10% of What? : State budget cuts threaten local facilities, and families stand to lose a precious literary resource. Volunteers may be one answer.

Lisa Gordon didn’t set out to make addicts of her children.

Then again, she didn’t exactly discourage that from happening, either.

From the beginning, she told them they could travel to faraway places without leaving their home.

That meeting imaginary people was fun.

That being transported to different centuries was magical.

Now her kids can’t get enough.

“They’re book junkies, no doubt about it,” said Gordon, a music teacher and Ojai mother of three children ages 3, 7 and 11. Her youngest son, quite appropriately, is named Reid.

“Every time we go to the library we bring home about 30 books,” she said. “They’ll be so excited that when neighborhood kids come over they’ll say, ‘Sorry, we can’t play now--we have new books.’ ”

Gordon and her children are familiar faces at bookstores around town and especially at local libraries.

“She started bringing her oldest girl when she was 3 for story time every week, and she’s 11 now,” said Kit Willis, branch manager of the Oakview Public Library, about 15 minutes from Gordon’s home. “She’s been coming with her kids once a week ever since.”

Given her family’s hankering for hardcovers, it’s hardly surprising that Gordon reacted like a mother tiger when she heard that her weekly sojourns might be in danger.

Because of state budget cuts, she was told, the Oakview library might be reduced to being open two days instead of five. The Ojai library would probably suffer cutbacks in staff and operating hours. And the library in Meiners Oaks might be forced to close its doors altogether.

“At one point, we heard a rumor from a reliable source that we were going to be closed too,” Willis said. “There was an uproar.”

One of the loudest roars came from Gordon, who encouraged her two oldest children to write a letter of concern to County Supervisor Susan K. Lacey. Gordon then quickly whipped out a pen and paper for her own letter--this one to the editors of several local newspapers. She urged readers to write to their local representatives.

“How many of us have taken our children to the wonderful story hours provided by our local libraries?” she wrote. “How many of us have sat at our library for hours looking up this, that and the other for some sort of research project? How many of us have written ‘the’ report with our librarian’s help? And how many of us have traveled to faraway lands and had outrageous adventures with a little help from a book?”

The answer, it seems, is quite a few.

According to Willis, Oakview library has the highest book circulation per capita of all the small branches in the county, with about 3,000 titles checked out each month. Those readers, she said, swamped their legislators with letters and calls. County supervisors, she added, also were inundated with calls.

As a result, the libraries got what they now consider to be a stay of execution.

“We’ve been reduced one day and so was the library in Meiners Oaks, but everything is still up in the air,” Willis said. “The budget really isn’t set. We know it’s going to be a 10% cut, but the question is: 10% of what?”

Gordon said her two children received a letter back from Lacey saying she didn’t want the libraries to close. But according to Gordon, Lacey also said that if closures were imminent, the volunteer route might be an option.

“She asked my kids if they wanted to volunteer,” Gordon said. “I don’t think she knew how old they were.”

Lacey didn’t know how old they were. But at this point, Gordon’s children would probably be welcomed if they held up their hands to help.

“Basically what we told the libraries is, ‘Please don’t close any branch. We’ll try and get volunteers,’ ” Lacey said. “But these cuts are coming from the state. Everyone is trying to do the best they can with less money.”

Besides libraries, several reading programs in the county are threatened, Lacey said, including a literacy program and a “Books to Grow On” program in day care centers.

“The bottom line is, we need volunteers,” she said.

With the state’s fiscal crisis, there will undoubtedly be closures of other valuable services and programs. And quite possibly, they will get more publicity than a little library on Highway 33. Libraries, after all, have a tradition of not making a lot of noise.

At least, not on their own behalf.

But if they are given a low priority, you can bet there will be repercussions down the road. In a society whose literacy is already threatened (“Did you read ‘War and Peace?’ ” “No, but I rented it at the video store.”), we can hardly afford to take away one of the few means of illiteracy prevention available to people.

Most important, though, is the tenet Gordon put forth so well in her letter and which obviously has been put into practice at home: Readers are not born. They are made.

“It’s not sending out a very pleasant message to our children and our future,” she wrote. “Books and reading--who cares?”