April 2025
Helaine Ortmann
I love walking in my Victorian-era neighbourhood.
On most days, before I return home to my street, I circle the full-block site where a beautifully renovated 66-suite condo now stands: once Stinson Street School, the historic landmark built in 1894-1895 that our two sons attended from junior kindergarten through to Grade 5 almost 100 years later.
What never fails to catch my eye (and trigger long ago memories) is the street sign on the east side of the Lofts that reserves a place of honour—a dedicated spot on Mondays from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.—for one of the City’s roving Bookmobiles; itself a venerable institution that has served the Hamilton community for decades.
Books and reading have always been important to me: a link to learning, a portal to other worlds, and a connection to fascinating people.
Back in the day when library branches closed for summer vacation, I was happy, at the end of June, to browse the Westdale Library in search of my 20-book quota, the allowable limit to borrow for two whole months; and again contented in late August, when Westdale Secondary School mailed home notices advising us to pick up our textbooks for the coming year: academic materials, yes; but also critical ballast for students like me who were too short to reach the overhead handle grips at the front of the bus on those precarious commutes to and from school.
This was a time, for a serious high school student in the 1960s, when print reference books reigned supreme.
Commissioned salespeople visited door-to-door selling encyclopedias (and vacuum cleaners), and, after earnest banter with friendly agents, my parents invested enthusiastically in both: a lightweight canister-style Electrolux, and more importantly, a 20-volume set of World Book (joined by its relatives the World Book Dictionary and annual Year Book); referred to ever after by my father as the “books of knowledge.” Over the years, I treasured these hardcover books, elegantly trimmed with gold and green highlights, now displayed in an antique mahogany bookcase in our living room: a family keepsake, and, a symbol of the value our parents placed on learning, even though it presented them with a financial hardship at that time.
The same feelings stirred, every September, when I queued up at the McMaster bookstore to purchase my semester’s worth of scholarship; the heavy pile still straining my back and shoulders as I continued to fight to balance myself on the bus (no appreciable change having happened to my four-foot-something height in the transition from high school to university); this in the days before knapsacks became de rigeur and online learning, the way of our brave new world.
Years later, in the 1980s, my husband and I became parents and then it was our turn to introduce books to our children. We had so much fun playing with those primary coloured rub-a-dub floating bath books, board books and those that were “touch and feel,” perfect for baby fingers to manipulate, and safe to gum.
How we kvelled, as the months went on, to wake up to the sounds of the babies responding to the books we tucked into their cribs. How we enjoyed the hours reading to our little boys, establishing what we hoped would become a lifetime habit. And, up until the time they were teenagers, how excited we were on holidays like Chanukah and Passover, and even Valentine’s Day, to give them books. To this day, I am drawn to old friends Robert Munsch, Sandra Boynton, Dr. Seuss and the Berenstains when I shop for “new baby” gifts.
As a student and later a working professional, I frequently visited book stores to add to my personal collection. But circumstances have changed. I no longer have the disposable income I once had; and, during the pandemic, I befriended Libby, the Hamilton Public Library’s reading app, to borrow E-books. While I sometimes need to wait weeks to receive my reservation for an especially popular title or new release, nu, what’s the big deal? I’m retired.
