As a kid I did all kinds of summer work at barbecue joints and drive-in movies. I cooked enough French fries to clog every artery in Texas. But my best summer job was at the old Oak Lawn library at the corner of Oak Lawn and Lemmon in Dallas. During college I spent two summers there shelving books, doing various odd jobs, and filling in behind the checkout desk when things got busy. Some of what I experienced there shaped the rest of my life.
In those pre-Internet days of the 1970s, of course, nobody Googled anything; ordinary folks didn't have vast computerized libraries just a mouse-click away, and the 24-hour news cycle spawned by cable TV wasn't even a distant dream. Back then, the problem wasn't information overload, but underload.
So people went to libraries for answers they could find nowhere else, looking for obscure books, half-remembered poems from childhood, or the truth behind some weird urban legend we'd find today on Snopes.com. I soon realized that I enjoyed helping people find answers to their questions. It gave me real pleasure to hear someone mention an author or some idea they wanted to explore, and then to go find just the book they needed.
Those summers in the library did as much to awaken my intellectual curiosity as any college course I ever took. I got to know every part of the library's collection, from the 070s (news media and journalism) to 999 (extraterrestrial worlds). As I made my way through the stacks shelving books, I'd pull out one that interested me, read a few pages, then move on to the next section. Before long I was reading, or at least skimming, five or ten books at a time.
Without intending it, I was receiving a broad liberal arts education, learning the big names and key ideas in different areas and disciplines. I discovered writers like John Updike, James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Joseph Wood Krutch, Wendell Berry and others who made a lifelong impact on me. I began to wonder if it might be possible, someday, to make a living as a writer.
Another part of my education came from maintaining the library's large magazine and newspaper collection. On my lunch breaks I'd read a couple of big city papers and browse a handful of others. I got to know magazines and writers across the political spectrum, ranging from The Nation on the left to National Review on the right, with The New Republic, The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New Yorker in there somewhere. I didn't understand all the questions being debated, but I began to see that the big ideas behind democracy, socialism, individualism, belief and doubt weren't just dead factoids to be regurgitated on a test; they were real forces in the lives of real people.
I don't remember how much money I made working at the library; my weekly salary probably wouldn't fill the tank of an SUV today. But the job gave me riches I'm still drawing on three decades later. That's why, when I find myself in a library today, I always look around for a young man or woman with a cartload of books to shelve. I hope they know they're the luckiest people in the building.
Chris Tucker is a writer and literary consultant from Dallas.
© Copyright 2010, KERA
