Mrs. Taylor's Spectacles

The old red brick William and Margaretta Library Association, on Second Street,  Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, predating the white brick and marble Taylor Memorial Public Library of my youth.

The normative institution of my formative years had a name that was pure torture for a small child who had trouble with his R's.

Taylor. Memorial. Public. Library.

It was bad enough that my name was Brian Gregory, but this place's name was nearly impossible to say. I didn't really know what any of those words meant, and had to practice a long time to say them in the right order.

The great thing about reading books was that I always said everything perfectly in my head. In real life L's and R's threw me for a loop, and made me a little ashamed.

But I loved that low marble counter on the children's end of the circulation desk, even though I worried because I was always bumping against whatever the generous maximum limit for the number of books you could check out was.

The best sound in the world happened after you handed your peach colored paper library card, with the metal plate, over to the library lady. She placed it in the machine, and then dropped the card from each book you had chosen from the stacks in. It made the most satisfying "chunk chunk" sound that you could ever imagine.

Years later, when they replaced it with a gun that slapped a price tag-like due date sticker on the book, I thought, wow, that seems disrespectful to the book somehow.

The library was close enough to walk to, and once I got old enough to cross Broad Boulevard on my own, I could ride my bike there of a summer day. In the era when air conditioning was still a bit of a luxury, I would then bask in a nearly perfect summer day. It was the next best thing to the forbidden swimming hole at the shale creek we called Trickling Springs, that dumped into the Cuyahoga beneath a hemlock grove, just past Mary Campbell's Cave.

In the summer, there were reading contests, involving a bingo card that made you read from every category in the stacks, and game pieces, which were toothpicks jabbed in a piece of Play Dough.  You got to move a space on the game board for every book that you read. To this day, my brother and I still argue over who read more books. At some point we may have to call in Betsy Booth to officiate.

I loved everything about that library:

The stained glass window, Flora and Fauna of Ohio, which was real leaves and flowers, pressed between glass.

The sound the drawer on the card catalog (a heavy maple wood cabinet, presided over by a paper mache Pinochio) made, when you pulled it out, and thumbed through the cardstock files, looking for whatever new topic had piqued your interest.

The way they let me check out books from the adult section before I was officially old enough, after I had read through everything in the children's section.

The way checking out the LP of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders suddenly made me feel like a really big kid, and like I understood those impossibly tall teenagers who towered over us with their 70's afros. Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy.

The bronze statue of the fawn, at the bottom of the Story Time circle, where you could curl up with a new book when you realized you weren't quite ready to be a teenager.

I loved how my picture, Leopard in the Sun, pastel crayons on purple construction paper, made it into the All City Art Show, in the basement gallery. It felt like a big accomplishment for a kid from DeWitt, in a show normally dominated by the kids from Silver Lake and Richardson.

There was a metal sculpture by Mr. Simon, the art teacher from the high school. Read Indian flint arrowheads, pressed in glass, right at the Third Street entrance. A glass case full of ceramic figurines of Beatrix Potter characters. A Local History Room full of old maps and yearbooks. The price of admission: your peach-colored library card, and a signature on a page the reference librarian kept, stating you wuoldn't steal anything.

There was no end to the magic of this place, all the more when I realized, I could make a calligraphy masthead across the top of a piece of paper, typewrite my news stories below, Xerox it on the library machine for a nickel, and then sell it to my neighbors for a dime.

(Okay, when you factor in the labor costs, the Seventh Street Bugle-Messenger was never a cash cow, especially when you consider the time I spent, inspired by the Cleveland Press v. Plain Dealer rivalry, of coloring in my pictures with Crayola markers. The Press made a big push for being Cleveland's first color paper, and folded shortly thereafter. The Bugle-Messenger didn't last much longer.)

Somewhere near the front door, was a picture of the ivy covered old red brick original Taylor Library, and nearby, a glass case that displayed Mrs. Margaretta Taylor's spectacles.

I always liked that somehow, because it connected us to the person who founded this library, and reminded us that it didn't have to be here. This place existed because a very small woman, whose tiny wire frame glasses were in this case, wanted it to be here, and worked very hard to make it so.

Taylor Memorial Public Library. A difficult name for a small child who had difficulty with L's and R's to learn to say, but well worth the effort.