Here’s a link to Part 1 for those of you who need a link to Part 1.
So…I’d outgrown or read all the books that interested me in the kids’ section of the West L.A. Public Library and I wasn’t allowed to check out books from the adult section. My parents checked some out for me but the library had a limit on how many books you could have out at one time and I was cutting into on my folks’ allotments. My mother sought out the Head Librarian and asked, “Is there any way to get my son a card for the adult section?” I think I was nine or ten at the time.
The Head Librarian had heard it had been done but it hadn’t been done at any library where she worked. “I don’t know how to arrange that,” she said. Since I was there participating in this discussion and something of a youthful smartass, I said, “Maybe there’s a book here somewhere that will tell you how to do it!”
She laughed and I think that convinced her I deserved what we were asking for. She said, “I think I can arrange it if you get a letter from the principal at Mark’s school.”
So we got a letter from the principal at my place of learning, Westwood Elementary School. The principal was a nice lady whose name kept changing because she was getting married, then unmarried, then married again, then unmarried again and so on. I think her name at this point was Mrs. Kermoyan and she dashed off the requested letter. We took it to the Head Librarian who stared at it for a long minute or two. Then she said, “I know the process starts with a letter like this but I’m not sure what I do next.”
Still the youthful smartass, I said, “Maybe you could call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do.” The Head Librarian considered my idea for a second and then said, “I think I’ll call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do.”
She did and that Head Librarian didn’t know what to do so she said, “I think I’ll call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do.”
And that Head Librarian called some other Head Librarian and that Head Librarian called some other Head Librarian and I don’t know how many Head Librarians this went through until one of them said, “Just issue the kid an adult card!” So they issued the kid (i.e., me) an adult card and the Head Librarian we started with wrote on the back of it, “O.K. to check out adult books” and signed her name.
By the way; Do I have to point out that the term “adult books” back then meant something different than it does today? It was then pretty much anything above the reading comprehension of Dr. Seuss or Freddie the Pig.
So all was fine except that every time I tried to check out books from that section, if the person at the check-out post didn’t know about me and my card before, they said, “I’m sorry but you’re too young to take these out.” I then had to tell this person to turn the card over and sometimes, they’d go check with someone and be told that yes, it was legit.
But back to the first day I had that magical card…and it really did feel like magic. I walked proudly over to the non-kids’ section. I’d been there before. No one had ever stopped me from browsing there. It was just the taking-home-a-book part that had been forbidden. I felt very powerful as I went directly to the Performing Arts section, which is where I’d done most of my browsing on that side of the library.
I noticed a book there I hadn’t noticed before. It was a very old-looking one on the history of vaudeville and I opened it up, flipped to a random page and there, before my nine or ten-year-old eyes was a photo of a naked lady. An actual, black-and-white photo of a naked lady.
I’m sure these days, kids in that age range have very little problem seeing naked ladies and maybe even naked men. They now have this thing you may have heard of called The Internet and there are also things like HBO and Netflix. The last time I went to a large newsstand, it was rife with photos of naked people. You couldn’t not see them. But in 1961, which is roughly the year we’re talking about here, that was not so common.
I stared at this particular naked lady — she was in that book because she was something called a “stripper” — and I stared at my newly-acquired magic library card and wondered: Did this card unlock some special access to books that were invisible to anyone without such a card? Were there now other books on the shelves with photos of naked ladies in them?
A quick check of other books in that section revealed the answer to that second question was no. But I could not only still see that naked lady in that book, I could even take her and it home with me. Which I did. It turned out the book had a few other photos of other naked ladies.
In the months that followed, I occasionally found another naked lady in a book there. I also found — and this was almost as good but not quite — a couple of books that told how certain magic tricks were done.
I loved watching magic on TV and I always understood that I was seeing tricks. The magician — it was often Mark Wilson, who I got to meet many years later when I joined the Magic Castle — did not actually saw a person in half or make them disappear. I always knew they were tricks and I was dying to know how they were done and if there were any that I could do.
Occasionally on some show, I’d hear a magician talk about “The Code,” about how all the magicians pledged on their honor to never, ever reveal to anyone outside the profession how tricks were done. What really puzzled me though was how it was decided that someone was enough of a magician to have access to those secrets. And while I was at it, I wondered how anyone became a magician in the first place if they were forbidden to know those secrets.
I understood: Magicians were forbidden to disclose to non-magicians how tricks were done…
…but apparently, there was no rule against them writing books that gave away many of the secrets to anyone who had an adult library card such as mine. Over the first few weeks with my new card, I checked all of them out and even mastered a few card tricks. I also checked out a few more naked ladies.
I spent a lot of time in that library for years…up until the point when I could afford to buy books instead of borrow. I began building my own library at home and it differed from that public one in two basic ways. All the books in my library were of interest to me and I didn’t loan them out. Still, that library over on Santa Monica Boulevard meant a lot to me and who I became. I may remember other things about it in the future and post them here but for now, that’s the end of this story.
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