Jack London Park

While on a visit to Sonoma with my children over the winter break, we visited Jack London's ranch, now a park, Jack London State Historic Park, in Glen Ellen. He lived from 1876-1916, so when I say he left home to join the gold rush, California fourth graders know it could not have been the California gold rush. He went to the Klondike, in Alaska, and from that adventure, he wrote several of his most famous stories, "Call of the Wild" and the short story "To Build a Fire." In 1886, when he was ten years old, he discovered the Oakland Public Library. Over the course of his lifetime, he gathered together his own library of more than 15,000 books (about the size of the collection of the LS library at LJCDS). He called his books "the tools of my trade." His trade was writing, of course.

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