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The Runaway
One Saturday morning I received a phone call from my boss. She wanted to prepare me for what I would find when I got to work, but even after she talked to me it was still quite a shock to show up at the library that morning to see the devastation.
At that time our library was in what would have been a retail store space. It had several large plate glass windows across the front. We were in the lower level of an outdoor shopping center which meant that the library was underground. Right next to the library on one side was a steep, grassy, sloping hill that led to the parking lot for the upper portion of the shopping center.
Late Friday evening a 10 year old girl decided to run away from home. She pilfered money out of her parent's pockets and purse. She got the car keys and started driving to a friend's home. She didn't want to run away by herself, so she was going to go get her friend to go along with her.
I don't know if she decided to stop at the grocery store that was above our library and that was why she was in that parking lot, but something went dreadfully wrong. For some reason she drove down the steep hill from the upper parking lot to the lower parking lot. She would have been headed straight for the "Skateland" building. She must have swerved the car around and hit the gas peddle instead of the brake. Her car went ramming through the big plate glass windows of the library, through several reading tables until it hit the several ton card catalog, sending it flying through the air until it landed upside down on top of several of the non-fiction shelves, causing them to lean heavily to one side.
When my boss was called in, she found a family car, a police car, a fire truck and a tow truck parked in her precious library. There was broken glass everywhere, decimated tables, the card catalog on top of the non-fiction shelves with books and catalog cards scattered everywhere.
Maintenance men from our library headquarters were called in and they worked all night to get the library ready to open Saturday morning. They cleaned up the glass, put wooden boards over the now non-existing windows, removed the decimated tables, got the card catalog down from the shelves, stacked the books and collected the thousands of loose cards. When I showed up for work Saturday morning I was greeted by the wood on the windows, missing tables, tire tracks leading to a half-empty catalog and shelves leaning at a 45 degree angle with stacks of books and cards here and there. My boss had a Polaroid of the library with all of the vehicles parked in it.
What happened to the little girl? She got out of the car, unharmed, and walked to her friend's house. So if you ever plan on driving through a library, be sure to drive a Cordoba.