From childhood to adulthood, a library card grows with you
August 30, 2021
Anna Jean Mayhew has been a Charlotte Mecklenburg Library cardholder for most of her life, and while the details of where and when she first received her card may be a bit foggy, the fond memories and joy her library card have brought her over the years are crystal clear. Growing up in Charlotte in the 1950s, Anna Jean remembers taking weekend visits with her mother to the Main and Myers Park (then called South Branch) Libraries, and the rush of excitement she felt whenever she checked out a new book. “Books took me to places I could never go to, from the Arabian desert of Ali Baba to an island in the Pacific where boys went from innocent to feral — Lord of the Flies. I used my treasured library card for journeys to the unknown,” she recalls. “The books I borrowed had glued-on pockets inside the back cover with date-stamped cards that bore the names of previous borrowers. I was thrilled to see my name added to such lists.”
It was through her Library card that Anna Jean first discovered her love of storytelling. Among her favorite childhood books was Horton Hatches the Egg, which she read so many times she was eventually able to recount the story to friends and family word for word. “Kids were delighted by my rendering of that fantabulous story; I had a querulous voice for Mazy the Lazy Bird and a faithful voice for Horton,” she recalls. “I was the family teller of tall tales, and it didn't matter that most of my stories were not original, but adapted from Dr. Seuss, Carolyn Keene (fictitious author of the Nancy Drew books), and Edgar Allen Poe — I loved the gasps at my horror stories, especially after dark in a dim room where my listeners shivered in anticipation of my next gruesome fable.” Anna Jean also drew inspiration for her storytelling style from the countless hours she spent during Saturday matinees at the historic Manor Theater on Providence Road, watching films of heroic tales and cowboys. There, she would sit with her friends in the dark with Charms suckers and bags of popcorn, imagining all the ways the handsome cowboy on screen might escape his almost certain fate.
There is one memory she’d rather forget, however. “Fines! To this day I dread fines, which have always seemed like a judgment on me, tokens marking my failure to conform,” she says. She dislikes fines so much that she has taken up the practice of rounding up her fine amount to the next dollar as a personal form of penitence for “breaking the rules.” Lucky for Anna Jean, she no longer has to pay penitence or anything ever again as the Library is officially fine free as of July 1, 2021.
The Library continues to serve Anna Jean in adulthood and in her career as a writer as well. The author of two novels, The Dry Grass of August and Tomorrow’s Bread, she uses her library card to access valuable historical resources that aid in her story development and research. Her latest novel, Tomorrow's Bread, is a fictional story centered in the very real Charlotte neighborhood of Brooklyn, a thriving Black community that was wiped out during Charlotte’s urban renewal. It is a story which required extensive research and attention to historical details. Anna Jean knew just who to turn to for help – the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room. “I was determined to know the facts about the neighborhood of Brooklyn before I began to write that story, and without the help of the great librarians in the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, I would never have uncovered details that were by then sixty years old,” she says. “So, a library card assists in time travel, from the known present into an ancient world unnumbered millennia ago.”
Are you ready to take your own journey with the Library? Signing up for a Library card is easy.
Click here to sign up for one and download the CMLibrary mobile app on your smartphone or tablet for immediate access to place holds, access resources and much more. Join Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and get your Library card today!
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This blog was written by Darrell Anderson, marketing and communications specialist for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.