Bookmobiles provided weekly reading source for thousands of Chattanoogans

When Chattanooga police stopped a car with an overloaded trunk on the McCallie Avenue overpass in 1965, they thought they had their man.

They were looking for a car of the same description that was suspected of being loaded down with illegal rum and headed for a distribution point.

What they found, according to a 1965 Chattanooga Times article, was Chattanooga Public Library employee Patricia Kidwell with a trunk load of books heading to restock the library’s then-popular Bookmobile.

As late as 1975, before the Eastgate and Northgate branches of the library opened, the Bookmobile was responsible for 26 percent of all the library’s material in circulation. When the Bookmobile was shelved at the end of 1991, it was responsible for only 1.8 percent of materials in circulation.

But thousands of people who grew up in Chattanooga from the 1950s through the 1980s fed their reading habit with a weekly visit to the mobile library.

“Walking into the Bookmobile on a hot summer day, and then to be able to sit on the floor and look through the books before I picked out my stack, is a very vivid memory for me,” said Lisa Burgess, 49, of Ooltewah. “I tried to stay as long as I could before going back home to sit under the tree in the front yard and start reading.”

As early as 1931, a book truck under the supervision of the County Extension Service began supplying books to Hamilton County Schools for recreational and supplementary reading. The library took over the work in the summer to provide books to what was referred to as “outlying areas.”

A 1949 Chattanooga Times story detailed the library’s use of an improvised Jeep station wagon that made eight stops per week, six at segregated white recreation centers, one at historically black Lincoln Park and one at Third and Holly streets.

Later that year, the library purchased its first Bookmobile. Within 11 years, it was offering nearly 3,500 volumes at 35 stops around the city.

Linda Crook Martin of Tulsa, Okla., said from 1954 to 1958 her family lived on 13th Street across from the Ridgedale Community Center where the Bookmobile stopped.

“I can remember the musty smell of books ... and looking forward to the visits,” she said.

By late 1962, the Bookmobile in service had less than 40,000 miles but was in constant need of repair. Collection boxes were even set out to help defray the approximately $17,000 cost of new equipment.

Within a year, a new truck and two aluminum trailer setup were purchased with a special appropriation from the city.

Circulation in July 1963 was more than 43,500 volumes.

With the advent of the Bookmobile, it was predicted circulation at the central library would fall off, head librarian Elizabeth Edwards said at the time, but it did not.

With the two trailers and a $10,000 contribution from Hamilton County that made the library eligible for $20,000 in funds from the federal and state governments, the library extended its service to East Ridge and Red Bank in 1965. A year later, 720 books were checked out in one day during the Red Bank stop.

“I have very fond memories of the Bookmobile that came to the old M&J supermarket in East Ridge in the late 1960s,” said Ms. Burgess. “It came on Thursdays, and I couldn’t wait. I would go across the street and through the neighbor’s backyard, and it was right there.”

In 1967, the trailers were making 15 stops of one hour to seven and one-half hours. By 1982, one trailer was making 16 stops of 45 minutes to three hours.

In 1991, when the announcement was made that the Bookmobile was to end its service, the library had three branches and was about to open a fourth.

“To check out a book at the Bookmobile costs the library three times as much as it does to check out a book at a branch library,” director Jane McFarland for the now Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library said in a 1991 Chattanooga Free Press story. “Records show us that with the continued openings of branch libraries, the Bookmobile has become obsolete and cost-prohibitive.”

David Clapp, the current director, said he worked at the library during the Bookmobile’s last few years.

“It went to about 20 different locations,” he said. “It went all the way to Sale Creek and Lookout Mountain, I think. It certainly labored. It just didn’t justify the cost.”

Ms. Burgess said she wished other people could have the chance she did.

“I sure wish kids now had the opportunity to make those memories,” she said.



http://timesfreepress.com/

The Runner: A slim book that doesn’t run very long

Alright bad pun. But in this new novel by David Samuels, The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue—this should be interesting.

“In the early 1990s, Princeton University erased from its records the grades and race times of sophomore Alexi Santana, a self-taught star runner with a colorful history. The Ivy League university had to erase its records because, in fact, Alexi Santana never existed. He was the invention of a 28-year-old drifter with a criminal record named James Hogue,” the AP article states.

Publishers Weekly notes, “Though Samuels has a gift for contextualizing people and events, he misses his mark in this repetitive and fragmented profile. He is so taken by his elusive subject, whom he calls a convicted fabulist, that he lets Hogue, a compulsive liar and criminal with repeated offenses, off the hook far too easily. To Samuels, Hogue's behavior is as harmless as the youthful lies the author formerly told strangers on airplanes. But the lie and the con are not one and the same, and the reader winces as Hogue cons his way past Samuels's otherwise intelligent grasp.”


http://books.monstersandcritics.com/