MLM: Miss Ketola and other terrors in the library

Librarians always seemed to be terrorizing me. Was it just me or did they have issues with all children, those little defilers of their sacred temples? Or did they have special, unwritten rules for the little boys?

At Pueblo Junior High School the librarian was Miss Helen Ketola. She was the epitome of scary librarians. Here is her picture from my 8th grade yearbook (that I had modified slightly):

Miss Helen Ketola

Librarian

There are a couple of incidents with Miss Ketola that haunt me.

One day I was reading in the library and had my feet on the chair on the other side of the table. Miss Ketola came up to me and flung a rag on the table in front of me, told me that chairs were not for feet and demanded that I dust it off. I dusted it and NEVER put my feet on a chair in her library ever again. The lesson was a good one but I think that the method was a bit extreme.

Then one day I was looking for something like "The World Almanac and Book of Facts." I wanted to know when something like an eclipse or meteor shower was going to happen. I asked Miss Ketola something like "Where are the almanacs that tell me what's going to happen?" Her answer was "You stupid child, almanacs can't tell you what will happen! They tell what happened in the previous year!" (She didn't say quite those words but that was the tone of her answer.) I was so stunned that I couldn't explain that I knew the almanac would have the information I was looking for and still wanted to look something up. I left with my tail between my legs.

I must have made peace with Miss Ketola. At some point of my stay at Pueblo I worked behind the desk at the library. I don't know how I got that job. Was it an honor or penance?

There was a bit of terror in the junior high library that I brought on myself. There was a book on taxidermy that I checked out. I thought it might be kind of neat to stuff my own small mammals and frogs. It got scarier and scarier as I read through it. You have to kill the animals! They suggested several ways. There was putting them in a jar with ether. That put them to sleep then suffocated them. That was a peaceful way for them to go. A quicker way was to poison them with cyanide. "Just run down to your local drugstore and ask the pharmacist for a bottle. Be very careful with it. Just a tiny bit on your tongue will kill you almost instantly." I didn't want to kill little animals it turned out and I didn't want to kill myself. That was the end of my taxidermy career.

Back then could you really get cyanide at your local drugstore? Or even ether?

At Los Alamos High School we didn't have a library. We had an "Instructional Materials Center" (what we called "the IMC").

The head of the library's IMC's Code Enforcement Department was Mrs. Arntzen.

Mary Jean Arntzen
Librarian

I really don't remember much about Mrs. Arntzen. The reason I remember anything about her was because an English class assignment. I don't know what we were studying. It could have been English poetry. For the assignment I wrote a parody of "The Constant Lover" by Sir John Suckling. I called it "The Constant Shover/Ode to Miss Arntzen" (I thought all librarians were unmarried). The premise was that if you broke any IMC rule, you were summarily shoved out of the building by Ms. Arntzen. Who amongst us hasn't broken a library rule? She was a busy woman.

Lucky for you I didn't keep a copy of my poem. It wasn't very good but it was well received by the class. Apparently they had similar feelings about Ms. Arntzen. All I remember about the poem was the title and that it ended with her shoving "A dozen dozen from their place."


I'm outta here!