak Park Public Library, how may I direct your call?” while checking in mountains of returned books. I felt so honored to sit in that seat and took it as my personal responsibility to make people like the library. Honestly, I would have taken the job for free; the money was one of many perks. When I received my check every other week, the $5.28 an hour added up nicely.
I loved poking around Technical Services to see what new materials would soon be entering the stacks. I put half of them on hold so I could read them first. As a library employee, I was exempt from fines. This really was a blessing as, prior to working there, a good chunk of my babysitting change went to paying late fees.
Thanks to my favorite OPPL security guard, Reggie, I went to the Backstreet Boys concert for free and screamed for my favorite boy band from the front row. Yes, the library did open my eyes to fine art and thrilling nonfiction history books, but I was not immune from the pure, poptastic fun of the Backstreet Boys. I don’t think the Gap gave their employees such perks.
But the best part of working at the library for seven years was the people. The staff and patrons made every day a new adventure. Developing relationships with the general public and creating a community of learning and friendship at the library was something I had never experienced in school. The wide range of ages and backgrounds of the staff and patrons made the library a perfect slice of Oak Park.
The regulars who came to the library a few times a week made the place feel even more like home and made me think about issues and life and the world and how we all fit in it together more than anything at high school. The library allowed me a place to grow and discover while high school often only seemed to be about a party and all the perils of popularity.
After graduation, I worked 40 hours a week every summer for the next few years. By this time I had been promoted from Telephone Aide to Circulation Assistant I, making real library cards and checking out books to real live people at the front desk.
Helping people find the books they were looking for and suggesting items they might like was always the highlight of my day. A girl of about 11 asked me once where Gone with the Wind was and, of course, I knew right where Margaret Mitchell’s classic sat on the top shelf of the third row in the fiction room. Leaving the desk I walked her to the shelf. The book was so high she couldn’t reach it, so I got it for her and gently placed it in her anxious hands.
“Wow. That book is really big. Do you think you can read it, Alex?” her friend asked doubtfully, cradling a stack of Babysitter’s Club books in her own arm.
The look on Alex’s face said it all. She would probably finish it in just a few days. I felt like I was handing down life and thought of the millions who had read it before her and the way Scarlet and Rhett come off the page and into our shared consciousness.
I read once that “art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” But even when the art of books or music allows us to escape, mostly it forces us to connect and examine our space in time. I knew that Alex, young as she might have been, knew this too.
The library is much different now and many of my favorite co-workers aren’t there anymore. Most notably, the building itself is changed. Along with a new building came new technology like automatic check in and self check-out machines. The message seemed clear–the human faces at the circulation desk might soon become a thing of the past.
Thankfully, that hasn’t happened and the circulation department is still the heart of the library. Now when I go, I have to pay fines, but I still feel like the library is my home. In my short, young working life I have had some incredible jobs in the U.S. and abroad, but none compare to the library. When I walk into a library, I feel as if I am close to uncovering a very big secret and that maybe if I just peek through the books, albums, and films a little longer, something will click and become clear and this truth will change things.
People always laugh when I tell them I realized dreams came true when I got the job at the library almost 10 years ago. They ask sometimes if I’m going to become a librarian, and I say no–all I wanted to do was make library cards and work at the desk. Thanks to the Oak Park Public Library, I got that chance and much more.
Abby Cramton worked at the Oak Park Public Library through high school and during college breaks from 1998-2004. She recently returned to the states after participating in HIV/AIDS relief work in Uganda. Currently she is reading all the books she can on freelance writing. You can contact her at abbycramton@yahoo.com.