I got hungry...

so I got up, made a PB&J, glass of milk and sat down to compose some random thoughts.

I listened to an interview on NRP with an author who just published a book on libraries; the one with interesting architecture.  I decided to order that book to see if they included the Petaluma Library which is now a museum.  It was a Carnegie built in 1904 and was famous for the largest domed glass ceiling.   I don't actually remember the dome but inside was a classical temple to books with a fabulous second story you could see from the ground floor.   I read a few books there from the summer of 1964 when I stayed with Robin and Carl.

The public library in Emmett, well actually the City Library, used to exist in a house on the street in back of the old Parkview Junior Highschool.  The library had books upstairs and in the basement.  I had a library card there in my pre-teen years after I had exhausted all reading material that interested me in the school library.  The school library was located in an odd little room at the head of the study hall.  I was once banned from checking out books from there until my grades improved.   I discovered all of the Glenn Balch stories about horses, Nancy Drew.  At one point I attempted to emulate the girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn who was systemically reading her way alphabetically through the local library there.  I found that method boring.

The new City Library is located on the block that used to hold the old Wardwell School.   My father attended that school briefly.  In my youth the third floor had already been condemned by the time I went there in the fourth grade.   Parkview did not have a lunch room so everyone who ate hot lunch marched to Wardwell to eat in the basement.  I used to get free meals there and was let out 15 minutes early to work the lunch shift.  

I remember the librarians were not too strict about checking out not quite so age appropriate books.  They let me check out a sci fi book by Robert A. Heinlein about the human Martian who was raised on Mars and returned to Earth, it was admittedly an adult book but no one knew because it was Sci Fi.  Because I was too young they asked that I have an adult okay the book.  I believe I asked my cousin to write me a note, Lynn then being a highschool senior I think he actually recommended I read it in the first place come to think of it.

One of the oddities of the City Library was that if you lived within city limits membership was free but if your residence was out in the valley proper there was a fee.  The old library became a museum of sorts and the new library is still there.  It ain't a gorgeous classical Carnegie but it is mid century modern. Yeah.