Fade to Gray: Love your library - The Saratogian

If you looked up the phrase “middle class” in 1975 you’d probably see my family.

My dad made a nice living working at the Watervliet Arsenal, while my mom was home keeping us kids in line and making sure we had all the chicken noodle soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a child could dream of.

We weren’t rich, but we certainly weren’t poor. One car, shared by all, a Christmas tree filled with presents underneath and church each Sunday morning at St. Joseph’s in Troy’s south end. On a good week, when there was a little extra cash in the kitchen drawer, my parents would order us a pizza from Red Front on Friday night which was the most amazing treat I’ve ever had.

Now when I say that I mean it. I’ve stayed at the Plaza Hotel in New York City and the Bellagio in Vegas and nothing on the room service menu could ever top a “Cheese on Top” pie from Red Front.

Cable TV hadn’t really been invented yet and video games consisted of something called “pong” which was little more than table tennis on a black and white television. Fun with your friends was a rousing game of “kick the can” or a game we made up called “chase-chase” where you divided up the neighborhood kids into two teams and played hide and seek with the added feature of tackling each other.

If you went home without a skinned knee, you didn’t play the game right.

I mention all of this because I want you to understand why one of my favorite places to be in the whole wide world in 1975 was the Troy Public Library. I’d catch the C.D.T.A. bus on the corner of 4th and Tyler streets in South Troy, ride the twenty or so blocks downtown, and then walk over to the library on 2nd street.

There’s a scene in the movie “Hearts in Atlantis” (based on a Stephen King book) where a young boy named Bobby Garfield is given a grown-up library card. He is upset because he wanted a bike, but a nice man named Ted tells him he was just given a key that would unlock the world. Ted was right.

I was Bobby Garfield in Troy 46 years ago, wandering up and down the rows and rows of books in the library, discovering authors and stories much more exciting than my simple little world.

I always admired authors and thought if someone had a book, they wrote sitting on a library shelf that was better than winning the World Series. As I’d sign out a new Hardy Boys mystery and climbed onto the bus for the short ride home, eager to see what crime or monster they would encounter and conquer.

I never told anyone back then I wanted to be a writer, some cards you keep face-down and don’t share with your friends. Then a teacher, the often-mentioned David Kissick of LaSalle and Lansingburgh fame, lit a fire under me about the writing and the hidden dream started to find its feet and follow each step toward the here and now.

I’ve written five books in the past five years, three of them for children and two for the grownups. It occurred to me a week ago that the library where so many books gave me joy, might want to have my novels to lend out to the next child who hops off a bus and is looking to escape in the pages of a story. So, I mailed them “Manchester Christmas” and “Chasing Manhattan” and now they are somewhere hiding in the stacks of the Troy Public Library.

I’m glad I was born when I was. Today, children have Google and Amazon and many don’t know the joy of exploring a library and discovering an author you didn’t know existed. The same can be said for walking around your favorite bookstore.

About 15 years ago I was in a bookstore in Manhattan killing time. I was going to grab the latest Grisham thriller, when I saw a book by an author who was new to me. His name is Tim Green. I picked it up and was thumbing through when one of the employees saw me and said, “Oh, he’s really good. Give him five pages and you’ll finish the book in a day.” Six Tim Green books later, I realized that only happened because I was there wandering about.

As technology advances and we can have everything instantly in our hands, I hope we don’t lose the simplicity of exploring a local library or bookstore. Does it take more time? Of course, but the reward is certainly worth it if you stumble upon something new and amazing.

I know this column is usually reserved for weightier issues, but I wanted to push the pause button on all the politics and mayhem and wish our librarians and bookstore folks a hearty thank you. You’ll never know what you did for a little boy from Troy. You were the onramp to my dreams.

John Gray is a news anchor on WXXA-Fox TV 23 and ABC’S WTEN News Channel 10. His column is published every Sunday. Email him at johngray@fox23news.com.

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