Jimmy’s career as a library director was doomed even before he got promoted to it.
The town had grown too big with all of the yuppies moving out to bulldoze virgin land upon which to construct their McMansions or even less prestigious townhouses.
Once the county straightened the winding road from Route 80, life as a quaint village ended, and for the most part, the founding fathers loved it.
Jimmy’s acquiring a part time job at the library in 1986 was a dream come true.
Libraries and bookstores were always central to Jimmy’s life, regardless of what he lived. In Montclair, he had taken over the Children’s book department. In Passaic, he hounded the rest of us for rides to the library even in the foulest weather, and on fair days when none of us were around, he even walked.
It was an even longer walk to the library in Towaco, although he apparently hitched a ride with Ginger’s mother who worked there.
While the Mount Arlington Library was no an easy trek from where he lived with Ritchie on Bertrand’s Island, it was significantly closer than the Fotomat or the Dunkin Donuts he worked at previously, and he much preferred coming home smelling of dusty books than of greasy donuts, he said.
And he could still ride his moped to the library in fair weather and he did, only later acquiring a car and all the associated bad habits that entailed.
The library played a pivotal role in the community, it largely served kids, seniors and bored housewives
The kids love Jimmy and so do the parents who bring the kids there, and teachers, and lonely housewives, all who come to that magical place, getting entertained by this book-loving director as well as informed.
Even though the community was growing in leaps and bounds, the library remained a tiny space on the second floor of a building most people pass by without noting.
Then building started out its long life as a fire house, then became a one-room schoolhouse, and finally the town’s library in 1968, serving about half the population of Mount Arlington’s 4,000 residents.
During my family trips to the lake in the 1950s and later my own in the 1960s, the street level part of the building served as the town’s police station – where off season the two-man police force resided.
Then, in 1996, the library board began to make expansion plans under then director Jeannette Donnelly. At that time, the board looked to take over a two-story brick building built in 1932 which has served previously as a telephone switching station and were looking to accomplish this using a variety of grants.
Jimmy, who worked as a part time jack of all trades, had helped expand the library’s media and computer resources, but did not then know that plans would drastically change over the next few years, putting him on the road to forced retirement.
“Libraries are going to have to adapt or die,” he told the local newspaper when asked about the expansion plans.
Jimmy had already had a huge impact on the old library. In 1994, he was credited with training staff members of Morris County library on how to use a new computer system he had helped install.
Naturally, when he demonstrated the MORENET system, he delved into some of his favorite subjects, hooking the library up to a system in Finland to explore UFOs and space. After which, he attempted to take the library via the internet to France to explore genetics. When he could not get into that system, he changed course and took off for the NASA system to look at press releases on the space shuttle Columbia.
“Garland maneuvered his way through the Interest with mind-boggling dexterity,” a story said at the time.
A year later in September 1995, Jimmy created a webpage for the tiny library in his role as the library’s technical director, making Mount Arlington the first library in wealthy Morris County to have a webpage of its own.
“People might read this and never come near the library,” Jimmy told a local newspaper.
Jimmy wrote the program and scanned all the pictures, setting up an email system that allowed the public to contact the director as well as the mayor.
When Jeannette in early 1998, Jimmy was appointed director – only because everybody else who could have replaced Jeannette had retired before her, leaving him the last man standing.
In the years that followed, Jimmy as director, set up a number of innovative programs such as summer reading program that used a horse race as a model.
In 2002, I remember him showing off the board he designed on which kids names were posted that resembled a racetrack. Each time a kid read a book, his or her horse advance with the ultimate winner being the kid who finished reading 16 books first.
“It’s neat because kids can’t see who the other kids are,” Jimmy told the local press. “We try not to make it into a competition – kid against kid.”
But the reading series didn’t require specific books or themes.
“The sky’s the limit,” he said. “The children can read any genre and they seem to love that.”
Any kid who participated got a certificate and a prize. But those in the winner circle got a special prize.
Jimmy also established story hour, which according to another news story was “masterminded by Garland in 2001.”
But Jimmy also created reading clubs for adults and had enough interest even in a town as small as Mount Arlington to have two clubs running.
During his tenure, he also expanded the DVD collection and offered the public “family nights” during the summer.
“You can come in and get two DVDs, three videos, five magazines, two software tiles and any number of books … and then all you need is pizza,” he said.
In June, a month after Jimmy’s appointment, the developer who proposed to build townhouse on the place which once housed a historic amusement park decided to donate $200,000 towards building a new library.
“The man is Santa Claus,” Jimmy told the press at the time. “It’s a dream come true.”
I could imagine him choking on every word, even though he more than once bemoaned the fact that the small library – over 100 years old – was too small and inadequate to handle the ever-expanding population of the community.
But this was the guy who bulldozed Bertrand’s Island amusement park and wants to turn it into a bedroom community full of yuppies!
Apparently, this wasn’t part of some kind of political deal that will allow him to overpopulate Bertrand’s Island or plow down the trees of a woods for another of his projects.
The locals see the developer as a generous soul, and perhaps, his erasing of history is the price we all pay for progress.
I still remember how close to tears Jimmy was when we wandered through the ruins of it after Woody Allen finished filming there.
Jimmy’s most extensive interview was done for the Star Ledger in 2005 and had almost nothing to do with the library, talking about his life and his preferences – such as his favorite musicians: The Beatles.
“Is there any other?” Jimmy asked.
“Garland has been playing music since 1967,” the story said. “He says he was one of the many young men who was swept up in the Beatles Phenomenon when everyone was part of a garage band.”
Indeed, Jimmy more than once told me that The Beatles ruined all our lives, because they steered us towards a creative path we could really not achieve, instead of allowing us to spend our lives following in the footsteps of our fathers.”
Naturally his favorite TV show was the X-File which fit into many of his personal theories.
His favorite movie surprised me” The in Laws” with Peter Falk although I recalled after reading this how much he liked the Colombo series on TV.
His favorite book “Lucifer’s Hammer” was no surprise since Jimmy and I had had many discussions about the end of the book from back in our days living together in Passaic.
Nor was Jimmy’s favorite author, James Joyce, a surprise, since Jimmy used to read from Finnegan’s Wake as far back as the Parsippany apartment, and once gave us all a cassette tape of one of his lectures.
Jimmy worked at the library as its director even after the new library opened in November 2006, until he was forced out in 2011 – partly because he lacked the degree necessary to run a library after the 2010 census showed the population had risen to a level requiring a certified library director.
Politics, of course, played a huge role in his demise.
Almost as soon as he became director in 1998, he was required to work to help the Republican mayor and council get reelected. He had to write for their campaigns, help them raise money and other political acts that helped him keep his job.
The changing and expanding demographics that eventually unseated him as director also played into local politics, expanding the Democratic voter base to get a foothold on the council.
A politically ambitious assistant municipal clerk used this Democratic clout and Jimmy’s lack of degree to wedge him out as director, eventually taking his place.
Jimmy, who had already been evicted from the Haas house back in 1994 when Ritchie’s mother decided to move back in, was living in a big house up the hill from the library, a house so run down he called it haunted. When evicted as library director, Jimmy used a portion of his buy out to purchase a trailer and relocated to a trailer park near Route 206 where he lived when he died, isolating himself even more than he had been.
He claimed e disliked being so remote and disliked the conditions he lived in yet failed to make any changes.
I never saw the new library building. It was still under construction in 2002 and later in 2004 when I saw Jimmy perform at the Mount Arlington Memorial Day festivities.
I got the impression – despite the many technological advances the new building offered, Jimmy preferred the library’s old digs, a little town library that fit his personality all so well.
During our travels to the lake in the early 1970s, Frank and I passed the old library many times without realizing what it was since the entrance was up a slanted side road and the door to the library was hidden in the back. The driveway – which had a huge bolder sticking out of it – was so full of potholes that each time we parked it was like making a moon landing.
Jimmy loved this place more than any home he ever lived in and spent more years there than any place else in his life. He knew every crook and cranny.
While Donnelly once complained about the fact that she had to stick a terry cloth towel under the door to keep the draft from freezing her feet in winter, the old library seemed to provide Jimmy with everything he needed, even if at times it was a nightmare to navigate into or once inside around the interior.
The library had two doors facing the parking lot, but each time I came, I always used the same one, rusted hinges and all. To get in, you had to pass through a narrow passage (usually filled with piles of books, a table stuffed with circulars, a big for local periodicals, and other things such as yet to be unpacked deliveries or boxes waiting to be shipped out.
While the configuration of the library changed slightly over the years, the four small rooms bulged with books which were jammed into every corner, often piled horizontally on the top of vertical books on the shelves. File folders were stuck into various spaces in the small kitchen – which could be accessed off a hall from the front door or from another door on the other side.
I remember the circulation desk was the first place I encountered faced into the library that was so crowded with bookshelves it could have served as a maze – with more than 20,000 books.
Jimmy had installed two computers into one of the corners where there was turnstile magazine rack and another holding books on cassette tapes. Despite Jimmy’s best efforts the library had very little in the way of audio-visual equipment. But because of the internet, patrons could order books from other libraries if they could not find one here.
Jimmy melded his artwork with his library duties, and so many of the signs posted around these four rooms showed his handiwork, characters straight out of his imagination.
Although he spent a lot of time at home making music through recording software, he frequently played at the library’s public functions, even if he sometimes had to share the stage with a clown.
The library was Jimmy’s social life, where he – a very private person – interacted with the public. So, when he lost the job, he lost a significant part of his life.
The 2010 federal census was his undoing.
For years, Jimmy had talked about that point in time when the population of Mount Arlington would require the library to seek a director with proper credentials. Increased development elevated the population to a point where the town needed to find a new director.
Another factor played into this. Mount Arlington Library had started its life as a county facility in the 1920s but became an independent library in 1968. In 2010, the county – seeing the new facility as the most modern in the county – once again used it as a county resource, adding more pressure for Jimmy’s removal.
Jimmy was let go in late 2010 – at some point after his mother’s death – and early 2011. Advertisements seeking a new director were published starting in June 2011, and by the end of the year, the politically connected former assistant municipal clerk had taken over as the library director.
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