In musing about how I (eventually) became a librarian, I thought about how my parents bought us the Encyclopedia Americana when I was nine. Or twelve or at some time in between; I don’t quite remember.
I am pretty sure the purchase resulted from a door-to-door salesman visiting our home. While our parents didn’t get into the details of the household economy, my sisters and I knew that we weren’t particularly flush with cash.
My mother was a bookkeeper for McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton, NY. She was well-suited to the job, as I also saw in her home budgeting.
My father was probably working nights at IBM in nearby Endicott, driving a forklift, a job he hated because it was not intellectually stimulating. He had done and was still doing other jobs, notably floral arranging, sign painting, and a bit of singing, but they were not lucrative enough to support a family of five.
So the purchase of the Americana was a big deal. I’ve read the set costs somewhere between $200 and $300, depending on the binding. That would be around $2000 in 2026 dollars.
It was pitched as an educational investment for the family. But everyone knew who was most likely to read it was the kid who memorized stats from the backs of his baseball cards.
Aardwolf?
Sure enough, I read the entire set, starting with Aachen, followed by aardvark, aardwolf… I didn’t know what that was, but it isn’t an aardvark or a wolf. It took me more than a year to finish. But I sped up the process when they purchased an annual update to the standard set, to reflect the changes, usually political.
One of my sisters commented that my father was certainly the one who used the Encyclopedia Americana more than anyone else, besides me. I was told that he wasn’t much of a student as a kid, but his innate curiosity as an adult required him to always be learning.
Along with the World Almanac, which I received for Christmas every year, my parents boosted my geek cred.
Les Green and Gertude (Trudy) Williams got married on March 12, 1950, and stayed together until my father died on August 10, 2000; my mom died on February 2, 2011.
Once upon a time, as I’m sure I’ve told you, I thought that, if I kept learning, I would eventually know everything I wanted to know. I read the local newspaper and watched the local and national news, first Huntley/Brinkley on NBC, then Cronkite on CBS.