Book Lovers All! By Lucille Taylor Kinsella

I think I was in second grade when Mom took me to downtown Geneva and introduced me to the library. One of the church women that Mom knew was a librarian there and she was starting a ‘story hour’ for the summer. Every Thursday, from 10 to 11AM, she would read a book and tell a story. From the first, I was hooked!

By the summer after 3^rd grade, I knew the way to the library and could go alone. Better yet, after story hour, I could walk through the children’s section and I had my own library card. I could take four books each week, return them the next week and get 4 more! This became my summer occupation. By the summer after 5^th or 6^th grade, the library held a contest. Read 8 books, half fiction and half about a country and write a story about your findings. I wrote, as well I remember, about living in Holland. I won the contest and was awarded a book to keep! (“Diantha's Signet Ring").

Yes, I was a reader, and descendant of a long line of readers! There are stories galore about those who came before me. Great Grandma Nancy Borthwick Baker, I never knew. But I have a letter written to my mother before she was married (1915) telling how Great Grandma was then living with her daughter (my great aunt Florence) in Scranton, recuperating from an illness. Aunt Florence was complaining to Mom about her inability to keep her mother in ‘reading material’. She went weekly to the ‘Carnegie’ to try to keep up ( a Carnegie was a building where books could be taken out—a library—given to many communities by Andrew Carnegie to promote reading. In fact, the original library in Lisle, NY near where Mom and Florence both grew up, was a ‘Carnegie’).

And there is my favorite cousin Gladys’ comment referring to her mother, ‘Ma might have married again after my father died, but there was no room on her bed!’(referring to the fact that the bed was always covered in books). ‘Ma’ of course was our beloved ‘Lilypickle’, Aunt Lil, Mom’s sister.

No better was their brother Adin! Mom always bought him a book for Christmas and his birthday. He leaned towards Zane Gray novels. Adin loved all Westerns, ‘Kill ‘em Bad Boys’ or whatever, and truly, his bed was his bookcase.

Growing up with Mom, I seldom saw her read more than the daily paper or a magazine. I thought it was the fact that those depression years there was little money to spare, and few people bought books. We surely had very few—but as I began to raise my own children, I understood why my memory was so scant. There was little time to read with the work involved with raising children.

 Ethel Baker Taylor

Magazines I could read sketchily, but I longed for books, but there was no time. Thus I was driven to invent the ‘reading lunch’ by my own selfish desire to find time to READ! Two or three times a week, especially in summer, when lunchtime was more flexible, we would read while eating lunch, and Yes, I still do it (Pat remembers these as ‘reading dinners’ and she too kept alive that tradition with her own children!).

Lucille Taylor Kinsella

Each of my siblings became ‘readaholics’. Esther even wrote a book report as she finished each book. 

I never knew Great Grandma Diadamia Mott Youngs, but she had the AMD gene (age related macular degeneration) and was very blind and deaf. Her daughter, Kate Youngs Baker was my grandma and she was a reader! Growing up, visiting her, there was always a copy of the latest farming magazine in the kitchen by the rocking chair near the stove. ’Farm Woman’ for her, and for Adin who ran the farm in my day, a man’s farm journal. When I visited Grandma, I used to read to her, for she had her mother’s gene and it grew hard for her to see.

Kate Youngs Baker and Friends!

Mom told stories of reading to her father, Byron Baker (whom I never knew) as he began to have eye trouble as he grew older. Perhaps glaucoma, as I know he spent some weeks in Cortland having eye drops inserted. In his early years when he farmed the land, he was often ‘out and about’ among his neighbors, selling books such as ‘San Francisco Fire’ or ‘Sinking of the Titanic’’; a job that I think he enjoyed more than farming. Grateful I am to him though, as those were two books we had growing up, and poured over by every kid.

Byron Baker

In Geneva, every Sunday night, until we grew old enough to go to ‘Young People Group’ at church, Daddy read Doris, Harold and myself a chapter from ‘Harlbert’s Bible Stories’.

Daddy’s choice in reading was more cosmopolitan. He liked western Indian stories. He used to sit on a tree stump by the stove and read in the evenings. I made many a cushion for that stump! His mother I also did not know but his father I did. He was deep into ‘National Geographic’ magazines.

With my own siblings, every visit or reunion brought an exchange of books, especially after the war years when paperback printing exploded!

Yes, I am part of a family of readers. A wonderful bequest! By the time I hit high school, the librarian told me I’d read every fiction book they had in the Geneva library. As you can see, Reading runs deeply in my DNA!