Keep Scrolling Down
By Charles Peek
For Edna McGrew and Lillian Ogden, my high school librarians
I wrote last month about my pencil collection and the lessons that collecting and mounting it taught me, and the blog set several of you to recalling your own collections, your own lessons. Thanks for your replies to the blog and by email and Facebook.
Pencil and paper are fast becoming outmoded technologies. They are comparatively cheap to buy, as any browse down the correct aisle in Office Depot will demonstrate. But they are incredibly expensive to teach someone to use…tens of thousands of dollars and that doesn’t even include the lessons in cursive any more…who needs it?
In contrast, by the time they are in 3rd or 4th grade, your child or grandchild can make presentations in Power Point to their classes, working on a computer connected to the internet that cost a few hundred dollars. Economics are one of the sure signs of obsolescence.
These same forces have an effect on another collection of sorts, the sort of collection we call a library. Writer Bias Alert: I love libraries! I served for years on my local library board, I’m a card-carrying library patron, and I’ve sent several students off to study library science. I’m in my first year of a three-year term on the Nebraska Library Commission.
My love of libraries, however, began in my own pre-history, the murky and unremembered days from which there is little recall. Greeley, Colorado. What seemed a gigantic book case, a row of colorful books, and finally spotting the Freddie the Pig mysteries, which I was reading well before I started school. Sometime 60 years later, I had taken a group of future teachers on a school visit and we had assembled for a talk by the Principal in the school library. I glanced over at the nearest shelf and staring back at me from a dust jacket: Freddie the Pig. As the class followed the Principal on a tour, I stayed behind to read the detective story again—Freddie was a sleuth and he’d found me again! The children coming in and out were curious but tolerant of their intruder.
I wonder if only-children are more attracted to libraries? Wherever we were, the local library was like a second home to me. I don’t recall ever going to a children’s summer reading program, though I might well have. But I do recall the Evanston, Illinois, library showing movies and seeing Clifton Webb in Cheaper by the Dozen there.
When my dad took his first parish out of seminary in Salida, Colorado, I was delighted to find we lived directly across the street from the Carnegie Library. These were the old libraries, with a long flight of steps up to the front doors and the checkout desk the first thing you saw when you came in. Book case after book case in long straight rows and a wooden case with small pull-out drawers, each drawer labeled with a code. It was Dewey Decimal then and for years of my early life until the trauma of the change-over to Library of Congress. By the ‘60’s I knew that much needed to be changed—but this? The Dewey Decimal System? What harm had it ever done anybody? I am probably still not quite over the trauma.
As we were about to leave Evanston, I had my tonsils removed (a woman doctor, at tat, name Dr. Pope), and in the wake of being relatively healthy for the first time in years, I put on about fifty pounds before entering the next grade. In Salida, McCray Elementary was just off the corner of our lot, so I’d walk home, come through the back gate in the wood fence, eat the hard-boiled egg my mother had decided was better for me than milk and cookies, and trundle myself off to the library. “Go see what books you’d like to check out,” Mom would call after me. Once, coming back almost too late for dinner, my folks asked me what took me so long. I told them I couldn’t very well know what books to bring home until I’d read them!
When I graduated high school, two amazing things took place that changed my life forever. One was, fearful of the hellish Freshman English program I had heard I would encounter at the University of Nebraska, I enrolled for my Freshman English at McCook Junior College in a class taught by C. F. Wright. My previous writing was pretty much the province of journalism and speech classes, so Wright was really my first real writing instructor. He taught me how to use a library for research and I still have the paper I wrote for him Summer 1960—a paper on the origins of jazz (another story for a later blog).
Fast-forward years later: I’ve been teaching in the University’s Freshman English program and we are in a bull-session where its fine director, Ned Hedges, is telling us some of how it came about and how it had changed over the years. Along the way, he mentioned its former reputation as what poet Lucille Clifton later called in Memphis a sort of “Death Valley.” The only Freshman course harder than ours, he said, was the one old Charlie Wright used to teach at McCook Junior College! I was able to bear witness!
The other occurrence came from a conviction I felt strongly as I graduated high school that I was, on the great scale of things, as ignorant as a stump. Maybe this came from comparing myself to educated people. My parents were both educated and readers, my grandparents as well, and then many (of course, not near all) of my teachers showed signs of literacy. But none of them were warning me that I was woefully behind. Nevertheless, something did warn me, and I heeded the warning.
The same summer I took Wright’s class, I went to the local library. It was a Carnegie Library then (his portrait adorned one of the walls), but we referred to it as “Millicent Slabey’s Library” in honor of is librarian for 20 year just retired when we moved to town. Subsequent librarians would say that their terms were just years on loan from Ms. Slabey. The Library has been moved now for many years, is called the McCook Public Library, and the former library is part of McCook’s High Plains Historical Museum.
There, I looked up the only name I really could pull out of the hat—John Steinbeck. I read every Steinbeck book the library had to offer. Any contributions I might have made to any intellectual conversations my freshman year were fairly limited to what I could dredge up from The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, or even The Short Reign of Pippin IV!
I repeated that the following summer. Back from college and working for the State Highway Department on road crews, I checked out all our library’s holdings of Ernest Hemingway. A couple of philosophy classes, however, taught me that just possibly binge reading was not the most productive way to conduct a reading career. The only binge reading I did after that was one long weekend when I realized I’d forgotten to read War and Peace when it was assigned in Lee Lemon’s class. But my choice of classes from then on was pretty much determined by what lay ahead on my reading list.
In other words, my life of reading and writing (and, holy smokes, getting paid to do it) began in libraries. I spent hours in the stacks at UNL’s Love Library while I was writing my dissertation in a field almost unknown to me (another story for another time) or reading Medieval Italian (a grammar and dictionary in hand for a language I did not know) for Paul Olson’s Spenser seminar. Then came library tours with my students at NAU (where the college president referred to it as “libary” but then he and his wife also claimed not be “a reading family”) and again at UNK, and the pleasure of being able to update the library’s holdings in fields in which I was supposed to be, in Steve Martin’s words, a man who knew a thing or two about a thing or two.
Several of the UNK librarians were and are our personal friends and one, Colleen Lewis, is a Deacon at our parish church. I was honored to serve on my local library board when the late Ron Norman was our fine librarian, and always delight in seeing Christine Walsh when I’m in the KPL for a Senior College class. She’s a great help to my role on the Library Commission.
The digital age has changed libraries. I am not a partisan of either side—it is what it is. The libraries I grew up in did not have to be hospitality centers for homeless and transient populations, but I’m overjoyed when I see many of them not confine themselves to the lobbies and restrooms but find a nook inside and read or teach themselves English. And all in all, the physical labor of librarians has greatly reduced from the first libraries with their cumbersome tablets and scrolls. Those technologies, however, are still embedded in our language…you may well be reading this on a “tablet” and you’ve managed to “scroll down” at least this far before deciding this may all be a shaggy dog story.
Nebraska’s libraries, incidentally, are among the best in the nation. I can say this because, being new to the Commission, I had nothing to do with that. There are nation-wide rating systems, however, and the number of our “star” libraries ranks up there with those of the states with the biggest populations, and despite my presence on it, we have a top-drawer Library Commission, mostly because we have a top-drawer Director named Rod Wagner and very fine regional directors, including my region’s Denise Harders.
Two of our newer libraries, Alliance and Beatrice in opposite ends of the state are also architectural delights, in each of which my old college brother, Gary Bowen, had a hand.
Legislators, hard-pressed for budget dollars, might well consider how the services of their local or school library benefits so many of their constituents of all ages. Or, in the face of all the tough problems legislators face daily, they might look up and think: our libraries never give me any problem—in fact, they help me solve a lot of them! At least it was once assumed that literacy itself was a vital element in a healthy Republic.
If you are in our neighborhood and haven’t seen it yet, stop by UNL’s Love Library and see their new “learning commons.” It is spectacular and has multiplied exponentially the number of students using the library. (Thanks, Jeanetta Drueke!)
Kearney, Nebraska
March 31, 2017
Chuck Peek’s award winning poetry has been published in several journals, as well as in his chapbooks, Where We’ve Managed Somehow to Be (Wayne State College Press, 2014) and Breezes on Their Way to Being Winds (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Breezes was selected for Talking Books and won the 2016 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Another poem appeared in the March 6, 2017, issue of Ted Kooser’s “This American Life in Poetry.” Parson’s Porch recently published a book of Chuck’s sermons preached in Grace Church (Episcopal), Red Cloud, over two decades during Cather events: Speaking Aloud at Grace Church. He is currently working on his first book of fiction. Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska Kearney, Fulbright Scholar (China 2005, 2008), and winner of Nebraska Center for the Book’s Mildred Bennett Award for fostering the literary arts, Peek has made invited presentations on Faulkner and Cather, both nationally and internationally, as well as keeping up his interests in Hemingway and the Harlem Renaissance. With Robert Hamblin, he co-edited A William Faulkner Encyclopedia (now available in Chinese and Japanese as well as English) and edited A Critical Companion to Faulkner Studies, directed Kate Benzel’s Heartland Emmy Award winning program “Prayers for the People: Carl Sandburg’s Poetry and Songs,” and continues to teach for Senior College of Central Nebraska, UNL’s OLLI, the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry, and the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, as well as serving on the Willa Cather Foundation Board. Chuck and his wife Nancy divide their time between Kearney, Nebraska, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They are both active in the Bold Alliance and Kearney Action Network.
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