Category Archives: books

Getting Rid of Some Books

This was an okay book, not great. Not sure of its truth. Will never read it again, so it’s gone, today added to the sale/donation pile.

Our efforts at dis-accumulating continue. Perhaps not as fast as needed to do a downsizing in this decade, but we make a little progress. The last month has seen the old postcard collection acquired in the mid-1980s, having been left behind in the house we bought, for $115. But the buyer wanted me to ship it to Houston and so didn’t want the small, steel cabinet. I was able to sell that for an extra $10.

Then Lynda decided she was willing to part with the Gulf War memorabilia she brought back from Kuwait in 1991. They were supposedly Iraqi items. I listed them on Facebook Marketplace, not being sure they would sell. After one price reduction, a mom contacted me. She wanted them for her son (maybe a teenager), who loves military stuff. We were able to arrange a transfer that was convenient to both of us.

But really, the big thing we need to part with is books. For a bookiphile, that’s like cutting your wrist. But we have to do it. Despite the number of books we’ve gotten rid of, we still have at least 2,000 books in the house. I gave one away at writer’s critique group last week.

One book obviously isn’t much; we need to do more. In our living room is a built-in bookcase.  We are going to have to dismantle this to repair some water damage that appears to be from improperly installed flashing around the chimney. We have already removed some books from the lower shelves and piled them, to prevent them from being damaged and allow the bookcase to dry from a little moisture found.

As Lynda and I discussed it, she suggested that we get rid of a series of Bible study books that are shelved on that built-in. We went through one of those books together, and started a second. They aren’t bad books. I learned something from them. But when you have 2,000 books, and need to unload at least a thousand, I agreed with her to put those in the sale/donation pile.

I then suggested we also get rid of two books from the built-ins, the two books in The Bible Code series. We read these aloud together. They are an easy read because the books are not long, are well-written, and have lots of illustrations of where the Bible may have a code in the books of Moses. I say “may have” because, while the writer makes a good case, I’m not fully convinced it’s true.

At first Lynda balked. She was more accepting of the Bible code than I was and thought more of the books than I did. But then she agreed with me that we read the books, got something from them, and with all the other books in the house we were unlikely to read them ever again. So she agreed to get rid of them. I’ll move them out tomorrow.

I also have a fairly large set of magazines about World War 2 that I got from my dad. I had intended to read them, but it looks as if I never will. I have them listed on Marketplace and lowered the price twice. I think I’ll do so again and see if they will sell. Also on the getting-rid-of-block is my collection of WW2 history books. They are all good. If I had a shortage of books I would probably read all of them again. But, with a book surplus and a shortage of years ahead, I think they will also go up for sale.

Six Bible studies, two Bible codes are a long way from 1,000 books. A good sized box of magazines, and perhaps ten war books are not much. But it’s a start. I’m hoping over Thanksgiving, when our children are here, we will be able to take some time to go through a few things and, with their encouragement, get rid of some things we haven’t done anything with since the 1970s through 1990s.

And that will be a good start.

An Introvert and An Extrovert…

Where the extrovert goes to talk, and the introvert goes to read.

An introvert and an extrovert walk into…let’s make it a coffee house rather than a bar. They are not together but arrive at the door at the same time. The extrovert pulls open the door and holds it for the introvert, who says thank you. They stand in line together, get their coffee at about the same time. The coffee shop is kind of crowded,  with almost all tables having someone at them, so the extrovert says, “Let’s sit together at that empty table.”

The introvert has a book under his arm, and was obviously hoping for a quiet time of reading and sipping his large house blend, but doesn’t want to be rude, and so says, “Sure.” They sit together and the extrovert keeps up a steady conversation between occasional sips of his latte. The introvert says little. He has placed his book on the table, hoping the extrovert sees it and recognizes what the introvert wants.

Fortunately, before their coffees get cold, the extrovert sees a friend enter the shop, excuses himself, and goes to the newly arrived friend. The introvert heaves a sigh of relief, picks up his book, and begins to read.

Is this a realistic scenario?  To me, who sits well out on the introverted side of the spectrum, it seems about right. I’m obviously not an unbiased observer.

But it seems to me that the introvert sees an extrovert and, rather than say, “Why can’t you be more like me, just keeps to himself and lets the extrovert do his thing.

Coffee, a book, and solitude when you want it or community when you want that. The introvert’s life.

But the extrovert, encountering the introvert, not only says, “Why can’t you be more like me,” and then sets out to convert the introvert to the extrovert’s ways, insisting he join a group of six other extroverts for community.

Am I right on this, or am I being too harsh on the extrovert, or perhaps not understanding the extrovert at all?

At a literary agency blog that I follow, the post this week had to do with ways and means of marketing our books, but slipped in this statement:

A high percentage of writers are introverts, yet even they crave community…just on their own terms.

And I thought ain’t that the truth?

You ask what’s the point of this post? Maybe nothing. Perhaps I’ll print it out on cardstock half-size sheets, carry them with me, and the next time an extrovert tries to draw me out in a coffee shop, hand him or her a copy.

Author Interview: Susan Barnett Braun

Susan is a long time writing friend and colleague.

I met author Susan Barnett Braun at the 2011 Write-To-Publish Conference in Wheaton, Illinois. I attended that conference with the help of a generous Cecil Murphey scholarship. Susan did the same. I was one of six people who were members of an on-line writing group, The Writers View 2. Six of us in that group received scholarships. We got an e-mail loop going before the conference and agreed to meet, share meals together, and hang out.

Susan received her scholarship by other means, perhaps direct from Cec’s website. But when she got to the conference and quickly came to know of our little huddle of scholarship winners, she “crashed our party,” so to speak, and joined us for meals and other conversations.

Susan and I kept in touch afterward. She was beta reader for several of my books, providing great feedback. One of her daughters, who is talented with graphic arts software, has made several of my book covers.

What evil lurks in the organ loft? You’ll only find out on Kindle Vella.

Susan recently dipped her toe into the Kindle Vella pool. She wrote about it on Facebook, and I exchanged e-mails with her about the process and prospects, then offered to interview her here about it.

Q: Before we get into Kindle Vella, tell us a little about your writing career up to this point.
Susan: I loved to write even as a child, and wrote several books while in elementary school. I would write them out in longhand, and my mom would type them for me on the typewriter. I’d even take a few snapshots and add those in. I wrote my first book as an adult in 2011, when I wanted to write a memoir of my childhood for my 3 girls to read someday. After doing that, I attended a writing conference which further lit the writing fire. I wrote two other books in the next year or two; one a biography of “mad” King Ludwig II of Germany, and the other a children’s biography of Kate Middleton.
Q: In an e-mail to me, you implied that “Kindle Vella got me writing again”. That implies you’ve been through a dry spell, or at least a non-writing period. Is that true?
Susan: It is, as far as books go. After my whirlwind of writing the three books about a decade ago, I didn’t write more books. I just didn’t have the ideas or the motivation that I often felt when I had written my books. I have, however, blogged since 2008. That’s been great in keeping me still writing in some form. I have to say it feels good to be working on a longer work, a story/book, again.
Q: What made you decide to write a serialized story for Kindle Vella?
Susan: In June, our family took a vacation to Glacier National Park and the surrounding area. One night, we had dinner with my husband’s cousin. She is a prolific writer, and she immediately asked if I’d heard of Kindle Vella. Although the term was vaguely familiar, I didn’t know anything about it. She told me about how she’d become a big fan of Vella. It’s a different way of releasing a book, one chapter (or “episode,” as Vella terms it) at a time. She works full-time writing grants, but on Saturdays she writes on her Vella stories and then releases a couple of episodes each week. She liked the way it’s so easy to do this, plus after a story is fully released on Vella, Amazon makes it easy to convert into an e-book or paperback 30 days later. She was so excited about Vella, and spoke so highly of it, that I caught her enthusiasm and thought I might enjoy trying it too. I like the idea of serialized stories — it reminds me of the “old times,” when authors often released stories this way, but in magazines, not online.
Q: Tell us something about the story line in Phantom of the Organ.
Susan: Fiction isn’t my usual genre. In thinking about what I might write as a fiction piece, I thought of what I knew. That led me to the world of church, and specifically, a church organist. I thought I might like to try writing a mystery, and I liked the idea of combining a church with a mystery. My girls have always loved Phantom of the Opera story. All those threads came together for me, and I came up with a church organist who is practicing at night in the church, when she hears strange noises … The Phantom of the Organ was born.
Q: Rumor has it there will be a season 2 of PotO. Is this true?
Susan: Yes! My original story line took me 10 episodes to tell. I thought that was that. But then, I realized I was liking the characters and setting I’d come up with. I wanted to spend more time with them! So, I thought up another mystery for season two; this one involving items going missing from St Matthews church. My plan at this point is that I’d like to come up with four seasons. With each season running just over 10,000 words, that would be a book nearing 50,000 words. At that point, I would plan to release the story as an e-book and paperback. Can you tell I’m having fun with this?
Susan’s books can be found through her Amazon author page. That doesn’t get you to her KV story, however. Here’s the link for that. I hope you will check it out.

The Reverse Reasoning of Screwtape

Reading it for the fourth time, studying it in Sunday school for the second.

A few months back, I asked our adult Sunday School class for ideas on what they wanted to study. We were in the midst of a video series, and had a plan for ten lessons on Holy Week before and after Easter. So this was some medium-range planning. At that point, I asked the class to write down what they wanted to study in the coming year. Several people wrote “The Screwtape Letters”.

I wasn’t terribly happy at first. It wasn’t so long ago, maybe 15 years, that we studied this book by C.S. Lewis. It’s a great book, one of three books I would say that had the most influence on me in my Christian walk. But to study it again? But, if that’s what the class wanted, we would do it.

We finished the study we were in, had the Holy Week study, did one or two weeks of fill in stuff, and started the Screwtape study on June 18. I taught that week and got through the Introduction and Letter #1. The next week my co-teacher taught Letter #2.

That got us into a rhythm of one letter per week. Last Sunday, I taught Letter #7. What I’ve found, and I think my co-teacher has found, is that we can easily study at this pace without it being an overwhelming burden on us to prepare. But, with 31 letters in the series, plus that toast that Screwtape makes at the end, this study will take a long time.

Last weeks was quite interesting. World War 2 has broken out, and the new adult Christian that the junior devil, Wormwood, is tempting, is confused. Screwtape advises the young devil, who is his nephew, to work on that confusion. Keep confused if you can, or tempt him into becoming either an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. Screwtape wrote,

“All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged.”

The Enemy is Screwtape’s word for God. He sees God as the enemy, wanting to see all men live in extreme devotion to Him.

That rang true to me, but only once it was combined with Screwtape’s next advice. The extremes give rise to the “Cause”, something that is extremely important to the man being tempted (called the Patient) that he begins to mix it in with his religion. It become Christianity and the Cause. Religion becomes the reason for the Cause. Then, the Cause and religion are on equal footing. Then the Cause becomes primary, and religion is what justifies the Cause.

This gives rise to factions and cliques. The Cause becomes so important that a small group forms around the cause. Believers in the Cause are freely admitted; non-believers are excluded and looked down upon. Even if the Cause is a godly thing, with just a little tempting on Wormwood’s part, the sequence that turns the godly cause into an evil Cause is not that big of a stretch.

This is something we need to watch out for in the church. Each denomination has its Cause, i.e. its own doctrine, its own reason to be. Once we begin to think we are the only ones who get it (Christianity) right and look down on all others, the Cause has supplanted God as our reason to be. That can happen with denominations, with individual congregations, or with any small group within a congregation. It is something for us to watch out for.

I think I’m going to like this Screwtape study. I have some study materials from last time, and I’ve found much more available on-line. This is at least my fourth time to read the book, and I have found much help in it for myself even on this re-read.

One More Big Hole

Here’s where they sat for over 20 years.

As I’ve posted before, my wife and I are slowly in the process of shedding possessions accumulated over the first 44 years of marriage. You would think that with the moves we made we would be lean in terms of stuff, but, alas, not so. When we went overseas our company paid to store our stuff so we didn’t have to get rid of anything. Now, being septuagenarians and knowing we will someday have to downsize, each possession is getting scrutiny. Does it bring us joy? Will we ever use it? Will we want to move it to whatever our next place is?

And here is the hole.

I’ve written before about some dis-accumulation we’ve done. Here’s a summary.

  • Dad’s tools. When Dad died in 1997, my brother and I split his tools between us, while my brother took all the hardware. My share, except for a very few I found uses for, sat in garages, unused, catching dust. It was in 2020 that I realized, “Do I really need six saws and eight planes?” Facebook Marketplace was my friend then, and I sold everything I didn’t see myself ever using.
  • They aren’t elegant to look at, but are obviously old. People like that.

    Mom’s books. In the 1930s and 40s, Mom accumulated books, some of them through book-of-the-month clubs, some through one-off purchases. Most of them were commonplace books with no sentimental value. Except they were Mom’s. I came to realize I never would read them, couldn’t keep them forever, and sold off about 800 of them. The last 120 or so went to thrift stores, with a couple figuratively stained by my tears.

  • And the “innards” aren’t splashy the way encyclopedias became—before they migrated to the internet.

    Dad’s Stars and Stripes. I’ve written about them before here and here, so I won’t go into it much. They are now in residence at the University of Rhode Island Library’s special collections, most likely in the inventory/curation process, waiting for scholars to pour over them.

  • Grandpa’s trunk. I also wrote about that not so long ago. The trunk Grandpa Oscar Todd brought with him when he emigrated from England to the USA is now at the home of a cousin, and much appreciated there.

So, what’s the new “hole” in our house, left from dis-accumulation?

  • Uncle Dave’s encyclopedias. These are a very nice, gently worn, 1900 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As our son urged us to do even more in anticipation of future downsizing, I listed them on Facebook Marketplace for a pretty good price. I had no action on them for a few weeks, then someone made an offer while we were out of town; I countered; a bargain was struck; and the transfer of money and books and bookcase happened on Saturday. The hole is in our entryway, which serves as an antique room.
A close-up of the covers. How they did encyclopedias in 1900.

The encyclopedias sat for many years (1950 to 1997) in the basement of the house I grew up in in Cranston, Rhode Island. Covered by a bedsheet, I found them one time in my teenage years, and had occasion to use them only once, in 1990 while visiting Dad. He said they were mine when he “croaked”.

I’m pretty sure they belonged to David Sexton, my grandmother’s uncle and the man I’m named after. He took my grandmother in when she was a single mother in a strange country and became a surrogate dad to my mom—or maybe a surrogate grandfather. He emigrated to the USA in 1887 and made his way to Providence in 1903. I suspect he bought the encyclopedias around the time of his arrival in Rhode Island.

A typical title page. Again, not splashy. Only a hole now because they belonged to Uncle Dave.

Our house here had the perfect place to display them. They took up little space and made a nice decoration for anyone entering the house. But are they something I would keep forever? I wish I could. When our son was here in January, he encouraged more dis-accumulation. My wife and I were at an impasse as to what to get rid of next, and as a result I decided these antique books would be next.

So they are gone. Even the bookcase, which was an antique of the same era, is gone. After confirming the sale, I wound up getting a full-price offer from another buyer. But, having made the bargain with the first buyer, I felt it had to go to them.

What more can I say? There is a hole in the entryway where they stood, and a little bit of a hole in my heart. But I have many other legacy books that belonged to Uncle Dave. Someday they will go the way of all earthly possessions, but not just yet.

Library Memories – Part 5: Later Adult Years

This post continues in the series of my memories of times in libraries Earlier posts are: Part 1, Part 2Part 3, and Part 4.

After moving to northwest Arkansas, with our children a little older, with a house that had space to accumulate books, with the school libraries apparently adequate, we spent less family time at the Bentonville library. However, from 1991 to 2000, my office in downtown Bentonville was across the street from the Bentonville Public Library. I went there frequently during lunch hours, even sometimes on breaks. Once in a great while, I would go there with some of my company work and find peace and quiet, away from the telephone and people, and get some real work done.

I don’t have memories of particular books or discoveries from this library. One thing I did was look at investment publications, particularly Value Line. You couldn’t check that out, so I would sit and read it over several days. Was it time well spent? I’d like to think so. The things I learned about stocks, for investment and trading, provided a foundation for how I use the stock market now for supplemental income.

The Bentonville Library built a new building at the edges of downtown, and our company moved way away from downtown. I used the Bentonville library less. In the last ten years, it has been more of a meeting place. I used to meet with our pastor there for coffee and conversation. I donated a number of my books to this library for their local authors section.

Nowadays, my library forays are to the Bella Vista Public Library. While I sometimes browse and find a book to check out, it’s more a place for organizations I belong to to hold meetings. My critique group, Scribblers & Scribes, meets there one afternoon a month. Another group, Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society, meets there one afternoon a month. And another writers group, Village Lakes Writers and Poets, does the same. So I’m in this library typically three or four times a month. A recent expansion makes it much more functional.

If it weren’t for the 2000 or so books in our house, which I’m trying to sort through and read those I don’t think I will ever read, or read again, I would get more books from the library. I actually checked one out last week. But that was at the Big Spring, Texas, Public Library. It was a biography of C.S Lewis. I had only a few days to read it, and couldn’t get through all the 300 pages in that time, not with the babysitting and pet sitting duties to read a whole lot. I read a number of sections, determined it’s a book I’d like to read in full, and returned it to the library on the way out of town. I’ll see if they have it in Bella Vista, or if I can get it on interlibrary loan.

This will be the end of this series. I conclude by saying: Long live the public library!

Library Memories Part 4: Asheboro, NC

This post continues in the series of my memories of times in libraries Earlier posts are: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I learned a lot from reading Congressional Quarterly in the library.

In 1984, after returning to the USA from Saudi Arabia, we settled in Asheboro, North Carolina, instead of Kansas City. Asheboro, the seat of Randolph County and then was a city of less than 30,000 people, stretched out along a highway. In the downtown district was a very nice library.

Our children were 5 and 3 when we moved there, and many times in our four years in Asheboro did we take them to the library. That meant a lot of time spent in the children’s section. I think the number of visits increased as they became young elementary school students.

But it was in the adult section that I made two discoveries in this library. They weren’t, perhaps, quite as mind-opening as the atlas of the universe in Dhahran, but they led to other things.

The first was the magazine Congressional Quarterly. I had never heard of it before. It is (was; the name and format of the magazine may have since been changed) a reporting of Congress’s actions, and other things related to our national government. It may have been a weekly magazine then. For sure it was at least monthly, not quarterly as the name suggests.

While the kids were engrossed in their books, I would sit with CG and read for hours. Well, we didn’t really stay in the library for hours, but I could have. How interesting I found this publication. It seemed to me to be balanced politically, neither pro-Democrat nor pro-Republican. I learned much from its unadorned pages.

Dad at the truck-mounted mobile unit of the “Stars and Stripes”, putting out the Combat Edition in Italy.

The second discovery was a large book—coffee table book size—about the Stars and Stripes military newspapers. Readers of this blog will know that my dad set type for the Stars and Stripes in Europe during World War 2. Yet, we kids didn’t know that in the basement was a steamer trunk full of those S&S, sent home during the war and preserved by my grandparents then passed on to Dad.

So, I found this book of the S&S, which consisted of copies of the newspapers along with narrative about the newspaper. I skimmed it in the library and was fascinated by it. When we were preparing to drive to Rhode Island one year for a holiday, probably Thanksgiving, I checked the book out and brought it with me. Dad looked at it with less interest than I expected. But we had a good conversation about the S&S. Dad was glad that one of his children took more than a passing interest in what had been most of his war service.

That was in 1985 or 86. Fast forward to Fall 1990. Kuwait was now behind us, I was spending a couple of weeks a month in Boston working a temporary job while the family stayed in NC. On weekends, I drove to R.I. to spend time with Dad. Somehow in our conversation the S&S came up. He said, “Come with me. I want to show you something.” He led the way downstairs and showed me the trunk with the newspapers. He said, “When I croak, these are yours.”

Dad died in 1997. Lynda and I drove from Arkansas to Rhode Island for the funeral. One reason for driving instead of flying was to be able to take the S&S back with us.

So, my obtaining the Stars and Stripes from Cranston RI came about probably because of time in a library in Asheboro NC. Like I said, perhaps this isn’t an earth-shattering memory, but it fits with my current theme. Thank God for libraries.

Library Memories Part 3: Early Adulthood Discoveries

Continuing with my library memories series. This post will likely be shorter than the last two. See them here and here.

This was a good library find, probably in 1976 or 1977.

A long, long time ago, back in the second half of the 1970s decade, I first discovered the joys of library use for other than school stuff. Lynda and I bought a home in Mission, Kansas in 1976. Early in career, early in marriage, there wasn’t much budget yet for buying books. So we found the nearest public library, and checked books out there.

Two particular books that I got at that library stand out in my mind, even after all these years. The first was The Origen by Irving Stone. This is a biographical novel about Charles Darwin. Stone has done many of these, and I’ve since read a couple of others. This was my first introduction to Stone and to the concept of the biographical novel.

I didn’t know a lot about Darwin at that time, either, other than what I learned in science classes, that he had put together the theory of evolution and that he was English. The novel treated Darwin very fairly, I thought. He was a sympathetic character, and I learned much about him from that. I came away with a favorable opinion of him. I’ve since read Origin of Species, and reviewed it on this blog. I’m currently reading the first volume of Darwin’s letters, although I’m still in the lengthy biographical preliminaries. Hopefully I’ll be in the letters themselves in a day or two.

The second book was a genealogy book on Lynda’s family, The Cheney Genealogy. This was published in 1898, and I believe I got it via interlibrary loan rather than it being a book at our local library. At that time, I was having conversations with Lynda’s dad and paternal grandparents about genealogy, and just beginning what would become a serious effort to trace family history.

In that book, I found much information that appeared to be relevant to her family, though with a missing link that prevented me from making a firm connection to the original Cheney ancestor, John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. Years later, in the internet era, I was able to build upon The Cheney Genealogy and make the connection. But it all started with my local library and the book I accessed through it.

23 Feb: Editing to add: One other book I found at that library was Rees Howells: Intercessor. This told the story of Rees Howells, a Welshman who was in the USA at the time of the Welsh revival around 1903. He went home, was converted himself, and began working in Christian ministries, including a Welsh bible college. He became known for his praying. The book tells about times of intense prayer in his personal life, in ministries, and in the life of the British nation during World War 2. The story of Howells has stayed with me, and in later years I picked up a copy of his biography for my personal library. Another good find at the Shawnee Mission Public Library.

Well, these are not profound memories, but they fit in this series, so here they are. Look for more going forward.

Library Memories – Part 2: The Company

These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.

The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.

This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.

We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.

In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.

In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.

I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).

That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.

My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.

This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.

Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.

The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.

That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.

I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.

Library Memories, Part 1: childhood and teen years

The Elmwood Ave. Branch of the Providence Public Library, in a recent picture on Google Earth. Just as I remember it.

Right now, say for the last three years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in libraries. I met our pastor for coffee from time to time in the Bentonville Public Library. The writing groups I’m in meet in libraries, either the Rogers Public Library or the Bella Vista Public Library. So four times a month on average I’m in a library. That’s not a lot, but it got me to thinking about libraries I’ve been in and memories I have with them.

Growing up in Cranston, Rhode Island, you would expect me to have memories of libraries there, but I have none. I don’t think we ever went to public libraries in Cranston. They were a little too far to walk, there were no convenient bus routes, Mom didn’t drive much, and Dad didn’t take us, so for whatever reason we weren’t library patrons in our hometown. In my adult years, when visiting the hometown, we took our kids to Cranston Public Library—in a building that wasn’t there when I grew up—when we were home visiting Dad.

I don’t think our elementary school had a library, and I have almost no memories of a library at my junior high school. I know there was one there, and I used it, but don’t remember it. But I remember our high school library. I wasn’t in it too often, but was some. One main memory I have was a date in the library. I was talking with my sister’s best friend, two years older than me, about how I had never had matzoh (she’s Jewish). So she said she would bring some to school and share it with me. This was my sophomore, her senior year. We agreed to meet in the library a half hour before school on a certain day. We sat at one of the tables off in a corner, ate matzoh and shared pleasant conversation.

A recent photo of the main branch of Providence Public Library. Again, just as I remember it from the outside, though its neighborhood looks a little different.

You say that’s not much of a date, and you’re right. But, hey, went you had as few dates as I did (4 total in 9th through 12th grades, only 3 if you don’t count the matzoh date), you count everything you can as a date.

But, strangely enough, I have many more memories of public libraries in Providence, Rhode Island. I remember it was in 8th grade, after Mom had died. I had a history research and report assignment. Whatever library was in junior high didn’t have books that helped me. So I got Dad’s permission to hop on the bus and ride to the Elmwood Ave. Branch of PPL. We lived four house lots off of Reservoir Ave., right on a bus stop. The bus also stopped right in front of the Elmwood branch. You had to cross Reservoir twice on foot, but I think we had some traffic signals not far away.

So I did that. It must have been around wintertime, because I remember it was dark. I crossed Reservoir, caught the bus, rode it toward downtown Providence, got off at Elmwood branch, crossed Reservoir again, and entered a world of books. I still have some idea of the layout, of going to the history books and finding ten books that were suitable for the report. I spent an hour or more reading and taking notes (I didn’t have check-out privileges at PPL). I listed all ten books. Then I went home by bus. This probably happened from around 7 to 9 p.m. If memory serves me correctly, I did this a second time for this report.

As a side note, I listed all ten books in the bibliography of my report, even though I really only used two of them in writing the report. I remember I got an A on the report, and the teacher wrote, “Great bibliography!”

I may be unclear about one part of this. When Mom died in August 1965, Dad’s shift at ProJo ran from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m, usually with an hour or two of overtime. At some point they moved him to a 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift, usually with two hours of overtime. If his change of shift happened after my 8th grade year, it’s possible that Dad drove me to the library as he went to work, and I took the bus home. No matter.

When I got to high school, the Elmwood branch seemed inadequate, I guess, because I took the bus to the main PPL in downtown Providence and did research there. I remember it was closed stack when I first started doing this and open stack by the time I graduated high school. You wasted a lot of time waiting for someone to find the books you needed and bring them to you. The open stack shifted the searching function to you. It still took time, but at least you could look at other, nearby books once you found the one you wanted.

I probably went to PPL Main Branch between five and ten times per school year. I kind of remember the layout. In fact, I remembered where both the Main branch and Elmwood branch were and found them easily on Google Earth. They are still in the same buildings and look the same as I remember them. I suspect, of course, that the insides are much changed, as technology updates have surely been made. No more card catalogue. Yes, that’s how I found those history books at Elmwood: looking in the card catalogue, finding one book that sounded good, finding that shelf, and see a great treasure before me spread out left and right, up and down.

I hope my grandchildren will have equally fond memories of libraries. I try to take them our ours whenever they visit, and to theirs whenever I visit them. We have a sizable library of books in our own home—as they do in theirs—but it’s not quite the same.

And, before some of you express being aghast at a 13 or 14 year old boy taking the bus in Providence, Rhode Island unaccompanied by an adult, after dark, all I can say is it was a different world and a different city then. And greatly different family circumstances that required it.