The Library

What are you looking for…?

After towns become cities and the established structures were churches, city halls, schools, brothels and barrooms…. There came libraries.

When the Rev. Thomas Bargrave died in 1621, he bequeathed his library to the Richmond College but all were destroyed in the Indian Massacre of 1622.

The library is a prestigious building where knowledge is kept.

There was a library established in Richmond proper on October 1812, when the Christian Library was founded. It lasted 20 years.

Even before the day that most could read, the library was a warehouse of thoughts and ideas and learned scholars could compare and expand the theories and observations.

On March 2, 1901, Andrew Carnegie offered $100,000 to establish a public library in Richmond. The City was, according to the terms of the offer, to provide the site for the proposed structure and appropriate $10,000 yearly for its maintenance. The City Board of Albermen agreed on April 19^th by a vote of 14 to 2 to accept this great opportunity. However, the matter was dropped because of the race question.

I worked at our cities public library during college.

After the City of Richmond’s finance committee rejected the first Carnegie offer in 1901, Richmond formed a Richmond Public Library Association in 1905. The Association did not gather sufficient funds to open a library until 1922, when John Stewart Bryan became president of the Association. The next year, in 1923, Bryan became chairman of the Richmond Public Library Board, and in 1924, the Board chose the former home of Lewis Ginter as the site of the first Library.

Not an avid reader or studious, I followed a friend who left the train station (that is another story) and applied for a position at the library.

Don’t remember filling out an application or getting an interview, but there I was, a civil servant of the city.

The first branch opened in 1925 as the Phyllis Wheatley Branch of the YWCA to serve African-Americans. In 1925, Sallie May Dooley died and left $500,000 to the City to construct a public library in memory of her husband, Major James H. Dooley. The Dooley Library (at the same location as the current Main library) opened in 1930 and the contents of the original library were moved in.

Unlike my friends who worked the stacks searching and retrieving volumes of readings for patrons, all smartened up in pressed shirts and ties; I worked in the basement.

Leaving a job as an assistant manager of stocking and cleaning vending machine machines without much pay (but plenty of coin), I’d joined a respectable job as a Liberian page.

 In 1947, RPL Board opened all branches of the library system to blacks.

My part-time vocation requirements were to make signage and illustration to promote the libraries events, information for the patrons, and give directions to the bathrooms. It was advertising 101. The same thing I was ‘learning’ in college and go on to make a career of.

My boss was a sweet preacher’s wife who wore a smock apron and was as cheerful as anyone could be. She even knew my family from North Carolina.

A physical description of the building itself will suffice to prove that is is one of the best-equipped libraries in this country for the amount of space that is occupies. It embraces an area of twelve thousand and ninety six square feet, containing three stories and an attic.

Being a teenager in college with all its trials and tribulations, Mrs. P. was always available with an open ear and a kind word. I think we both learned through our experience together.

Its interior area totals thirty-nine thousand square feet, including stack levels and mezzanines; and over seventy per cent of the floor capacity is for book us and public benefit. The exterior walls are the modern design, constructed of George Washington stone; while the interior walls of the entrance and the main front stair hall are of Italian marble.

While the busy work was going on upstairs, once a week the librarian staff would come down to the basement to discuss purchases of new books. The conversations did reveal what was appropriate for the city public library to place on the shelves for public viewing while trashcans full of improper books (previously ordered by the same librarian staff) taken out to be burned.

Since security was nil, I could wander the stacks (where only library staff could go) and pick out books covered in dust that had never been read.

The structure tops these specifications with a storage capacity of three hundred and fifty thousands volumes.

Every now and then I would cover for one of the upstairs pages to rearrange books by size and color until some patron requested a title, so to the Dewey decimal card cabinet I’d go trying to decipher this antiquated database and retrieve the prize before the patron got bored and left.

Formally dedicated to public use on December 15, 1930.

One day, at a lunch break, I walked a block away to the local newspaper and was hired in a matter of minutes. I properly gave my two-week notice and finished my stint as a public servant.

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444650/this-american-life