The best little library ever...

One of the greatest joys of my life has been reading. I learned to read when I was four years old, thanks to a sister a year older who didn't seem to mind if I hung out while she was learning at home.

We loved reading so much we would use flashlights under our blankets so we could read at night, and Christmas time meant those electric candles in the window that gave enough light to read by.

My parents couldn't afford to buy a lot of books, so we used the bookmobile and then our community opened a little neighborhood library. It was called Perry-Highland Library, and it was in two small rooms at the back of someone's building on Perry Highway in Perrysville (north of Pittsburgh).

The adult/chapter book room included two desks for the volunteers who checked the books in and out, plus the stacks that went to the ceiling and two that were back-to-back in the middle of the room, which was probably 8' x 12'.

The children's room had the picture books and was roughly 5' x 5' with mostly shelves in the lower half of the three sides of the room, and windows above.

This is my rough approximation of the layout of the library - the blue rectangles are the stacks, the gray rectangles are the librarian desks. The black area is the entrance/stairs/little porch. The pinkish rectangle next to the desk is the card catalog.

As I write this, I realize I'm writing it as if it still exists - and it does, but only in my mind and heart, and probably my sister's and other folks like us who loved it. One of the reasons I'm writing this post is that I looked it up online, and there is not a single reference.  Maybe it didn't exist for many years, but it did exist. Mrs. Schweers and the other volunteers spent many hours taking care of the library so we could enjoy it.

One of my favorite memories of Perry-Highland Library is the summer day that one of the volunteers didn't show up, and Mrs. Schweers let me sit behind the desk and check in the returned books. I felt as if I'd won a million bucks that day.

To the left is the building as it looks today. The library was the part under the red line. You can sort of see the stairs on the left side, which are now made of cement, not weathered wood.

The little outcropping on the right is the children's room. As you can see, all of the windows were removed - the old library is now a storage area for the business above and in front.

To the right is the view from above what used to be the library. We lived about a quarter of a mile from the library, and as young as six or seven my sister and I were allowed to walk there and back together, without an adult coming along.

Some of those walks were pretty exciting. You could choose from a variety of routes - one of my favorites took me past the home of a beautiful collie named Lad, that one also went past a cemetery and a tiny little house on the corner that you could barely see for all of the trees and bushes that surrounded it.

The book cover to the left is one of the stories of the legendary Lad of Albert Payson Terhune (not the Lad I visited on my way).  My sister, brother, and I still own some of those books - they were sold to patrons when a larger library was built in the area. I was heartbroken to lose my beloved library, though I did enjoy the wider selection of the new one. It was never as homey, as intimate, but it did have greater resources.

There have been many wonderful libraries over the years, and I've appreciated every one of them.  Perry-Highland Library no longer exists, but I still remember my card number - J694. It was a gift, and one I will treasure forever.

Take care,
Doc