The
old Salt Lake public library on State Street, a classic Carnegie-style building,
inspired me. As a young boy I often paid
a nickel to ride the bus downtown, all by myself, as I recall. (Little children
must not travel alone nowadays, especially not to the inner city.) The youth section was in the expansive
basement, which had its own outside entrance on the south side. Greek mythology was one of my favorite
subjects for reading. I was particularly
enthralled by the Iliad and the Odyssey; (what I read, sometimes lying
on our Second-Ave front lawn in the summer, must have been simplified prose for
young people.)
"The
Odyssey is one of two major ancient
Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer.
The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second oldest
extant work of Western literature, the Iliad being the oldest. It is believed
to have been composed near the end of the 8th century BC ..." –
en.wikipedia.org
SLC Library History
The
Ladies Literary Society persuaded the mining millionaire John Q. Packard to
donate land and money for the library, which opened in 1905. This was the main branch until a new library
was constructed in 1964 on 500 South [which had the protected archival section
in the basement I recall visiting.] In
1965 the old library was transformed (including the addition of a large dome)
into the Hansen Planetarium, Space Science Library and Museum. When the planetarium moved to the new Gateway
District in 2003 (Clark Planetarium), the building was restored and renovated
(cost $24 million) into the O.C. Tanner Company Headquarters, which opened in
2009. –
en.wikipedia.org
Another
bright memory is of Grandmother Cannon's basement library; (of course it was
Grandfather's as well, but she was obviously the librarian, as she encouraged
us kids to borrow the books – check them out for a
time, like the public library.) To me it
was manna from heaven.
Great
Grandfather Rich in east Ogden had a huge basement playroom. In later decades it would be called a recreation
room, or "rec" room; (back then, the only recreation in that room was
the library with nothing in it except walls covered with books, and maybe two
chairs on the smooth tile floor.) The
other attraction in his basement was a "tunnel" consisting of two
adjoining closets with the shared wall removed, so we could run from one
bedroom to the other, via the closets, then around through the outer doors for
a circular chase. Among the hundreds of
homes we have visited, I have never seen another basement like the one in that wonderful red-brick home of "Poppy Rich".
Here
in our frontier home, we lack bookshelves in the basement “library”, where I
recently unpacked some boxes of books, sorting them into stacks by
category. A small stack is bound for Deseret
Industries, one of the few remaining places where crowds of people are eagerly
buying non-digital books; (B&N/Layton and Salvation Army Thrift in Ogden
are also favorites of mine.) Now, what
to do with the rest? Let our children
truck them to DI when we die? (A hint to
our posterity:) Kay and I treasure the old books we inherited from her
parents and mine; maybe our grandchildren would too, in their own basement
library someday.
Photo
courtesy of Wikipedia
