Dr. Metablog

For all its fabled color, life in 40s and 50s Flatbush was extraordinarily provincial. In terms of sophistication, it might just has well been central Nebraska or U. P. Michigan. First generation working-class Brooklynites were simply too busy making ends meet to acknowledge that there was a great world outside. Although "The City" — i.e. flush upscale Manhattan — was just a 30 minute subway ride away, trust me, no tourists ever made it to our isolated grimy neighborhood.

In the middle 50s, when I was a pupil at Flatbush's semi-famous Erasmus Hall High School, I worked after school shelving books in the McDonald Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. I worked two or three days a week from 3 pm to 6 pm and earned seventy-five cents large an hour. A frugal young fellow (cheap as dirt, some say), I saved every penny, and I was proud to be able to pay my first year's Cornell tuition ($900). It was a good job for me; I handled a lot of books and because I was an omnivorous reader and an autodidact by nature, I borrowed and chewed over many a volume that I wouldn't otherwise have encountered. Plus I was able to sneak peeks at the contents of the 612.6 shelves.

It was at the McDonald library, which was barely more than a storefront, that I experienced the first glimmer of an idea that there might be a world elsewhere. 

The library staff was organized hierarchically. At the very bottom were the part-time shelvers like myself. Masters of the Dewey Decimal System, we had no greater qualification than the ability to remember the order of the letters in the alphabet. A long step up were the clerks, who checked books out and in, issued library cards, and collected fines. Clerks, like shelvers, were native to the neighborhood. But then there was the "professional staff" — five people with degrees in "library science" who answered inquiries at the reference desk, advised borrowers, and purchased books. The "pros" were not from the neighborhood; they lived across the river In Manhattan and took the elevated Culver Line to the stop at Ditmas, and they intrigued me.

Miss Owen — Alice Owen — head librarian, imbued with gloom, was an extremely small, thin, clipped, austere woman with an unBrooklynish Maine or northern New England accent. Archetype of the proper maiden lady — sexless in my view, but then, as I learned later, who can ever tell?  Miss Owen was, how shall I say this respectfully, detail-oriented. There was Miss Warren, from South Dakota, a fan of Senator McCarthy, who explained to me that the world's brown and black people had benefited enormously from colonialism. Exotic Mr. O'Shea, obviously gay (but of course I didn't recognized it at the time) from North Carolina, a young man with more hip sway than Miss America and who actually — hard to believe — referred to our borrowers of color as "jungle bunnies." I was stunned and horrified. Miss Kyvelos, whose parents were Greek fishermen and who was as round and warm as Miss Owen wasn't.

And then, another kettle of fish entirely, Bob Reisner, a 30ish bearded Greenwich Village writer (not an entirely successful one, or he wouldn't have been working at the library) who hung with jazz musicians and who was writing a biography of Charlie Parker. He was a type entirely new to me — skeptical, disrespectful, "anti-establishment." Borderline hipster. In strong contrast to the McDonald convention, his demeanor and language were lecherous, and he was more frank about his desires than anyone I knew, though whether his lusts and triumphs were real or imaginary I don't know. He was compiling a book called "Show me the Good Parts" — a catalog of the sex scenes in contemporary novels. Pornographically speaking, he was way in advance of his time. 

On the whole, the McDonald library was quite an eye-opener for provincial me. I stayed on through the summer of 1956, then headed for Ithaca, where more surprises awaited.

February 10. Thinking over what I've written, I can now correct my initial memory. Miss Owen wasn't the head of the library. That position was held by Miss Boies. Miss Owen was a figure of authority because she was in charge of the part-time shelvers like myself. Miss Boies was also a librarian who came to us directly from central casting by way of Ohio. At some point, she retired and was replaced by much younger Mrs. Gerstner, who contracted cancer and died only a few months after her arrival. I clearly remember her valedictory words to me, "Get the most out of life."

And also, I wonder why Mrs. Gerstner and Bob Reisner took the time to talk to me. I had nothing to offer them. Is it possible that they saw me as a youth of promise. If so, they were over-optimistic.