I don’t remember at what age Mom introduced me to Weymouth Landing’s old Tufts Library southeast of Boston, Massachusetts. What I remember perfectly about that wonderful day was her hand holding mine as we walked into Weymouth’s huge library to experience the absolute wonder of seeing all those warmly glowing wooden shelves filled with books! My two brothers and I had grown up with books around; our mother had turned two rooms of our home into a children’s kindergarten in the forties making more books handy to us than most other kids’ neighborhood homes. The words ‘more books’ on that amazing day became a relative term however because Weymouth Landing’s wonderful Tufts Library seemed to have millions!
I stood inside the huge double door entrance gaping until Mom led me into the stacks on a quick tour explaining where each type of book was kept and which sections I’d probably be most interested in. Then we tiptoed to the librarian’s desk where, speaking in hushed tones and then signing my name, I received a brand new library card. I still remember the first book I chose; it was written and illustrated by W. Ben Hunt and titled “The Golden Book of Indian Crafts and Lore,” a book I’d seen just once before somewhere and had always wanted to explore.
Books like that were grist for my mental mill and within weeks the cellar of our home was cluttered with half-made bows and arrows, headdresses, lances, tomahawks, and rocks in the process of being chipped into arrowheads. We had a full cellar with a smooth concrete floor which, on rainy days, we’d turn into a roller skating rink. But our clamp-on roller skates had a vacation once that W. Ben Hunt book jumped out at me from the Tufts Library stacks. I must have returned and retaken out that book five or six times before some other kid put a hold on it and my delightful routine was broken.
By then I had discovered a book with the title of “The Scientific American Boy or the Camp at Willow Clump Island” which followed a group of young boys through a summer of experimentation building bridges, docks, and other projects with lots of illustrations and explanations. It too was right up my alley and, luckily for me, I had a man living with us who had every hand tool imaginable and the temperament to pass on his skills to a young boy thirsting to build things. He was my grandfather, William Seach, a hero of the Boxer Rebellion who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his many actions in 1900. Together we built everything up to and including a canoe as well as turned completely wrecked bicycles into good-as-new ones.
Similar volumes filled all my years with a multitude of projects growing up, and on rainy days I found myself turning to adventure novels by the likes of H. Rider Haggard, Zane Gray and Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as classics such as “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”.
My life beyond high school went on with early years in the Navy flying the world followed by a two-year stint in a South Indian village with the Peace Corps, always with books as constant companions. Both the
Air Force and Navy bases I served on had decent libraries but the pickings in my little Indian village of Shivalli were nearly non-existent. Luckily Peace Corps supplied every volunteer back then with his or her very own library. This was something we had not known would happen and all three of us at Shivalli were delighted to see a truck arrive at our village site with a crate of books for each. They included classics, adventure, non-fiction, and even some light engineering volumes which came in handy as we tried to apply rudimentary solutions to age-old sanitation problems in our village. One section in that book dealt with hand flush latrines and, when we departed India two years later, we left behind a self-sustaining small business that manufactured and sold latrines to the State government of Mysore – since renamed Kannada.
After Peace Corp, I worked as a photojournalist at several newspapers before joining my father in his business. Local libraries were always handy and, since much of the business I cultivated came from Boston, I also spent time wandering through the huge and lovely Boston City Library where newspapers chronicling our American Revolution were still available to peruse.
As time went on my father retired leaving me to run the business and sometime later my youngest son took it over when I retired. By that time I had moved several times in Southeastern Massachusetts and finally landed comfortably in a small cape with over two acres of land in the town of Duxbury.
It was in Duxbury where I discovered reading delights available not only in an exceptional town library but also at a world-class DUMP!
In our dump – or to be more precise, our transfer station – there is a big area where folks can leave things that are either extraneous to changing circumstances or have been replaced but are still usable. Duxbury natives refer to this hodge-podge of sometimes useful items as the “Duxbury Mall” and there are people in town addicted to pawing through all that varied stuff on a regular basis finding useful gems to bring home. Some arrive home to face the wrath of their mates . . .
Across the way from the “Mall” is a long white trailer like those often used as offices for construction sites. Ours is chock-a-block full of books which various volunteers arrange on wooden shelves free for the taking. People downsizing or cleaning out attics and garages in town bring cartons of these books each week and volunteers go through them deciding which volumes to offer and which to trash. There you can find paperback and hardcover books on history and how-to, sports and yachting, antiques and biographies, romance and British novels, children’s books, magazines, and dictionaries . . . there’s even a section for jig-saw puzzles!
People like me visit that trailer nearly every week for reading materials which some carry along to the beach or on vacations and others take home adding to their own collections. Many are read and returned, a fact that becomes apparent when you see penciled initials inside to alert folks with faulty memories of books already read.
That old white trailer doesn’t take the place of our town library where you can find recently published books or put your name down for a book when it’s either returned or available in another town’s library. But you don’t have to return dump books in two weeks and you don’t have to whisper in the white trailer either. I use both venues and value them equally, although the trailer has an added feature I enjoy: their books are not categorized and therefore I often stumble upon a subject or author suddenly piquing an interest never considered before.
Now, before you decide to visit Duxbury’s dump for a few books, here’s a warning. You need to be a resident and purchase a dump permit in order to enter our dump . . . excuse me, our Transfer Station! But no matter the nomenclature, a dump by any other name is still a dump! Our dump is just plain superior one!
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