Jean Pike, 84, has owned The Wonderful Bookstore in North Little Rock for about 30 years. She enjoyed running the store and misses being surrounded every day by all the books on the store shelves. She is comforted, however, by the home library that one of her six daughters has created for her. “I can leave the bookstore more easily since I have a good library,” she says.
(Special for the Democrat-Gazette)
Jean Pike likes to read – and to read people.
“My favorite thing was bringing people together with books they liked,” says Pike, who recently sold his business, The Wonderful Bookstore in North Little Rock. “Since I’m such an avid reader, I wish they liked books too.”
Pike, 84, was the bookstore’s first customer, discovering it when she ventured from her Lakewood home to Park Hill to shop and buy clothes for her six daughters.
“I would go up to shop for the girls and, of course, I would always stop at the bookstore,” says Pike, who has become friends with the store owner.
When she got the chance, 30 years ago, she bought it.
“We built a lot more books than we originally had when we started, and in sections,” says Pike. “I could take people to that section and help them find something they liked.”
Pike lived in Prattsville until second grade, when his family moved to Memphis and, a few years later, to Little Rock.
“When I learned to read, I always had a book in my hand,” she says. “Since I learned to read, I have a book with me.”
She graduated from Little Rock Central High in 1955 and then went to Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
“I liked being at a big school, so I wanted to go to a big school. I loved Baylor,” she says.
She had been in Baylor for four quarters when her parents, who moved to Conway, asked her to come home and try Hendrix College.
“They said I could go back to Baylor if I didn’t like it,” she says, and that’s exactly what she did.
“It was different living at home. Baylor was very strict — you were in and out of everything. But I was more independent in a way,” she says.
She lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Fayetteville for a few months while he was in law school before returning to Texas. After graduating from Baylor, she returned to Fayetteville to pursue an MA in English Literature at the University of Arkansas.
“I was kind of a peripatetic traveler,” she says.
She taught remedial English while in graduate school, prepared for the job by the head of the English department who had written a grammar book used for the course.
Pike’s friend was moving to Los Angeles to work at Pepperdine University, and Pike decided to join her. On a recommendation from the head of the English department, she was awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of Southern California, where she enrolled for a doctorate.
“After a year of this, I was tired of school and I thought, ‘I don’t want to do this. I want to get married and have a family,'” she says.
She met George Pike during her time at Hendrix. While she was in Texas and California, he was at Harvard Law School.
“We would come home for the holidays and get in touch and decide we were made for each other,” she says of her husband, who died last year.
She invited him to dinner on one such occasion and, according to her, her mother prepared a wonderful meal.
“We kind of pretended I could have done it,” says Pike.
Pike’s mother was worried that Pike didn’t cook while she was home.
“I only wanted to read if I had the time, but I said, ‘Mom, I can read. I can buy a cookbook,'” says Pike.
She had, in fact, obtained a “Better Homes and Gardens” cookbook while she was working on her master’s, and practiced recipes like shepherd’s pie and stroganoff.
“I would do all the business, enough for four. My apartment was upstairs and the guys downstairs would come and eat and it worked out really well,” she says.
Years later, her daughters make some of the same recipes for their own families. They remember various animals that resided with them over the years.
“We had every pet you could imagine,” says Pike. “We had gerbils, hamsters, a raccoon, a quarter horse, lots of dogs, lots of kittens.”
There were several Dutch rabbits, including a special one the girls found in their backyard that liked to sleep nestled next to their golden retriever, lots of ducks and geese, and, for a few months in one winter, a rebellious roller pigeon.
Pike enjoyed running the bookstore, even when it was difficult to stay afloat amid the influx of e-books.
“I knew it was coming, but it came a lot faster than I thought,” she says. “The bookstore was doing great before that. But we still had all these customers who liked to read and wanted help choosing their books. Fortunately, people kept coming.”
She misses the bookstore, albeit less so since one of her daughters created a home library filled with some of her favorite books.
“She got me this beautiful library, full of books – some I read and some I didn’t,” she says. “It is wonderful.”
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