Possible Last Chapter for Library Vital to Seniors : Literature: County bankruptcy threatens to close refuge for Seal Beach retirees. Some cling to hope that facility can be saved at public auction.

Evelyn Diamond’s dream transcends the Dewey Decimal System, but it may not survive the chaos caused by derivatives.

Every few days, Diamond sits in the Leisure World Public Library, savoring poems, scouring novels, collecting titles in her ever-expanding list of “books that might interest Jewish readers.”

The endless bibliography is no mere pastime for Diamond, who retired to Leisure World four years ago with her husband Sy. It is her Sistine Chapel, her Egyptian pyramids, her passion.

But it also may be another unintended victim of the county’s financial ills.

If officials make good their intention to close Leisure World’s library next month, as part of a plan to pare $3 million from the library system’s $23-million budget, Diamond and 8,700 other Leisure World residents will lose a precious refuge.

They appear like clockwork, these senior citizens who linger for hours among the stacks. About 2 p.m., they ride a free shuttle to the little book-filled building on the outskirts of Orange County’s oldest retirement community. Most seek a vital resource: a word or thought to engage their minds.

“To take the library away would be one of the saddest things to ever happen here,” said Diamond, who would not give her age but could not conceal her erudition. Seated at a book-covered table, she resembled a concert pianist before a keyboard.

Besides books, the library offers a variety of items that patrons treasure, including the county’s widest selection of large-print titles. Patrons have come to depend on the library’s “talking” books and video cassettes, plus its extensive collection of rare genealogy manuals, which help the vast number of patrons interested in exploring their family trees.

“This library is a lifeline to people,” Diamond said.

Plans to save the library by selling it to the Golden Rain Foundation, which governs Leisure World, recently won tacit approval from county officials. But legal snags killed the deal last week.

Leisure World residents and county officials now hope the Golden Rain Foundation can make the winning bid at a June 24 public auction for the property. They acknowledge, however, that bidding will be open to convenience marts, fast-food chains and anyone else with designs on the 23-year-old building.

“Our concern is that somebody who may want to speculate will buy the property at auction,” said George Brown, mayor of Seal Beach and a Leisure World resident.

Such a scenario terrifies 75-year-old Anne Aiello, who depends on the library’s collection of video cassettes for nothing less than companionship.

“Don’t take my library away; I live here,” she said.

Books and tapes are like faithful friends to Aiello, who said shyly, glancing away, that cable TV is a luxury she can’t afford.

In the wee hours, when sleep will not come, nothing but static, gunplay and mayhem can be found on network TV, she said.

So she tucks herself into a warm love story.

On Saturday mornings, while making a huge pot of spaghetti, she likes to hear Clark Gable or Jimmy Stewart in the background. Their voices soothe her as she stirs the thickening meat sauce.

One recent afternoon, after a meeting of her Italian-American club, Aiello was filling plastic grocery bags with library books, apparently stocking up for the weekend.

First she borrowed a book about organizing family get-togethers, because she is eagerly awaiting a Fourth of July reunion and wants everything to go smoothly from the moment her relatives arrive.

Then she borrowed a book about irises, because the flowers remind her vaguely of the days when she worked.

“Outside my office window were irises, and I’d see them all the time when I went to work,” she said. “Everyone was cheered” by them.

Then she borrowed a copy of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden.” Then a book about love and loss by Leo Buscaglia. Then a book called “Finding Your Strength Through Hard Times.”

She quickly slipped this last title back among the others.

Asked how she felt about the prospect of losing access to the library’s 25,000 titles, thanks to shaky municipal investments she couldn’t begin to understand, Aiello leaned forward and said in the appropriate library whisper:

“I think it stinks. I think it’s unfeeling.”

For Aiello’s generation, said Leisure World librarian George Tait, borrowing books satisfies a craving developed when entertainment required less money and more intellect.

“I hear people across the counter saying that they learned to love libraries during the Depression,” said Tait, a man visibly distressed about leaving his post of 16 years.

Tait’s library staff did not want to comment about the library closure, fearing they might jeopardize their jobs with the county. But at least one staffer has postponed her summer vacation, Tait said, because she didn’t want to miss a single day with her Leisure World friends.

One of the library patrons most prized by the staff is Bill Rudolph. Tait recalls the time he looked up and saw Rudolph, 87, cleaning and reorganizing the video cassette section, a chore that requires lots of bending and stretching.

No one asked Rudolph to straighten the movies. Certainly no one could pay him for his efforts. But Rudolph explained that he cared deeply about the state of his library, and wanted to pitch in.

Now a full-time volunteer, he is also an informal library spokesman.

“The closing of this place would be a very tragic thing,” he said one day not long ago, sitting himself on a couch in the periodical section and removing his tweed hat, which sported a jaunty feather in its brim.

Besides restoring order to the video section, Rudolph has found meaning at the library through the study of medicine.

A man of vast energy (“I do 150 pushups every day!”), he has devoted himself to decoding the library’s weightiest medical tomes, driven by a haunting sense that he might have saved his sister’s life several years ago if he had better understood her condition.

Some days, after poring over pathologies, memorizing symptoms and diagnosing various diseases, Rudolph checks out a novel or two for sick friends who are homebound.

He understands what they mean when they tell him they are desperate for something to read.

“I just recently spoke to a patron of this place,” he recounted. “And she’s in a wheelchair. And she says, “What am I going to do when this place closes up? I can’t go out of Leisure World. I’m entirely lost.’ ”