Life Was Learned in Los Angeles’ Library

As we mourn the old Central Library, we must also recognize that library buildings as such don’t really matter. Saving most of the books matters more. If the Carnegie Library of South Pasadena was where I learned to read, the ill-fated Central Library of Los Angeles was where I learned to work. It was my first library job, although only a substitute appointment.

In 1937 that job, however humble and irregular, meant a life-giving $125 a month, and it served to launch me on a career which, half a century later, begins at last to show signs of winding down. To be paid to do what came naturally has never seemed like work.

The setting resembled a Hollywood set by Cecil B. De Mille. The zigurat-style building violated everything learned about good library architecture years before at library school. Everything was bad: storage facilities for books, service to readers, communication between departments. Lighting and ventilation were poor or non-existent. Although we did not realize it then, the building was a firebomb awaiting its time to explode, whether by arson or accident.

But the people in the library were so good and they, along with the books, were my new education. I worked under the wing of the woman who had plucked me out of Jake Zeitlin’s bookshop and sent me off to Berkeley. When graduation brought no job, she provided that temporary appointment.

“You don’t belong here,” she said sternly. “With your background you belong in a university library.” Whereupon she sat me down in her office and proceeded to estimate the life expectancy of the university library administrators around Southern California.

“There!” she concluded triumphantly, putting her finger on the map. “UCLA is where you belong. You can stay here until a beginning positions opens up out there, then out you go.” And that’s the way it went.

That prophetic angel was the red-headed, yea-saying Althea Hester Warren, city librarian of Los Angeles, who became then and forevermore my role model. Perhaps because my wife Fay and I had two small sons, librarian Warren put me in the children’s room under another powerful yea-sayer, Rosemary Earnshaw Livsey.

If given to pessimism as I was in my youth, there is no place like the children’s room for a cure. I learned that books are useful as both downers and uppers.

I also worked at University branch across the street from USC. Although mostly on desk duty, I was given the story hour one day when the children’s librarian went home sick. Remembering how I had devoured the normal violence in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I added some modern trimmings. Whether from terror or delight, my auditors stopped squirming. The little ones are wonderful; it’s when they reach their teens that they become obnoxious.

Miss Warren allowed the library’s imprint to appear on a catalogue of D.H. Lawrence’s manuscripts I had compiled for Frieda Lawrence and Zeitlin. It was paid for by Dr. Elmer Belt, renowned surgeon and book collector, and produced by Ward Ritchie, Los Angeles’ pioneer fine printer. She also sponsored a library exhibit of the manuscripts and the event began with a talk by novelist Aldous Huxley who had newly arrived in Los Angeles to write for the movies.

In preparing the display that included my own collection of books by and about the then-controversial Lawrence, I foolishly challenged librarian Warren: “You’d probably fire me if I included ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover.’ ” She fired back: “I’ll fire you if you don’t!” I also worked in the order department under Albert Read, who had been the manager of Fowler Brothers’ big downtown bookstore. From him I extended my knowledge of the book trade, which had begun with Leslie Hood of Vroman’s in Pasadena where I worked alongside Ward Ritchie after college, and then in two years of increasingly valuable experience with Zeitlin.

From Read and from Katherine Garbutt, head of the literature department, I came to appreciate the library’s riches in history, literature, foreign languages, science and industry, philosophy and religion, documents, patents and newspapers--all of those fields and forms attracting thousands of local users. Like the university library at Berkeley and the one-to-be at UCLA, the Central Library impressed me with the limitlessness of human knowledge. That world was where I wanted to be.

At Central, I could still feel the presence of that greatest of earlier city librarians, Charles F. Lummis, who shook up the system in the first years of the century. He was the prime innovator, never again equalled, who introduced telephones, typewriters, open stacks, outdoor reading areas and fostered a library staff association.

Lummis was the man who collected the rare Southwest materials, probably the library’s greatest treasure, then and now. That treasure--books, maps, manuscripts--escaped the flames.

I learned to be able to talk about the collection and I used to be in demand as a speaker at library dedications until I came to believe (and say) that the building is the least important element among books and staff. What I lament is the hurt inflicted on the heart and soul of the Central Library: the useful materials that suffered damage or loss.

Lummis’ spirit is surely there even now, doing what he can to help apply first aid to the survivors. Mine is there too, for it was at Central Library that I first learned what I meant to do with my life.