Three libraries, one childhood, and the making of a lifelong reader
I attended third grade in a small town in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The town was called Spearfish, which I considered a very fine name. From our house, we could see Lookout Mountain, a tall rocky mountain at the edge of town, but a mountain neither so tall nor so rocky that a third-grader with a lunch made by his mom couldn’t scale it in a day and be back in time for dinner.
My family lived close to a creek, where my best friends, Marlin and Gerald, and I, wearing the plastic helmet liners my father had brought home from the Korean War, defended America from forts made from fallen branches.
The adult world was invisible to me then. I remember wanting a man called Kennedy to become president, because that’s who my parents wanted, while most of the kids went home to families who supported a man named Nixon. I remember that when I was old enough to join the Cub Scouts, Marlin and Gerald weren’t welcome because they were Indians. But for the vast majority of my days in the Black Hills, the concerns of adults were not my concerns.
Spearfish was where I went to my first public library. It was a modest library, with books crammed into a narrow room barely bigger than my…