Lessons from My High School Library Experience

I’ve got a confession to make.

I’ve lived a life of high adventure. I was a police officer. I was a soldier. I’ve been in gunfights. I’ve been in wars. All of that tends to put a person into anything except a normal life. If you looked up “tough guy” in the dictionary, my picture might be alongside it..

Now, my confession.

Deep down, I’m a four-star, card carrying, Grade-A certified and dyed in the wool nerd. And since I wear glasses, you may as well add “Four-eyed” to the description. Again, look in the dictionary, and you might find my picture alongside the definition for a “nerd.”

That means I love libraries. Put me in a room full of books and I just relax. I’ll wander among the stacks, find something that interests me, and I’m in heaven. If the place has bean-bag chairs, I might never leave.

So, it was when I hit the library at Centauri High School. Books. Books. And more books. Fiction. Science. History. all in one large room. By the time I’d graduated four years later, I’d read almost every book up there. Some, I’d read several times.

But the first person up there I met was the librarian.

Her name was Mrs. Sanders and she reminded me of my Granny. She was a wizened old woman with gray hair she wore in a bun. She dressed in a manner that wouldn’t have been at all out of place with her 19th century ancestors. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall her first name. I want to say it was Dorthy, but I might be wrong. The thing that astonished me was Mrs. Sander was old. So old, she joked she was a librarian at the Library in Alexandria.

I was always asking her

about books and magazines. Then one day she introduced me to a couple of tools I still use to this day.

One was the Dewey Decimal System. As she explained it to me, this the address for a book on the shelf. Then she introduced me to the Card Catalog, the directory for the Dewey System. The system made finding books by subject, author, or title so simple.

She also noted my interest in reading and writing. And she turned me on to some of the writers of old. The library had a large cache of books, very old books. Since she was directed to clear them and replace them with newer copies, I became the recipient of them. Old books like seven H.G. Wells novels bound together. I devoured The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and First Men in the Moon. Homer’s Odyssey also ended up on my shelf and Plato’s Republic. Then there were adventures and classics. The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Tom Sawyer. There were countless others.

I read those books till they fell apart.

To this day, I rescue old books. An example is I’ve a Bible on my shelf printed towards the end of the eighteen hundreds. It’s beautiful and I can only hope to leave it to one of the kids with a love of books.

One day Mrs. Sanders was on a small ladder and fell. I saw her being taken out by two of the coaches for the trip to the hospital. A busted hip ended her career at the school.

I was in the 9th grade when that happened.

We never saw her again. Her home in town sold and I’d heard she’d left to live with her son in Salt Lake.

Dr. Lynn Weldon taught me that education shouldn’t teach you the answers. It should give you to tools to ask questions and find the answers.

If so, then Mrs. Sanders gave me the tools I needed long before.

All I needed was the master builder to tell me what to do with them.

I never got to thank her for that.