THE SECRET OF THE OLD BOOK COLLECTION

TheY lived in a small city called Bayport, located on Barmet Bay three miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. No one knew the name of the state. Their house, shaded by trees and made of stone, stood on the corner of Elm and High streets. A two-story garage towered above  the driveway; its second floor was a well-equipped crime lab where their father, an internationally known private detective, often worked his cases. Their names were Frank and Joe, two brothers in high school. Frank was eighteen, Joe seventeen, but they were in the same grade.  Their best friends, often referred to as “chums,” were Chet Morton, Phil Cohen, Biff Hooper, and Tony Prito. The boys’ Aunt Gertrude lived in the Bayport home with them and their father and mother, Fenton and Laura. They were the Hardy Boys, amateur teenage sleuths who were somehow able to solve cases that eluded their famous father and the bumbling Bayport police. I own thirty-four of the first forty-one volumes of the longstanding series that introduced the Hardy Boys to readers worldwide. 

            I started collecting these books at age ten when my mother began to buy them for me – hardcover editions with marvelously painted dust jackets, and, later, nonremovable hard picture covers. We were not a family who owned many books – they were a luxury a tad beyond our budget – but my mother heard my despair when we learned that the Johnstown Public Library refused to carry novels like the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Nancy Drew. At age ten, I borrowed the first Hardy Boys book, The Tower Treasure, from our nextdoor neighbor and devoured it. My mother, a reader who thrived on library check-outs, wisely bought installment number two, The House on the Cliff, and things went from there.  Each book cost 79¢ when she started buying them and 81¢ when she stopped.

            It didn’t matter to her that books like these were considered low-brow. What mattered was that I was a grade-schooler who liked to read, and she wanted to fan that little ember any way she could. We had a TV, a black and white Philco, but books were always better than television, everybody knew that, and so my mother, without complaint or hesitation, gradually bought thirty-four volumes for me, stopping before I reached junior high.

            I didn’t much mention my love of the Hardy Boys to my teachers (Miss Davis in fourth grade, Miss Tie in fifth, Mr. Clarko in sixth). They were nice people and good teachers, but they were apt to recommend only the classics. Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities were always high on the list – and these authors and their books were in the libraries. But I preferred Franklin W. Dixon. I wasn’t old enough to begin feeling guilty about many things, but there were inklings that Frank and Joe Hardy would become a guilty pleasure – potato chips among the broccoli.

            We lived in an old brick duplex then, 529 Oak Street, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Somehow I remember my parents renting it from a old man named Baer – grumpy Mr. Bear who would not let us have a dog – for $75 a month. Three bedrooms, two stories, slate roof, big front porch also shared with the duplex family next door, the Kennedys. We were already installed in 529 when the Kennedys moved into 531, right after Joanne Rice and her two daughters, Nicky and Judy, moved away, and I still remember the day they arrived. Handsome young Catholic family, three kids, number four on the way. Mr. Kennedy worked as an undertaker at a funeral home downtown, which gave these people a marvelous air of mystery. What work did an undertaker actually undertake? What was “embalming fluid,” and did he bring any of it home with him, say on his clothes?  Mr. Kennedy wore white dress shirts with black ties to work and smoked Kent cigarettes. But it was the kids, not the parents, I adored: Tommy Kennedy, a year older than I, and his beautiful sister Jackie, my age. Jacqueline Kennedy, living nextdoor in 1962. It was too good to be true.

            Everything Tommy did, I wanted to do; any time I got the chance to visit the Kennedy home next door, I secretly anticipated seeing Jackie, maybe even getting to talk to her. But it was Tommy who held my attention, the handsome Tommy I emulated and adored. He was the one who handed me that first Hardy Boys book, which I read and gave back. He was the one who got me into conversations about each book in the series, as soon as we had read them. He had jet-black hair like Frank, and I had wavy blond hair like Joe – and so we called each other Frank and Joe, and hoped Jackie would not laugh at us. Tommy and I were a two-man book club, and our chats, usually at his place, were my first literary conversations. Low-brow or not, they stuck.

            I found those books, long forgotten, at my parents’ home in Orangeville, Utah, where they moved in 1974 on the occasion of my father’s retirement. My mother had kept them over the years for reasons unknown to me; maybe she simply remembered how important they were to her son, years before sending him off to college, the only person in our family who ever got to go. I don’t recall carrying them to Montana but I must have, as I had them when Whitman College hired me in 2001 and Dorothy and I moved from Missoula to Walla Walla. It occurred to me to place them in my campus office, where they stood untouched for twenty-one years on the bottom shelf of my private teaching-library, nearly a thousand volumes covering two walls. Once in a while a student would notice them and say something, or ask about them, but I never had a single Whitman kid who had read the Hardy Boys or identified with them. I never mentioned them unless someone asked, and only once do I remember taking a few volumes from the shelf and showing off the wonderful kitschy artworks on the covers. Frank and Joe spading up a trove of buried coins inside a dark mine tunnel on the jacket of Hunting for Hidden Gold.  Frank and Joe surreptitiously peering through a crack in the upstairs floor of an antique gear-tower in The Secret of the Old Mill. I never mentioned my discovery of the fact that the author named Franklin W. Dixon never existed; that all of the Hardy Boys books, from 1927 to the series end in 2005, were ghost-written by freelancers, hired by the world’s first book-packaging firm invented by a writer named Edward Stratemeyer. I knew by then that a Canadian journalist named Leslie McFarlane wrote the majority of the volumes in my collection, despising all the while the tasks of penning empty-headed, formulaic mystery stories for children. 

            Still, these books belonged in my teaching library – full to the rafters with Faulkner, Plato, Shakespeare, Emerson, and the like – because I taught writing and valued great literature, and these lowly books were the first books I fell in love with. The first to quicken and hold my reader’s imagination. The first to bring me the priceless sensations of bound pages, the smell and feel of a volume pulled from a shelf. The sound of a new spine cracking. I placed them in my office, also, because Whitman College was an institutionalized version of those first teachers of mine who believed that the only way to turn callow pupils toward the learning arts was to introduce them to the finer things and keep their minds contained within them. When I came to Whitman to teach, I barely knew what a liberal arts college was – in fact, that was one of the things that first drew me to the job, to learn about this great educational tradition from the inside. But I was raised by potato chip people, not broccoli people, and I wanted to carry my collection of pulp fiction as a badge of honor.

            My mother reached the age of 95. She suffered all manner of ailments as she entered into old age – a heart attack, a trans-ischemic brain-blast that knocked her to the ground, skin cancer surgeries – but the thing that ended her life was her losing the ability to read. When her macular degeneration became severe, we took her to specialists who recommended books on tape and several different kinds of magnifying and lighting devices, to make all books exceed the appearance of large-print volumes. But for her, much of the joy in living departed when she lost to ability to fetch a volume at the Orangeville Library, and sit in her armchair beneath a nice lamp, and feel the warm, soft pages turning with the touch of her fingers. When she lost the ability to read in old familiar ways, she lost the will to live. Bless her, that woman, for transferring such a love to me.