Who.....Me?

The Riverton Free Library

When January of 1981 rolled around and it was time to pack all the Christmas decorations up for another the year the house looked a little sad.  The bad thing about winter on the East Coast is that it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. The winter itself was usually not too bad in that we usually did not get a lot of snow but there were a lot of cloudy, gray days.

I was still trying to figure out just exactly what I was supposed to do as President of the Home and School Association besides spending hours fighting with the mimeograph machine and trying to figure out how to raise some money for the very broke organization. There were still the Friday pot lunch/craft sessions at Bay's house. They were fun and I actually finished knitting a sweater I had started in a knitting class ten years before. The house still needed a lot of redecorating so I did not have too many boring minutes.  Actually what I needed was more hours in the day and money to throw at the house.

One day the door knocker echoed through the house.  Oh, the house was pre-doorbell so we had a very loud brass door knocker engraved with "Adams", the previous owners' name.  Standing on the porch was the lady I most aspired to be like, the lady who gave us tickets to the Christmas house tour right after we first moved in, the lady who lived in the magnificent house on the river and The President of the Riverton Library Board.  Susan was like the grown up girl next door, always perfect in Preppy clothes, very nice and probably played bridge and golf.  What could she possibly want from me?

Since I hate tea, which would have perhaps been the right thing to offer, I just invited her to sit on the sofa after I moved Tug and the toys off. After a few polite conversational topics she asked a very strange question. Would I consider becoming the Librarian at the Riverton Free Library?  What? What! Me?  She had to be kidding even though I knew instantly she was not. Aspiring to be a Librarian was not in my never ending slate of what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Didn't those people have something like a degree in Library Science which was far from mine in Biology and Chemistry?  Most of the ones I had seen wore silky flowered dresses and sturdy teacher shoes of which I had neither.
Hopefully I was not old and grumpy....yet.

Susan said the board thought I would be perfect after my helping Sis with storytime for the little ones and some of Sis craft classes.  They also thought since I was involved with the Home and School Association that I might get more children into the Library. Actually I would be only the third Librarian in the ninety year history of the Library.  Now that was a little intimidating since I had doubts that I could last a week at a real job and here the previous librarians had each lasted forty-five years.

She went on to explain that the Library was open from 9:00 to 8:30 Monday through Friday and 9:00 until noon on Saturday.  There was one part time employee and about thirty volunteers.  The volunteers had a regular schedule that they liked to work and the part time lady, Betty was flexible in being scheduled.  It was sounding like a maybe but when she stated the salary all of a sudden I could see the new kitchen floor, dozens of rolls of wallpaper and a truck load of paint arriving at the house. I think at that point I said yes even though I knew I was not going shopping for flowery dresses or sturdy shoes. And of course, how could I say no to Susan.

So, the rest of the week I spent several hours a day with the old Librarian, both in actual years she worked and in chronological age. As the woman showed me the finer points of the library I began to think my name was Honey Girl since that is all she ever called me.  There seemed to be a look of terror in a lot of the volunteers eyes because I am quite sure they thought I was going to change their little sacred place.  The part time employee looked at me in total disdain which never seemed to change.

I learned where the card catalog was, how the books were arranged by the Dewey Decimal System even though I knew those things before I was ever in the first grade.  The books each had a card in them that you wrote the name of the person checking out the book on which you kept until the book came back and put a date stamp in the front cover telling when the book was due.  Hmm...that had not changed since the first grade either.  You could order books patrons wanted through the Burlington County system and we bought new books through a book service company.  Usually you got a list of thirty books on the list of which you could choose from of which ten were recommended. Usually the current librarian just had them send the ten recommended books. That was pretty much it.  Guess I could have been granted a degree in Library Science.

I did learn a little background from some of the volunteers.  The library was called the Riveton Free Library as they did not accept any local or state tax money. Free meant no one had any say over it except the Library Board. They made all the major decisions and did fund raisers to pay for what the Library needed.  Besides the Christmas House Tour there were many anonymous donors who gave large sums of money each year enough to support the Library for decades to come.

During that first week I learned that the Library had actually started in the Episcopal Church just before the turn of the century.  The building the Library was currently in was actually a house built in the 1860's and was given to the Library as a gift in 1905. Originally there was a staircase to the second floor but it was moved to the back of the building in the 1940's to make more space on the main floor.  Upstairs was an apartment which was rented out to a young college girl who in turn had to keep the building and the yard in good shape. She dusted and mopped, mowed and weeded for free rent which was very convenient for everyone concerned. The volunteers seemed to keep up with all the flowers only because the place was so special to them. Two of the little old ladies actually got into a fight one day over what color of rose bush to put in that each one wanted to buy.  Within the next week two rose bushes showed up to adorn the wrought iron fence, each one a different color.

Although I was a little dubious about the job, Dennis was over joyed. He liked the sound of money and maybe the idea that I would stop some of my lunch/craft or Porch Club doing.  Actually as long as dinner made it to the table he was happy. After the first full week on my own when I had memorized the Dewey Decimal system, cleaned out the desk of junk, met most of the volunteers and filled out my first order for books not just getting the suggested ten. I was at a lost as to what to do next but read a book.

A couple things I discovered the second week of work was that the basement was knee deep in boxes of stuff that over the course of ninety years someone thought needed to be saved and that my staff of volunteers really liked to run the Library (be in charge of) all by themselves. Remember the lady who stopped by the house one day and wanted a tissue?  The same one who lived in the house so filled with stuff you couldn't walk through?  It can't be a surprise that she was Librarian #1. The volunteers gave me the time to wade through the mess in the basement.  I saved artifacts that I thought were neat and threw out several pickup loads of damp moldy books, craft supplies and children's drawings.  It was a move that put bees in several ladies bonnets but that would not be the last time. My saving grace was putting up a display of the artifacts that made them ooh and ahh for weeks.

The volunteers loved it when I put them in charge and went home to fix lunch for the boys, i.e. half the school or dinner or go to lunch/crafts on Friday or run over to the school on so called Library business. Actually part of my trips to the school were Library business as I noticed no kids came to the Library.  So I arranged for each class to come and I gave tours and talked about the value of reading.  That slowly worked into "Noise Time" at the Library.  We made 3:00 to 5:00 in the teen room a time when they could talk, laugh and play their music tapes with the hope they might find a book to read.  Naturally I ended up working that time frame as my volunteers were still in the stage where you should here pins drop. Everyone adapted pretty well as they all learned not to come to the Library during the time the kids were there.

I really tried hard to keep the Library pretty close to what everyone had always known it as.  To the town of Riverton it was like a sacred place.
all the residents had grown up there and change is difficult but at the same time the readership was declining when I took the job.  Part of what I was supposed to do was to breathe some life into it and get people coming in. As in all older communities you lose some of your patrons due to old age.  One thing I did that was not good was under the cover of a weekend I moved the desk. THE DESK. The desk that been in the same place for ninety years.  The desk that took up space that could be used for something else.  The desk that people literally stumbled over to get to the book shelves behind it.  It got moved to a more logical and convenient location but to this day they are probably still talking about how I moved THE DESK.

Before THE Desk got moved

By the third month I had survived two Board meetings without getting fired and even asked to attend Rotary and Lions Club meetings to talk about the Library.  It impressed them that the Library always looked so neat but that was only because I was OCD about having every book spine exactly even with the one next to it. Tug became the Library dog since as soon as the boys arrived home they let him out and he made a beeline to see me.  The teenagers had a great time with him and he loved the attention or he curled up under my desk for a nap.  He was not the only Library dog as one of the volunteers had a Golden Retriever that carried her basket of books on their walk there and stayed with her during her volunteer time. It was beginning to be a very happy place.

Maybe this job thing was not so bad.  Sure I was always there at 9:00 getting all the books in perfect order but the "take charge" volunteers preferred that I go do something else.  In truth it was not like a job but more like community service that really gave me great leeway in my hours.  My biggest fear was what to do when summer came and the boys were out of school.  The summer reading program had really flopped in previous years as the children were not used to going to the Library.  The boys would probably shred the house by 9:30 each morning or kill each other or be bored.

I would have to figure it out fast or quit the job that wasn't at all like a job.

I Fell In Love With New Jersey

There are times when I have to look back and laugh at how much I did not want to move to New Jersey.  I had conjured up mental pictures of what it would look like and after the three day house hunting trip I found them all to be true with the addition of an Archie Bunker living on every corner. Then of course there was the 1300 mile crying jag on the trip there.  

Perhaps I tried a little too hard in the beginning to hate every breath I took in that state, did not even try to understand what they were saying
and was just being stubborn and hard headed.  Although I am not one of those women content to stay home and bake bread I really am a "nester" and resent packing up and moving around.  At some point in time the magic of the silly state rubbed off on me and I began to see that I made a big mistake in my characterization of the state and it's residents.

Yankees are not cold and unfriendly as they are purported to be.  I found they are just a little slow to warm up to new folks, especially ones from the southern half of the country.  In the south people tend to smile and say hello when you see them on the street but that is about the extent of it. In Yankee country they spend weeks to months glaring at you and then suddenly anything you need from them is yours. They just need the time to check you out, make sure you are staying and from there you have a friend for life.  Of course being from Oklahoma was a great curiosity as they all had to ask if everyone still rode their horses to town on Saturday to shop. They had seen pictures so they were sure that was the case.

Must say that the fact that New Jersey is called the Garden State was a laugh before my arrival.   Truthfully my mental picture of the entire state had been one of dirty, overcrowded, smog filled Newark. That is except for Atlantic City where all the Miss America contestants strolled around in evening gowns and bathing suits. If you cut the state in half by drawing a line from Trenton to the shore the southern half of the state is very similar to the Midwest.

Driving on any road from the west to the east or north to south takes you by hundreds of small farms.  During the spring and the summer there are stand after stand selling fruit and vegetables grown right there.  While we were there we picked strawberries and blueberries.  There were tomatoes almost too big to hold in one hand along with asparagus, corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, apples and almost anything else you might want. Closer to the coast there are miles of cranberry bogs and the forty foot tall pine trees.  So much for the smog filled cities I thought would be the face of New Jersey.

I have to admit that I had never seen the ocean before the move to New Jersey.  There are 141 miles of coast from New York to Cape May all dotted with communities.  Most of the beaches are groomed everyday and there is a small fee for a beach tag for a day, a week or the entire summer. I really liked the groomed beaches as they were always clean and smooth.

Atlantic City was a straight forty-five mile run from Riverton and although it was not my favorite place it was very interesting.  Legal gambling was passed for New Jersey in the late seventies so when we arrived the huge hotel and casinos were popping up all along the old boardwalk.  Your point of view made the change in Atlantic City either a good or a bad one. The sad part was that Atlantic City land values went up and since all the business was along the Boardwalk with the casinos the town itself slowly began to look like Berlin after the war. Buildings were torn down to make way for the hundreds of buses that rolled into the city everyday and the residents could no longer live there. Instead of creating jobs for them the casinos actually drove them out of town.

Atlantic City back in the day was accessible by a short train ride from Philadelphia for a day on the beach, amusements along the boardwalk, carnival rides on the huge piers and great places to eat.  After five o'clock in the evening dresses and sport coats were mandatory for strolling the boardwalk or dining in the restaurants.  As life got more casual so did the clothing rules for the boardwalk become more casual.
With the advent of the casinos came the change in the character of the Boardwalk itself.  All the old "shore" type of businesses like the Mr. Peanut stand with the huge iconic Mr. Peanut Man himself, the Saltwater Taffy and the arcades begin to disappear. The saddest part was the fire, questionable fire, that destroyed the Million Dollar Pier to be replaced with a shopping center. 

I have to admit that it was fun to take visitors to Atlantic City to see the sights and lose my allotted twenty dollars.  I had never seen Playboy Bunnies or even been to Las Vegas so it was something different.  I did however get a little less enthralled when I took a friend one day and parked my new red five speed Capri in a parking garage and it took twenty minutes for it to come down from where ever.  I actually was beginning to think I would never see it again as that  was a great place to lose your car. It was said the parking attendants had a list of cars the bad guys would like to have and they seem to get many.  Driving the backroads along the shore you could find many empty shells of what were once nice vehicles.  They were reduced to nothing and left along side of the road. I can not remember if car insurance was high there or not but it must have been.

One of the other things about both Philadelphia and New Jersey was the food.  Texas may be famous for steaks and Kansas City for BBQ but that place was the best for pasta and pizza. There were little shops that sold fresh pasta.  You could get plain, lemon pepper, tomato basil and ten other kinds of dough and have it cut into anything from angel hair to lasagna. There were a dozen kinds of homemade sauce and you had a great quick dinner.  Sal's Pizza Shop was a couple of blocks from our house and I fell in love with his deep dish pizza. Sal himself was a character as he loved every woman who came into the shop and it was difficult to pay him for the pizza without getting your hand held and many compliments. Too bad Sal was only about five feet tall, not a handsome Italian and had a wife about six feet tall all dressed in black that looked like she might break you in two at any moment. The kids loved to tease me about little Sal. Can't forget the Bosch's Deli and their meatball subs.  I think I became part Italian while living there.

After our big mistake the first Christmas in Riverton of putting up a fake tree at Thanksgiving and the horrible lights on the house I was not going to make the same mistake again.  A few miles north of Riverton was a little farm along side of the road.  In the summer you could go to his gate at seven in the morning and buy a bag of fresh cut corn.  At Christmas he had a limited number of Christmas trees he would cut.  So I went up and picked out a live tree, put it up on Christmas Eve, put single candles (electric) in all the windows and a fresh wreath on the front door. Now everyone knew I was finally acclimated to their town.

Things got interesting after Christmas.  I got offered a JOB.  I hated to tell them I was incapable of working at a regular job where I had to be someplace at a certain time and stay there until a certain time. It was a job I knew nothing about and not one I ever thought about.  It had hours and responsibilities. They all thought I would be perfect and I did not have the heart to tell them I would be awful at it.  But....it paid money and my decorating budget was at that time a big zero and I had put the house on the Christmas house tour for the following December.
Compliments and money sort of forced me to say yes.

Busy Seemed To Equal Happy

I need to backtrack a bit before my story about school starting.  That first summer we lived in New Jersey was really fun except for going to Oklahoma for a family visit the first part of August.  Notice I did not call it a vacation as that is going off to someplace where you have fun, don't get in a hurry, eat out and stay in hotels or cool cabins in the woods.

Not only going to visit family could be an ordeal but Dennis' rationalization was that you get in the car at 3:00 in the morning and drive the thirteen hundred miles only stopping to eat.  God forbid you would pay to stay in a hotel and waste all that time and money. I always figured we were in a hurry so there would be lots of time to play cards, watch great television shows like Hee Haw and have Dennis' Mother cook all his favorite foods that I never learned to cook. I never learned to make gravy or fry chicken or fish.

That trip we did drive over to visit with my Mother one day. I did get to meet the new man in her life and found him quite charming and fun. He owned quite a few restaurants in Oklahoma City and attended many social affairs.  Mother was turning into a very happy, easier to get along with social butterfly and it was actually fun to see her school-girl flirty side.

However the best part was coming home.  We had left the Barnes' children in charge of Tug.  They were to put him out on a leash attached to the clothes line everyday, bring him in and feed him at night. Sounded like a good plan until we got home and the entire house seemed to be jumping up and down from fleas. Seems like we did not think about the fleas and the humid weather of the East Coast. Actually they did not seem to bother the boys and I but Dennis must have tasted very good.
I did suggest to him that I could go buy a couple of flea collars, hook them together for his neck and that would solve the problem.  That did not go over so well so I had to resort to more professional methods.

When school started I decided that I would maybe get more involved and be a homeroom mother instead of just showing up with cupcakes or cookies when someone called and asked. I was rather surprised when the note came home about a Home and School Association meeting.  I had attended a Historical Society meeting or two and was told the national organization of the PTA had been founded in Riverton.  Now there was no PTA?

Never did get answer about the PTA's disappearance but it looked upon my arrival at the meeting that the Home and School Association might well be doomed.  Only two of the newly elected officers and the Principal showed up for the meeting.  I have never been exactly sure how by the end of the meeting I was the new President and a Homeroom Mother for both Wes and Wally's classes.  The Secretary agreed to also do the Treasurer job although there was no money, no dues and no fund raisers planned.

Mr. Kline, the very cute Principal, told me my first job was to put together and print the school booklet.  This would have the school rules, times and dates of events, a calendar of holidays and a complete list of every student and teacher with addresses and phone numbers.  He then took me into the office and showed me the mimeograph machine, gave me a box of stencils and a stack of papers and class lists all that had to be typed onto the stencils.  He also said that this needed to be done as soon as possible.

For those of you who do not know anything about mimeograph stencils and machines they were the fore runners to the photocopier.  The stencils were a sort of purple/blue piece of stuff attached to a backing paper.  When you typed on a stencil it actually cut the letters in the purple/blue part.  Then you tore the back off and laid it on this drum part of the mimeograph machine and as the paper rolled through you got the printed sheets. Simple - right?  Wrong.  First of all the stencil had this very strange smell you never forget.  Then when you make a typing error you had to dab correction fluid on the mistake, let it dry and retype. Even with tossing out my Underwood boat-anchor with the missing o typewriter and purchasing a new electric one my stencils still looked like a teenager's worst nightmare case of acne with little dabs of correction fluid everywhere. Then the sheer time element in typing twenty seven pages and making three hundred plus copies was enough to make me resign.

In the end I was rather proud of myself to the point of thinking if I could do that then I could do anything.  As I watched the pages fly off the machine I got to thinking about the carnivals, the talent shows and all the fundraisers there were when I was in school. There could be a lot more to this than mimeographing.  We could charge dues, make more parents join, raise money for things the school needed and have some fun at the same time.  See how easy it was for me to get involved with something.

One day when the boys and I were out raking leaves this car pulled up against the curb.  It wasn't exactly parked as the back of it was still sticking out on the street. I had seen this car before driving around town at about five miles an hour. It was an early 1950's thing, maybe a Dodge or a Desota, one of those with big bubbly fenders.  The driver was what the boys called an OBH.  An OBH was a blue/gray haired person who had to look through the steering wheel as they were too short to look over the top. 

The lady (OBH) asked Wally to get her a tissue. He was a little confused as to what a tissue was since his mother (me) never bought them.  After all napkins, paper towels or toilet paper would do the same thing and were much easier to find than a box of tissues. When he asked me what to do I sent him in the house for a napkin which must have done the trick because the lady drove over part of the yard on her way back to the road and disappeared around the corner.

Sis appeared about this time and told us the lady was Miss Echols.  She was in her nineties and had been the Librarian for many years.  She actually lived around the corner in a two story house that the kids in town thought ghosts lived in.  As the story went the house was originally in Palmyra but when she started working at the Riverton Library she had the house moved to Riverton.  No one had been in the house for years but the story was that their were only little narrow paths through all the stuff piled in the house.  If you asked her if she had some historical item she would smile and say yes but it was "down under" at the moment and she couldn't get to it. I guess she knew she would not be able to find a box of tissues at home either.

It was the most beautiful fall I had ever seen.  Kansas City had trees that turned different colors but nothing like New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  With that also came days of raking leaves that the boys and Tug loved to jump in so that you got to rake them again.  Also with Fall came Halloween. The night before Halloween Palmyra and Riverton got together and had a parade. The firetrucks from each town, the Palmyra High School Band, several floats and every kid from both towns in their costumes marching in the parade.  The parade started in Riverton and ended at the park in Palmyra with hot dogs and ice cream for everyone.

Why would they have a Halloween parade the night before the big event?  It seems like All Hallows Eve was the prime  for childhood pranks and a little vandalism.  By keeping all the kids busy it cut down on the rolls of toilet paper in trees and using soap to write all over cars.
On Halloween day before the parties at school the kids paraded on the sidewalks in Riverton.  Then there was the usual trick or treating in the evening.

Don't Judge A Book By It's Cover

For all the fun and the new interesting people and places that living in New Jersey had brought there was the beginning of the thought that nothing I could do or say could make Dennis happy. Well, maybe it wasn't the first time I realized I couldn't make him happy.  The move to New Jersey, the house and everything else magnified his unhappiness.

In the fifteen years we had been married I tried really hard to keep him from getting mad at the smallest of things to no use. I think Wes and Wally actually thought my name was "God, dammit, Donna" as he seemed to call me that at least once or twice a week. If He got mad at big things, like burning the house down or wrecking the car maybe it would have been easier to deal with.  However, it was the little things like blowing a fuse from too many electrical things being on at the same time, my making plans to go somewhere or inviting someone over for dinner usually caused a temper tantrum and the silent treatment for several days.

I grew up in a house where Mother would be upset at Dad, Paul or me and not speak to us for sometimes two weeks at a time. It was a pattern of behavior I was used to although it was behavior I hated.  Perhaps that is where I learned to try to always keep the waters calm even though I knew that was impossible. The funny thing was that Dennis always accused me of being just like my Mother who he really disliked.  No, sorry he was just like my Mother which is why they never got along.

The moral to this little story is that you can not make someone else happy.  Happiness is only what you make of it yourself. My thought that the move to New Jersey might be good for Dennis was really a mistake as it only made him more unhappy and more difficult to live with. The only thing I knew to do was to keep trying to make him not explode by having the yard mowed, the wash and ironing done, the cars washed and the house clean.  For all the fun stories I write and the fantastic friends I had there was a dark side at the home front that no one knew about.

Don't think the idea of leaving never crossed my mind.  It is easy to think that I did not have to put up with that kind of behavior but years of being told how stupid I was left a doubt that I could survive on my own. Confronting him on his behavior was something I had tried many years before and there was no winning an argument with him.  According to him I was too dumb to get into medical school, terrible at decorating because I did not charge enough and what job could get I get when

we made the move from Kansas City I  that could support me and the boys.  I certainly was not going to run home to Mother. 

In a lot of ways verbal abuse is a lot worse than physical abuse.  Usually physical abusers apologize, swear they are never going to do it again and proclaim how much they love the one they abuse.  With verbal abuse there are no apologizes, no profession about never saying awful things again and life goes on.  To all outward appearances we looked like a happy couple, nice home, new cars and great kids. By this time it was ingrained in my brain to put on the happy face for the kids and the world.  I also developed great empathy for other women in bad relationships who could not seem to make an exit from them. The old "been there, done that" thing.

Without realizing it my survival depended on friends, getting involved in the community, staying busy in general and Barney.  It would have been easy to sink into depression, never leave the house or become an alcoholic as I had observed many other Ford wives did.  Maybe because Mother treated me much the same way that Dennis did I learned very early that other people might find value in you even if family doesn't. So I worked really hard at making and keeping friends plus learning lots of new skills.  Some people would say how amazing I was but no, I was just surviving the best way I knew how to.

When we made the move yo Kansas City I was concerned that my friendship with Barney would slowly disappear.  There are a lot of miles between the two towns that would be difficult to navigate.  But to my surprise there were still the phones calls every Tuesday and he managed to make brief stops in Philadelphia every six or eight weeks.  You have to give a guy credit that manages to make a four hour layover in Philadelphia when he is headed from Kansas City to Atlanta. Lunches at the airport, a trip to a museum or a walk along the Schuylkill River were happy times and I realized he wasn't going to just disappear.  Although our conversations stayed away from our spouses I often wondered if maybe he needed someone who always believed in him like I did.

There are probably a lot of people who can relate to this story.  I did not write it for anyone to feel sorry for me but maybe so you can understand that everyone has their share of problems and their own way of getting through life.  The old adage about never knowing what goes on in other people's relationships is very true and it is difficult to judge someone until you have walked in their shoes.

Now back to the story.

There was some urban myth that the national organization of the PTA, the Parent Teacher Association started in Riverton, New Hersey.  Not sure that is true but when the boys brought home an announcement of the first Home and School meeting after school started I thought I would attend.  Being a good Mom I thought I should at least go check it out.  Big mistake.  Only two of the newly elected officers showed up.  The President had quit before the first meeting and the Treasurer had left town.  Strange how a person can get elected President when the only ones in attendance at the meeting were the Principal, the Vice-President, the Secretary and myself. Suddenly my baking cupcakes and cookies for Homeroom parties expanded into a territory I did not know much about.