Niles: A library attacks itself

Niles Public Library, ca. 1966 (Village of Niles photo)

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The principal aim of the new board majority of a suburban Chicago library is to gut its budget.

Four Niles-Maine District Library trustees, three of them stealthy victors in a recent sparsely-voted election, want to carve deeply into the budget, resulting in staff and program cuts and a 23% reduction of hours. They apparently ran for the board because they don’t like the idea of the library putting its ink-stained little paws into their pockets.

I think that the members of this new conservative majority, like many other people who dislike spending public money on the public, misunderstand what a library is.

A library still can’t be replaced by digital access and a book delivery system. It is an actual important place -- usually the most visited public space in any community.

This particular library was critical to my own life as a youth. Without it, and its relatively generous hours, I may never have become an adult.

It goes back to when I was about 8, new in town from Chicago. I would tag along with my parents on Saturday morning when they would spend two or three hours at the Jewel and Dominick’s grocery stores, seeking the best prices. They figured I was too young to be left alone. They were right.

It was around this time, that when left to my own devices, I had watched “Horrors of the Black Museum” on television. That’s the one where the young lady puts a pair of trick binoculars up to her eyes, and the binoculars employ a couple of nails to ensure she never needs to use binoculars again.

I haven’t been the same since.

There wasn’t much for me to do on the grocery store trips. Once in a while, my father would pop for an ice cream cone, which went for a dime at Dominick’s. This was a rare act for him, because a dime could actually buy something then. And what would be the point of spending three hours at two grocery stores if you were going to waste dimes?

So I was given a choice. I could continue to be the third wheel at the supermarkets, with no guarantee of ice cream, or I could be dropped off at the library.

I took the books. Less walking.

What was then called the Niles Public Library was a narrow storefront on Waukegan Road, just south of Oakton Avenue. As I recall -- and I may misremember -- there was one small main aisle down the center, and tiny ones going off to the sides. 

I would find a book to read, then sit on the floor in the only relatively well-lighted spot in the place -- half-way down the main aisle, under a light bulb hanging from the ceiling.  People would climb over me to get to the back if I didn’t notice them coming. They were occasionally nice about it.

I rarely met any of my friends at the library. It was not a popular place on Saturday morning. That was when the cartoons were on.

When I was 10, the library built a modern building around the corner on Oakton Street. It contained 10 times as many books, with promises of more. It had a lobby and chairs. And lights.

My first Saturday at the new building, I noticed that the childrens’ books all had stripes painted on the spines. When I was ready to check out, none of the books I carried up to the counter had any paint on them. I had a feeling of foreboding.

The lady at circulation explained with a faint sigh that not only could I not take unstriped books, but I could only take certain colors. But she’d let me move up to the 12-year-old colors, she said.

Most of the striped books had pictures or big print on the front covers. My books mostly had nothing on the covers, and big-kid names like Mailer and Hemingway and McCullers on the spines. Not even close.

“I don’t ever want to read those books with the stripes,” I told the circulation lady. “I want these.” 

She called her supervisor. He looked at me for a few seconds.

“Okay.” 

That one word instantly explained to me what a librarian was. He or she was a special kind of government employee. A librarian protects the right of citizens to have access to information, not limitations to their access.

A librarian might rather die than work in a building where people are denied the information or literature that they want. Everybody gets their books, regardless of poverty or politics, inconvenience or age.

A librarian is the people’s champion, fighting against recording patrons’ interests for the use of the police, and for providing forums for voices of all types in the spaces of the building, if lucky enough to have them.

I was thrilled to have these heroic librarians on my side. I never again had to argue for what I wanted to read. My library card was changed, and it became my key to understanding the world far beyond the largely corrupt, racist and backward place where I was living.

I never saw the other boys from my block at the library, no matter when I went. If I had, I doubt the names of all but one of them would be missing from the internet to this day. If you’ve never been on the ‘net, can you be alive?

Certainly, but probably not. If you are indeed alive, you’ve gone to some trouble to avoid connecting with people.

I often wonder if the understanding of the world I got from the Niles library is part of what protected me better than my pals in subsequent years. It definitely helped introduce me to the life of the mind. 

I’ve had good friends in the library business. I’ve met many bad library board directors, and a few bad administrators, too. But just about all the staffers were great.

Niles librarians remain on the side of the people of their community. The library executive director resigned, and immediately upon getting wind of the plans of the board, the staff formed a union to fight the $1.5 million cut.

Yes, they are trying to protect their jobs, which are funded by about a third of that cut, but they’re also fighting for programs, and to protect the rights of people to get into the library when they want to. 

There might be another little boy who needs to be there Saturday morning. There might be another organization that needs a meeting room Thursday evening.

A group of citizens also formed, calling themselves Save Niles Library, to support the three trustees fighting for the status quo. Those trustees walked out of a June 30 library board meeting to deny the majority the quorum it needed to move on stripping the library funding.

A public budget hearing will be held at 6:30 p.m. July 20  at the library at 6960 W. Oakton St. The board is to vote the following day.

The small-minded people attacking the source of knowledge of their community may succeed. But there will always be other elections when they can be driven out in shame. 

If they’re not, the shame will be shifted elsewhere.

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