Downtown Library a Haven for Bookworms, Socializers, Homeless

For 33 years, San Diego’s Central Library has been a sort of giant living room for downtown as well as a warehouse of books and knowledge.

Past its glass doors each day walk 2,500 people. Many are old but alert, inhabitants of nearby residential hotels like the Golden West and the Lynne. Others are young but troubled, street inhabitants who carry life’s possessions in knapsacks or cardboard boxes and who appear as worn and drab as Central’s brown and gray linoleum.

There are students and children, white, black, brown and yellow, some immersed in serious literature, others simply looking for Garfield. And though their numbers are few, there are even some downtown office workers, noticeable by their suits and ties in what is an atmosphere nearly as casual as the beach.

Some of Central’s patrons seek a break from monotony, some a safe refuge. Some hope to find tools of knowledge to chisel a toe-hold in a new society. Some don’t care much for people, period.

A Comfortable Place

“If you look closely, it hasn’t really changed that much. Sometimes you see the same faces you did 15 or 16 years ago, just that now they’re 15 or 16 years older, and you still may not known their names,” says Patricia Allely, a librarian who has worked at Central since 1961, the last several in charge of the aging three-story building that sits on E Street between 8th and 9th avenues.

“We reflect the social changes outside, and people come here because it’s a comfortable place . . . (with) a non-threatening atmosphere. People can come in and not be hassled.”

Central Library is a squat building, not much to look at, unlike the historic Post Office across the street. It is cramped for space, its two basement floors--closed to the public--hold more than 1 million government documents. Meanwhile, circulation is up and the library continues to add 15,000 new titles each year to its collection of more than 700,000 volumes.

While other downtown structures, such as the vacant and dilapidated Balboa Theater, have become magnets for preservationists, the Central Library appears to have no such appeal.

The librarians who work there have little sentimentality for the place and say they can hardly wait to move into a new building, a prospect that still seems several years away as the city plays see-saw over where in downtown to construct it.

A recent study done by the library found that its entire system of 31 branches plus Central were near the bottom in available space, budget money, volumes, hours open and staffing levels in comparison to 10 other major cities nationwide.

While the findings were troubling, they also served to raise more questions and initiate yet another study, this one comparing San Diego to other large California cities that have also had to slowly fight back from the effects of the now 9-year-old Proposition 13 and rampant population growth.

At Central, though, all that seems to have little bearing on the daily routine, where people sit at large tables reading books in Yiddish or the latest Armchair Detective magazine or sleeping in a back aisle or washing their clothes in the restroom.

“I’m a traveling man,” says a proud Errol J. McCalmon, 68, retired from heavy construction and now a vagabond who rarely stays anywhere for more than three months.

He’s been in San Diego for three weeks--”but the place I’m staying has walls so thin I can hear them belch next door”--and has visited Central six times. On this day, he is studying a geography book and looking up facts about Tucson, his next probable stop.

“I’ve used libraries all over, in Philly, St. Louis, New Orleans. This one is well-supplied, but Philadelphia was the best of all, they had anything you were interested in. But, hell, after a while it doesn’t matter how many books there are because you can’t read every damn one.”

It’s hard to imagine that McCalmon, a small man with a slight build, spent 20 years in the Marines, including a long stint as a drill sergeant. He decided to indulge in wanderlust after his wife died several years ago and he retired from his Washington, D.C.-based job.

Places like the library give him a chance to meet people in new towns. “I like to talk to people--although I don’t like to get too close--and libraries are good for that.”

Newspaper Room

Another thing they are good for is newspapers, and Central’s second-floor newspaper reading room is one of its busiest locations.

With more than 60 papers available, it provides many patrons with access to news from back home. On one wall are located the most popular papers, but they must be read while standing. At nearby tables several people--predominately men--peruse through the Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Arizona Republic and others, setting off a dull noise of rustling pages. There is little talking and most people keep to themselves.

Inside the reading section there is yet another small and narrow room filled with a row of electric typewriters. Like washing machines in Laundromats, they rent for 25 cents for 20 minutes. “Be prepared to begin as soon as the coin is dropped,” warns a sign. Faced with a ticking deadline, people are too busy tapping away to talk.

Cutting a striking figure through the reading room is Betty Glen, a dignified woman wearing black gloves, a black dress, bright red lipstick. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a bun.

A friendly and articulate woman of 62, Glen, who now lives by herself in a University Heights apartment, talked at length about the library and her life.

She reminisced about her past jobs, beginning as a sort of Girl Friday for the NBC Matinee Theater in the early 1950s, a live television show whose purpose, besides providing entertainment, was to sell color television sets.

“They needed something on the air in the afternoon so that people in showrooms across the country would have something in color to look at,” she said. Problem was, though, the technology was so raw that the actors faces had a tendency to appear purple or green. She worked as a sales secretary for ABC radio, was in the hotel and restaurant business, worked for the airlines handling reservations, did telephone solicitations, traveled around Europe for a while and spent some time in Mexico during World War II.

“It was a fantastic time. People from Europe were fleeing the Nazis. The chief of police in Acapulco would arrest you if you weren’t wearing a skirt as you walked to the beach. There was lots of intrigue. Someone said it was a sunny place for shadowy people.”

Most recently, though, Glen has worked as bell ringer at Christmas time for the Salvation Army, concentrating mainly in places such as the old Gemco store in Clairemont. She’s lived in San Diego for 16 years--she looks forward to receiving her her first Social Security check next month--but doesn’t feel particularly close to anyone. “The truth is, I find most of the people here suffocatingly dull.”

Glen used to visit Central more often, especially to see the weekly classic movie series. But she stopped because she became afraid while waiting for the bus after dark.

Now she visits about once a week, but she never checks out any books. She likes the newspaper room because she can read the obituaries and the new phone books from other cities.

“I’m looking for people I know and checking if they are still alive, Glen said.”

Although the library has a tendency to become stifling and hot, Glen rather likes the place, though she makes it a policy to stay out of the restrooms. “I think they (the staff) do the best they can,” she said.

‘We Get It All’

One of those would be Susie Ward, a librarian in the children’s room. A veteran of 17 years in the library business, most of those working for the county, she has been to almost every library in the county. None, however, were quite like Central.

“I get college students doing serious work in children’s literature, people from the YWCA, children looking for books in French and Spanish, we get it all,” she said one day last week. “They come from La Jolla and the rest of the county.”

One night, she recalled, a local agency that helps battered wives had a large and sudden influx of abused women, who came with their children. The women, because of their condition, couldn’t come in and yet their children needed some distraction. Quick arrangements were made for the library to provide the children with books.

Similar things have occurred with other public service agencies. While it wasn’t anything dramatic or headline-grabbing, it was for Ward a new experience, one she says makes her job more interesting and fulfilling.

In San Diego’s suburbs, she found the tastes in books to be more narrow and uniform.

“Out in the county, in Poway, Lakeside, Borrego, Valley Center, you don’t get questions from kids in French and Spanish immersion courses. They asked for a Garfield book. Here they ask for Garfield, too, but also a whole lot of other things.”

Something Ward and most others who use the city’s branch libraries also never had to worry about was stumbling over someone sleeping in the aisles.

One side of Central’s many faces are the homeless who use the library as a depot. And as long as they don’t disturb anyone, they are usually left alone.

In a far back aisle last week, for example, one young man was lying on the floor asleep. His belongings were in a cardboard box, his shoes next to it. Awakened from his slumber by a visitor, he said he’d been reading about Western Indian and Chinese culture. “Reading this is heavy stuff,” he said, grabbing his possessions and leaving, declining to say anything more.

On the shelf, in front of where he’d been sleeping, was a book. It’s subject: Western Indian and Chinese culture.