Valley Libraries Lack Proper Names

Breaking with hallowed tradition, not to mention a mayoral edict, the Los Angeles City Council has dedicated a library to a living person who did not buy the honor with a million-dollar offering.

In naming the new Watts branch after Alma Reaves Woods, a mere volunteer, the council has exposed the deep and troubling connection between politics and library names.

The devilish part of it is that, despite what the mayor or the library administration may want, there are really no rules. Anyone who can muster the votes, the money or the public sympathy has a shot at having a library named after him or her.

The records show that some libraries are born with names and others have names thrust upon them.

Expectably enough, many of the dead heroes whose names are emblazoned over Los Angeles library doors are literary figures: There are Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir and Washington Irving.

But--in light of persistent complaints that the San Fernando Valley has been denied a fair share of city services--one trend in library names jumps out. For certain, the Valley has been shortchanged on illustrious library names.

Most downtown-area branches are named for somebody. In other parts of the city, it’s as many as half. But only two of the Valley’s 20 branches bear any name other than that of the community where they are located.

Secessionist critics are likely to seize on this as one more example of downtown bureaucrats’ bias.

Do they suppose that the Valley has produced no equals to Will and Ariel Durant, the husband and wife historians whose names now grace the branch near the home in Hollywood where they wrote “The Story of Civilization”?

Or Abbot Kinney, the developer who built our local Venice in the image of the great city of the Italian Renaissance?

All right, so the answer to both is probably no.

But the Valley has contenders.

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For starters, there’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan books, a good candidate for the Encino-Tarzana library. And, from a more contemporary genre, we could choose from Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Robert Redford and Paula Abdul--all products of Van Nuys High School.

Considering that the library on Ivar Street in Hollywood is called the Goldwyn Hollywood, why shouldn’t the movie-mogul theme apply to the one on Babcock Avenue in Studio City, which could be the Wasserman Studio City? Or would Bronfman be more appropriate now?

What would it take to make it the Lucy Library of Northridge, for Lucille Ball, who lived with husband Desi Arnaz on Devonshire Street?

These speculations, unfortunately, find no favor with the library administration downtown.

They think a potential patron searching for the nearest library would have a better chance of finding it under the name Chatsworth, say, than the names Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the horse opera royalty who once lived there. As did Charles Manson, though he’s an unlikely inspiration for a temple of sweet reason.

But librarians are suspicious of any kind of name change, it seems, having found the practice too often driven by crass political motives, according to a bureaucrat at the city library department who would rather not be named, for obvious reasons.

Take, for example, the Martin Pollard Library in Sherman Oaks, named by the Board of Library Commissioners in 1971 for the late owner of six Valley car dealerships.

Pollard published no earthshaking novels, but he was a master of the check-writing genre. He donated heavily to the state’s big Democrats and served three Los Angeles mayors in appointed positions. After Pollard’s death in 1970, Mayor Sam Yorty leaned on the library board to name a branch after his longtime confidant and supporter.

Community boosterism appears to be behind another name change that still rankles purists, the library department bureaucrat says, even if its motive was benign.

To celebrate the fact that one of American aviation’s early heroines had lived nearby, the North Hollywood Jaycees and an international women’s group called Zonta commissioned a statue of Amelia Earhart in 1970. They donated it to a North Hollywood library, along with a plaque describing her mysterious disappearance in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, which remains to this day the subject of voluminous writings.

But in order to become the Amelia M. Earhart Library, the branch had to dump its previous name, the Sidney Lanier Library.

That sort of dismal treatment is the norm for Lanier, in life and afterward.

He was a 19th century Georgia writer whose biographers maintain would have been one of the nation’s most illustrious poets had he only lived another 10 years. But along came the Civil War and he lay down his pen to take up the sword for the South. This led him to a Yankee prison, where he fell ill and died, forever mired in the ranks of America’s minor poets.

For a brief time, his spirit lived on in North Hollywood, his name emblazoned on the library door. Why this Confederate man of letters was celebrated in the San Fernando Valley is yet another mystery.

But today, it is Earhart’s. Only seven books remain on its shelves to mark Lanier’s life. And five of them were not even written by him but are instead the work of his biographers and critics.

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That leaves only two volumes of his own words, one the tantalizing “Shakespeare and His Forerunners,” the other a slender work titled “Poem Outlines,” which contains the gem “To the Politicians”:

“You are servants. . . . Your quarrels are the quarrels of scullions who fight for the privilege of cleaning the pot with the most leavings in it. . . . “

If they were familiar with his attitude toward them, it’s no wonder the bigwigs downtown thought him dispensable, especially when he could be replaced by a brave woman wrapped in mystery.

If Lanier’s admirers pine for his lost glory, there are 18 Valley libraries yet unnamed that they could target.

He’s probably got a better chance than Manson.