Library brings world to area seniors

Friday, March 15, 2002 | 2:56 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

As an eighth grader in a one-room Oklahoma schoolhouse, Cecil Ferguson developed a love for reading, especially Western novels.

"The principal saw me reading one day and asked, 'Cecil, you out fighting Indians somewhere?' " Ferguson said. "He didn't know I was part Indian."

After school, Ferguson would relax in a rusty, splintered wagon under the big blue Midwestern sky and lose himself in tales of gunslingers, dance hall girls, cowpokes and lawmen -- dreaming of the West he one day would see firsthand.

Now 88, the retired keno manager and Henderson resident has difficulty just getting out of bed and putting on his clothes, let alone going to the library. Still, he wants to continue enjoying a pastime that for him will never wane.

Thanks to a Henderson Library District program that delivers books on a variety of subjects via its own employees and through the Meals-on-Wheels program, Ferguson and nearly 40 other homebound area seniors can temporarily escape from the restrictions that aging has placed on them.

"I get 17 books at a time through this program," said Ferguson, taking a break from the Dana Fuller Ross Western trilogy "Vengence."

"I think it's just wonderful. People should take advantage of it. Reading makes me forget about my back pain because I sit real still and get so absorbed in it. I also like to watch TV, but it doesn't do the same for the pain because I move around a bit."

Though he has excellent vision, Ferguson orders large-print books to protect against eye strain. He has catalogued in a blue spiral-bound notebook 800 books he has read in the last 10 years, including 70 through the Henderson homebound program.

The library's year-old program also provides audio tapes, talking books that require special tape recorders and magnifying devices for its clients.

The idea for Henderson's homebound library program came from retired local physician Dr. Paul Wainscott, a Henderson Senior Auxiliary board member.

"I had long thought about doing something that could combine the efforts of the senior center and the library," Wainscott said. "So I called (library circulation manager) Vicki (Rudolph) and put it together. I have always wanted to do something to help homebound seniors."

Rudolph said 160 books are delivered every two to three weeks to 20 clients by Meals-on-Wheels and to 18 clients by library personnel.

"Our program differs from the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District's homebound program that delivers books by mail," Rudolph said. "Ours has more of a personal touch. We would like to see more people use it. We can handle up to 100 or more right now. It's free."

Joan Kerschner, director of the Henderson Library District, said the homebound program is one of several aimed at providing the aging with services that give them a sense of greater independence.

"We analyzed our clientele and found it was primarily young families and seniors, with the seniors really booming," Kerschner said. "They have the most leisure time, being retired, and many of them have taken a recent interest in learning how to use computers so they can e-mail their grandchildren."

Joan Vaughan, Internet services librarian for the Henderson district's Gibson branch near City Hall, said a number of seniors come to the library wanting to learn the most basic of computer skills.

"At our first class we teach them how to turn the computer on, how to use the mouse and how to play the games to enhance their hand-eye coordination skills," Vaughan said. "As they move on, many of them use the Internet to acquire health information and other subjects of interest to seniors. My sense is that they are active and, like anyone else, are curious about the Internet that everyone is talking about."

The computer classes also are free to seniors but limited to eight people per session.

Ferguson is content to stick to his books. His five decades in gaming gave him an up-close look at much of Nevada's Old West and made it possible for him to afford to take vacations to other Southwestern places of interest that he read about as a child.

"I've seen the petrified forest (Arizona) and Bryce Canyon (Utah) -- they were real remarkable places," said Ferguson, who helped open keno rooms at the Horseshoe, Thunderbird, Riviera, Silver Slipper, Flamingo and MGM Grand (now Bally's) in Las Vegas.

"What I saw, of course, wasn't the same Old West I had read about when I was a boy. But still it was great to see so much of the Southwest United States."

The twice widowed father of six, grandfather and great-grandfather says that while he no longer puts himself in the place of the characters in the books he reads, he does enjoy trying to guess where the plots will go. Having seen much of the West, he does not enjoy the descriptive parts of the story.

"Zane Grey is one of the best writers of Westerns, but he spends too much time describing the land," Ferguson said. "I just skip over those parts and get right to the plot."