by Susan Orlean
The telethon was held in January 1987 and ran live for twenty-four hours straight, then was rerun for the following twenty-four hours. Volunteers manned a bank of two hundred phones for call-in pledges. The fund-raising goal was $2 million. Celebrities were wrangled to appear on the show, reading from their favorite books. There were dozens of celebrity readers, including Red Buttons, former governor Pat Brown, Angie Dickinson, Lakers coach Pat Riley, Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, and Henry Kissinger. Dinah Shore read from The Prince of Tides. Charlton Heston read the last chapter of Moby-Dick. Zsa Zsa Gabor showed up but forgot to bring a book.
Some of the other celebrity guests performed. Lodwrick Cook, known as a staid corporate executive, danced alone onstage to the song “Just a Gigolo.” A reporter covering the event described his presentation as “seductive.” Cook’s wife later told the Los Angeles Times, “My mother called me and told me [Lod] was dancing . . . and I said, ‘Oh, my God.’ ” Cook’s performance was so stimulating that, within minutes, it generated a hundred thousand dollars in pledges. Wyman Jones excelled, especially on piano. Throughout the telethon, Gene Scott’s band, which was named the Un-Band, played Beatles covers. Scott smoked his way through a case of cigars, announced each reader and performer with a flourish, and in general seemed delighted by the spectacle, by the gush of pledges, by the unusual assortment of powerful and famous people arrayed on his stage. In the end, the telethon exceeded its $2 million goal. It might have been one of the strangest nights in the history of Los Angeles, which is a city that has had its share of strange nights.
12.
Special Report of the History and Present Condition of the Sheep Industry of the United States (1892)
Published by Authority of the Secretary of Agriculture
636.305 U51
Let’s Go Gold Mining (1964)
By Hall, J. P.
332.4973 H177
Slavery in the West: The Untold Story of the Slavery of Native Americans in the West (2011)
By Nixon, Guy
970.3 M685Ni
Les Caresses . . . (1921)
By Richepin, Jean
F.841 R528-4
Among the first books acquired by the Los Angeles library were Hints to Horse-keepers; On the Sheep Industry; How to Make Money; and the simply titled Honey Bees. The earliest public library in the city was established in 1844, when a social club called Amigos del País opened a reading room in their dance hall. At that time, there weren’t very many books in Southern California, and the larger collections were in the Spanish missions and unavailable to the public. When Amigos del País fell into debt, the reading room closed. Interest in having a library in town persevered, and in 1872, an association formed to establish a library in the city. To raise money, the association sponsored a “Dickens Party,” which partygoers attended dressed as their favorite Charles Dickens character. The party lasted for a full week. Hints to Horse-keepers and On the Sheep Industry were purchased with proceeds of the party.
The first thing the library needed was a building. A member of the library association named John Downey agreed to donate space in a building he owned, the Downey Block, in the center of the city. The block had small offices and an outdoor arena where weekly slave-labor auctions were held. The slavery was permitted under an 1850 California law that allowed white people to buy Native American children as “apprentices,” and to “bid” on Native Americans who were declared “vagrant,” and oblige them to work off the cost of the bid. (The law, known as Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, was not repealed entirely until 1937.)
The library opened in January 1873. Membership was five dollars a year. At the time, five dollars represented several days’ pay for an average worker, so only affluent people were able to join. Library rules were schoolmarmish and scoldy. Men were required to remove their hats upon entering the library, and patrons were discouraged from reading too many novels, lest they turn into what the association labeled “fiction fiends.” Books considered to be “of dubious moral effect, or trashy, ill-written ones, or flabby ones” were excluded from the collection. Women were not allowed to use the main facilities, but a “Ladies Room” with a selection of magazines was added soon after the library opened. Children were not allowed in the library at all.
The space in the Downey Block consisted of a reading room furnished with long tables and straight-backed chairs. There was a small checkroom where patrons stored their hats and umbrellas; on occasion, people stored chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Even though the new library was welcomed, many people worried that sharing books and being in close quarters could spread disease. The space was “cramped and inadequate . . . a menace to life,” according to the Los Angeles Herald. At the time, influenza, smallpox, and typhus were rampant in cities. One city official told the Los Angeles Times that anyone who checked out a book knowing someone in his or her family had a contagious disease was committing “nothing short of a crime.”
The first city librarian of Los Angeles was a dour asthmatic named John Littlefield. He hated the crowded space more than anyone, and he tore out of the reading room whenever he could to hide in his office and smoke a medicinal compound of jimsonweed to soothe his lungs. According to one of the library’s early annual reports, Littlefield’s smoking was unpopular with library patrons. “As [Littlefield] coughed and wheezed and gurgled and smoked,” the report states, “the abominable fumes of the burning [jimsonweed] permeated the whole establishment and nearly choked everybody in it.” Littlefield, in general, seemed burdened, regretful, and tormented. Any time he was called out of his office, he muttered, “Well, if I must, I suppose I must,” which was followed by a loud groan. Somehow he managed to last six years in the post. His successor was an alcoholic painter named Patrick Connolly who barely made it through the year.
Mary Foy
Mary Foy was only eighteen years old when she was hired to replace Connolly. While it is surprising that such a young person would have been considered for the position, the bigger surprise was that this young person was a woman, since in 1880 the library was still an organization run by, and catering to, men. Women were not yet allowed to have their own library cards and were permitted only in the Ladies’ Room. No library in the country had a female head librarian, and only a quarter of all American library employees were women. The feminization of librarianship was still a decade away.
Foy turned out to be a stern and efficient administrator, even though she was so young that her father had to walk her home from work every day. The library didn’t have a catalog, but Foy was so familiar with the material that she could find anything on the shelves in just a matter of minutes. She pursued overdue fines with a vengeance, depositing them in a leather purse she wore slung across her chest like a bandolier. The adult male patrons respected her. Among her regular responsibilities was refereeing their chess and checker games, which were played all day long in the reading room. She was also constantly settling bets between patrons who were arguing points of trivia.
Mary Foy probably would have continued as city librarian for years, but when the mayor who had appointed her left office in 1884, the library board voted to remove her. The reason cited was that Foy’s father was doing well enough financially that he could now afford to take care of her; it was presumed that she no longer needed a job. In addition, a popular rancher named L. D. Gavitt had just passed away, and his daughter Jessie was desperate for work, so the board decided to appoint her to the position. Foy left under protest and published a sharp criticism of the library board in the newspaper as she left. She went on to become a teacher and a suffragette.
Gavitt and then her successor, Lydia Prescott, ran the library quietly and without incident. In 1889, a newspaper reporter from Ohio named Tessa Kelso was appointed to the job. Kelso was broad and busty, wore her hair short, and went out in public bareheaded—a shock at a time when most women had long hair tied up in chignons or topknots and never appeared on the street without a hat. Kelso was u
nmarried and smoked cigarettes. People referred to her as “unconventional.” She was so brilliant and forceful that she persuaded the board to hire her even though she had no relevant job experience except that she once covered a library convention for her newspaper.
Kelso thought the library was stodgy and needed to modernize. She abolished the membership fee. In no time, the number of cardholders rose from a little more than one hundred people to twenty thousand. She moved most of the books onto open shelves and allowed children over twelve years old to use the library if they had an average of ninety on their school exams. She set up “delivery stations,” an early version of branch libraries, in outlying areas where immigrants were settling. She moved the library from its crowded rooms in the Downey Block to a much larger space in the new City Hall building. With the additional space, she hoped the library could expand and begin loaning more than books; she pictured a storeroom of tennis racquets, footballs, “indoor games, magic lanterns, and the whole paraphernalia of healthy, wholesome amusement that is . . . out of the reach of the average boy and girl.” She believed a library could be more than a repository of books; she felt it should be “the entertainment and educational center of the city.” This ambition never came to pass during her tenure, but it anticipated by almost a hundred years the modern notion of what a library can be.
Although Kelso wasn’t trained as a librarian, she wanted a highly trained staff. She hired as her deputy a woman named Adelaide Hasse, who was the champion female bicycle racer in Los Angeles as well as a trained librarian, and they established a library school—one of the first library programs on the West Coast. The school became famous for its rigor. A number of its students reacted to the academic pressure with fainting spells and nervous breakdowns. In 1898, a student at the school named Corinne Wise died suddenly. Some people attributed her death to extreme anxiety over her exams. Kelso dismissed this as nonsense and even suspended two students for gossiping about Wise’s death.
When Kelso arrived, the library’s collection was just twelve thousand books. She acquired new books, and during her tenure, the collection grew to three hundred thousand. In 1893, Kelso signed a purchase order for a large number of novels, including one by the French author Jean Richepin. A protégé of Baudelaire, Richepin was known for the fulsome erotic tone of his work. After he published La Chanson des gueux in 1876, Richepin was charged and tried in French courts on the grounds of gross indecency. By the time Kelso ordered Le Cadet, Richepin had attained a measure of acclaim in Europe, but his work was still considered shocking in the United States.
The library’s book committee signed off on the purchase of Le Cadet, but it’s unclear whether anyone on the committee knew what the book contained. For one thing, none of them spoke French, and the book might have been one of many on a list that was only quickly perused. Le Cadet arrived at the library with no fanfare. It was processed and shelved like any other book and might well have stayed unnoticed for decades. But through some serendipity, the book was noticed by a Los Angeles Examiner reporter who was familiar with Richepin’s racy reputation. The reporter’s resulting story about the book caused a commotion. It triggered a score of critical editorials in local papers, calling Kelso’s judgment into question. The head of the First Methodist Church of Los Angeles, Reverend J. W. Campbell, believed Kelso was flirting with the devil, so he began a public prayer vigil for her soul. “Oh Lord, vouchsafe thy saving grace to the librarian of the Los Angeles City Library,” Campbell preached, “and cleanse her of all sin, and make her a woman worthy of her office.”
Kelso left Le Cadet on the shelf and then took what the Los Angeles Times called “a sensational and decidedly novel action”—namely, she sued Reverend Campbell for slander. She argued that his condemnation had interfered with her ability to do her job and that she hadn’t known that Le Cadet was controversial. What was more, she pointed out that the book committee, not she, approved all acquisitions. In her suit, she noted that she wasn’t a Methodist, so it was particularly slanderous for a Methodist minister to condemn her. She asked for $5,000 in damages—the equivalent of almost $140,000 today.
The case twisted and turned the issue of free speech for months. Kelso maintained that the acquisition of the book was an expression of her free speech. Reverend Campbell argued that his right to pray for someone’s soul was an expression of his free speech. As the lawsuit advanced, Reverend Campbell’s right to free speech seemed to gain the moral upper hand, though the court decided in Kelso’s favor on the grounds that Campbell had indeed intended to disparage her. The church settled for an undisclosed amount, but the victory cost Kelso far more: Public opinion and the library board were never on her side again.
Shortly after the Campbell case, Kelso sued the city, saying she had never been reimbursed for expenses she had incurred when traveling to a library convention. She was awarded the money, but the enthusiasm for litigation finally did her in, and as soon as that suit was settled, the library board urged her to leave. She resisted, saying she had been good for the library, but the board persisted and prevailed. All library matters were followed by the entire city, so Kelso’s forced resignation played out very publicly. The front page of the Los Angeles Times declared, “IT’S ALL OVER! Surcease of Agony on the Librarian Question. A special meeting of the board . . . was called yesterday afternoon for the purpose of removing Miss Kelso’s scalp with all due ceremony.”
After Kelso, the library chugged along under the quiet stewardship of directors Clara Bell Fowler and then Harriet Child Wadleigh. It grew and grew and then outgrew the quarters in City Hall that had at first seemed so capacious. The library was a bit of a madhouse. Patrons elbowed each other at the reading tables. Books spilled out of shelves and off countertops and were stacked on stairs and in the attic. Some moldered in the basement. At the urging of Harriet Wadleigh, the library board launched an appeal to fund a new freestanding library, but nothing came of it. “WANT NEW LIBRARY,” a story in the Los Angeles Herald reported. “No Funds in Sight Is the Reply.”
The library expanded like the city expanded. Los Angeles was flourishing and spreading. In 1887 alone, two thousand Realtors sold property in the city. Southern Pacific Railroad and the Santa Fe Railway were in the middle of a price war, and at one point, a train ticket from Chicago to Los Angeles cost just one dollar, an almost irresistible temptation to head west. The railway compressed the immense, yawning distance across the country into a few days and some spare change. Hundreds of thousands of people rushed to California. Over the next quarter century, it proved to be one of the largest internal migrations in United States history.
In 1898, Harriet Wadleigh’s husband struck a vein of gold in their backyard orange grove, and in 1900, the couple decided to go on permanent vacation. The timing was auspicious, as Wadleigh had been tangling with the library board. Her replacement, Mary Letitia Jones, was the first city librarian of Los Angeles to have graduated from a library school. Before coming to Los Angeles, Jones ran libraries in Nebraska and Illinois, where she had been commended for her pleasantness and professionalism. Jones was thin-lipped and tall and wore a blond chignon that added six inches to her height. She was serious, efficient, and innovative in her own quiet way. She began her term by dropping the age limit for children in the library by two years, allowing ten-year-olds to come in. She recruited African American librarians for branches in neighborhoods with large black populations and encouraged them to build a collection of books about “the Negro experience.” The library thrived. It was circulating about four hundred thousand books annually when Jones took over. By 1904, that number had almost doubled.
The general public didn’t really agree on the value of public libraries until the end of the nineteenth century. Before that, libraries were viewed as scholarly and elite, rather than an indispensable and democratic public resource. Many public libraries still had membership fees. The change of attitude began with the philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie, who launched a li
brary-building project in 1890. Carnegie was born in Scotland and then emigrated to the United States. His father was a weaver, and the family teetered between poverty and modest comfort throughout his childhood. As a young boy, he had little money to spare; for instance, he couldn’t afford the two-dollar membership fee for the local library. Eventually, he made a fortune in steel and railroads, and at one time he was the richest man in the world. When he reached middle age, he decided to commit the last third of his life to giving away his money. The disappointment of not being able to afford the local library had stuck with him, and he chose libraries as one of the main beneficiaries of his philanthropy. He offered large grants to build libraries in communities that would commit to supporting them with tax revenues. Towns and cities began lobbying to get Carnegie funding, and the process of applying had the effect of rallying interest and support for public libraries. Carnegie ended up building nearly 1,700 libraries in 1,400 communities. He funded six small libraries in Los Angeles, which were added to the main system as branches.
Mary Jones
By the time she had reached her fifth year on the job, Mary Jones had reason to assume her job was secure. The board’s 1904 annual report noted her fine work. In June 1905, Jones attended the monthly board meeting. After the business at hand was completed, the head of the board, a lawyer named Isidore Dockweiler, turned to Jones and asked her to resign. As Jones sat dumbfounded, Dockweiler explained that the board believed it would be in everyone’s best interest to have a man run the library. He already had a man in mind—a journalist, poet, editor, historian, and adventurer named Charles Fletcher Lummis.
