President David Johns
(September 29, 2021)
I spent many of my after school evenings at the Greentown Branch Library. I really don’t remember how it started or why I gravitated there; there was no formal program, no academic intervention, no outreach to poor kids in the neighborhood; but, for some reason, the library is where I wanted to hang out.
Greentown is a few miles from the Pro Football Hall of Fame and Interstate 77, and close enough to the Akron-Canton Airport that we could smell smoke from the wreckage when New Yankee catcher, Thurman Munson, crashed his Cessna Citation there in August 1979.
You could see the library from my school playground. It was tiny, only a few hundred square feet, a single reading room with shelving along the walls and a few freestanding cases stuffed with newspapers, books, and magazines. And, most importantly, I could walk there in less than ten minutes.
Of course, I understand why my parents allowed me to spend countless hours there each week — one less fidgety kid running through the house! But I am not sure why Jean Shelly, the fiercely disciplined, frighteningly stern librarian, put up with me. But she did. In fact, she was kind to me, even maternal, keeping a table always ready for me to spread out all the materials I was exploring.
She pointed me to things that interested me, and then to things that became interesting to me: Al Unser, the Indianapolis 500, magic tricks and biographies of Harry Houdini, stories about the Buddha, world maps, castles, articles about Japan. And mysteries, lots of mysteries like the Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, and especially Ellery Queen, whose ‘Mystery Magazine’ was the first ever subscription I had in my own name.
Miss Shelly was cool, like Morticia Addams is cool; she may have eaten the young of other families in town for all I knew, but she opened the world to me in that diminutive biblioteca, and I loved her for it.
The heavy black rotary phone on her desk sounded the same no matter who dialed the library’s number—except for one. Each evening near closing time, my mother would call—I always knew it was her—and Miss Shelly would tell me it was time for me to go home.
I always carried a treasure back home with me, a book or two that swept me up and drew me in, something that opened my imagination to worlds close at hand and far away. My sisters knew I was back in the house by the familiar sound of a stack of books sliding from my arms, hitting the kitchen table, and fanning out like a deck of cards.
I visited that little place recently, a few days after my father died. Like a lot of things from childhood that we look at with older eyes, it was smaller than I remembered, no bigger than a modest starter home. I haven’t thought about that library for years, so I am not sure why I stopped by then. Maybe I thought the bricks still carried something from those days—a droplet of mystery and adventure, a glimpse of Miss Shelly’s kind and unsmiling face, the ring of a telephone summoning me home.
But all was silent.
No longer a library, it is now a museum, weather-beaten and stuffed inside and out with other types of wonders and curiosities: lightning rods, mailboxes, and hitching posts.
I took a photo in front of the door that opened to me each evening. In my hand I held a book that I could never have read then, but that I wouldn’t be reading today had that once-upon-a-time library not embraced a towheaded boy from Greentown, Ohio with mismatched socks, and a heart hungry for the world.
This column by President David Johns appeared in The Franklin News-Post. President Johns may be reached at president@ferrum.edu.
