From: Ruth I. Gordon <druthgo>
Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 10:22:08 -0700

It is necessary to know that I was a child during the last big Depression (the 1930s) and libraries did not have large stocks of books and those they had were really tired looking. Fortunately, my parents had books at home for us and they read to us. The books that resonate throughout the years were R.L.S. "Child's Garden of Verse" in an edition I can still "feel" when I think about it. Those poems provided a larger view of the world and showed me what I often thought (Why did I need to go to bed when in was light out? Yes, I was up in the air in the swing.) Another book was large with a picture of an elephant with a howdah on the cover. It contained many folk tales and I never tired of hearing the stories.

The Petershems provided me with my a great deal of information on nonfiction subjects: cotton, transportation, oil, coal, etc., etc. Recently I looked over one of them. Well, we do have much better books now--but they supplied a different world and may very well have laid the basis for my interest in history, technology, and a wider world.

In those years, the library also loaned large brown manila envelopes with pictures and these, too, gave me a glimpse of a world not my own. Pictures in an old Webster's dictionary and pictures in a very early edition of the World Book (or some such) were also important as was Nat'l Geographic.

Life changing--all in a world of long ago but they also showed a world in the primeval forests of the past.

Big Grandma
Received on Tue 23 May 2006 12:22:08 PM CDT