Each year it is estimated that over 246,660 women in the United States will be diagnosed with breast cancer and more than 40,000 will die.
On November 5th, 1895, in Pittsburgh, Pa., Andrew Carnegie attended the dedication ceremony of a building that bore his name, a massive gray sandstone structure built in the Italian Renaissance style. Sixty years later, three youngsters would make weekly pilgrimages to that building, marching up the steps and through one of three arches, passing beneath these carved words: “Free To The People.” Three of those people were happily entering the great joy of their green and growing lives: The library.
Each Saturday, weather permitting, an 8-year-old boy led his 7-year-old brother and 6-year-old sister from the house where their parents rented a room for the family and tramped down hills to the Oakland area of Pittsburgh. Our objective was the Carnegie Library, where we would find and read books for hours. I don’t remember if we checked out books, although I’m sure that if we could have, we did. In the 1950s, the library was connected to Carnegie Museum by a short tunnel. There was a parrot in a glass cage midway through the tunnel; the parrot would croak, “Gramma,” and we always stopped to encourage it to do so. Once in the museum — admission was free, then — we three would wander among the exhibits until we got tired, or hungry. The museum was a novelty to us, but the library was our great joy.
Just past the teenaged threshold, I got a job at the University of Pittsburgh, as a page in the closed stacks. My mother was a housekeeper for a regent of the university, which might account for my being employed at 13 years of age. Some shenanigans were involved, but I was paid 50 cents per hour, in cash. When I turned 14, my wages increased to $1.00 per hour (a better math problem for me) and I started to literally punch the time clock. But the greatest wonder for me was the astonishing number of books that I had access to. And the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, which housed its library, was one block away from the Carnegie Library I had frequented when younger.
The “closed stacks” of Pitt’s library was a place where special permission was required for entry. It was one floor beneath the main library, and connected by pneumatic tube and a dumbwaiter. My job as a page was to retrieve the requested books and place them into the basket of the dumbwaiter and send them upstairs to the main desk. I would listen for the whoosh and sock of an arriving pneumatic tube carrier and run to the dumbwaiter. I would twist open the brass carrier, dig out the request slips and run into the stacks to retrieve the books. I was the only non-college student employed there, but my fellow pages were happy to let me gambol about the stacks, collecting books. And I was happy to touch the old books, to feel the pages and smell the dust and must.
Recent TV coverage of the restoration and reopening of the New York Public Library’s historic Rose Main Reading Room highlighted an innovative little train that travels the bowels of the stacks and brings books up to the main desk. I watched in fascination as a little engine that could go over, around under and UP tracks, carrying books to the main desk. But I did see something that gave me a nostalgic flashback: a page, scurrying about the aisles of the stacks, retrieving books to be put into the little train’s carriages. And I remembered my young self, fascinated by and in love with the delights of the library.