The photo above is of a building that was enormously important to my life for several years…but I haven’t set foot inside it in for over a half a century. Come to think of it, I’m just assuming it’s still there. I haven’t even driven past it in a couple of decades. There could well be a Whataburger at that address by now for all I know.
The address is 11360 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles and having just done an online search, I see they have a website and an active Facebook account so I’ll assume it’s still up and running…or up and loaning, whatever the correct term is. That was our public library when my age was a single digit. My mother, father and I went there a lot because my parents loved books and it rubbed off on me. We were there a lot, returning what we’d checked out and checking out some more.
When you walked in the front door, there was a chiildrens section to the left and the non-childrens section was to the right. At a pretty early age, I was issued a card to check out books from the left section and I did…lots of them. From the moment I started Kindergarten and on through elementary school, I was constantly being tested because my reading and writing skills were markedly above those of other kids my age. When I was six, they said I was reading and writing at the level of a ten-year-old…and let’s just skip the part where the smartasses out there e-mail me to say, “I’ve read your blog and you still do, Evanier!”
The Powers That Were in the L.A. School System started skipping me in grades because of my reading ‘n’ writing, which was not wholly a good thing. It meant, for instance, that I was usually the youngest, least-physically-developed kid in my class. I had trouble making friends. I had trouble because I’d missed certain grades where you learned certain things — like how to play certain games we played on the playground during recess. But I think I’ve written about this before here…and about the problems I had because I wasn’t equally advanced in math or history or other subjects.
This is the first of a couple of articles about that library and how important it was to my life. We were there a lot and I managed to exhaust the selections in the childrens department. There came a day when I’d read every book there I wanted to read. That was not that hard to do because an awful lot of them were targeted at kids well below the age level at which I was reading. I began going over to the “adult” section, finding books I wanted to read and having my parents check them out for me on their cards.
The restriction didn’t make a lot of sense to me. There was nothing stopping me from taking a book off the shelf in that section, sitting down at one of the tables in the reading area and reading it. But I couldn’t check it out on my card and take it home and read it there. I know because I tried it once and the librarian who did the checking-out that day reacted in shock and upset. For a moment there, I felt like she was going to call the police station — it was about a block away — and have me thrown in a cell along with other hardened criminals.
My parents decided they had to do something. I’ll tell you what they did in the next part of this series.
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