Reading Interest Blooms in Delano

Jean Erck and I were happily lost in Leona Valley when we saw the only wildflowers I have seen this year.

The sweep of hillside was covered in purple and gold. The lupine and California poppies flowed from the edge of the highway to the top of the rise. Scarlet Indian paintbrush made explanation points.

We had made a wrong turn coming out of Palmdale when we took the road less traveled, which took us to the flowered hillsides and brought us out near the top of the Ridge Route near Tejon Pass.

We were on our way to Delano--I had been invited there by the Friends of the Library--and Jean had offered to go with me. It is a 4 1/2-hour drive from La Quinta and would have been woefully long alone.

I felt good about the invitation because my husband, Doug, grew up on an orange ranch near Strathmore, which is up the middle of the San Joaquin Valley from Delano.

A gracious lady named Helen Fogle, a retired teacher and president of the Delano Friends of the Library, had extended the invitation.

There are 320 members of the organization, and most of them were in the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall, where their annual celebration and accounting of their stewardship was held. It’s a dinner, a program and general toting up of the Friends’ accomplishments for the year.

During the year, they have children’s programs; a book review luncheon; provide books for children in the Delano Hospital; have a book sale, a Christmas tree and Santa Claus party; sponsor a summer reading club, and even present an occasional puppet show.

Helen said the group is “a lively and strong organization.” There is never enough money, and the membership dues account for most of the support. Last year, the Friends held two book sales and made $1,075 for the Miriam Beall Panero Memorial Fund. This money is earmarked for new books so Delano citizens are able to read the new bestsellers.

To make an organization like this work as well as it does takes determination, work and a real devotion to books.

Books are friends and teachers; they make music from beautiful words, teach hard truths. They pique the imagination, bring hope, spin dreams. And none of these things could happen to the people of Delano if it weren’t for Helen Fogle and her intrepid band of friends, who are starting their 25th year together as a dynamic organization.

Jane Randolph will be the new president of the Delano Friends, and Helen will go back to writing the library newsletter. Jane was head librarian for 20 years. The library building is a handsome place to work and to read, and Delano is a lucky city to have these men and women carrying the reading banners for them.

When I was about 7 or 8, I read Johanna Spyrie’s “Heidi,” as did just about every other little girl. I couldn’t go to school because I had rheumatic fever. When I read about Heidi and her friend going to take the goats up the Alps to graze and stopping in a lush daisy-dappled meadow to have a lunch of creamy cheese and peasant bread, nothing ever sounded so good. I asked my mother for a piece of cheese and some bread, and went across a vacant lot to a row of pepper trees and imagined that the street I could see was the path down the mountain. I see it yet, taste the bread and cheese, and see the grass wave like a gentle river.

Fogle says the library is in great need of books in Spanish, especially fiction. For children, they need hardbacks and paperbacks in Spanish--the school population is 72% Latino. Also needed are adult books on tape.

Maybe some day soon, another lonely little girl will ask her mother for some creamy cheese and chewy bread, and sit under a tree dappled with sunshine to read “Heidi.”