The Brooklyn Public Library

There was a long, uphill stretch of wide sidewalk between the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and Flatbush Avenue, across from the Prospect Park Zoo. Riding to the library with a basket of John Tunis baseball books or Ray Bradbury science fiction to turn in for some more of both was fairly easy, up Westminster to Caton, up Caton to and around the Parade Grounds to Prospect Park, and thence to Flatbush Avenue, except for that final stretch of hardtopedal slope for what seemed like a mile but was probably only the equivalent of a long city block.

That was hard. I had to stand up to pedal my heavy onespeed balloon tire Columbia, and a couple of times as the bike slowed and I zigzagged I had to curse and walk the last fifty yards or so.

But it was worth it.

First the children's library and then the modernistic regular stacks and reading room on Grand Army Plaza across from the Knights of Columbus building, a free entrance way to hours of pleasurable afternoons when there was no baseball on the radio, in the years before I was old enough to have to spend my summer days painting fire escapes on my father's apartment houses that he was repeatedly trying to keep from going all colored, even putting an ad in the Yiddish newspaper, as he vainly tried to get one last white tenant to replace another one who had moved out.

Later, I would be embarrassed to be there when a negro superintendent, a gentle, handsome man in his late forties, would be forced to admit that he was embezzling money from rents that he was collecting. But in the years before I had the obligation to work at a summer job, scraping fire escapes, then red lead, then brown paint, there was the library, neat, quiet, serene with stacks of books, many of which I cared not the least for, but with baseball, and Robin Hood, and space adventures for the taking home, and after a little bit uphill there was that long coast down, Newton repaying me for having gotten that heavy machine to the top of the hill, wind and fresh air was it already polluted? and after supper, maybe a fresh baked apple pie for dessert, I could start on The Kid Comes Back or some other good baseball story.

I wish I had been more courageous as a child, as when someone on the block made fun of Jimmy Schariff's family because they sat around or lay around their apartment, I don't know how the accuser knew, and "read books all day." Jimmy and I did laugh at his mother when she cried at the boring ending of some romantic movie she had taken us to, but I wish I had taken that big Italian kid by the shirt and said, "Hey, I love to lie around the house reading, too." I never ate venison until a sergeant from Fort Sam Houston and I made a road kill just before Thanksgiving in 1969, and I never did acquire a taste for ale, but Sherwood Forest venison, hot bread and nut brown ale did sound so good as I read about them I could almost taste them, and I loved the way Robin Hood won even though he'd occasionally get beat up good by Little John or somebody whom he'd immediately sign up for his gang and the sheriffs were crooked, unlike Clancy, the local cop, who we couldn't imagine taking a payoff, but maybe that was much later.

I guess I also liked the baseball books because one of my dreams was to be a major leaguer and I threw the ball against the wall of my house for hours on end and I had imaginary GiantDodger games and I always let the Giants win themmuch more on Giants vs Dodgers later and I wanted to be a professional baseball player but my brothers told me that "you just do not have the reflexes" and I accepted that but I still wanted to make the Holy Innocents team, and those books by Tunis had so many great endings, all happy.

For my merit badge in the Boy Scouts for library work I had to do a reading list or bibliography for one another and even the young woman librarian was impressed at all the Tunis books I had read. She believed me, for my smile was proud, not "sneaky " or so it looked once to a man in a candy store who would not sell me cigarettes my dad had sent me for.

It took me a few years before I discovered that there was a branch of the library tucked in on Linden Avenue near Flatbush and that I didn't have to pedal so far. But perhaps when my wife insists, bless her, that I still have good legs, I can give part of the credit for all those trips up that hill of Flatbush Avenue, between zoo and botanical gardens, to the Brooklyn Public Library.

Mike Messer, who was a year or two older than I, was the first on Westminster Road to report on the availability of books on sex, and how the college girls at the reference desk were very helpful to polite thirteen year old enquiring minds. Mike also took time to instruct Ronnie Deiter in the meaning of some of the symbolic religious objects he had learned about in years of faithful attendance at Temple. Messer spent a lot of time at the library, too. I bet ended up as a CEO or an M.D.