Amid Cheers for Disney Resort, Arena, Give a Hoot for Libraries

Don’t get him wrong. It’s not that Bill Griffith wants to rain on anyone’s parade. Or, even that he could if he did want to. Oh, and by the way, hold on to your hats, because the parade is about to begin now that Anaheim has cleared the way for the $3-billion Disneyland Resort.

No, it’s probably more to the point to say that the 69-year-old Griffith will be a silent bystander, watching the floats and smiling at the revelers celebrating the city’s leap into the 21st Century.

Perhaps as he watches the gala scene heralding the future, Griffith will lapse into a pleasant reverie and recall himself as a young man in his early 30s, having hopped a Greyhound in Corvallis, Ore., for the long ride down to Anaheim.

He had answered an ad in a journal for someone to head the library system in Anaheim, and although he was considering using the job as a possible bargaining chip for his position at Oregon State University, Griffith ended up taking the Anaheim offer.

The existing library had been built in 1908 as the result of a gift from the Andrew Carnegie family, but it was woefully out of date. By Griffith’s arrival 50 years later, Anaheim was flexing in all directions and had grown nearly twentyfold.

Over the past 36 years, Griffith had been Anaheim’s only library director. He has presided over a system that expanded as the city has--a system that now has a central library and four branches.

Would you believe it, there’s never been a parade for him? Now that I mention it, I don’t think there’s ever been a banner in any city that read, “Welcome to Our Town: Home to the Finest Libraries in the Country.”

That’s just me being a wise guy. Griffith isn’t asking for a parade. But as he sees Anaheim building one showcase for itself after another, he can’t help but think about the library system and its ever-frequent budgetary battles.

The budget on the table now, he told me yesterday, doesn’t allow enough money to sustain the library at its current level of service. Yes, there will still be libraries, but the system won’t be able to replace books as quickly as it wants. And, as in other communities, branches will remain closed on one weekday.

So, at the same time Anaheim has found ways to build a sports arena and will find ways to accommodate Disney, a library system shrinks.

I asked Griffith how much it would cost to to keep just the branches open on Mondays. Somewhere under $50,000, he said. That almost made me laugh, given that Disney is talking about a $3-billion resort.

What about the quality of service, I asked. “It’s beginning to sag,” he said. “Partly, because we’re not adding to the book stock we need to . . . and the staff is stretched very, very thin so we’re not giving the same degree of service.”

Do you have trouble, I asked him, accepting your budgetary situation at a time when the city is blaring the trumpets over major projects? “I have a lot of trouble” with that, he said. “I’ve been in Anaheim since 1957, and one of the things that attracted me and one of the reasons I accepted the job was the challenge in building a library system. I’ve poured my life into building it, and it hurts to see it going away.”

He is quick to say that the system isn’t being gutted. But he wonders why in an information age and when we know that our society depends on a literate population, libraries are often looked at as places to cut funds.

Beyond those reasons is another that sounds “romantic and abstract,” Griffith said, but that he believes has merit. “The library, particularly for children, is one of the few places where they can go and exercise free choice in terms of determining which direction they want their minds to go. They’re not being told what to do, as they are in school or with mass media. They can still go in any direction they want.”

This isn’t about an amusement park versus a library. A city is many things, and Anaheim can have both.

It’s just that we’ll hear lots of honking horns in the months ahead as Anaheim congratulates itself over being the theme-park capital of the universe.

Like other cities, Anaheim won’t reflect much on the hundreds of thousands of children and adults who have sat in silent wonderment inside a library, browsing the stacks and expanding their minds.

If any company appreciates the power of the mind and the imagination, it’s Disney. If Jack Lindquist and the people behind the new resort really want to do some imagineering, they could start with a call to Griffith and ask him a single question: “What will it cost to keep the library open on Mondays?”

To Bill Griffith, who has spent a lifetime in the library, that’d be better than any parade.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.