Books can be powerful influencers. I am very grateful that the books I was exposed to growing up created such vast historical, geographical and imaginative worlds for me. To this day, my only real material wealth is in books. Most of my books do not have much trade-in value, though, so I keep some of them to remind me of the wealth of experience they have given me.
I am from the pre-television era. I had only once seen a television screen before we got our first TV the year that I started grade one. The library, though, was a place of wonders. When I dream that I am browsing in a library, excited about the treasures I am finding, it is always some variation of the stone and stained glass windowed West Vancouver War Memorial Library. Mom regularly took George and I on the seven-block walk there to take out library books.
We had some books at home too, classics anthologies that Mom had from her childhood: “The Arabian Nights”, “Alice in Wonderland” and fairy tale anthologies, all complete with Art Nouveau or Art Deco illustrations, which we unfortunately scribbled on. I also had one Disney Book about Mickey Mouse, which I quite liked.
One of my first little Golden books was about children in New York City. In it there were drawings of African American children in Harlem, Chinese American in Chinatown, and Italian American in Little Italy. It was an important book, even if stereotypical by later standards, because in white West Vancouver, I had never seen racially diverse people. At a young age, I learned that there was a big city called New York where all these different children lived and played like I did. I remembered my little golden book when I finally went to Manhattan.
Among my other earliest books were the classic European myths and fables. I learned that you should build your house out of bricks in case the Big Bad Wolf came and tried to blow it down. From “Chicken Little”, I learned you should not cry “wolf” unless it was real. I learned from the then more contemporary story, “The Little Engine that Could” that you should keep trying and never give up. One other early book I had was the curious “Baby Weems” about a baby that is born a genius and starts solving all the world’s problems from his nursery cradle, but then gets sick with a high fever and almost dies. He survives, but he loses all his superpowers and becomes an ordinary baby. Something about that strikes me now as an early Cold War story – the great post-1945 dream of a new world of peace that dims with the growth of the atomic age and Cold War.
I didn’t attend school until I was six and a half years old. Finally, in school, I soon got the knack of reading and became an avid reader. Before I was out of primary grades, I was reading “pioneer” (settler stories about survival on the prairies, the classic kids’ stories and classic fairy tales and even though they scared me, ghost stories. Intermediate grades introduced me to books like the Nancy Drew mysteries and even inspired me to try and write a mystery with my cousin Nancy, “The Secret of the Old Cabin”, but we didn’t develop the story line very far.
When we moved to Haney, the small local library was quite a disappointment. In junior high, I was not allowed to take books out of the “adult section” and I recall little of interest in the junior high school library at school
When I was in Grade Seven, I brought home “Gone with the Wind”, which for some reason, must not have been in the adult section. I had seen the movie at the local theatre. When Dad, who could be prudish, saw me with the book, he demanded that I return it to the library because it was “trash” and not appropriate for my age group. I was offended and a few days later, sullenly took the books he had given me that he said were more appropriate. They must have been books of his because they were old. Jerome K Jerome’s supposedly comic Victorian novel left me cold and I didn’t read it, but I plowed all the way through Dicken’s “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. Ironically, I grew up to have more sophisticated literary taste than Dad, but I am very thankful he introduced me to Dickens. How much I would have missed if I had never encountered Fagin, Bill Sykes and Rose, Mr. Micawber or Uriah Heap!
I was fortunate to have parents who were readers and had the means to buy books and magazine subscriptions. Besides the Vancouver Sun, which I started reading in grade five, my parents subscribed to “Time” , “Newsweek”, “Life”,”Macleans” “The Atlantic Monthly”, “The United Church Observer”, as well as the ubiquitous “Readers’ Digest”. These compensated for the teen magazines I bought with my own money. I followed fashion and makeup advice in “Seventeen” and I scanned “Teen Screen” and the like. At best, you could say my magazine reading was eclectic and not particularly snobbish.
In high school, as we followed US civil rights struggles on TV, my friends and I read “Black Like Me” and “To Kill A Mockingbird”, which was not on the high school curriculum. We didn’t have any Canadian novels at school, but we had John Steinbeck and I went on to read “Canary Row” and “East of Eden”. Our high school English teacher, a worldly guy in his late thirties, said he would like to order “Catcher in the Rye” for the school library, but he feared the School Board would fire him.
One of the odder and perhaps unfortunate parts of my teen reading were Grandma’s “Fate” magazines, which she left for us to read. The stories of ghost sightings and premonitions that came true, inevitably ending badly in someone’s death, probably contributed to creating an irrational part of my mind that to this day leads me to urge, “Don’t Say that!” when people say something bad for fear it will make the thing more likely to happen. Or maybe that is just some remnant of Highland superstition that I inherited.
The summer before Grade 11, I was sitting on the train on my way to visit our Calgary relatives, reading a paperback from the library, “The Nature of the Non-Western World” Two older women sitting nearby said, “my, what a serious book for a young person to read” and then proceeded to lecture me about which immigrants were all right and which weren’t. I never did read much of that anthropological study, but it was predictive of some of my future interests that I couldn’t learn about in Haney.
Not only was the library inadequate, it was difficult to buy books in Haney. There were only drugstore paperback racks and the Haney Art and Music Store, which featured bibles and cookbooks. I already had been given bibles by both my grandmothers. In Grade 11, I was excited when we went to Robson Street in Vancouver and I got to go to Duthie’s Paperback Book Cellar. Around that time, we also got an out of town membership at the old Vancouver Library on Burrard. I took out poetry, a book of Russian poet, Osip Mandelston (I’d read about him in Time Magazine) and the Poems of Mao TseTung because I was intrigued by the idea of a world leader writing poetry.
It seemed like it took forever, but the day came soon enough when I was eighteen and I moved to the big city. I not only had access to Duthies, the Vancouver Public Library and the UBC’s bookstore, I had the undergrad library and my most favourite of all, UBC’s Old Library with its nooks and crannies and vaults of treasures.
I grew up in the age before children were exposed to screen images at a young age, but if I look back now, I think the two books that influenced me most were photo books.
I repeatedly investigated a collection from an international photo show, “The Family of Man”. It showed pictures of people all over the world with different skin colours and clothing taking part in common activities and rituals of life.
I’m not sure how young I was when I was first captivated by Life Magazine’s “Picture History of World War II”, certainly I started to “read” it before I could read print. I spent a very long time staring at the strutting Nazi soldiers, and public hangings of resistance fighters, and carefully turn the pages to see again the dead soldiers on the beach, the bomb destroyed buildings, the survivors of Auschwitz . I’ve sometimes thought that I will still remember these images after even it I’ve forgotten many other things. I don’t regret seeing those photos. Those images, along with my books, helped make me who I am.
I was fascinated to see that you were reading many of the same books I read, such as Nancy Drew and old Dickens novels. As a teen Black Like Me was a major book for me in helping to understand the experience of black people in the US, and also a sense of a huge community of people who knew about it that white people did not see. To Kill a Mockingbird was also really impressed me..
I too was in a school system in Scarborough Ontario that was mainly white. I can count the number of fellow students of colour I remember in my classes. Although there were mainly people of colour in my high school, we were streamed, and I think most racialized people were in the stream that did not lead to university.
My father did not have the opportunity to finish high school. (Decades later he studied and got his diploma.). He encouraged me to get a library card when still very young.
My mother gave me a copy of Water Babies, a book that she had enjoyed, but it didn’t appeal to me.
What do I remember from the library? Thomas Paine, the deist and after that Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian.