Susan Patron

efore I knew Susan Patron the Famous Author, I knew Susan Patron the Librarian. It began more than thirty years ago, when we were both radical young employees of the Los Angeles Public Library. A small cohort of like-minded colleagues started an underground newsletter called Giraffe: We Stick Our Necks Out. This newsletter, which had a mercifully short run, took on such issues as administrative pig-headedness and customer advocacy. Susan and I were working on layout, no small task in those days before computers. At the time, I was a young adult librarian in the West Valley region, about to be promoted to branch manager; Susan was a children’s librarian in the East Valley. Our paths might not have crossed without that odd (and oddly seventies) experience.

I suspected that she was a fine children’s librarian, but it was more than twenty years before I had direct evidence of this. I was teaching library science at UCLA and invited Susan to visit my children’s literature class. One of my students went into paroxysms of delight when she heard the name. “Mrs. Patron?” she exclaimed. “Mrs. Patron was my children’s librarian!” Lynn Lampert talked with me recently about Mrs. Patron, her children’s librarian. She told me how, as a four- and five-year-old, she felt overshadowed by an older sister who was skilled at so many things, especially reading. It was Mrs. Patron, so young and pretty and enthusiastic, who made Lynn feel respected for who she was. Mrs. Patron never let her leave the library until she had just the right books. She also guided Lynn’s older sister, a voracious reader, through the children’s collection and over to the adult side when the situation called for it. When Mrs. Patron left the Studio City branch to work downtown, Lynn was devastated. She cried and cried until her parents took her to the Central Library to visit her children’s librarian. You will not be surprised to learn that Lynn is now the chair of reference and instructional services at the California State University, Northridge, library, and her sister, Dr. Lisa Lampert-Weissig, is a professor in the department of literature at the University of California, San Diego.

As a senior librarian in the children’s literature department and then in children’s services at LAPL, Susan no longer served children directly, but her influence was still strong. She trained hundreds of new children’s librarians and guided collection development for the entire city. When I became children’s services coordinator in 1987, I had the privilege of working with her on a daily basis and came to admire her organizational skills, her vast knowledge of children’s literature, and her commitment to children. She is truly a librarian’s librarian, at the peak of her powers and the top of her field.

Susan had started to write and to work with editor Dick Jackson by the time I left LAPL to teach at UCLA in 1990. She reveled in the experience of seeing her words visualized by gifted artists such as Mike Shenon in Burgoo Stew and its companion volumes and Peter Catalanotto in Dark Cloud Strong Breeze. She dug into her own childhood for the story of three sisters in Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe. And then she dried up. She still had stories to tell, but the right words wouldn’t come. It was agony for her. Her editor and her friends had faith that she would find her voice again, however; and when she did, it was with the book that we are honoring this year, The Higher Power of Lucky.

No longer my work colleague, Susan Patron is now my treasured friend. We have nurtured our relationship over many meals, at her home and mine, and at countless restaurants. We have rejoiced over the addition of Theresa Nelson, another of Dick’s authors, to our circle. Theresa and I believed in Lucky long before the Newbery committee validated our judgment.

Here are a few things you should knew about Susan Patron:

She is earthy, in a delicate kind of way. It makes perfect sense that she would find a place for the word scrotum in a book for nine- to-twelve-year-olds.

She is possessed of unnerving curiosity about almost everything, but especially language. She probably collects other less delicate words for scrotum, but she would not use them in a book for children.

She is intensely practical and has many versions of Lucky’s survival backpack at the ready. When we worked together at LAPL, she was the only person in our office who took any interest in the barrel that arrived one day with the label “earthquake kit.”

Her adult worldview is informed in part by her long marriage to a droll Frenchman who enables her to see American society through fresh, affectionate eyes.

She is equally at home in her quintessentially Southern California Spanish-style home in the Hollywood hills and in her cabin in the high desert, where there is no telephone, no Internet, no television, and little in the way of government structure. That is where she does most of her writing, far away from the distractions of city life.

If you want to know more about Susan Patron, read the two novels she has published so far. Imagine that the eight-year-old PK who discovers stories in the family’s dirty clothes hamper grew up to write a novel that won the Newbery Award. Imagine that ten-year-old Lucky grew up to be a great cook, an exemplary librarian, and a witty, caring, generous friend who long ago managed to cut off her meanness gland using non-surgical techniques. My friend, Susan Patron.

Virginia A. Walter is a professor of information sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a past president of ALSC.