I am a looooong-time user of the public library. My mom used to take us to the bookmobile in the parking lot of the Thrifty Drug Store near our house almost every week when I was young.
[Speaking of Thrifty Drug Store - or,
Thrifty's, as it was commonly called - who remembers their awesome, cheap ice cream? They used a scooping device that pulled out the ice cream in a cylinder shape rather than in a ball, so when you got a double it was a big, tall cylinder on a flaky cake cone. Thrifty's ice cream is soooooooo a favorite thing!]
Occasionally Wombat would make the trek with us to one of the county's regional branch libraries, and those became regular destinations for me as a high schooler.
As an undergraduate I was a regular patron (both for checking out books and
sleeping studying in the carrels at the McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz and Central (now known as the Theodore Geisel - yes, as in Dr. Seuss! - Library) at UC San Diego. When I REALLY needed to get something done at UCSC I'd go to the "SciLi" (Science Library) because the books there were too hard for me to understand, so there weren't any distractions!
I worked for several quarters at the Science and Engineering Library at UCSD, and again, was able to complete my tasks quickly, since the books were beyond my brain power! Many of my friends from those days worked student jobs in campus libraries. Two of them have gone on to get master's degrees in Library Science and work in university and corporate libraries. A friend from high school now has a doctorate and works at the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress (and serves as a researcher for historian Doris Kearns Goodwin). NERD ALERT!!!
As a graduate student I spent many hours organizing research material and writing papers in the libraries at UC Berkeley (Oh, Doe, how I miss thee!) and Holy Names College... I can almost smell those places again just thinking about it!
It was amazing to experience the beauty of the new San Francisco Public Library, and I suffered through the year(s) of the Berkeley Public Library's main building move, renovation, and move-back. The Oakland Public Library gave me access to a series of ancient children's novels I hadn't read in 20 years. I taught an immigrant man to read over the course of many weeks in the South Branch of the Berkeley Library, and took both The Little Mermaid and her late sister Pocahontas on many happy visits to the Berkeley North Branch.
Even in the age of eReaders (and yes, I use eReader apps extensively on my iPad and iPhone both), I'm still a near-weekly visitor to our county's public libraries. Fiction books to read for pleasure, story books to share with my class, audiobooks for the car, cookbooks, reference books - every week there's something new for me to find at the library.
My current public library
Public libraries are a great, and
favorite, thing!
~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)
