Growing up in the 1940s, Ronald Clark had an experience that sounds as if it was plucked from a children’s book – he lived in a New York City public library. And indeed, he believed that living in this ‘temple of knowledge’, where his father worked as a custodian, was a grand privilege, even as it led to feelings of difference among his peers. In this brief animation from StoryCorps, Clark recalls how growing up in a library, where he could wander the stacks and read late into the night, would later lead to his becoming a college professor – a job that made his father very proud.
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