Entering the Springfield Library was like opening that ice box door in summer–the cool washed over you when you swung the massive old paneled oak door open–the cool and the smell. It came from the books and the humidity of a pre-air conditioned era. While the cool bathed your hot body, the smell entered your nose to be sucked inside to find your Center—a kind of intellectual incense as it were, welcoming you to the Temple of Knowledge, or what passed for one in Jacksonville in the Forties, at the corner of Tenth and Silver Streets.

Inside, there were books, lots of books. Not simply a few, sterile metal shelves of kaleidoscopically jacketed tomes, but shelf after oaken shelf of books covering every wall and almost every square foot of floor space with a muted red-green vertical patchwork of book spines. Preoccupied knowledge “Seekers” shuffled slowly down the aisles, the worn, but dignified oak flooring creaking softly in time to their studied pace. Others sat in comfortable old oak library chairs at the library’s one reading table located at the back of the building–also surrounded by shelves of books.

The cool, the quiet, the concentrated searching, the palpable respect given the Temple, added to the mystery of the Springfield. It was an esoteric, awe-inspiring place for a kid who could not then read. I felt as “religious” at the Springfield as I did at church. Even much later on when I could read the books themselves, the wonder of it all was still there. By then however, there was the added challenge of digging out the information required to complete a term paper for Mrs. Mayhall, my English teacher at Andrew Jackson High School.

If the Springfield was a “temple,” then its “priestess” was Mrs. Porter. A widow in her 60’s then, to a kid she seemed ancient. Mrs. Porter presided over the rituals of acquiring knowledge from the “altar” to which Seekers brought their books to be checked out or in. As the awe inspiring “Priestess” of that Temple of Knowledge at Tenth and Silver Streets, Mrs. Porter, who knew everything and every book that had ever been published, issued me my first library card when I was no more than six years old. I was impressed to the core of my being at the power of that card–that a six-year old would be trusted on his own recognizance with important books that held the riches of knowledge and understanding. I’ve been issued all kinds of cards since then–cards that took me into secret military places, the halls and galleries of Congress, onto bases and ships, that authorized me to drive and to vote, but none has ever come close to the power contained in that first library card from the Springfield Library.