Some of my best childhood memories are about libraries, and books in general. I remember vividly my fourth grade teacher at the Otter River Elementary School, Priscilla Sullivan, reading aloud The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, (published in 1961), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (first published in 1871!) and still one of my top 10 favorite books The Twits by Roald Dahl. This was a new book at the time!
Mrs. Sullivan was one of the three fourth grade teachers at the Otter River Elementary School, which was a strictly fourth grade school, with only three classrooms (does not sound very efficient). She was one of my favorite teachers ever, and her reading to us was my favorite part of the school day. My hometown library was the Boynton Public library at 2 School Street in Baldwinville (apparently now the Fire Department headquarters), adjacent to the actual Otter River. Unfortunately, somehow I still have a book that never was returned to the Boynton Public Library. I don’t even remember liking this book very much, so maybe it just got lost in the shuffle and resurfaced years later.
Back when I was a kid…As many old people stories go, my mother would drop me off by myself at the Levi Heywood Memorial Library in Gardner (then located at 57 City Hall Avenue, now the location of Gardner Family Medicine). I remember spending hours at a time there! I must’ve really gotten wrapped up in the books because I don’t remember any other people being there (maybe not even my little brother, who I’m sure I was supposed to be watching), but I remember what the chairs were like and I can exactly picture exactly where the entire Boxcar Children series (first published in 1921) was located. Hear me out, who didn’t dream of also being able to live in a boxcar like those kids?
Maybe all of this is why Matilda, also by Roald Dahl, is one of my favorite movies to this day. My time spent at the Gardner library was probably 1980 to 1982, and at that time you could even check out puppets. My brother and I would check out puppets and then host puppet show concerts while hiding behind the couch at home until our arms were tired of holding the puppets up for the show.
Fast forward about 25 years, Jay and I both worked for Little, Brown and Company Publishers, a division of Time Warner, at a time where they had an amazing employee perk called automatic distribution, which meant we each got one copy of every new title published, all the first editions. When eBay was first created, we were already married and ended up selling one of each title, and made a fair amount of Christmas money that year.
About 20 years ago, we had the opportunity to buy 12 matching bookshelves from a publishing company that was moving. We had always dreamed of having a home library, but with 6 kids, every room was a bedroom. Our ‘library’ at that time was three sets of these shelves in the living room, three sets in the den, and the rest of them went in the semi-finished basement. It didn’t feel like a library. When we began house hunting in 2014, the bookshelves almost didn’t make the cut. We put most of our furniture into storage. 12 big book cases take up a lot of room. We made a last-minute decision to not sell them and they went in to storage for almost three years. We bought our house pretty much furnished, and then two weeks later sold my mother’s house (this was December 2016 and then January 2017, proving that people buy houses year-round), and we moved the contents of my parents’ house into our new home.
A few months later we had the movers empty out our two huge storage units. As we were anticipating, what was in the storage units? what would the movers be bringing back that we actually need? At that point we had an over stuffed house. By dumb luck, our house has a room that the former owners called a passageway on the floor plans. This is a nice way of saying this room is more like a hall because you need to use it to get through to another room on the other side, so it was no good as a bedroom or even an office (although it was a Covid 12th grade classroom for a while). My aha moment before the movers came back was LET’S TURN IT IN TO A LIBRARY!
t’s not a fancy library with a sliding ladder, or anything like that. But it’s a really fun space that we have decorated obviously with books, but also oddball items that relate to the categories of the books. Need a snakebite kit? We’ve got one right over near the nature books. Shark tooth? In the geography and oceans section. Set of juggling balls? Those are in the children’s section, which, it turned out, we have so many books that I had to hijack a closet in an adjacent room to make a children’s library.
When we have time, Jay and and I go to the Wachusett Watershed Regional Recycling Center (open to residents of the five Wachusett towns plus Boylston and West Boylston), and we get interesting hardcover books, and then if we already have that title in paperback, we donate it back to the recycle center on a future trip. Here’s their Facebook page, which is kept up to date.
All this talk about books, libraries and childhood memories got me thinking about local children’s libraries, so I took to social media and asked for recommendations for today’s top local children’s libraries. The most frequently recommended one is West Boylston. Check them out! I’d love to hear your thoughts and memories of time spent at your local library. I encourage you to check out these libraries below and participate in programs that will stimulate your kids’ curiosity and creativity, and give you some time to connect with other parents.
Ashburnham
The Stevens Memorial Library
Ashby
Ashby Free Public Library
Athol
Athol Public Library
Auburn
Auburn Public Library
Barre
Woods Memorial Library
Boylston
Boylston Public Library
Charlton
Charlton Public Library
Clinton
Bigelow Free Public Library
Fitchburg
Fitchburg Public Library
Gardner
Levi Heywood Memorial Library
Holden
Gale Free Library
Hubbardston
Hubbardston Public Library
Lancaster
Thayer Memorial Library
Leicester
Leicester Public Library
Leominster
Leominster Public Library
Lunenburg
Lunenburg Public Library
Northborough
Northborough Free Library
Oakham
Fobes Memorial Library
Oxford
Oxford Free Public Library
Paxton
Richards Memorial Library
Phillipston
Phillips Free Public Library
Princeton
Princeton Public Library
Rutland
Rutland Free Public Library
Shrewsbury
Shrewsbury Public Library
Spencer
Richard Sugden Library
Sterling
Conant Public Library
Templeton
Boynton Public Library
Westminster
Forbush Public Library
West Boylston
Beaman Memorial Public Library
Winchendon
Beals Memorial Library
Worcester
Worcester Public Library