I went back to my hometown last month to celebrate my dad's 75th birthday and stopped by a place filled with good memories. Near the center of downtown is the site of the old public library. Long ago razed, the city expanded the adjacent park to a full quarter block. The 1911 fountain, sculpted by Lorenzo Taft is still there, adorned by a small garden.
As a girl, I'd go with my mom to work on some Saturdays, and hang out in the library. As a staff member's daughter, I had the privilege of exploring the musty stacks, taking naps in the employee's lounge, and poking through the piles of a old newspapers waiting to be microfilmed. I was a roaming explorer, and when I found something that captured my imagination, such as newspapers from the civil war or 1920's comic strips, I'd spend hours just reading at times cross-legged on the library's old linoleum floors. It was here I first found WPA travel guides, their soft pages giving me a view of this country in the 30s, and a solid foundation for the work I'm doing today. You might say I spent my formative years with my head inside a microfilm machine, and loved every minute of it.
At lunchtime I'd walk down to the Woolworth lunch counter and have a tuna salad sandwich (this was before the allergy hit) and an orange pop. This made me feel incredibly independent. I'd dawdle on the way back to the library...all of two blocks....and soak up the sun outside the fountain before heading back to the soothing darkness of the stacks.
It was touching to see the nymphs and wolves and bears on the fountain were still in such great shape. I miss the old library of course, but I'm glad the spot is still giving the city so much grace and beauty.
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