Since I’ve been alive I’ve known the Cloverdale Library to have three locations around town.
When I was growing up Cloverdale’s library was a small red brick building on the corner of 58th Avenue and 176 A Street. It was a tiny building, about a third of it for the children’s section, and the balance would have been adult’s fiction and non-fiction. It had the old catalogue card system of finding books – wooden drawers full of cards carefully typed with the book’s name, author, etc. No room in this small place for chairs and tables. We chose a book and took it home to read. I seem to recall there was a story time on Saturdays and a librarian would read to a bunch of kids who sat on the floor. Of course, like everything else in Cloverdale, the library was closed on Mondays and back then was not open in the evenings. In comparison, the school library at Cloverdale Elementary school was about 4 times larger than this library.
The librarians handwrote our library cards, numbering each card in the order that people came in to the library. Library cards were reissued every year. I must have spent a fair amount of time at the library because my library card numbers were usually small in number: 3, 4, 19, 20. Miss Partington, who lived down the street from us, always got card number 1 every year because she was Cloverdale’s first librarian.
The selection of books was small but the good news was that we were part of Surrey’s public library system and if we were interested in a book we could put in a request to see if the book was available at another library and if it was it would be shipped to Cloverdale. This was all back in the days before computers and it might take a few days to find out if the book was in the system or not. The librarians made the calls and would phone us to let us know the status of the book and when we might expect it.
The Cloverdale library moved to a new location on Highway 10 in 1973 but the original building still stands and has been used as a daycare for many years.
When I was growing up Cloverdale’s library was a small red brick building on the corner of 58th Avenue and 176 A Street. It was a tiny building, about a third of it for the children’s section, and the balance would have been adult’s fiction and non-fiction. It had the old catalogue card system of finding books – wooden drawers full of cards carefully typed with the book’s name, author, etc. No room in this small place for chairs and tables. We chose a book and took it home to read. I seem to recall there was a story time on Saturdays and a librarian would read to a bunch of kids who sat on the floor. Of course, like everything else in Cloverdale, the library was closed on Mondays and back then was not open in the evenings. In comparison, the school library at Cloverdale Elementary school was about 4 times larger than this library.
The librarians handwrote our library cards, numbering each card in the order that people came in to the library. Library cards were reissued every year. I must have spent a fair amount of time at the library because my library card numbers were usually small in number: 3, 4, 19, 20. Miss Partington, who lived down the street from us, always got card number 1 every year because she was Cloverdale’s first librarian.
The selection of books was small but the good news was that we were part of Surrey’s public library system and if we were interested in a book we could put in a request to see if the book was available at another library and if it was it would be shipped to Cloverdale. This was all back in the days before computers and it might take a few days to find out if the book was in the system or not. The librarians made the calls and would phone us to let us know the status of the book and when we might expect it.
The Cloverdale library moved to a new location on Highway 10 in 1973 but the original building still stands and has been used as a daycare for many years.
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