In Indiana: Here Comes the Bookmobile

By Frank Trippett

This was no ordinary bus. Anybody could tell as much from the fact that folks are being welcomed aboard by a human-sized cat of polka-dotted green. The mimic cat, it turns out, is named Readmore. And he--or she, or it--is part of the crew of this onetime school bus that the Indiana department of public instruction has dressed up as a roving Read-A-Rama, or bookmobile. The rig has rolled into leafy Claypool (pop. 464), the smallest of 102 cities and towns on its route, to stir up interest in reading by giving some books away.

Claypoolers straggle through the 40-ft. bookmobile for 2 1/2 hours--young and middle-aged adults, children with and without parents, and a good many grandparents. Inside, shelves flaunt 6,000 paperback volumes of fact, fiction and fancy, skinny picture books for preschoolers, fat classics for the solemn. The "Hardy Boys." The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. A Child's Garden of Verses. Mark Twain. Sinclair Lewis. Bernard Malamud. Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. But which one to pick?

The visitors' eagerness to choose something--anything--seems at odds with the widespread notion that nowadays reading is an endangered activity. The townspeople jostle amidst the shelves, teasing and badgering one another to decisions.

The first aboard, Gladys Yarian, assistant cashier at the Claypool branch of the First National Bank of nearby Warsaw, Ind., ambles back to her job across Main Street clutching The Call of the Wild. In her wake, Bank Teller Cindy Leslie carries off Little Women. The Rev. Steve Cain, 30, a Van Gogh beard and casual garb offering no hint that he is pastor of Claypool's United Methodist Church, chooses Marathon Man on the assumption, he says, that this nasty little spy thriller is about running. The Rev. Cain's daughter Rachel, 8, is a small celebrity in Claypool. Year before last, as part of a book-reading contest in the first grade, she was able to dash through 150 volumes, including Uncle Wiggily and The Yearling. Now she picks Laura Wilder's These Happy Golden Years.

Outside in the harsh sunshine, bookmobile workers ply everybody with posters and pins promoting--what else?--reading. Postal Carrier Wendell Brown emerges blinking at the cover of Louis L'Amour's The Burning Hills and waits for his wife Pat, who steps out bearing another L'Amour, The Lonely Men. Says Pat: "I got it for him." A well-fed matron waddles off with the Joy of Cooking.

Rolling libraries got going in 1905 with a horse-drawn wagon operating out of Hagerstown, Md. The motorized variety was widely in use before World War I and grew in popularity until well after World War II. Of late, branch libraries, mail order services and other ways of circulating books have been making bookmobiles seem a bit quaint, but there are at least 1,500 in operation in the 50 states. The Indiana department of public instruction still keeps two bookmobiles on the road each summer. This summer they distributed some 40,000 books, embracing 800 titles, at a cost of $40,000. The intent is mainly to stir a love of reading in children. According to Rosemary Hurst, coordinator of the Indiana Read-A-Rama program, it works fine. Children heckle teachers to tell "when the readmobile is coming." After a visit, local librarians report an upsurge of business.

By closing time, 11:30 a.m., at least 302 people have come out for the book bash--65% of the town's population. To achieve comparable participation in a civic outing, Indianapolis would have to send forth 451,000 people, New York City 4,550,000. The turnout seems amazing. Somnolent in its pleasant, maple-shaded neighborhoods and moribund elsewhere, Claypool is a place where a visitor is surprised at any conspicuous display of activity. On Main Street, the general store has been spruced up, but just opposite the only gas station stands closed and dusty. Jim and Lynda Snyder this year bought and refurbished the Main Street Cafe (open until 2 p.m. weekdays). Just next door, ugly debris can be seen through shattered plate glass in an abandoned store.

Claypool was born as a railroad town in 1873. It began to die with the rise of the automobile. Today, for shopping, play or work, everybody heads for Warsaw, nine miles up Route 15. Claypool, it is remembered around the bookmobile, used to have a fine depot. It used to have a high school, a tavern, a cattle market, a drugstore and soda fountain. It used to have a hardware store, its own doctor, even a dentist. It used to have a barber shop, a newspaper. Marvin Neff, 74, and his wife Lucy, 70, treasure some old sepia postcards that prove Claypool even had a handsome elevated bandstand, center block on Main Street, where brass-band concerts were given every Saturday night. Another card shows an attractive little commercial hotel. "The Shipley Hotel was right there," Neff says, pointing at a building now occupied by the Chamness Tucker Funeral Home.

Claypool persists, true. Yet it remains a bit of a puzzle that almost the entire town would surge forth on a hot Friday morning for an event that nobody, not even the sponsors, considers dramatic. The appeal of free anything, even books, doesn't quite explain it. Nor does the touching fact that the bookmobile visit was dedicated to the memory of a respected Claypool veterinarian and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Harrison N. Waite, both well-known lovers of books. Indeed, the remarkable turnout is not accounted for even by the fact that for people in lonely or quiescent places, reading has always been the surest nutrient for imagination, the most reliable route to the human community of mind and fancy.

The fullest explanation of the book mobile's attraction more likely lies in what the town has become: less a town than an accidental suburb, a collection of people who live on there long after the town's reason for being has gone. Trains only whistle as they chuff through Claypool these days. Such a place, in raw reality, provides precious few events to rally the folks into community. The brief stop of the Read-A-Rama provided just such an event, producing, by chance, a good day for all and enough poignant memories to fill a book.

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