Legends

By Andrew Tonkovich / Photograph by Jen Rosenstein

It doesn’t look like much, the remote Silverado branch of the county’s library system. There’s a general store on one side of the shabbily charming strip mall, a closed restaurant on the other, the system’s smallest branch in between. That’s fine with locals living in this eastern foothills canyon and Lucille Cruz, the branch’s senior librarian. ¶ A new resident of the canyons myself, I’ve become a big fan, checking out books, using the generous online reservation system to order DVDs, bringing my 6-year-old son to story hour, and joining celebratory visits to the branch by firefighters, reptile experts, and Santa. So, sure, I’m a library booster, but it’s our librarian who makes a branch more than a repository of books. ¶ Hired back “in the old days,” as she calls them, Cruz arrived in Silverado in 1978. She offers her autobiography with local history, an easy and familiar conjoining, between puffs on her cigarette. No smoking in the library, of course, so Cruz tells me her story out behind the prefab building housing the stuffed-to-the-walls 1,200-square-foot facility, under a massive sycamore next to Silverado Creek.

Here in the “staff lounge,” we’re surrounded by potted succulents arranged on a wrought-iron table under an umbrella, and a plaster Bible, its pages open to the passage in Ecclesiastes about there being a time for everything.

Sandbags remain stacked against the wall, protection from the floods and slides since the October 2007 wildfire. Cruz keeps the back door ajar to allow ingress and egress of the branch cat, Megan, not to mention listening for her staff. Cruz’s single demand is that I laud her two colleagues and friends, assistant librarian Ruth Loc, who has worked with Cruz for 17 years, and, until recently, Wendy Esteras, a community college instructor, poet, and Silverado resident who left to teach full time. After I accept her modest bit of coercion Cruz begins.

“Per capita,” she says, “we have the highest patron use of any [county branch] library.” It’s the first of many wry lines she offers, this one acknowledging the small but stubbornly devoted demographic of 1,200 households, many multigenerational families, who keep Cruz busy ordering material, managing events, and answering questions, many on local history. Indeed, as social historian, Cruz is the go-to person for All Things Silverado, by dint of knowledge and position.

“I used to answer bar questions,” she says, alluding to another variety of patron, those at what once was a saloon in the long-gone restaurant next door. They’d call her over to settle bets. Cruz was authority, and authority figure. She’s also a social worker: helping local kids become scholars, finding refuge for domestic violence victims, breaking up fights, sobering up drunks, looking out for families in crisis.

Cruz’s little library has garnered attention lately. A write-up in Library Journal. A profile in a new book, “The Library As Place in California.” In a tour of 32 California public libraries, researcher Stacy Shotsberger Russo wrote a celebratory chapter on the one-room branch and cat Megan, who Russo observes, adds “to the unique sense of place that makes this small library feel like you have entered a friend’s home.”

That is, if your home is a temple of knowledge staffed by three canyon muses. Cruz mentored Esteras, once a volunteer. “Lucy doesn’t live in the canyons,” Esteras says, “but she’s more local than the locals.”
Cruz left a stint as assistant librarian in Garden Grove to accept the Silverado assignment: “Nobody else wanted it. It wasn’t full-time.” But when the county assessed her work, she advanced to senior librarian, despite lacking a master’s degree or formal academic training in library science. (She majored in business at Arizona State, though she didn’t complete her degree.)

Since then, Cruz has been a loyal employee and advocate for a resource-starved resource, in addition to local archivist—defender, as one recent Los Angeles Times article characterized her—of both community and literacy.

Indeed, whoever wrote the official proclamation about the library from county Supervisor Bill Campbell elegantly balanced the famously feisty canyonista ethos of commitment meets organized insubordination. That seems right considering the rough-and-ready efforts to preserve this rustic enclave and to support its heart and soul, the library—perhaps second only in import to firefighters. The proclamation reads: “Whereas in the aftermath of the [1994] county bankruptcy, the Silverado Branch Library was slated for closure, residents coalesced and worked diligently to raise funds in support of their treasured community resource,” cites Cruz, and congratulates everybody on 75 years of struggle, some of it against the cash-strapped county itself.

Curious, with encyclopedic knowledge, Cruz is an autodidact, much like her bookish Mexican-American father and grandfather. Her dad was self-taught and, she says, read and discussed history, philosophy, and politics with the family. For 21 years a Linotype operator in her Arizona hometown, he lost his job when the newspaper “busted the union.” Sam Branch—yes, the branch librarian’s family name—became a janitor, but also worked as a weekend magistrate. He left his mark as the first state judge to require courtroom interpreters for the local Hopi and Navajo. Cruz’s grandfather was a “kitchen lawyer,” fluent in three languages, who translated legal documents for semiliterate Spanish-speakers.

The apple seems not to have fallen far from the tree. Cruz, a librarian now 30 years, has left her own mark in Silverado: in photos and posters hung on the walls, local geology on display, a kids’ reading area organized with Loc, a used-books sale shelf. Out on Santiago Canyon Road, in “downtown Silverado”—abandoned gas station, post office, funky old cabin—Cruz mounted a nifty “Library” icon placard on a telephone pole. She bought the blue reader-in-profile sign with proceeds from Friends of the Library raffles, yard sales, and donations after admiring signs she saw in New Mexico, on road trips tracing her family history there.

Regarding local history, Cruz refers me to first editions and archival materials. Her collection once was available here, but it was the first thing trucked out—after the cat—when the fires began. You can read Cruz’s own contribution in “A Hundred Years of Yesterdays,” the 1988 anthology published by the Register. But it’s more fun to hear Cruz tell it herself, often correcting the official record, and adding details: the founding of the Inter-Canyon League, which developed out of the Mothers Club, came to the rescue during the Big Flood of ’69, when a transformer hit the building. Soon a Friends of the Library arrived. The Friends, the league, the local fire crew, the library itself—all sustain the community.

The canyons have a reputation for eccentrics, but Cruz’s winning combination of bright eyes and deadpan tone shows real affection for patrons. “We are nonpolitical, a common ground. I listen to all you nuts and I tolerate anyone,” she says, adamant and with a straight face, eyes twinkling. “Most anyone, anyway.”

Ruth Loc steps out to deliver a slice of bread spread heavily with homemade plum preserves, a gift from a grateful local. “Good jam,” says Cruz, “good people.”

“No,” she says, savoring the perquisite fruit of her labor, “we don’t have an agenda at the public library. All you have to bring here is openness to knowledge, a thirst for knowledge. All questions are equal. That’s how we serve the people.”

I am offered jam, then follow both women back inside, spotting a poster I’ve missed in the kaleidoscopic sensory abundance. It’s Isaac Asimov’s grateful tribute to libraries, and seems a fitting one to Cruz. “My real education, the superstructure, the details,” he proclaims, “the true architecture, I got out of the public library.”

The architecture of this humble library—a joyously cluttered modular unit—speaks volumes about the pride of its community. And the success of its loyal, independent librarian in staying true to its desires.

When I ask about the library’s new automated phone-answering system, Cruz wrinkles her nose. “Pretty complicated for what we need,” she says. “Too downtown for us.”

Andrew Tonkovich is an Orange Coast contributing writer and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

Library Hours
Visiting librarian Lucille Cruz at the Silverado library means planning ahead. This branch, the smallest in the county system, is open 1 to 8 p.m. Monday and Wednesday, noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday and Friday. 28192 Silverado Canyon Road, Silverado, 714-649-2216, www.ocpl.org.