A Cradle of Civilization

On the understanding that the week’s most astounding revelation--that O.J. Simpson has suffered stress that, by his doctor’s assessment, “maybe no other human being short of Job has endured”--does not merit any more news space, we move to the week’s second most astounding revelation:

Los Angeles County is mortgaged to the hilt. It is a pauper posing as a moneybags. County-USC Medical Center, fire stations, jails, the very courthouse under O.J. Simpson’s Size 12 feet--all hocked. And with a budget gap as wide as Yosemite Valley and as far underwater as Hetch Hetchy, the only options seem to be close or foreclose.

With that cheery knowledge of civic finances, I set out for what some people consider to be caviar in a macaroni and cheese world: the public library.

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At last reckoning, there are 87 county libraries, with futures about as problematic as the California condor’s. One is the Clifton M. Brakensiek branch in Bellflower, and there, I witnessed two acts of faith.

Their names are Florence Nwede and Kari Montez.

Nwede was born in Nigeria; Montez was born in Bellflower. Nwede never knew such a thing as a public library as a child. Montez grew up using this library, hurrying in the door past the alarmingly large and vivid portrait of the good Dr. Brakensiek.

Nwede’s three children are enrolled in the library’s summer reading program; they are zipping through the shelves with the speed of a radial arm saw. Montez runs the summer reading program. Nwede’s faith is in education, and in books. She is studying at Cerritos College; “My children see me doing my homework. If Mommy can do it, they can too. A lot of moms don’t get involved.”

Montez’s faith is in the irreplaceable role of the library. She got her master’s in library science in December, and came back to Brakensiek as children’s librarian in February--an era when signing on to a public library seemed to hold out as much of a future as working as a deckhand on the Titanic.

The countywide summer reading program is called “Amazing Library Kids.” Montez has added to it weekly exhibitions as a kind of marketing enticement. See the magic act, read about magic; see the exotic animals, read about animals--read, read, whatever you do, read. She is competing, she knows, “with the pools and the amusement parks and the movies. We want to make literature a way to escape, to enjoy, to have fun.”

On two long walls of the children’s corner, over hills cut from brown butcher paper, a black construction paper locomotive pulls a train of bright paper cars bearing the names of the 102 children in the program. Javier, Kelsey, Laura, Ping and the others come in and search out their cars, for children’s love of locomotion does not change. In my hometown library, in the glory days of the space program, it was constructionpaper spaceships, fueled by gold stars, one for each summer book we read. In Bellflower it is a locomotive pulling a reading train.

To sketch her engine, Montez consulted a book from the library’s shelves. In it, she came across the author’s speculation about “what would ever happen if we got to the moon.” That happened in 1969. The book was older than the librarian using it.

Los Angeles County can close every hospital or open every one, and people still will die. It can fire every sheriff’s deputy or hire a thousand more, and people still will be shot. Generations grow, generations perish. A library is the human distinction, the external transmission of knowledge, what we have learned and where we have failed.

Pick your quote. Elbert Hubbard: “This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.” Mark Twain: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”

From the torching of the library at Alexandria in antiquity, to Hitler’s bonfires, burning a book touches us with primal horror. Of all the dreadful events I’ve covered, it was the fire at the Central Library that had me crying. Yet what was lost there in a few hours would not match the toll of slower, fiscal death: No new books for years. Library doors locked more often than they are open.

The first time people come in, they usually ask how much the library card costs. Nothing, Montez can still tell them. And then, when she explains that can use it in Lakewood or in Norwalk--”they think you’ve just given them Christmas.”

*

By the rules of the reading game, every 20 minutes that Tarye Nwede spends reading earns him a footstep on the game board, and a prize. Tarye has nine steps. So he rummages for his prize, his hand deep in a Surf detergent box that Montez wrapped in silver foil. The new children’s homework center behind him, with its computer and its staff of two, was donated by the local Kaiser Permanente hospital. Others donated the trinkets in the box: pencils, sports trading cards, neon-bright shoelaces with “County of Los Angeles Public Library” printed on them. His mother tells her 8-year-old son not to take too long, there are others waiting.

I mention the rocket ships and the stars. Montez smiles and hands me a pair of shoelaces. I’ll thread them into my running shoes. They will take me a good long way, but not as far as a book.