A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Library Friend Discovers New Life in Books

Evelyn Stanfield didn’t set foot in a library until she was 20. But in the four decades that have passed, she’s made up for lost time.

Now president of Friends of the Granada Hills Library, she spends several days a week at the library, sorting and pricing donated books for the Saturday sales that have raised thousands of dollars to help supplement the library’s shrinking budget.

Earlier this month, the Friends gave the library $15,000 for a typewriter and books. Many of the books bought will be children’s books.

“My main interest is seeing that children have the opportunities I didn’t have,” said Stanfield, 61.

Growing up in Detroit, Stanfield was often left to watch her two younger sisters and missed much of kindergarten and first grade.

When Stanfield was 7, her family’s landlady gave her a used roll-top desk full of books. But when the family moved to Pontiac to be closer to her grandparents, the gift wouldn’t fit in her grandfather’s 1937 Dodge.

“From then on, I got books any way I could,” she said. “If I found them in a trash heap, I’d pick them out and take them with me.”

But because she hadn’t attended much of her first two years of school, reading didn’t come easy. When her second-grade teacher asked Stanfield to read aloud, the child stumbled through the words and the teacher responded with a slap across the face.

Stanfield’s grandmother went to the school to complain but was told if the child didn’t learn to read by the end of the six-week grading period, she would be sent back to first grade.

Under her grandmother’s tutelage, Stanfield learned. “I’ve been a reader ever since,” she said.

But even then, Stanfield didn’t use the local library, though she walked past it to and from school.

“We lived outside of town,” she said. “I thought it was just for town kids.”

Her first glimpse of a library came when she was 20 and living in Lead, S.D., where her first husband worked in a gold mine. The mine offered workers and their families little pay but use of a building that included a bowling alley, swimming pool and library.

“I thought I was in heaven,” Stanfield said. “I couldn’t read those books fast enough.”

Now married again, Stanfield surrounds herself with books. The living room of her Granada Hills home holds the classics. In the den are biographies and reference books. In an upstairs room and hallway, modern novels.

But she still spends many days in a public library. Stanfield joined Friends of the Granada Hills Library 10 years ago and became president in 1986. Two years later, health problems forced her to drop out temporarily.

She became exhausted easily. Walking across a room was too challenging. Doctors couldn’t pinpoint the problem.

In early 1992, she was diagnosed with a disease that causes arteries to collapse. It is a progressive disease that has no cure and requires that she take 23 pills a day.

“I have so many things I want to do, I don’t have time to sit around and think about what’s wrong with me,” she said. “I feel pretty good, but I tire quickly.”

Stanfield decided to return to volunteering. She recalls seeing a funeral procession that consisted of a hearse and one car. At the sight, she pulled over to the side of the road and cried.

“God, I don’t want that to happen to me,” she said. “I need to spend the time I have a little better.”

In 1992, Stanfield started showing up at the public library again, and was soon persuaded to return to the presidency.

Librarian Tina Hanson, who has known Stanfield since she first volunteered, was happy to see her return.

“She is really a dynamo. She has more energy, more enthusiasm, more innovative ideas to get people to work,” Hanson said. “I can’t see her not being involved in something. She’s a real go-getter kind of person. I can’t see her staying sedate.”

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