Libraries of the Unexpected : From Golf to Grand Opera, L.A.’s Offbeat Archives Offer Special Kinds of Knowledge

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA has long been a magnet for people with unusual passions. The region’s sometimes quirky intellectual landscape is mapped in its special libraries, collections that often reflect the vision or pointed interest of one person or small group. Outside the many institutional, corporate, legal and medical libraries, there are some that approach the pursuit of knowledge from unlikely directions. The Elysium Nudist and Naturalist archives in Topanga Canyon, for instance, or a proposed library devoted to the history of LSD and the psychedelic movement. Nobody knows exactly how many specialty libraries there are in this area, but the local chapter of the Special Libraries Assn. says it has 600 members who specialize in providing information on narrow topics. What follows is a sampling of L.A.’s more notable repositories of specialized information.

DRIVER’S EDUCATION

FOR SOME GUESTS ATthe Industry Hills Resort and Sheraton, the check-in routine is: Find the room, unpack--and head for the library. The golf library. Visitors who’ve come to the hotel complex in the City of Industry to play on the world-class greens are often surprised to find that they’re steps away from the Ralph W. Miller Golf Library, the only public golf library in the western United States, with a collection that includes more than 5,000 volumes on the science and history of the game. There are also memorabilia--score cards, postcards, medals, artwork, golf bags and clubs of Bobby Jones, Babe Didrikson, Craig Woods, Amy Alcott and other famous players.

Students in golf classes can watch videos to help bone up

on technique; scholars and course architects do research.

The library’s hundreds of pre-1900 books include a 1597 edition of “Lawes and Actes of Parliament,” recording the edict of 1495 that banned Scots from playing golf because Scottish landlords felt that people should be learning archery to defend their property rather than hitting balls around the countryside. The original collection was the life’s work of Ralph W. Miller, a Los Angeles lawyer who once lived near the California Country Club, about eight miles from the library. The facility is now run by his widow, Jean Bryant.

ANNALS OF MEDICINE

THE STAFF OF THELos Angeles County Medical Assn. Library is used to fielding unusual questions: Will hypnosis help a patient with hormone imbalances? Should a film maker put a plaster cast on a 15th-Century character with a broken leg? What do Islamic forceps or Roman surgical instruments look like? And the library is often able to provide answers from its 140,000 holdings, which range from clippings on contemporary medical topics to a collection of books that includes such precious texts as a 1532 Latin translation of Hippocrates’ aphorisms. In a small museum at the library, in the northern part of

the Medical Assn.’s headquarters near Wilshire Boulevard and Alvarado Street, visitors can examine early stethoscopes, a wooden obstetrical mannequin on which 19th-Century doctors practiced deliveries, a transparent, decalcified skull preserved in wintergreen oil--even a pair of shrunken heads from cannibalistic tribes in South America, all gifts from private physicians. One doctor also donated a Daumier caricature of Louis Philippe, king of France between 1830 and 1848, who was honored by Indians for his medical services. The library’s primary emphasis is on providing literature searches and clinical information to its physician-members--about 2,000 use the facility regularly--but it also assists lawyers researching malpractice and accident cases as well as TV- and film-production companies and other media.

THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS

GARDENERS WHO WOULD LIKEto identify a strange plant in their back yard can bring in a cutting and learn its name and function at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia. Then, to find out more about it, they can go to the arboretum’s Plant Science Library, where about 25,000 volumes await. The library is the only one in Southern California that welcomes the public to research plant-science subjects with the help of arboretum horticulturists and botanists.

Along with the gardening enthusiasts and landscape

designers who come to use technical reference works, artists who want to do illustrations of plants that are not in bloom can study them at the library. And with the growing interest in natural medicine, the library’s collection on herbs attracts many would-be herbalists. A researcher can study one of the library’s oldest books, “A Newe Herball, or Historie of Plantes,” published in 1578, to learn about the use of plants to treat ailments during the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

SPEAKING VOLUMES

A NONDESCRIPT, UNMARKEDgreen building on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles houses the Pacifica Radio Archive, the oldest collection of public-radio programming in the United States. Built from the tape collections of the five radio stations of the Pacifica Foundation and swelled by contributions from other listener-sponsored stations and independent producers across the country, the archive holds about 30,000 interviews, performances and tapes of historical events. Visitors and mail-order clients can listen to recordings of hearings of the House Un-American Activities, Watergate or even a Ku Klux Klan rally in Saugus. Interviews include the only known recording of a leader of the Sufi Islamic sect, the past three poet laureates of the United States reading from their works, memoirs of the crew that dropped the first atomic bomb and assorted oddities, such as a conversation with a man who lives only in Kaiser automobiles.

“To actually hear the voices of people interacting really

takes you back to the mind-set and the milieu of the period, the way seeing something printed can’t do,” says archive director Bill Thomas. This sort of aural time warp attracts historians and researchers, as well as actors and performance artists who want to capture a feeling or imitate a voice. Lily Tomlin prepared for one of her one-woman shows here. And when the Three Stooges were mentioned on the floor of Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, Moe Howard’s daughter called to get a tape of the proceedings.

Tapes are extensively catalogued and indexed. For example, the catalogue section from FR to FU covers Fruit Punch, Functions-Polyhedral, Fund Raisers, Functional Analysis and Futurology.

Most clients use the mail-order service, for which there is a small charge, but visitors can listen to tapes for free.

ON THE TRACK

GAMBLERS ON THEIR way to play the ponies at Santa Anita sometimes make a stop en route--the Carleton F. Burke Memorial Library at the California Thoroughbred Breeders Assn. offices in Arcadia. This is a place a handicapper could love: It has racing chart books from the early 1900s as well as seven years of back issues of the Daily Racing Form’s West Coast edition. Charts show the detailed performance of every horse in every thoroughbred race in North America from the Civil

War to the present. And there are racing and breeding records for every thoroughbred produced in Great Britain and America for more than 200 years.

The 10,000 volumes, microfiche files and periodicals aren’t just for gamblers, of course. One researcher, Suzanne Cardiff, says she uses the library’s facilities to plan matings for mares by studying genetic crosses and to discern how sons from the same sire have performed. She also studies the Daily Racing Form collection to conduct in-depth studies of horses.

“For example, maybe you know that a horse came in first in a particular race, but you want to know who did he beat, was it a nice, competitive field that day?” The curious can find out at the library.

The facility is named for Carleton F. Burke, a racing official at Santa Anita and a leader of California racing in the early days of pari-mutuel betting, whose collection of racing literature evolved into the library.

THE LEFT STUFF

DURING THE communist witch-hunt days of the ‘50s, says library director Sarah Cooper, “if you had the works of progressive authors on your shelves, that might be evidence that you were un-American and therefore not entitled to ordinary civil liberties.” Fueled by fear of persecution, people began dumping anything potentially incriminating--books, pamphlets, files, magazines. But Emil Freed, a well-known labor organizer, avowed Communist and activist in Los Angeles, believed that this “unwanted” history was too valuable to destroy. So he drove his battered station wagon around the city, amassing materials from friends and storing them in his garage. When the first garage overflowed, he enlisted the help of neighbors. Before long, he had filled 26 garages.

That collection formed the nucleus of what became the nonprofit Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in South-Central Los Angeles, the only private social research library of its kind in the country. Its documents trace such local history as the Hollywood Studio strikes of the 1940s and work of the L.A. Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born, which fought political deportations from the ‘40s through the ‘60s. And its archives draw researchers from around the world, who come to study such rarities as Mother Earth, the journal published by Emma Goldman from 1913 to 1917, as well as periodicals that run the gamut from the March 1918 issue of The Liberator, which offers “John Reed’s Story of the Bolsheviki Revolution,” to Ramparts, the popular leftist magazine of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The library contains more than 20,000 books, 21,000 pamphlets and 28,000 periodicals, as well as films, posters and special archives.

THE MUSIC MANSION

IF THE BRAND LIBRARY in Glendale looks familiar, it could be that you’ve seen this 1904 mansion in “The Naked Gun” or in an episode of “Mission: Impossible.” It is a favorite local film substitute for Bagdad, Casablanca and other exotic locales.

But what’s unique about this branch of the L.A. public library system, other than its very un-library-like “Moorish palace” architecture, is its collection--the only extensive circulating collection of art and music in Southern California. And its unusual lending policies are a special attraction for most visitors. Patrons regularly drive miles to take advantage of the Brand’s practice of loaning many of its holdings--such items as art prints, recordings, videos and slides--to any California resident.

Amid the fine woods and Tiffany windows of the mansion’s Victorian interiors are 10 rooms that house 4,000 compact discs--one of the largest collections in the world--along with 40,000 books on art and music theory, history, criticism and technique. Other holdings include piano rolls and sheet music, 30,000 records and 3,000 cassettes, which visitors can sample at listening stations in the music room. The building also contains a concert hall and the Glendale Municipal Art Gallery.

The facility, donated to the city by one of its founding fathers, Leslie Brand, draws 25,000 visitors a year.

TRICKY BUSINESS

IT MAY SEEM funny to have a library for magicians,” says Milt Larsen, founder of the Magic Castle in Hollywood, “but magicians actually rely a lot on reading and research to find material for their acts.” They can study the work of their colleagues and predecessors in the Magic Castle library, 4,000 volumes set in a turn-of-the-century Victorian atmosphere.

“If a magician is developing an act that has a new illusion in it, say, levitation,” says library commission member Bill Pol, “he may want to research other levitations to find one that fits his style. After researching what’s been done, he may combine a number of ideas to come up with something truly new.” And there’s an abundance of ideas in such publications as The Bat, The Trickster Monthly, Chaos, The Last Pages of the Cabbala and The Christian Conjuror.

The library, the largest of its kind in Southern California, is open only to magician-members of the Magic Castle, Pol says, because its resources “expose the trade secrets of our profession.” The library is a world of books dealing with linking rings, suspensions and levitations, spiritualism, hypnotism, witchcraft and the occult, mind-reading, escapes, juggling and the ubiquitous tricks--tricks with balls, balloons, boxes, cigarettes, cards, coins, dice, handcuffs, fire, livestock and, of course, venomous reptiles.

“There aren’t many new tricks,” Pol says, “but there are many, many new ways of performing them. That keeps the field up to date.”