In the Library Ashes, There Is Some Hope : For the People Who Worked There, Loss Is Like a Death in the Family

They were there until nearly midnight, slogging in ankle-deep water and warm ashes, working by flashlight to swaddle anything they could salvage in protective plastic sheeting.

They were back at sunrise Wednesday, waiting like mourners searching out their relatives’ remains in sodden wreckage. While many Angelenos talked about the fire at a historic building they had never set foot in, librarians at the charred Central Library were grieving for an intimate loss.

“It felt,” said a librarian who had worked there for 13 years, “like watching my own house burn.”

To many, like Billie M. Connor, the Central Library has been home. She spent 17 years among the stacks in the Science and Technology Department. Now, her department may hardly even exist.

“We pretty much feel we’ve lost the heart of our collection,” she said.

Connor had watched from across the street Tuesday and had seen the flames curling out of the window of her office, where a rare collection of U.S. patents dating back to 1790 was stored.

“It’s really like having a death in the family,” she said.

On Wednesday, chief librarians were being escorted into the basement to check damage, down wet stairwells that one librarian said had “looked like Niagara Falls” Tuesday night. Today, they will train others to return in small groups for the salvage effort.

Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary on Tuesday morning--not even the fire alarm.

“Nobody knew it was the real thing,” said principal librarian Helene Mochedlover, who would have celebrated 20 years at the library this September. “We have fire drills all the time”--false alarms, a transient’s cigarette tossed in a trash can, even bomb threats.

Just that morning, a staff meeting had warned them to be vigilant of ominous packages lying around.

After everyone filed out routinely, Mochedlover stood in the parking lot, casually admiring someone’s new car.

“I couldn’t believe it when people started pointing at smoke coming out of the building,” she said.

Standing There

Hours later, they were still standing there, riveted by the horror of it. After watching the ebb and swell of flame, Susan Patron, who worked there six years, “couldn’t stand it” and went home--like most--to a bad night’s sleep.

“I have it all pent up inside; it’s really very difficult to talk about,” said Fontayne Holmes, senior librarian for interlibrary loans.

“The Central Library was just an accident waiting to happen. . . . Preservationists were very interested in preserving the building as a historic monument, and while that’s important, (much of) the living monument is gone--and that’s the collection. . . . A good part of our collected memory is being lost.”

While Connor and others praised firemen as “absolutely wonderful,” they spent Wednesday totting up the damages. Even though they were less than expected, they were disastrously more than anyone had ever wanted to contemplate.

Lost Patents

For Connor, it was the lost patents, nearly 10,000 cookery books--some more than a century old--auto manuals back to Model As, the wiring schematics for 1920s cathedral radios.

“It’s not so much the attachment to the things, but the totality of the knowledge and culture,” she mourned. “It’s something we felt we were guarding . . . we felt it was a great trust and a great treasure we were privileged to work with.”

For Mochedlover, it was the relieved thrill that things survived, like the index, and the matchless, century-spanning collection of theater documents.

Nonetheless, she said, “I haven’t felt the way I felt yesterday since the day President Kennedy was shot--the same kind of total devastation.”

None of them has given up. Connor was up at dawn Wednesday, calling the Patent Office in Washington about starting a new collection. The recording on the library’s telephone said it was closed because of the fire “and will reopen as soon as possible.” Already, people have asked where they can donate money or books; a spokesman said arrangements would be made soon.

Showed Up

From all over Los Angeles, volunteer librarians showed up Wednesday to help or just to be there.

“I’ve been so touched by all the kids, part-timers and so forth,” Connor said. “I’ve never been aware it was so important to them. A lot came just to be with us, and I’ve seen a lot of tears.”

Librarian Evelyn Greenwald had nowhere else to go. Until Tuesday, she spent her days inside, fielding questions from libraries all over Southern California, minutiae about the weight of Einstein’s brain and whether llamas can transmit syphilis.

On Wednesday, she stood on the wet sidewalk and watched. “We’re out of business,” she said sadly.

Times staff writer Scott Harris and research librarian Patricia L. Brown contributed to this story.