BRATTLEBORO-For a decade, Brooks Memorial Library has been the front door of Brattleboro. Now the woman who flung open that door is leaving.
Starr LaTronica, 71, resigned as head librarian just before the new year. She will stay in her position until April, giving the town time to find her replacement.
LaTronica began as head librarian in Brattleboro in 2016, after a long and successful career as a librarian in Binghamton, New York, where as the head librarian she managed a system encompassing 42 member libraries.
She has also served as chair of the John Newbery Medal committee, as a past president of the Association for Library Service for Children, a division of the American Library Association, and as a judge for the National Book Awards. She has helped decide the annual list of The New York Times’ Best Illustrated Children’s Books.
She is the namesake for Daniel Pinkwater’s librarian character Starr Lakawanna in his book Looking for Bobowicz (HarperCollins: 2004), who utters the immortal lines “I live to astonish, amaze, and astound. Those are things librarians do well.”
LaTronica and her husband, John, a builder, eyed Brattleboro as their community long before the head librarian position opened.
“When we knew this job was available, we started coming and hanging out more frequently to make sure we really liked the town as much as we thought we did,” LaTronica told The Commons. “I wouldn’t tell them why I was asking, but I would ask everybody, ‘So what do you think about the library?’ And the worst thing anybody said to me was, ‘I really should go more.’
“Well, I thought, This is a great place to be a librarian. And I was not wrong. It was.
“The community is so incredibly responsive and so supportive. Even those people that don’t come to the library, they still support the library because they understand that it’s for the public good.”
Dealing with change
LaTronica arrived in Brattleboro just as libraries were on the cusp of major changes.
They have always been a welcoming place, offering their communities free information, knowledge, and a quiet place to read.
But the internet was changing everything.
Card catalogs disappeared. Google offered easy searching of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips; Wikipedia emerged as an enormous crowdsourced encyclopedia. You no longer had to sit and read a book by hand; you could listen while running on a treadmill.
Meanwhile, bookstores went under. Banking went online. Medicine went online. States and the federal government followed. Magazines went online. So did television.
Suddenly, one of the most important services the library could offer was its public internet connection.
Yet, as the world grew into the internet age, LaTronica has seen how people have realized technology’s limitations and have come back to the library.
“Luckily, people realize now that not everything that you see on the internet can be trusted, and so they have come back to the library to get the expertise of the best reference librarian I’ve ever worked with, Jeanne Walsh,” she said.
“Also, children’s service libraries never fell away, because that is really the heart of the library,” she added. “Parents always recognize that.”
That’s because “the socialization kids get, the agency they get, that they can come in, they can choose books, and a parent doesn’t have to worry about the price of the book or anything — it’s one of the first places that kids can make their own decisions, which is a great thing,” LaTronica said.
The children’s department also offers group experiences, “like story time, where parents learn songs and finger plays and rhymes to do with their kids, and kids develop social skills by being in a group,” she continued. “Kids’ services always kept libraries afloat, even in that messy time when the people thought the internet was going to solve everything.”
‘That’s sharing’
When LaTronica began her work at Brooks, libraries were being threatened by powerful interests. The Heritage Foundation and other right-wing organizations have for years funded and coordinated a movement to slash library funding from town budgets, effectively privatizing or closing them.
This was an effort that she especially frowned upon.
“What makes libraries great is that they are for everybody,” LaTronica said. “They are the public good.”
Once, she said, she was talking to a group of preschoolers about libraries, “and I explained how they worked and how everybody gives money through their taxes, and then we buy things, and then everybody borrows them, and then they bring them back.”
“That’s sharing,” one little girl told LaTronica.
Nationally, censorship also reared its ugly head.
“It depends on where you are in the country,” LaTronica said. “That’s why I’m a really lucky librarian to be in this in this community. This community is a protection against some of the more horrible strains of anti-humanity going on in the rest of the country. Luckily, we have not had challenges to materials here.”
She said there has been only one challenge during her tenure, and “that was a misunderstanding” on the part of the complainant.
“She hadn’t read the book,” LaTronica said. “She misunderstood the title and thought it was about something else. So that got cleared up in a hurry.”
Other than “some complaints around programming that we did several years ago,” community support for the collection and for those programs “was overwhelming,” she said.
Keeping a good thing going
The retirement of Brooks’s former head librarian, Jerry Carbone, opened the doors for LaTronica as his successor. She credits his leadership for building a library that was widely respected and appreciated by its town and the region.
Carbone, widely loved in the community, “left me with just a fantastic staff and such a solid reputation in the community, that everybody already loved and supported the library,” LaTronica said. “I couldn’t do what I’ve done here in a lot of other communities. This community, which is what made me want to move here, is just so unique and so engaged in the common good.”
She believes that spirit has made her 10-year-long tenure so successful.
“It’s been my experience in this community that so many people are engaged in efforts, whether they’re volunteers, whether they’re activists, whether they’re are leaders or employees of not-for-profits, or if they’re just residents, they are working towards the common good,” LaTronica said.
“Even when we find ourselves on opposite sides of opinions, there’s a sense that I get from this community that we care about the town and we want the town to be as good as it can be. That’s what I love, and that’s the kind of support and benefit I’ve received from this community. It’s an encouragement and inspiration. People know one another. They know one another’s names. You don’t see that everywhere.”
From the beginning, the electric LaTronica threw herself into the community. There was seemingly not a social service organization whose board she did not join, not an art show or meeting she did not attend, not a homeless person whose name she did not know, and a connection to the library that she did not tie down.
“My goal was to just inform and educate and inspire everybody to use this incredible resource,” she said. “It’s at their fingertips. If you think that this library doesn’t have something for you, then please — I’m inviting you to come in. I’ll find something for you in this library.”
Today, Brooks is as much a community center as a library. You can borrow passes to most of the nearby museums. You can check out snowshoes or cooking equipment or an electric bicycle from Brooks’ Library of Things. You can listen to legislators explain their goals for the year. You can hear authors speak about their latest books.
In LaTronica’s own words, she has moved the library from being “a place to a presence.”
“I made an effort to really go out,” Latronica said. “I went to the [Brattleboro] Farmers Market, to the table at the [Brattleboro Food] Co-op. Everybody I talked to in the town knew I was a librarian. That is my identity. So people really came to think of the library as the place if they wanted an event, if they wanted to have a meeting, if they wanted some kind of program. They would think, ‘Oh, the library should do that.’ And now I really see it as the pulse of the community.”
‘You see everything’
LaTronica waves a hand from her seat behind a giant computer in her office on the mezzanine, down to the main reading room below.
“You can really see what’s going on here,” she said. “You can see the folks that are hanging out here. You see everything.”
She describes that scene on the library main floor as “a microcosm of the community.”
“Folks are coming and doing art for a while. People are coming here and working on puzzles. You see people with disabilities and people who are aging, and some people that I think maybe staying here all day because their house is cold,” LaTronica said.
The library, she continued, is “a place where people come to be around other people, and there aren’t that many places that you can just come and be around other people. Sometimes we’ll have two people playing Scrabble at a table downstairs.”
Shortly before LaTronica’s arrival, the town learned of a surprising $1.2 million bequest to the library by Ronald Read, a retired gas station attendant and janitor who had secretly amassed wealth through stock market investing. He also left $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital.
The library’s two small meeting rooms on its mezzanine — in such heavy demand they are usually booked all day — were part of a renovation of the library building using the Read bequest.
“We never could have done that without him,” LaTronica said. “People are tutoring or having a chess lesson or having a Zoom call or something. They’re always busy, you know.”
The library also got a teen reading room, which replaces “a little movable shelf in the middle of the adult reading room, which is not a place to hang out.”
The new space is called the “Spicy Lime.”
“That’s the name the teens voted for,” LaTronica said. “The teens get to have some agency there, so that’s what they picked. I’m really, really proud of the room. It’s a special place for teens.
“And every time there’s a youth council meeting or any gathering of teens, and they talk about where are safe, or about good places for teens to go in the community, they always mention the library. And that’s because they have their own space, and that wouldn’t have been the case before,” she continued.
What’s next?
Will it surprise anyone that while LaTronica is leaving Brooks, she has no intention of ever giving up being a librarian?
“I can’t imagine ever stopping work,” she said. “I can’t imagine not being a librarian. I’ve been a librarian longer than I’ve been a wife or a mother. So I intend to work until they haul me away feet first.”
LaTronica says she wants to return to working with youth — her professional speciality prior to her roles in top management.
“And that’s really where my heart is, and that’s where my expertise is,” she said. “So I miss the candor of kids. There’s no better way to fight cynicism than to work with children. They’re just the hope of the world, and I have a blast with them, and they get my jokes, darn it.”
The LaTronicas have three children: a son and twin daughters. One of her daughters, Ramona, 32, is a school librarian in Turners Falls, Massachusetts.
“I can really spend some time there and do some fun things with kids,” LaTronica said. “I’m going to ask her to let me volunteer there. Actually, I’m going to make her let me volunteer.”
So, after a decade, it is time for Brooks to have another library director.
“Jerry Carbone said that it is a transformational moment that occurs when a library gets a new director,” LaTronica said. “I’m so grateful that I was able to contribute my vision and to make some changes and bring some new things along. And now I think it’s time for somebody else to come in and freshen things up.
“I’ve been here 10 years. It’s time for somebody to come in with another vision, with another perspective, and it’s only going to be better,” LaTronica said. “It’s absolutely only going to be better.”
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.