Memory Lane is Just a Few Blocks Over

Sitting in a gorgeous Stickley-esque chair in the Heritage room, I find myself staring at a photo of one Bruce Ballard. If my Google-fu skills have yielded accurate results, the same Bruce is an Orthopedic Surgeon. He went to UCLA and played for the Bruins as Blocking Back, Fullback, Cornerback and Wingback. However, This isn’t the same Bruce I’m looking at. I’m looking at the Bruce from 1953. The Student Body President of . The one who was also voted Best Looking. I can see that.

I don’t know Bruce. I simply stumbled upon his picture while thumbing through old Monrovia High School yearbooks. His picture exuded that All American clean-cut look that you just don’t see in today’s youth. I could flip through these for hours, and I didn’t even go to MHS.

You can learn a lot in the Heritage Room. Stuff that you can’t learn anywhere else. Like how in 1983 the Monrovia Public Library launched their Children’s Puppet Corner, where kids could play with and check out puppets for 7-days at a time. That was also the year the library started to develop the Shut-In Program. A program to help deliver books to shut-ins. Can you even call them that anymore? It’s all there in the city’s 1983-1984 budget.  

I can’t imagine the amount of leg work it might take to get a copy of an almost thirty year-old budget from a city directly, nor what it would take to get a fifty-eight year-old yearbook from a high school. But it’s all there in the Heritage Room.

The Heritage Room doesn’t house Monrovia-based history exclusively. While it does contain a full line of first editions as well as obscure works of former resident Upton Sinclair, it also houses a number of California related books, many of which are likely impossible to find anywhere else in their first edition form.

Sure, I can buy John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra for about nine bucks, but it just isn’t the same as thumbing through an actual copy from 1911, nor is reading about California mining camps as enjoyable if I were not reading a guidebook about them from generations ago when they were all the rage in tourist destinations. And, no, you can’t check them out.

Sure, you can drive around Monrovia for an hour or two and take in all of the history via sightseeing, or you can peruse the Heritage Room and soak up the kind of real history that only your grandparents could vaguely recount to you. I personally consider myself lucky to live in a city that has dedicated so much to not only preserving it’s history, but making it publicly accessible. Typically by appointment. With no food or drinks allowed.