Support your local library, the jewel in every community crown

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The stamp is what did it: "Duxbury Free Library" in bold print on the first page of a book I picked up in Canton.

You can do that now. Go to one library, request a book, and have it sent to another.

The word free startled me. I hadn't seen it on a book since I was a kid borrowing from the Turner Free Library in Randolph .

"Free" was important back then. I used to think - every time my mother would burst into "The Best Things in Life Are Free," which she did with alarming regularity - that it was a shame the songwriter hadn't included a stanza or two about libraries.

The library was the only free thing I thought warranted a song.

It used to amaze me - awe me, almost - that anyone with a card, which the library gave you, could go in and pick out a book and take it home and read it, copy words from it, memorize it even, keep it for two entire weeks, then return it and pick out another.

Rose and I had to pay 10 cents for the corn muffins we bought at Whitey's Bakery before we went to the library every Saturday morning. A lime rickey at the drug store, which we always got on the way home, cost 15 cents. The movies were a quarter, candy bars a nickel. Even church on Sunday required loose change.

Only the library cost nothing.

I never owned a book when I was growing up. No one I knew did.

We had Golden Books and fairy tales and Reader's Digest condensed novels lying around our houses but no real books. No "Bobbsey Twins" or "The Little Prince" or "Little Women" or "Heidi." I borrowed all these from the library.

I remember standing before the crowded shelves in the children's room, eager to be old enough to go into the young-adult room. Finally getting there and devouring Betty Cavanna and Rosamund DuJardin: "Paintbox Summer," "Double Feature," "Marcy Grows Up," "Double Wedding."

Children weren't allowed to take out adult books in Randolph in the late 1950s. The rooms themselves were off limits but Rose and I would sneak in every now and then, just to touch what we couldn't have and imagine the worlds within.

"Can we borrow an adult book if we have a note from our mothers?" I once asked one of the stern librarians.

"May we," she said, correcting me.

"No, you may not borrow an adult book. Only adults may borrow adult books."

In seventh grade I hit pay dirt. I got to borrow any book I wanted.

I still lived in Randolph but my parents sent me to school in Dorchester and every day, when all the other kids went home for lunch, I'd walk up to Codman Square and go to the library.

If Colestones had given away macaroni and cheese I'd have probably gone there and become a chef (how my family would have loved that), but macaroni was 45 cents a plate - and the library was free, so I went there instead.

In the Codman Square library I discovered new universes. Every book was mine for the asking. It didn't matter that I was a kid. I could take home anything I chose.

I chose "Out of My Darkness" and "They Loved to Laugh" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "I'm Fifteen and I Don't Want to Die."

I chose fiction and non-fiction, mysteries, history, science, war stories, love stories.

For a while I was awed. All this was mine. But you get used to a thing and you stop noticing how special it is. You don't mean to, but you begin to take it for granted.

All my life I've been borrowing from libraries and accepting all they give as if it were my due.

Today I can get not just books and magazines, but audiotapes, videotapes, books on tape, CDs, art work, sculpture and even museum passes. When my library doesn't have something I want, it borrows from another branch.

The Boston Public Library, which is the state's Crown Jewel, has everything a person could need. Its architecture and art work rival that of any museum. It sponsors 5,000 free events a year. And all of this is the public's, free for the asking.

Tomorrow from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., Channel 5 will host a telethon to raise money for the library. Their cameras will focus not just on the building itself, or the treasures within, but on people like me, whose lives were enriched and enhanced by an asset we so often take for granted.