My Own Two Feet (21 page)

Then, after a bad case of flu, when I was about to give up, I received a call from Xenophon P. Smith telling me the Hotel Oakland was being converted into an area station hospital. He suggested I look the place over, and if I wanted the position of post librarian, it was mine. A job only a twenty-minute streetcar ride from home with no transfers—of course I wanted it, but when I went to the hospital, I found myself involved in the strangest interview that any librarian I have ever known has had. I was shown into the office of the commanding officer, who was leaning back in his chair. He misunderstood the situation and thought he was interviewing me. A huge man, tall and heavyset, he sat up, reached out, pulled me toward him so I was standing between his knees, gave me two pats on my bottom, and said, “So you're a librarian. You can have the job anytime you want it.”

I stepped back and stared at him. All the men I had met at Camp Knight had been friendly,
courteous, and proper. No one had ever touched me. I thought fast. By this time I had seen enough of the army to know that officers did not stay long in one post. I would take a chance.

The C.O., assuming the matter was settled because he said so, released my hand, sprang to his feet, and said, “Follow me. I'll show you where the library is going to be,” and left the room with long strides.

“Run!” cried the secretary in the outer office. “Run, or you'll lose him.”

I ran. This giant of a man led me down the hall and into the ballroom where I had danced when I was a student at Cal. Thus began a relationship of post librarian vs. commanding officer. He waved his hands and explained how the ballroom was to be divided, with Red Cross recreation offices at one end, a stage in the center, and the library and Special Service office behind the stage. “And the Dutch door to the library will go here,” he said, pointing.

A divided door in which the top and bottom halves opened separately? “Why a Dutch door?” I asked.

“So the men can come to the door and ask for their books,” he said. “We can't have them going into the library and getting the books out of order.”

I was speechless. Then I thought of the rallying cry of the Office of Librarianship of the 9th Service Command: “Make adversity work for you.” A rich opportunity of adversity lay ahead, if I could make it work.

Traveling to work at the Oakland Area Station Hospital was much easier and much more interesting than my journey to Camp Knight. I walked two blocks to the number 14 streetcar, run by a very old motorman named Willy, who had been called out of retirement to serve during the war. Willy, glad to be back at work, took wicked pleasure in speed, and piloted his car over the uneven roadbed as if he were in a race. We bucketed around Lake Merritt, past the Hanrahan, Wadsworth, Pine, and Borba Funeral Home and a place that manufactured “The Laminated Shim That Pe-e-els for Adjustment,” whatever that was, to stop directly in front of the hospital.

I was given a desk in medical supply, down the
hall from the morgue, where I could make out book orders while the ballroom was being converted. The administration correctly assumed that a librarian was entitled to eat in the officers' mess, a real treat after so many Spam sandwiches. The food was good, and we were often served steak. In wartime! I savored every bite of those meals even though surgeons came into the mess in their blood-smeared “scrubs.” Enlisted men, suspicious of officers, often asked what I had to eat “in there” and were reassured to learn that officers and enlisted men were served the same food with one exception. Officers had salad.

I quickly revived from life at Camp Knight. My first obstacle was the Red Cross, which objected to my starting a library when its workers already circulated books from a small collection of donations. When I pointed out that the army provided both librarians and ample funds for books, the woman in charge of recreation told me I could have the medical library, but the Red Cross would continue to supply reading material to patients. I quoted AR 210-70 to the library officer, who consulted the C.O., who pronounced, “There will be one library in this hospital, and Mrs. Cleary will run it.”

When partitions were in place, I moved from medical supply to the most poorly designed li
brary I have ever seen. It was T-shaped, with the stage in the recreation room in one angle, the medical library locked in one arm of the T, and the circulation desk and the Dutch door in the other arm. Over the partition, in the long part of the T, was the Special Service office. The main part of the library made a detour around a thick pillar. Light came from two windows and a crystal chandelier suspended from a very high ceiling.

With the help of a sergeant who had been wounded on Attu and was on limited service, we opened the library with books piled on the floor. We solved the Dutch door problem by leaving both halves open, an act of disobedience the C.O. apparently never noticed, probably because he was so busy changing specifications for library shelves, which I had sent him and which he said would waste lumber in wartime. When his six-foot-long shelves arrived, they sagged under the weight of books. The C.O. humphed and snorted and ordered them rebuilt. But did he follow specifications? Of course not. He was the C.O., wasn't he? This time he had the shelves made the right length but so high we could not reach the top shelves. Most of them remained empty, wasting lumber all through the war.

Once the books were shelved, the sergeant was
assigned to other duties, and a civilian assistant was hired, a pretty girl named Judy with curly red hair who often said, “This is the best job I have ever had. I just
love
working in the library.” Even though she was worried about a brother serving in the navy in the Pacific, she was always willing and cheerful. The Red Cross, now friendly and cooperative, gave its book carts to the library and assigned Gray Ladies to help in the wards. Most of these volunteers had sons or husbands in the service and were enthusiastic workers. Without their loyal help, the library could not have efficiently covered the wards in a six-story building designed to be a hotel.

The library was not the only part of the recreational facility badly designed. The stage had only one dressing room, the size of a closet, which was inadequate for USO shows. Since the library was closed evenings because ambulatory patients had little to do during the daytime but select books, we allowed the library to be used as a dressing room. I did not mind picking up bits of hula skirt when I came to work, but I did mind an unanticipated problem with the Dutch door. The lock was in the top half, and the Red Cross worker in charge of the evening's entertainment invariably went home with the key instead of leaving it with the sergeant at the entrance to
the hospital. The bottom half could be opened without a key, and so, until the Red Cross worker with the key could be located, everyone had to bend low to enter the library. When the entire door was open, the library was so noisy that at night I went to bed with the click of billiard balls, the
gnip-gnop
of Ping-Pong balls, and “Cow-cow Boogie” pounded out on the piano still running through my head.

As the days grew shorter, the library grew darker. One high chandelier designed to flatter ballroom dancers was inadequate. I brought my college desk lamp from home for use on the circulation desk, but the patients could barely see the shelves. I complained to the library officer, who passed my complaint on to the C.O., who came to see for himself, humphed, and left. Before long, fluorescent lights, twice as many as needed, were installed and produced light so bright one man said, “When I come in here I feel like I am about to be beaten with a rubber hose.”

Then one day inspectors from the Fire Department arrived. Ignoring me, they stood in the narrow space in front of the circulation desk, where one man pointed to the shelves opposite and said with authority, “A door can be cut through these shelves
here
, and steps built down
here
.”

Steps in front of the circulation desk for pa
tients to trip over? And what about book carts and men on crutches? They couldn't get past steps. I interrupted. “Why is the door needed?” I asked.

“Fire Department regulations require two exits from a stage,” the inspector said. “There is none on this side.”

This suddenly struck me as funny. “But doesn't the front of the stage count as an exit?” I asked. “In case of fire, couldn't performers simply jump off the stage?” The men looked thoughtful, departed, and that was the end of that project.

One day an enlisted man came in and picked up the ancient Woodstock typewriter, which probably had been mothballed since World War I, and started out the door with it. When I protested, he said, “Sorry. There aren't enough typewriters to go around. I have orders to take this one.”

Finally there came a time when I had to start a letter through channels to the commanding officer of the 9th Service Command on some minor matter. Because librarians were not allowed to write official letters in their own names, letters always began, “On behalf of the Commanding Officer…” and were signed by the post librarian and the library officer before being passed on to the C.O. Here was my chance. I wrote the letter
in my neatest longhand, signed it, and turned it over to the library officer. “Why isn't this typed?” he demanded.

“Because the army took away my typewriter,” I said.

He signed the letter and, with a hint of a smile, sent it off to the C.O. Before long I was called into the adjutant's office. “What is the meaning of this?” the major demanded, holding up the letter. “You can't send a handwritten letter through channels.”

“They took away the library's typewriter, sir,” I answered.

He handed the letter back to me. The typewriter was returned.

Next we faced the problem of dust in the army. The post library at Camp Knight had been “cleaned” by sullen prisoners from the guard house while an armed M.P. stood over them. With wide brooms the prisoners pushed the dust and grit from one end of the library to the other and then pushed it back again. We dusted the tables ourselves with dustcloths brought from home. No one worried about dust on books. The whole camp was dusty, and nobody cared.

Dust in a hospital was different. During weekly inspections the officer in charge looked for dust and found it. When I explained that dust on li
brary books was inevitable, the officer went peacefully on his way until the day the C.O. conducted the inspection himself. Ah-ha! Dust on library books! The accompanying officer recorded our dust on his clipboard. The next day half a dozen cleaning women arrived to remove the books, dust them, and return them to clean shelves. The library was busy and the women were almost finished before I noticed they were shelving the books at random. When I pointed out that books should be shelved in order, they seemed bewildered. Then I understood—they could not read. Reshelving several thousand books was a daunting task, but fortunately sympathetic patients offered to help.

The C.O. not only wanted a dust-free station hospital, but wanted to command a dust-free regional hospital. “Keep the bed census up” was a remark often heard. On the C.O.'s orders, the bed census was kept up, and eventually he won out and became the commander of the Oakland Regional Hospital.

Before long, as I had anticipated, the C.O. was transferred. His last order to me was “Buy me a couple of Thorne Smith books out of library funds.” I didn't do it.

The next C.O. was Colonel Harry Dale, a tall, thin, bald officer whose erect bearing indicated a
West Point background. The first time he entered the library, the men sat as if frozen. Colonel Dale looked around and said we should have a proper circulation desk instead of the beat-up old office desk we were using. “Go ahead and order one,” he told me and added, “Is there anything else you would like to have?” I could scarcely believe what I was hearing.

There certainly was something I would like to have: a door that was not a Dutch door. The next day, carpenters arrived, measurements were taken, and a new door was installed, a perfect door that did not divide in the middle, a door divided into glass panes that diminished the noise from the recreation room and at the same time allowed men to see that the library was open. I thought loving thoughts about Colonel Dale every time I opened that door.

Another kindness of Colonel Dale that I particularly appreciated was his asking me, when the Special Service officer who was also library officer was about to be transferred, “What do you think is the chief duty of a library officer?”

After a moment's thought, I answered, “To say yes to whatever the librarian asks.”

Colonel Dale laughed and asked me to choose any officer I would like to have. I selected a mild-mannered lieutenant who worked in the mess of
fice. The moment a new library officer realized with horror that he had to sign for the entire library and was held responsible for all the books was always an interesting moment until I quoted AR 210-70 and assured him that all he had to do was sign papers. I took care of everything else.

Working on what the chaplain's assistant called the lunatic fringe of the army was fascinating, a view of the joys and tragedies of life. Babies were born, patients' bodies were mended, men died. One handsome young man requested a book on mathematics, and when I took it to him, we talked a few minutes. The next day I was shocked to learn he had died. When an army wife who had been hospitalized with high blood pressure gave birth to stillborn twins, her young husband sat in the library with his head in his hands for hours.

The case that caused the most excitement was an army wife who at dusk had backed into a spinning airplane propeller, which sliced off three pounds of her buttocks, shattered her elbows, and fractured her skull. Her husband, barely out of his teens, came every afternoon for weeks to read Western stories to her as she lay facedown. Everyone followed her progress with concern, and the staff was proud of its work when she was finally able to walk out of the hospital.

Italian cobelligerents, men who had been taken prisoner but were unsympathetic to Italy's part in the war and had volunteered to work for the United States, sometimes became patients. This irritated the men who fought in the Italian campaign. “We fought those guys,” they said. The Italians were very much aware of their unpopularity. I went to a North Beach bookshop in San Francisco and persuaded the owner to sell the army about fifty paperback books in Italian, which the men were happy to find on the book cart. One homesick Italian admitted for an ordinary appendectomy looked so sad that the chaplain felt sorry for him and called on an Italian priest to come and visit with the man in his own language. Instead of being cheered, the poor patient went into shock. In his town in Italy a visit to a sickbed by a priest meant the patient was going to die.

A young gunner with the British Merchant Marine turned up at the hospital for several weeks. He was a handsome young man who admired the quality of American uniforms compared to his own. He was popular with girls, including Judy, but he soon married another American girl. He then learned, when his orders arrived, that he was being sent to Australia by sailing vessel. “Eyety dyes to Austrylia,” he moaned. Almost as
soon as he left, his American bride sought a divorce, which upset his family in England, who did not take divorce lightly and who somehow wrote to Judy about it. She was saddened by the letter and wasn't sure how she should answer. I suspected she was in love with him herself.

Almost every day enlisted men asked for the key to the medical library, and when we explained that it was for the use of medical officers only, the men usually grumbled, “What's the matter? Are they afraid we'll know more than they do?” I tried several times to persuade Colonel Dale to move the medical library, pointing out that according to AR 210-70, using my time to take care of it was a misappropriation of funds. Adversity did not work this time.

An army chaplain requested a book on flower arranging, a subject I had not expected to interest the army. I bought the most beautiful book I could find, and when I handed it to him, he remarked, “We teach little children to worship in beauty and then send them to Sunday school in church basements.” How well I remembered. To my surprise, a number of men borrowed that book.