Patricia Ann Kettles did not read her first book until she was 10. She knows what it is to struggle with the very act of reading, trying to make sense of words on a page long past an age when other children can polish off a thick Harry Potter or Twilight novel as quickly as a wedge of cake.
“The family’s name for me is Patty Ann, and for the longest time when I wrote the name ‘Patricia,’ I thought I was writing ‘Patty Ann’ because I had memorized it,” she said. “I didn’t realize I was not writing my right name.”
Forced to repeat first grade and twice made to switch schools, she was so lost that she was in fourth grade before she conquered an entire book. “That was ‘Dear Mr. Henshaw,’ by Beverly Cleary,” Ms. Kettles said. “I remember, because I was so proud.”
Today she is the manager of the Port Richmond Library, which operates out of a stately brick edifice that Andrew Carnegie’s largess built a century ago on “one of the finest residence streets on Staten Island,” as the area was described in The Staten Islander of March 1905. There is a theater in the basement bestowed upon the library 74 years ago by the Work Projects Administration.
When Ms. Kettles took over in 2010, the library was a fixer-upper, serving a clientele that was overwhelmingly poor. Crime is also a problem, even though the library has a fair number of police officers who are devotees of its mystery section. She has had to shoo drug dealers away from the property more than once.
It is not far from the schools where classmates called her “stupid” and a teacher yanked her hair for getting everything wrong on a spelling test.
“That did not make the other kids nicer to me,” she said, with a weak smile.
She had told some children at the library about those days, but her bosses at the New York Public Library had little inkling until earlier this year, when library officials were canvassing the staff for ways they could illustrate how vital libraries are to make the city rethink some proposed budget cuts. Ms. Kettles drew gasps at one of the brainstorming sessions when she then raised her hand and shared the story of her struggle to read.
“I was floored,” said Yolanda Gleason, the supervisor who had approved Ms. Kettles for the Port Richmond post. “She is at Port Richmond, where people are transitioning and trying to raise their literacy levels, and she’s there telling them, ‘Don’t be discouraged, because at one time I couldn’t read.’ ”
Colleagues now know that Ms. Kettles’s father, a mailman in Midland Beach and his family’s sole provider, was killed by a drunken driver in 1976. Patty Ann, the youngest of four daughters, was 3 at the time. The sisters muddled through, as did their mother, a homemaker for much of her life.
But not Ms. Kettles.
“Emotionally disabled,” she said. “When they finally diagnosed me in school, that was my classification.”
When she finished first grade at Public School 36 on Staten Island without knowing how to read, her mother moved her to St. Joseph and St. Thomas School on Maguire Avenue. “Within a month, they realized I couldn’t really read and left me back,” Ms. Kettles said. She added that the adults in her life “just did not know what to do with me,” especially when others her age were avidly reading.
She wished she were too. On rainy days, friends gathered to play a game Ms. Kettles invented called “Library.” Her role was to arrange the books in her basement and stamp out anything borrowed from the collection.
By third grade, the school felt it could do no more for her, and she found herself back at P.S. 36, with a warning, as fourth grade began, that she would be held back again if she did not improve.
She credits her breakthrough that year to her teacher, John Bilotti. She was the student who rarely opened her mouth. But the teacher, who still has playbills from every community production he acted in and play he staged at school, put her at ease. “He said, ‘Can anyone do a witch’s cackle?’ and I could,” she said. “And he called the other teachers in for them to hear.”
Finally able to overcome the anxiety that had thwarted her reading, she blossomed as a student, sought out theater classes and graduated from Tottenville High School in 1992. “She worked very hard,” Mr. Bilotti, now retired, said.
College had to wait, though, since she was unable to obtain documents she needed for financial aid. Instead, there were administrative jobs, the last at Bankers Trust.
Then, 17 years ago, the New York Public Library came calling with an entry-level job. She knew the money would never be grand, and she was taking classes after hours at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. But the library was an opportunity to work with children, and she jumped at the chance.
She spent the first year reading to schoolchildren, showing teachers how to use electronic resources and running craft projects, and began climbing the ranks. For her last assignment, she commuted nearly three hours each way to run a library in Spanish Harlem. She also found time to complete all but a few credits of the bachelor’s degree in psychology that she has been pursuing since 1996. As a single woman living on her own, Ms. Kettles said she deferred the last lap for financial reasons, but was determined to finish.
Now that she has sway over other tender lives, Ms. Kettles aims for a friendlier feel than the rule-bound libraries of her youth. She organizes relay races through the stacks to help children learn how to find books. Drop-ins from nearby Public School 20 are as likely to be reading by the fireplace in the “quiet room” or tapping away on the computers outside as lounging in the children’s area. She scoots in and out of the basement theater, stopping to demonstrate a sailor dance she remembers from a middle school production of “South Pacific.”
She supervises the library, adult stacks included, which has more visitors who are under 18 than any other branch on Staten Island. They tend to crave time on the free computers, so she rewards them with bonus minutes for every 20 minutes of good old-fashioned reading they do.
Before Ms. Kettles arrived, “everyone had to be so quiet,” said Ashley Ortiz, a sixth-grader who has visited the branch for years.
“But now with Miss Patty,” Ashley continued, “we can talk.”
Another point she notes in the librarian’s favor: “She’ll give us books we never knew about, like old-time books.”
Bria Benjamin, also in the sixth grade, offered another reason library denizens like Ms. Kettles’s regime: “Sometimes, when we have a problem, she comes out of nowhere and tells us a story.”
from: NY Times
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