Librarians

Mrs. Allene Taylor
Chairman of the Board
Mtn. Home Carnegie Library
Mountain Home, Idaho

I am happy to have chance to pay tribute to the Mountain Home Carnegie Library. It will always remain one of my most pleasant memoirs for the days I lived in Mountain Home.

I was born in a house a few blocks from the library and the year I was in first grade I walked past it every day coming and going from school, I did not know the building was filled with books. I thought of it as something like the courthouse and vaguely associated with God.
[see image of the old Carnegie Library at right from Crossroads: A History of the Elmore County Area)

Then we moved to a farm and I did not see the library again for several years. Meanwhile I learned to read and developed a great thirst for reading. We had only half a dozen books at home. I would read anything. It did not matter that I could not understand it. It did not matter that I could not understand it. I remember reading eh 1902 Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture. Once I found a stack of Literary Digests someone had thrown away and brought them home as a treasure. I still remember being laughed at because I pronounced the name Littery Diggest without the slightest notion of what the words meant. I was in either the third or fourth grade when someone finally told me about the existence of he library.

I went there with much trepidation one afternoon after school. Just inside the outer door I encountered a strong smell compounded of rubber matting, books and possibly some sort of floor wax. That order most pleasant one, associated with the greatest pleasurable excitement the world had to offer me. I know now why incense is burned in temples. I stood there sniffing it and reading a marble plaque engraved with the names of the women's clubs instrumental in founding the library. Finally I summoned my courage and went through the inner doors.

The librarian was Mrs. Sessions, a pleasant and kindly woman. I told her my name and asked her permission to read one of the books. I could not take my eyes off the books. They were all around the big room and much higher than my head. I had not realized that so many books existed in all the world. Mrs. Sessions explained to me about a borrower's card and how I would have to get two property owners to sigh surety for me. i did not understand too clearly and it began to seem to me like a catch that was going to prevent me from ever getting at those books after all. Something of it must have shown in my face, because Mrs. Sessions smiled and said that I could take a book away with me right then, if I wanted to. Instantly, I loved her.

I have been partial to librarians ever since and for the past seven years I have been very happily married to one. Perhaps my eventual love affair with my wife really began in that mystic moment.

Then I had to choose a book. I will never recapture the awful, tremendous feeling of anticipation with which I first walked up t that wall of books. In those days, as later, my mind leaned to the wildly romantic. A Rudolph Valentino movie, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,: was showing in town. There was a large billboard advertising it beside the highway near the water tower, which I passed each day going home. The poster was of four wild horsemen riding through the sky above a flaming city. I thought the movie was literally about warriors riding through the sky pursued by skeletons and I would so and look at that poster and become very excited thinking about it. But I was lucky to see a movie once a year and I did not even think about the possibility of seeing the show itself. Suddenly, too high on the library shelves for me to reach it, I saw Blasco Ibanez’s novel “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Timidly I came back to the desk and asked Mrs. Sessions if there was a connection between the book and the movie. I learned with wonder and joy that movies were often made from books and that the books, unlike the movies, cold be enjoyed without paying money. That was a very great and heartening discovery. I said I wanted the Ibanez novel. Mrs. Sessions explained how I would not understand it and led me to the children’s books, then located in an alcove opposite the desk. Finally I left, dazed with happiness, and carrying a copy of “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

It was just as well, I would not have found the actual men riding through the sky which I expected in the Ibanez book. My understanding was that I should read all of the children’s books before I could take out any of the adult ones. It did not take me long. Even when school was in session I could read two “Motor Boys” books in a day. I read them all, girls’ books and boy’s books, with equal pleasure. My mother thought so much reading might be harmful and tried to limit me to two books a week. I never once thought of obeying her. Mrs. Sessions, God bless her, continued letting me have all the books I wanted. I hid them in various places. One of my favorites was a little, square, unused wooden building to the rear of the library. I seem to remember it had a windmill on top.

In time I read nearly every book in the library, I worked through a long row of French novels in pale green bindings and all of Stoddard’s Lectures and a set of Abbott’s Histories and yards of Alexandre Dumas. I think the only thing that stopped me was a set of Ridpath’s Universal History. That was too dull even for my omnivorous appetite. Of course I did not understand all of what I read, but from all of it I took away something. It is only in the past few years that I have begun fully to appreciate how significant an influence the library was for me in those formative years. I think now I owe it as much as, and very possibly more than, I owe to the public school system. I hope there is better liaison now than there was in my day between the library and then school, with children being told about the library and helped and encouraged to use it.

Yet even as a boy, I felt a real gratitude toward the library. In the far corner

opposite the desk there was a glassed cabinet containing some mineral specimens. Somewhere I had found a piece of matrix containing some large, pinkish crystals, probably garnet. To me it was a mass of jewels and one of my greatest treasures. One day I gave it to Mrs. Sessions to put into the cabinet. She, with that rare understanding which marked her, did not tell me my treasure was of no particular interest. She thanked me and put it into the cabinet and it always gave me a good feeling to see it there.

The names of those women’s clubs which founded the library are engraved as deeply in my memory as on that marble plaque, which I
sincerely hope is still in place. They were the “Sub Rosa,” the “Entre Nous” and the “Artemisia Mothers Club.” No doubts the clubs vanished years ago. I did not then understand the French or Latin and it was not until I studied botany here at the university that I learned Artemisia is sagebrush. Yet even then my gratitude extended those clubs. Many writers I know here and in New York complain humorously about invitations to speak before women’s clubs. I never do. There may be a Helen Hokinson sort of futility about many of them, but I know that once upon a time in the pioneer days of one little town some women’s club did something very solid and good in the world.

A lady in Boise recently sent me a sprig of sagebrush. It is here on my desk as I write and the fragrance of it brings back powerfully the memory of forty years ago. Similarly, writing the foregoing has revived strongly the special feeling I had for the library as a boy. Please use the enclosed check to buy the kinds of books I most enjoyed reading in those days. They would be travel books and highly imaginative fiction, principally science fiction, and popularized science for young people.

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