When I was five and before our mother packed us into the back of the black Ford Econoline station wagon to drive away from our father and the black working-class life we thought we’d know forever, my two older brothers and I either walked to, were taken to or dropped off at Hamilton Lane Public Library, a few blocks out of downtown Hamilton back when Hamilton had a downtown.
It was a beautiful, stately, whitewashed building that used to be some conquering white Hamiltonian’s manse.
What mattered most was its serenity and its proximity to Dr. Gregory Gressel’s medical practice across the street where my mother took the vitals of old white people and worked the front desk.
Gladine could leave us there a few hours when we had days off from school but she had to work. Or she could order us to walk there from our funeral home-cum-bungalow across Symmes Park from downtown.
With Randy leading us, we were a trio of precocious brown ragamuffins: Randy, artistic and esoteric in his burgeoning homosexuality; Kenny, rambunctious and kinetic in a skinny body that couldn’t hold his energy; and me, deceptively shy and quiet except when I knew adults were listening.
We’d traipse through town, stopping to touch and talk about stuff we could never examine when we were with grown-ups.
Usually, we’d stop first in front of Petricoff’s Bicycle Shop to bang on the window, triggering the alarm.
Once we realized no one ever showed up to check the disturbance, that lost its appeal quickly.
By the time we got to the steps of Lane, we were hot, sweaty and listless and all we wanted were books about dinosaurs and adventuresome children and Dr. Suess and the alphabet and colors and movie stars and all manner of important dead folks like presidents, explorers, astronauts and inventors.
I cannot recall exactly when I broke away from my brothers in the children’s room and started walking up the steps to the closed stacks, that mysterious perch where smart, moody librarians and secret spines lived.
But I did and a librarian, a woman, let me browse and wander, telling me where some general stuff was since I couldn’t yet fathom the Dewey Decimal System.
It was my own well-lit and expertly organized tree house that smelled like the mustiness of centuries of knowledge on paper, and I wanted to touch it all.
I used to run my fingers along the bottom spines of the books I could reach, stopping sometimes to figure out where “W” would go when I wrote my own book, probably about my only grandfather working in a coal mine.
Edward Hill was then my only hero.
By the time I’d disappointed myself more times than I could document in my journal or count, I was a 24-year-old, dyslexic, autodidactic, permanent college sit-out working at the Main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.
Living in my father’s basement where I’d sit up nights chain-smoking and scribbling furiously on one of many yellow legal pads strewn across my oldest stepbrother’s well-tested bed, I’d drive my 1973 yellow Super Beetle to somewhere between Lockland and Wyoming where I’d park it and get on the No. 78 Metro for the 75-minute ride into downtown Cincinnati.
On the bus I’d read and write some more, like I was studying for an exam.
At the Literature desk four hours a night and eight hours every Saturday, I learned about literature, etymology, languages, how to really use a dictionary and customer service from a gaggle of some of the most eccentric and brilliant people I have ever met anywhere.
Donna Monnig, Georgeanne Bradford, Bruce Sherwood, Jack Barrett, Myron Neal and Joan Luebering were like my teachers and graduate advisors the way they showed me how to investigate, think sometimes illogically in pursuit of an answer and how to treat all-comers with precisely the same amount of courtesy and service.
When I wasn’t hired as the department’s administrative assistant — a post that would’ve meant more money, full insurance and paid vacation — I was depressed and crestfallen.
However, it was Myron Neal who soothed me by saying: “You’re not meant for this department forever. You’re not going to be one of those people who stay here for the rest of your life. There’s something else for you.”
He was right.
After five years I left to take a job as a general assignment reporter at the Hamilton Journal-News, the daily of my hometown. I rediscovered the little city I’d left as a young girl and it all came flooding back to me, but it was merely another five-year plug in my journey as a writer and thinker.
I wasn’t then and neither am I now a journalist.
I have always been a writer.
In 1999 — a full decade after I’d started at the library uncertain and floundering — John Fox hired me to write a column in this paper and even though he fired me in 2006 it was another chapter in the life of my life with this city.
Yeah, in all my chronicling of this city — my city — I’ve seen us as a major player in this nation and a prime example of what can be right and sweet and what can go horribly awry in not only the Midwest, but in this country.
Ohio Against the World, indeed, to coin a concept and slogan from #FloydfromOhio.
And in the millions of words I’ve published about us, in all the honors, attention, infamy and hatred I’ve received, being named the first-ever Writer-in-Residence by the Library Foundation of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is, by a mile, the greatest gift of validation and security I have known.
It is a revolutionary act, in fact, and it is perfectly curvilinear in the scope of my life.
I will keep looking for myself in the fluttering pages in the books of the library.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2014.
