Not long ago, while reading an interesting opinion piece by Emory Earl Troops in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on George Orwell's 1984 and efforts to restrict the books available to students, I was reminded of an experience I had 45 years ago.
Back in the 1970s, I was an avid viewer of the NBC's Weekend, a Saturday evening program hosted by journalists Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbee. Weekend was a newsmagazine, but unlike the staid, establishment demeanor of 60 Minutes over on CBS, Weekend could be funky and irreverent.
For example, the show opened with the guitar riff from the Rolling Stones' Jumpin' Jack Flash and at the end of each episode, the anchors signed off with "...and so it goes..." a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.
One particular Saturday in 1978, Weekend profiled the attempt by General Electric (then NBC's parent company) to patent an oil-eating bacterium. Host Lloyd Dobyns said something along the lines of: if you thought the idea of corporate patents on microorganisms sounds like something out of George Orwell's classic novel 1984, you're not alone.
As a science-fiction fan, that wry, off-hand comment by Dobyns piqued my curiosity, and so early the following week I stopped by the main branch library in downtown Fort Wayne, pulled a copy of Mr. Orwell's book from the shelf, and took it up to the front desk to check it out.
There was no self-serve scanning of library books back then—you handed your selections to a library employee, and they stamped the return date on the little cards tucked into the manila pockets glued inside the books' front covers before handing them back to you.
On that day back in 1978, however, when I handed the grey buckram-covered copy of 1984 over to the librarian behind the desk, she examined me very closely before asking a couple of a questions.
This had never happened before, as most of the books I had checked out at the library up to that point had been light-weight juvenile tales such as Robert Arthur's The Three Investigators mystery series or Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr space adventures. 1984 was the first book from the adult section of the library that I'd ever attempted to check out.
First, the lady librarian asked me if I knew what 1984 was about, and I replied with a vague statement about authoritarianism that I'd cribbed from Lloyd Dobyns—even if I wasn't entirely sure what he meant at the time.
Next, she asked me if I thought I was old enough to understand Mr. Orwell's book, and I replied with great pride that I was one of the most advanced readers in my class (as I'd recently been told by one of my English teachers).
The librarian, who, like many of her peers back then, seemed to be of indeterminate age—not quite young but not really old, either—paused for what seemed like an eternity while peering at me through her cat's eye-framed eyeglasses before, apparently satisfied by my answers, finally processing the book and handing it over to me.
At the time, I was simply happy to have successfully checked out a book I'd been curious about, and only later would I come to appreciate how George Orwell's cautionary tale helped prod me to move beyond books offering simple escapism and explore more challenging narratives.
Don't get me wrong—As a teen I still loved reading about John Carter of Mars and Doc Savage, but not long after reading Orwell's 1984, I was inspired to check out novels by Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser from the library, books I may not have discovered until much later if not for that nameless (but perceptive) librarian downtown.
For that reason, I agree with Mr. Troops, the author of that opinion piece in the Journal Gazette—kids are smarter and more resilient than we give them credit for, so censoring the books they have access to does them a great disservice.
I often think about how my life would have been different if that librarian had decided 1984 was unsuitable for me back in 1978. Sure, I would have eventually read Orwell's book in high school (which I did—and it was one of the easiest assignments ever thanks to my previous familiarity), but I would have missed out on all the great adult fiction I'd read in the interim—slowing my advancement both as a reader and a critical thinker.
By trusting me to handle Orwell early on, that anonymous librarian opened the door to a whole new world of more challenging fiction, for which I'll always be grateful.
There's more to come in the next dispatch.
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