My Own Two Feet (17 page)

Saturday story hours began the end of September. I was to tell stories for three weeks of a month, and Berneita would take over the fourth
week. The first week I had an attack of stage fright even though I had rehearsed two stories at home and in the half hour granted me in the staff room just before story time. Unfortunately, Miss Andrews had trained us to rehearse in front of a mirror, which did not help. In the staff room mirror, my hair, my lipstick, my appearance suddenly seemed all wrong.

As I was about to face my audience, Charlie walked into the children's room and presented me with a gardenia to celebrate the event. That gardenia gave me courage, and the story hour was a success in spite of the distractions of adults standing at the back of the room to listen, borrowers going in and out, fussy infants. I learned to concentrate on the faces of the children and to shut out everything that was going on in the room.

With the help of one of the Upshots I began to learn stories quickly. He enjoyed reading aloud. After he read the story I had chosen, I told it back to him while he prompted me. Soon I no longer needed his help. Not only did I tell stories in the library; in summer I told them in parks, where I competed with shouts and splashes from swimming pools.
The Five Chinese Brothers
, by Claire Huchet Bishop, was the most popular of the sixty-two stories I learned while in Yakima,
and I told it many times. In 1939 and 1940 the Dionne quintuplets were in the headlines, which may have been one of the reasons children so often asked for the story about “the five Chinese twins.”

Not all my storytelling was successful. I still cringe at the memory of my first visit to a small school outside Yakima's city limits. Using bus fare from the library's petty cash, I rode with my armload of books to the end of the line and enjoyed a pleasant walk the rest of the way on a road lined with sumac turning red in the autumn sun. My repertoire was limited, but I felt secure in my preparation of a story for the first graders,
The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was in It
, by Carl Sandburg. In the classroom I introduced myself and began the story, which contained such lines as “They chubbed their chubbs and looked around and chubbed their chubbs again.” The words nearly froze in my throat. The class, children of migratory workers, all looking blank, staring at me as if they thought I was speaking a strange language. The expression on the face of the teacher standing at the rear of the room was no help. Somehow I got through that story, but that visit taught me always to find out something about an audience before speaking.

Other visits, to six public schools and two Catholic schools, were more successful. Children always made me feel welcome, possibly because my visit freed them from arithmetic or spelling, and I enjoyed introducing children to books. One small boy laughed so hard at my rendition of
Horton Hatches the Egg
that he fell out of his seat. When I stopped at an interesting point in a book talk, someone always asked, “What happened next?” and the rest of the class wanted to know, too.

There were other library activities that required preparation at home and prevented me from writing. Once a month I took over the library's weekly radio broadcast; classes walked to the library for instruction in the use of the card catalog; during Book Week I spoke to assemblies at the two junior high schools; and before school was out, I visited the elementary schools once more to talk about the summer reading club, an event probably more educational for a new librarian than for the children.

To earn a certificate, each child had to read eight books of suitable reading level and tell me about them. No taking the easy way out with picture books allowed. Everyone who joined was given a card with a picture of a clown holding eight balloons. After telling me about a book, the
reader was given a colored sticker to cover a balloon. When school started in September I visited schools once more to hand out certificates to proud readers of eight books. Listening to Yakima's children tell me about the books they had read gave me valuable insights into the children and their reading.

While the atmosphere of the children's room was always lively, the two hours a day I spent in the adult department were quite different. The Depression was even more in evidence. The reference room was a haven for old men who came to read the newspapers we hung on wooden sticks. On rainy days one man dried his socks on the radiator. Housewives came for escape reading, a struggling writer for advice; so many people sought answers for a puzzle contest that they hoped would win them fortunes that we finally had to refuse to answer contest questions. Some people could not afford to pay two cents a day on overdue books and left empty-handed while we recorded their fines on tiny slips of paper pasted to their registration cards. They could not renew library cards until all fines were paid, a system that worried the whole staff, for it denied books to people who needed them most. When I left Yakima, Miss Remsberg was conferring with the
city attorney to see if the system could be changed.

My tasks in the adult department were varied: registering new borrowers, finding books for readers, telling people they could not bring their dogs into the library, answering reference questions. Berneita explained that if a question asked over the telephone had an embarrassing answer, I could go into Miss Remsberg's office to say, for example, that “whales suckle their young.” I soon learned to respect the Department of Agriculture bulletins, which were easy to use and invaluable in locating the period of gestation in goats or the cure for cabbage blight.

One seeker after knowledge asked me if there wasn't an older librarian who could find the answer to her question. I called Miss Remsberg, who explained with amusement that I was a library school graduate and well informed on the latest in reference work. Another time, when I found an answer, the borrower looked at me with skepticism and took the same question to Miss James, who looked up the answer, the same answer I had found. Even though my youth did not inspire confidence in everyone, I once wrote gloomily to Jane that in another year I would be a quarter of a century old.

There was another aspect of library service, not
taught in library school. This I thought of as Fear of Taxpayer. When reading book reviews, or especially books, during lulls, the staff always kept a pencil and a pad of paper slips at hand. Otherwise a sharp-eyed taxpayer might think we were enjoying ourselves. Discarding battered books also brought on Fear of Taxpayer attacks. In those Depression days a WPA worker mended torn pages with rice paper, replaced ragged spines with buckram, on which she lettered author and title with white ink, and protected them with shellac, and did what she could to hold books together. Libraries at that time did not have plastic to protect books' original jackets. Children's books too far gone for library shelves but still hanging together, more or less, were given to teachers from rural schools too poor to buy books. What to do with the rest? If they were sent to the town dump, they were sure to be seen by a taxpayer, who would complain that the library was throwing away books. If Mr. Royer tried to burn them, the glue in the bindings gummed up the furnace. Once Miss Remsberg solved the problem by asking me to make the smelliest, most tattered books worse. I ripped bindings and poured ink on pages. She then presented the books to the library board, and with
official approval to back us up, we sent the books to the dump.

Because Yakima was so isolated, small events took on excitement out of proportion to their importance. When Sally Rand brought her feather fans to Yakima, the elderly gravedigger horrified Mrs. Johnson by inviting her to go with him to see her dance. Mrs. Johnson went, but not with him. I did not go, but I heard earnest discussions about whether or not Sally Rand was really naked behind her fans. Miss Remsberg's comment was “Well, I suppose she's part of the American scene.”

The day nylons appeared on the market, the library staff went out in their lunch hours to buy the miracle stockings—reputed to dry in twenty minutes if rolled in a towel. The wonder of it all! When
Gone With the Wind
, originally a long movie with an intermission, came to Yakima, the whole town turned out. In the library the stack of reserve cards for the book was several inches thick.

One morning I received a telephone call at the library. It was Bob telling me that Virginia had died of a ruptured appendix. I was stunned. They seemed to have so much, to be so happy, and now Virginia was to be buried in her wedding dress.

Fall turned to winter. On rainy nights when I
worked until nine, a car parked in front of the library often blinked its lights, a signal that one of the men from the boardinghouse had come for me so I wouldn't have to walk home in the rain.

As the weather grew colder, an open-air ice rink opened a few blocks from the boardinghouse. On my Friday afternoon off, I rented a pair of skates and took a lesson, wobbling around the rink on the arm of an instructor. When I told this at dinner, the Upshots laughed. Who needed lessons to skate? Determined to learn, I bought a pair of figure skates and a season ticket to the rink, an act that gave me an attack of Depression guilt because these were for fun, not survival. To my surprise, in my new skates, whose leather was not softened by wear, I skated off without a wobble. I then made myself, on Mrs. Johnson's sewing machine, a red skating skirt with red bloomers. “It's Miss Bunn!” children shouted, surprised at seeing a librarian in a short red skirt. I skated alone on Friday afternoons, and evenings I sometimes skated with the Upshots. When I worked until nine o'clock, we often skated until midnight. A timid skater who could not risk breaking bones in those days before medical insurance, I found exercise both soothing and stimulating as I went round and round to
The
Skater's Waltz
or Bonnie Baker singing “Oh Johnny, Oh!”

The temperature dropped even lower. As I walked to work, the heavy fog that settled over Yakima froze and fell like dainty snow. Then real snow began to fall, and the ice rink had to be swept frequently. Skating in falling snow is exhilarating, but I soon changed from my short skirt to ski pants. Ski pants! I actually had money for ski pants, but of course I bought them on sale.

At Christmastime, Clarence traveled by train and bus to Yakima. In my eagerness to see him I went to the station much too early, fidgeted until the bus pulled in, and there was Clarence, in person, right there in Yakima. I took him to the boardinghouse, where one of the men who had gone home for Christmas had offered him his room. We sat on the living room couch, and as the radio played, Clarence produced a small velvet box, opened it, and slipped a diamond engagement ring on my finger. We kissed and without speaking rose and began to dance to the music of the radio. Before he returned to California we decided to marry the next December in San Francisco.

I let several months go by before mentioning my ring to my parents. As I expected, when Mother received the news, she wrote in anger,
which left me depressed. I worked out my feelings on the ice rink.

The next June, Miss Remsberg and I planned to attend a library conference at Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood. Urged on by the Upshots, I decided to be brave and fly to Portland, and one of them drove me to the airport so he could actually see the inside of an airplane. The plane took off, bumping down air currents down the windy Columbia River Gorge to Portland, where Mother and Dad were excited to meet someone getting off an airplane at the Swan Island airport.

When I told them that Clarence and I planned to marry in December, Mother looked sad, but I was shocked by Dad's anger. Although I knew he was not enthusiastic, he usually could see my side and be understanding and supportive. Now I realized that because Mother wrote all the letters, I had not known the depth of his feelings. They refused to announce our engagement, and the next day I was glad to escape by bus to the conference at Mount Hood.

To me the highlight of the conference was seeing Dell McCormick accept the Young Readers' Choice Award for his book
Tall Timber Tales
, which I had used with success with my little troop of nonreaders. I was awed to hear a real author speak and would have been even more
awed if I had known that someday I would win the same award and win it more than once.

After the cool mountain air in Oregon, the summer heat of Yakima was dehydrating. Life was speeding up. I told Miss Remsberg that I was leaving in December, so she wrote to Miss Worden at the university about a replacement. Miss Worden wrote back, “I can guess what Miss Bunn's next move will be.”

Talk of war was increasingly serious. World War II had begun in Europe. Charlie was haunted by his memories of the First World War, when he had left his premed course at the university to volunteer with his fraternity brothers. He had been assigned to caring for the dead on the battlefields of France, an experience so devastating he was unable to continue his medical studies when the war ended. That summer of 1940 he suffered so badly with allergies he finally had to go to the Veterans Hospital in Walla Walla to recover.

In September I was given a two-week vacation (with pay!). After a few days in Portland, where Mother and Dad were cool toward me, I fled by train to Sacramento, where Clarence had managed to take his vacation at the same time. We spent a few days with his mother, who had retired and lived in a cabin in the foothills of the
Sierra. With her car we drove to the Bay Area, where I was greedy for the sight of the Campanile against brown hills and the silhouette of San Francisco across the bay. Clarence stayed with his sister in Oakland or his brother in San Francisco, and I slept on a too-short couch of Connie and Park's, who were now married. I was sad to miss Jane, who had found a job, not as a teacher, but as a secretary to a high school in Southern California. Clarence and I attended the Exposition on Treasure Island, danced at the Mark Hopkins, and much too soon it was time to return to Yakima and the library.