Coming of Age, Library Style

I was six years old the first time I fell in love, a chunky, nearsighted child with huge glasses and braids so tightly wound that I looked slightly walleyed.

She was a short, plump chickadee of a woman with gold-rimmed spectacles, spindly legs and the traditional librarian bun of brown and silver hair. She might have been anywhere between 40 and 75, but no matter—she was my heroine, my mentor, my muse.

Her name was Miss Selma Bartmann, and she presided over the Children’s Room of the Marshfield Free Library with the demeanor of a duchess, even though her domain was the dank, poorly-lit basement of the City Hall. It was a small space, with ancient child-sized wooden furniture and an equally ancient collection of children’s literature, but to me it was Xanadu.

Every other Saturday morning my mother would make the twelve-mile drive from the family farm into town to do the grocery shopping and gather up a large bag of library books for our household. There were certain ironclad rules governing library usage back then, and we were unfortunate enough to live just outside the designated county service area but this fact was graciously overlooked in our case, perhaps due to my mother’s powers of persuasion, but more perhaps because of the hefty library fines she paid regularly and without complaint.

One of the delights of my life as a toddler was delving into that bag of books. I was an only child in a houseful of adults, and there were no children to play with nearby. A book was sweeter than candy, more fun than jacks or jump rope, and by the time I was five I had more or less taught myself to read. My appetite for new words, new stories, was voracious, so the Saturday after my sixth birthday, the “coming of age” for library membership, Mom took me by the hand and led me for the first time, wide-eyed and wired with anticipation, through the doors of the Children’s Room and up to the librarian’s desk.

“Miss Bartmann, this is my daughter Kathi,” my mother said formally. “She is six now, and she would like to get a library card.”

The lady behind the desk peered over the rims of her glasses, then stood to get a better look at me, and I was awed to note that even upright she was still at a reassuring child’s-eye level.

“Kathi,” Miss Bartmann said, extending a tiny soft hand. “I understand that you are a very good reader. We are delighted to have you with us! Let’s get you registered and then you can tell me what sort of books you like.”

No one had ever, in all my six years, offered to shake my hand. Did this mean I was a grown up? And this lady, who was not my mother and therefore obligated to care, was actually interested in what I liked to read. If a sudden shaft of heavenly light had beamed down from above to illuminate her radiant presence, I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised.

My mother co-signed my application, then drifted away and up the dark oak staircase that led to the sanctum sanctorum of the adult department. Miss Bartmann handed me the small blue pasteboard card with my name written on the front in her neat, uniform script, then rose, came around the desk and took me—Oh wonder of wonders!—by the hand.

“I’ll show you where everything is, and then we can pick out some books for you to take home.”

I am sure that my memory is at fault in this, but I could swear that there were no other children in the library that day. It seemed that Miss Bartmann and I were alone, strolling from one set of shelves to another, chatting like old friends about the merits of this author and that in blissful solitude. She showed me the picture book section along the wall with the low bench in front, and the beginning reader shelves, sparsely filled with the “Dick, Jane, and Sally” readers of the time. 

“Do you see anything here you might like to look at?” Miss B inquired, pausing before this section.

“Those are kind of babyish books,” I replied, emboldened by the thought that she truly valued my opinion. “I can read more big words than that.”

“Of course you can,” she said tactfully, drawing me with her toward the taller shelves across the way. “What about this book?  It’s a story about a very wonderful nanny who comes to take care of a family of children in England. It has some big words in it, but I’m sure you can puzzle them out.”

I nodded, taking the well-worn gray book from the shelf. It was a thick book, bigger than I’d ever tried to read, but I would have taken home War and Peace if she had suggested it.

“Do you have any real stories?” I asked.  “I like real stories, too, about real people.”

So it was that over the course of that magical summer I made a host of friends; Mary Poppins, Helen Keller, Nancy Drew, Florence Nightengale, Beezus and Ramona. Miss Bartmann always had a pile of two or three tomes tucked away for me in her desk drawer, at least one “real” story and perhaps a shiny new book or a sequel to something I had read and loved. No matter how busy it was, she always had time to discuss a story we both loved or hated and to suggest something more that would hold my interest and, often, test my limits.

As the years passed I devoured the better part of the children’s department’s offerings. When I outgrew Eleanor Estes, Maud Hart Lovelace, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, Miss Bartmann always seemed to have a stack of suspiciously adult books set aside for me; the mysterious tale of Amelia Earhart, the sometimes puzzling yet always captivating verse of Emily Dickinson, Mazo De La Roche’s Jalna series.

Eventually I found the courage to slip upstairs to the forbidden reaches of the adult area on my own, where Mrs. Waters, a steely-eyed woman with hawk-like features and an unbending nature, ruled. (Word was that she would revoke your card forever for some minor infraction, and though I lived in mortal fear of her, my desire outweighed my terror.) Miss Bartmann, bless her, would pretend not to notice as I crept silently past her desk toward the stairs. Once, glancing over my shoulder, I caught her eye and she winked broadly in complicity, steeling my resolve and warming my heart.

So it is that I am, 50 years later, about to finish my 34th year in the Milwaukee Public Library System. The passion for reading that Miss Bartmann fuelled in me is unending—and although she is long away, there are brief moments when offering to share with someone a book I’ve loved, I feel her at my shoulder, peering over her spectacles and nodding her approval.

—Kathi J Gardner

Kathi J. Gardner contributes a monthly column called “Baloney on Wry” for Outpost Exchange magazine. She is finishing her 34th year in the Milwaukee Public Library System. She writes; “I am a born and raised Wisconsinite who transplanted from rural Wood County to the Milwaukee area in 1972. I have been a bibliophile since my first cloth baby book (there were no board books back then), but my deep love of libraries began with the wonderful lady in this essay.”