Ode to the Bookmobile

Children gathered around the Saint Paul Public Library Bookmobile 1917
(Source: SPPL website http://www.stpaul.lib.mn.us/history/bookmobile.html)

When I was a little girl my grandfather drove the county bookmobile. For reasons unknown to me the bus was kept parked in the alley beside my grandparent’s house. I was entranced when I was allowed to reverently enter this mysterious library on wheels under the stern eye of my grandfather. This extraordinary conveyance seemed to be the best of all worlds, part gypsy caravan and part library. The bus offered the promise of new adventures, on the open road and inside the pages. I fantasized about traveling the globe, like Huck, Tom, and Jim in Tom Sawyer Abroad.


Plus, the bus was just the right scale for a child, like a house of books built to just my size. The big library buildings were fascinating, but slightly scary. This little room felt like a safe and cozy secret library. I even loved the smell and the neat orderliness of the books lined up tightly on the shelves, like soldiers standing at strict attention. 

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   Children using bookmobile 1958
      (Source:  Minnesota Historical Society Photograph)

Perhaps those early memories are why I applied to an ad to be a bookmobile driver fresh out of college and a paid summer internship. I needed something quick to keep myself in beans and rice, while I searched for my first “real job”. However, just entering the old downtown library for my interview proved to be overwhelmingly seductive, with its wobbly old wicker tables and mishmash of centuries and volumes. I experienced such a powerful sense of homecoming that I stayed for almost three decades.

I forgot all about my fantasies of museum studies at Winterthur or a bohemian life in the cafes of Paris. Working at the library was a choice I never regretted. I was charmed with a life filled with books and readers, and with the lovely group of women who ran the library and their families with the same gentle intelligence, kind hearts, and fierce devotion. Thus our lives can be inadvertently shaped by a random ad and a chance encounter.

The bookmobile driver job proved to be a memorable stepping stone. The system served more than seven hundred square miles, encompassing three counties and a city. One of the counties, Westmoreland, stretched almost seventy miles from the furthest point to the library, and required a full day on the road. Early every Saturday morning, rain, snow, or sun, we were on the bus (with a nod to Ken Kesey).

CRRL Bookmobile 1970
(Source: www. librarypoint.org)

In addition to the many built-in bookcases, the bus had large storage cabinets over the driver and passenger seats, also stuffed with books to be delivered. A sudden turn or shift in direction could result in one or both cabinets suddenly opening and multiple book missiles shooting out. In fact, the whole vehicle was a traveling book bomb,

1967 Bookmobile (Source: Providence Public Library)

In those bygone, innocent days, when no one thought of background checks, DMV driving records, or requiring a commercial driver's license; my bold assertion that I could drive this bus was sufficient. I had driven a small shuttle bus one summer so I could claim some experience. The truth was that driving that old bookmobile was a leap of faith. Each week we rolled boldly through the countryside and a series of steep hills and twisting curves as we descended deep down into the Northern Neck of Virginia to the Town of Montross.

I quickly realized that the brakes on the bookmobile were largely an illusion. The bus was so heavily loaded and weighed down with its treasure trove of volumes, that once we had picked up a good speed and were barreling down a hill, there was simply no way to stop the thing. Standing on the brakes resulted in only the slightest hesitation in speed for the first twenty yards. I lived in terror that an old farmer would suddenly pull out in front of us, with a pickup truck load of vegetables or a hay wagon traveling at farm speed, and that all that would remain would be a somber mingling of corn, fodder, and the written word.

Jean remained serene, regardless of the often challenging driving conditions. It occurred to me that this Zen-like quality was probably due to the fact that she had never had a driver’s license, thus giving her the innocent obliviousness of a child in the backseat. This was just one of her many endearing qualities.

To this day I owe Jean a genuine debt of gratitude for her tutelage. Under her slow Mississippi drawl I learned many important lessons about library service. Everyone, regardless of age, education, income, or background, was treated with great respect and attentive interest. The request of the tiniest child and the circuit court judge received equal care, attention and thoughtfulness. That democratic impartiality still seems to me to be one of the most wonderful and miraculous things about public libraries.

Children wading to bookmobile  (Source:  Library of Virginia)

Another lesson I learned quickly under her tolerant eye was to skew the flawed notion of the librarian as the arbitrator of good taste and fine literature. The first week I loaded the shelves with literary classics, and then watched dismayed as one disappointed reader after another scanned the shelves, and then left discouraged without a book for the week. Jean didn’t need to say a word. As soon as we returned to the library I immediately reloaded the bus with the wide variety of books people wanted.

I also had a quick education in the importance of libraries in the everyday lives of many people. Each week, as we pulled up to our first stop near the town square in Montross, we could see a large, impatient crowd of what appeared to be the entire village, all waiting for the bookmobile. It took the full two hour stop for the line of people to file through the bus; returning books and selecting new ones, chatting, and showing off new babies, husbands, and injuries.

"Children with bookmobile books 1969"  (Source: www.librarypoint.org)

Jean oohed and aahed, tsked, and nodded; dispensing books and that most valuable of commodities, interest and personal attention to each patron. In that pre-Internet, pre- VCR, pre-Cable TV, pre-Amazon era, the bookmobile was one of the few shows in town, and everyone came. I smiled and busily slid book card after book card into the little checkout machine with a satisfying clunk, clunk, clunk. Then I carded and shelved every book I could, piling the rest wherever I could precariously stash them.

I thought of those days recently when I heard that the library in Fredericksburg had permanently retired the bookmobile.  The final run was on June 30, 2010.  Those bustling days of hundreds of patrons has been replaced by branch libraries and a changed world.  What I think of as "The Golden Age of Bookmobiles" is drawing to a close in many places around the country. News stories abound of iconic bookmobiles disappearing from roads and towns across America.

"Library automotive truck Washington Country, Maryland"

The halcyon days began as early as 1849 in Britain. In America, there seems to be some debate whether the first horse drawn bookmobile was trotted out in Pennsylvania or South Carolina circa 1905, but there is ample credit to go around. These intrepid librarians, filled with a missionary like zeal to spread knowledge and books through the countryside, were soon setting out to remote areas across the continent.

Bookmobile June 2, 1941 (Source:  Davidson County Public Library - Bookmobile Timeline)

Over the years I have heard heart rending testimonials from famous writers and good souls how their lives were changed forever by a bookmobile visit.  Stories of when a librarian entrusted a small Indian girl or a poor migrant child with a beautiful book to take home, and in that moment threw open a door to a bright new world.  A world where a child suddenly became a person worthy of trust and respect, of possessing a library card, and being the keeper of a beautiful book. 

Over the past few months at the Chesapeake Public Library we have wrestled over the fate of our bookmobile. Its lifeline has hung in the balance, weighed against the unyielding economic realities of shrinking resources and hard choices. The use at many stops have dwindled to a few devoted souls, and the numbers tell a story that could not be denied. So we have gathered the data, sat around the table, and pounded out a new story for this relatively new and wonderful vehicle.

Chesapeake Public Library Bookmobile (Source: www.chesapeake.lib.va.us)

We are going to eliminate all of the sparsely attended neighborhood stops, and replace them with a system of changing lobby collections for seniors, books by mail for shut-ins, and curb side service for handicapped drivers. We are going to reserve the big bus for the big results.  There will be a single monthly Saturday run with two or three "Power Stops" at neighborhoods with a significant number of users. Two days a week the bookmobile will visit daycare institutions in Chesapeake that are interested in partnering with the library.  These dozens of daycare centers offer the potential of  15,000 bookmobile visits by children a year.

Once a month, children in daycare centers will have a chance to climb on that magical bus, select a book, and have a library experience. We believe that all of those visits will result in some wonderful opportunities to impact young lives. As I can personally testify, through these seemingly chance encounters, the course of an entire lifetime can be changed.

Riding the Rails in Old Virginia

Manassas Train Site (Source: Prince William County Website)

I grew up in a railroad town. At my grandparent’s house, I slept on the narrow cot that had been my father’s in the upstairs sleeping porch.  The enormous old maple tree by the alley released hundreds of seedpods that helicoptered slowly past the windows down to the lawn, and at night the limbs threw fantastic shadows over the walls.  The vibration of the trains gently shook the bed and echoed through the old wallboards. The long train whistles provided the soundtrack of my childhood.

My father was born in that Victorian house near the tracks. He was the son of a man who made his living on the train.  The railroad provided an oasis of stability, keeping the big frame house full of children safe through the darkest days of the Great Depression.  Later, during World War II, the job and the house sheltered the extended family, including young cousins who were refugees from the bombing of London.

In their heyday, the railroads employed tens of thousands of American men; laborers, engineers, designers, and operators. The trains efficiently moved people, freight, and livestock across vast geographical spaces and rugged terrains. You could mail a letter in Washington for delivery in Culpeper or Danville the same day. My great grandfather could load chickens early in the morning in Luray, which arrived in Baltimore that afternoon, and were on the table for someone's supper the next night. My grandmother recalled the challenges of housekeeping in the era of coal fired trains, when the entire town would be coated with a fine black blanket of coal soot.

The other side of the tracks through the window

In the nineteenth century train schedules resulted in a new concept of time. At one point in American history there were more than five hundred different time zones across the country. The railroads abolished this provincial approach. Instead of the casual reckoning of the farmer gauging the sun, men set their pocket watches to the newly standardized Eastern, Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones established by the railroad companies. Across the nation, Americans became accustomed to living and working on railroad time.

The old Southern Railway was established in 1894 from dozens of tiny former lines including the old Richmond to Danville tracks, which my Grandfather would later travel on nightly from Manassas, and which had carried Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet when they fled Richmond on the eve of the fall of the Confederacy. Known as the “First Railroad War”, towns with stations like Fredericksburg, Bristow Station, and of course, Bull Run (First and Second Manassas) became key battlefields.

                                                                             

Manassas Junction had been established shortly before the war as a stop on the old Manassas Gap Railroad. The trains that rolled through Manassas throughout the days of my youth were Southern Railway. When I was young in the 1960’s my father would drive me to the train depot and raise the signal flag. Taking a trip on the old Southern Railway cars required that you cross between them as the tracks yawned below the clanking connectors. On my first trip alone I was too unnerved to return to my seat after dinner. I set up all night in the dining car, complete with white linen table cloths and china, watching old men play poker while courteous white coated porters refilled their clinking glasses. At times, the train crawled so slowly down the track that I watched the cows in the fields saunter by at a brisker pace.

All of this recently came to mind because I had the pleasure of an unexpected train trip. When my car broke down in June, the day before the American Library Association Conference in D.C., I bought a ticket for an economical $38.00 and caught the train from Newport News to Fredericksburg. I must confess that I enjoy the modern era of train travel.

Rail travel with Amtrak is far more efficient, although minus the linen, the china and the patina. The chairs are comfortable and roomy, and the windows large. Once past Newport News we roll by the historic Lee’s Hall Station, which was last renovated for Reagan’s Victory journey by rail to Washington, D.C. The next stop is the tidy, picturesque Williamsburg Station.

Past Williamsburg, the trains follows a scenic passage through the countryside near the James. Glimpses of Virginia’s past still slowly scroll by like an old motion picture; scenes of old wooden train depots, swamps with gnarled cypress, eerily still herons, curtains of kudzu, and narrow country lanes flanked by high summer corn.

Kudzu shrouded landscape seen through the window

Eventually, the train enters the old part of Richmond and I see Main Street Station, and the familiar outline of Church Hill where firebrand Patrick Henry delivered his famed “Liberty or Death!” speech.

All of the old brick factories and warehouse of downtown Richmond pass by, their faded original signs now part of the chic retro look of fashionable condos.  Then the newly reopened Main Street Station, that venerable Richmond landmark with its great clock facing the Interstate, the site of thousands of arrivals and departures.    

Main Street Station,  Richmond

My husband remembers his grandmother taking the train from the Peninsula to Richmond to shop on Broad Street at Miller & Rhodes, a fashion mecca for generations of Virginia women. I feel certain that she was wearing gloves and a hat for the trip. Mention the famed Miller & Rhodes Tea Room and any woman over fifty who called eastern Virginia home from the 1940’s to the 1960’s sighs nostalgically. 

I remember going with my mother as a child, taking the elevator up to the top floor, the event of dainty tea sandwiches and chocolate silk pie complete with fine piano music.  Last year, the Virginia State Library actually had a tribute Miller & Rhodes Tea Room Party and Fashion Show, with many attendees wearing original millinery confections and outfits purchased from the store over several decades, and dining on the tea room’s once signature dishes.

Old warehouses renovated into condos

Looking out the train window I see scenes of my past life sliding by with the views.  Past Shockoe Bottom are the silhouettes of old Hollywood Cemetery high above the James River, a veritable Who’s Who of Virginia.  The winding hillside trails of Hollywood Cemetery (a National Historic Register Site) are the final resting place of two United States Presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler.

The famous 1849 cemetery is also the resting place of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis, twenty-five Confederate generals including J.E.B. Stuart and George Pickett, and more than eighteen thousand enlisted Confederate soldiers. They are joined by historian Douglas Southall Freeman, Matthew Fontaine Maury, "Pathfinder of the Seas”, Pulitzer Prize winning Virginia author Ellen Glasgow, poets,  patriots, and supreme court justices; a ninety foot tall granite pyramid, angels, monumental old Magnolias and, of course, ancient holly trees. 

In my childhood it was the scene of family picnics on Sunday afternoons, spent wandering through the Gothic park-like grounds learning history with a deviled egg, sepulchral art with a fried chicken leg, and horticulture with a cupcake.

Old Richmond passing by

Once past Richmond, the train enters the town of Ashland, which is neatly bisected by the tracks straight down the middle of the main street, appropriately named Railroad Avenue.  If you are strolling around the town there are little pedestrian cross bridges at each block over the tracks.  Ashland was established in the 1840’s by the railroad as a mineral springs resort, and each side of the track is lined with shops and charming old homes, including the Henry Clay Inn by the railroad station, and Randolph Macon College.

There is Ashland Coffee and Tea with live evening music, and some fine eating establishments including the Iron Horse for dinner, and Homemades by Suzanne for lunch fare (warning, they close early) featuring a wide range of freshly prepared Southern dishes such as crab cakes, country ham salad, and chocolate chess pie in the Railroad Side Cafe.

Once I was dining with my friend Alison in the café and she relayed a story about a local man.  During WWII he was on a troop train bound for Norfolk and the European front.  As the train rumbled slowly through his hometown of Ashland he leaned out of the window and tossed his boot, stuffed with a letter, into his own front yard.  Presumably, he was reissued a replacement before the Belgium winter.

Old house in Ashland seen through the train window

Leaving Ashland, the train rolls through still rural Caroline County passing right by the Stonewall Jackson Shrine operated by the National Park Service. “Stonewall” actually died at the Shrine, in the former small office of Fairfield Plantation in Guinea Station.  A commander chose this location to bring the wounded general because of the plantation’s proximity to the Richmond railroad. Jackson died from pneumonia ten days after arriving.  His final words were recorded by the attending physician. “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Sunset near Guinea Station

A friend of mine recently pointed out caustically that only in the South would the death site of a rebel general be maintained by the United States National Park System, and be called a “shrine”.  Touché.

Nearing Fredericksburg where I will spend the night with my mother, we pass a battlefield with another stone pyramid monument, built to memorialize some of the twenty thousand men that died in that horrendous slaughter of Union troops known as the First Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862.  Strangely, the evening after the battle, when countless men lay dead and dying on the frozen field below Mary’s Heights, the sky was lit in a rare and spectacular display of  Northern Lights.

Looking Up Caroline Street,  Fredericksburg Train Station                              

Railroads also figured prominently in the African American experience.  Southern tracks were laid primarily by enslaved and freed people working side by side.  When the Union troops camped outside of Fredericksburg in the spring and summer of 1862, the word spread to towns and plantations in the counties south of town. Up to an estimated ten thousand enslaved people seized their destiny, and begin walking to Fredericksburg on the trails and roads from Caroline, Louisa, Spotsylvania, and Orange.

In a dramatic and massive exodus to freedom they crossed the Rappahannock to the Union Camps and a new life.  Writing in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star on February 25, 2006, historian John Hennessey reported that: “The Union army shepherded them northward along the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad (some of them walking, some riding the cars) to Aquia Landing. There, virtually every day all summer, steamboats carried loads of freed people to Washington.  If ever a dot on America's map warranted the label "gateway to freedom," it would be Fredericksburg during the spring and summer of 1862. "

Double-decker VRE train pulls into station                       

Potomac River

A hundred and forty-eight years later I embark on those same tracks in Fredericksburg on the early Virginia Railway Express commuter train after spending the night with my mother. The train is a double-decker, and I position myself upstairs on the right to watch the scenery. The journey between Fredericksburg and Washington follows the Potomac and offers several beautiful vistas of the river glittering in the morning light. I notice that the Town of Quantico has been transformed from a sleepy small town into a bustling sprawling military hub over the past few years.

Brooke Station, Stafford                                             

We stop in Brooke, Lorton, Quantico, Alexandria, and then finally roll into the elegant Union Station, resplendent with a grand gold coffered ceiling and classical sculptures gazing serenely down into the pleasantly chaotic scene. The station is a destination worthy of lingering with cafes, shops, and even an outdoor market, but I have a quick croissant and coffee, and board the subway. I feel thoughtful and exhilarated from the hundred and eighty mile journey spanning centuries, life times, wars, and quite a lot of lovely countryside.

Passerby