The library trips which toughened me up for real life -- Garbo

This post is the next in an ongoing series about my trips as a teenager to the Indianapolis Public Library in the early 1970s. Each time I went, I had the same goal: to find books shelved in the Dewey Decimal 800s. I was looking for magic volumes which would teach me how to:  

a.) be a writer, and 

b.) be a funny writer. 

Happily, over time I discovered lots of authors and essayists I'd never have known about if it hadn't been for these library adventures. 


And they were true adventures; one might say quests, even. Finding anything to read in industrial Indianapolis (besides the Bible and Reader's Digest) had been a long-time challenge. Our house didn't have many books in it. Nobody read books. 

My father was an engineering guy, not a words person. My mother had only intermittent schooling as a farm girl and she was also dyslexic. My middle sister was also dyslexic and hated school, mostly because reading was a misery for her. My youngest sister was artistic and musical, and she wrote poetry now and then but that was it. In our family I was the only person who craved reading and sought out books. It took some searching to find anything mind-expanding to read, believe me. 

We had a school library, thank the stars, but Indiana was a strict place and many self-appointed guardians and attentive censors "protected" our young minds from "dangerous" books. For anything not rated G for General Audiences, I had to go to the "real" library.

In the neighborhood where I lived longest, there was actually no public library near us. There was one in Irvington, a better area of town, which was considerably north and west of our run-down neighborhood. Nagged by me my mother, sighing around the a Winston in the corner of her mouth, would pile us kids into our rusty Chevy on Saturday afternoons to browse the children's area of The Hilton U. Brown branch library and then check out a "six-pack" of the good stuff: words. 

My sisters also got books during these little excursions, but I'm not sure how enthusiastically they read their own rare treasures. On the other hand, the minute we got home, I myself would disappear into my bedroom, collapse onto the rumpled chenille bedspread pulled over my half-made bed, and read until I was almost ill from the motion of my eyes moving back and forth over the pages. By the end of the weekend, i would have devoured four or five of the six books we were allowed per library card. 

But as we all know, time passes and brings change. In the summers of 1973 and 1974, our family was dealing with a long, difficult medical crisis; my youngest sister was terribly ill. This dire situation and various related difficulties led to a book famine. I didn't have access to the school library June through August, of course. And my mother wasn't able to do the library trips to the Hilton U. Brown library branch in Irvington.

By this time, I was old enough to drive, but  my eyesight issues prevented it. The only way I could have gotten myself to the branch library would have been to walk first to the end of our road, then up Emerson from Southeastern to East Washington. This was not only dreary but somewhat dangerous as I had to walk along the too-narrow burm; there were no sidewalks.

 Walkways were considered to be costly and unnecessary. No one walked in Indy, which was a auto-factory town. Anyone on foot was mocked loudly by goons blasting by, from inside chugging Plymouths and Fords. Sometimes  things thrown at pedestrians for being weirdos.This was considered normal behavior in Indianapolis. 

Being a young woman, of course, just added fuel to the fire of harassment. I was 16 in 1973. I'd made the long walk up to Washington Street a couple of times, out of necessity, when I couldn't get a ride home from my job at a burger joint.  But the library was farther away than the McDonald's where I scooped up french fries into paper envelopes. Wven when I got all the way to Washington (aka Route 40), I'd still have had to walk several more blocks or take a city bus further down the street to the library. Then of course once I had the books, I'd have to reverse-trudge home again, concluding after another creepy half- saunter down Emerson Avenue with a dolewalk walk back along East Minnesota Street to my house.

So after struggling to get myself to the "nearby" branch library, I quickly vowed to figure out how to get to the Central Library downtown by bus. This worked much better. It was a really long trip each way but I could do it because there was a woebegone but convenient mess of a bus stop at the edge of the parking lot of a gas station next to a Burger Chef.

After it collected me, the downtown bus crept slowly along a winding collection of narrow roadways, first through a housing project, then past some weedy vacant lots, and after that the really crummy neighborhood where I used to live. Then the bus picked up speed after it turned onto Indiana Avenue. 

I took these bus trips in the turbulent 70s, when lots of  angry people had randomly taken to the street. The phone booths I saw out the smudgy bus windows were all ruined; all  the receivers had been ripped away from the pay phones, and the accordion-fold privacy doors had obviously lost the ability to either opened or close. Every metal mesh-sided trash cans was blackened and misshapen from all the fires set in it. 

The violence sometimes traveled from the street to the passing buses. Occasionally a rock would go through the glass window. You just ignored it and brushed glass shards off your clothes to the floor. Even on rock-free days, the bus wasn't always safe. Sometimes young tough girls, working in pairs, would try to rob me of my pathetic billfold and its pathetic contents. 

The trip downtown was a rough ride for many. A poor old alcoholic guy once died on the Indiana Avenue bus one afternoon, and we commuters all sat in the parked bus for an hour while the former passenger was taken away (they used the rear emergency door. Our bus driver passed out small yellow witness cards on which we were instructed to use provided golf pencils to record our contact information. Besides feeling sorry for the poor old guy who died in the backseat of an Indy bus, I remember feeling more annoyed at the delay than flustered by the experiece; it was that kind of bus route, and I'd begun to toughen up a bit. Not as tough as the cheap wallet bandits, but I was getting there.

I realize I make it sound as though every trip downtown and back was filled with crime. Mostly there was just vandalism and surliness and threats not actually followed up with robbery. There was one mildly-scary time when I gave up a decoy Woolworth's leatherette wallet (cost $1) which two dollar bills, a bus transfer slip, and an expired school library card in it; my real billfold was stashed in my sock. And there were a couple times when I definitely had to duck flying objects coming through a bus window. Mostly I did make it, relatively unharmed if a bit shaken, to the big library downtown and then back again. 

On the way home, I remember looking out the dingy window at the dingy old city, satisfied with my haul:  an armload of old books written by writers I didn't know, filled with topical humor about history and culture I had no clue about. This didn't bother me, as I knew I had to start somewhere. And I think I sensed, even at sixteen and seventeen, that this weekly library quest was a very good learning experience about real life. 

Next week: Life With Father, Life With Mother, and The Adventurous Daughter

Garbo