In September 2005 my father died after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. In the days and weeks that followed, I began thinking deeply about the values he had passed on to me, and their impact on my work.
First and foremost was his love of books and all that they represent—the world of ideas, the endless quest for truth and the beauty of language.
He inherited this orientation from my grandfather, an Englishman who had little formal schooling (he worked as a cutter of paving stones in the granite quarries of England, Wisconsin and New Hampshire) but loved literature and the life of the mind.
A life of hard labor prevented my grandfather from spending as much time as he would have liked on intellectual pursuits, but my father—after serving in the Army during World War II—went to college and eventually got a master's degree in library science. For the next few decades, he worked in the New York Public Library in Staten Island, where I grew up, and later in Manhattan.
As a young child, I frequently visited him at the library and wandered among the towering stacks, but I was not much of a reader in those days. I preferred television, records and my transistor radio. I think this indifference troubled my dad, but he needn't have worried. The experience of simply being around all of those books planted intellectual seeds that would later sprout and blossom.
There were books at home as well—shelves in almost every room of the house—and I found comfort in their mere presence. I'm sure that's why, to this day, I need shelves full of books around me, whether I'm working or relaxing. To me, they are unshakeable touchstones, as solid and reliable as my grandfather's granite blocks must have been, and no matter how chaotic life gets, I can always regain my sense of balance if my books are at hand.
In addition to literature—especially the poetry of Robert Burns—my father loved history and science. He was especially interested in botany, and he never limited himself to simply reading about it. When I was young, Staten Island was filled with wood, and on walks we took together he would tell me the names of plants, from honeysuckle to skunk cabbage. In this way, yet another seed was planted. I'm sure those early walks are responsible for ingraining in me a feeling that Emerson expressed so perfectly in his book Nature: "In the woods...a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of his life is always a child."
IN the 1960s, when Robert Moses was plotting to build a new highway through Staten Island, my father joined with other environmentally conscious residents to oppose the project and preserve what was then known as the Green Belt. I'm not sure how instrumental they were in saving it, but that doesn't matter to me at this point. What counts are the lessons I learned—that undeveloped land can be far more valuable than any construction project and that even the most influential power brokers can be defeated.
My father loved the urban landscape, too. When I was eight, he took me via subway to my first baseball game at the newly constructed Shea Stadium, and several years later we traveled up to the Bronx for bat day at Yankee Stadium. When I walked through the gate, an usher handed me a full-sized bat bearing a machine-copied signature of Mickey Mantle. To this day, it sits in the corner of my bedroom, a reminder of those golden years.
Years later, after I graduated from college, I would often meet my dad in Manattan for sushi, drinks at the legendary Algonquin Hotel or a lecture at the 42nd Street Library.
Some of those lectures were memorable ( especially enjoyed hearing Annie Dillard), but what I remember most about those outings are the conversations we'd have. My father was a liberal in the best and broadest sense of the word. He had his blind spots, as well all do, but he was fundamentally open minded and deeply committed to the fight for intellectual freedom and civil rights. In 1982, in fact, he teamed up with a colleague to write a book designed to help librarians deal with pressure from would-be censors.
"As we sail into the eighties," he wrote in the introduction, "we sense a growing fear of ideas and pressure to establish social 'absolutes.' The temperature of the debate has risen as positions of...intolerance are again considered respectable."
Rereading this passage again the other night, I couldn't help thinking how accurately it describe's today's social atmosphere.
My father was especially troubled by careless use of the word freedom by the very people who would undermine it. "Freedom," he wrote in the opening chapter, "is a word whose meaning has been worn smooth by use, its unpleasant edges and sharp points polished by oceans of newsprint and waves of oratory. It slips easily off the tongue, leaving us with a meaningless motto on a license plate or a cheap plaque on a roadside souvenir stand."
He saw library work as a noble calling, not only because it had the potential to ignite intellectual passion in individuals from all walks of life, but also because it could be a bulwark against the forces of censorship and willful ignorance.
As a kid, all of this was over my head. I used to wish he were a cop or fireman, like many of my friends' fathers. In time, however, I came to realize that he was right. He fought the good fight—and inspired me to do so.
Now that he's gone, I feel more inspired still. We live in dangerous times (he thought the Bush years were more disturbing than the McCarthy era), burdened by "leaders" who are as careless with the word freedom as the makers of those cheap souvenir plaques and as reckless with the environment as anyone in modern history. It's not easy to remain optimistic in the face of such realities. But the most important lesson that my father taught me, in the end, is that even the smallest seeds of change can have a monumental impact.
—Tom Robotham