Library Board Honors Retiring Assistant Director For Years of Service

The Fort Lee Library Board of Trustees honored one of the ’s longest serving employees Wednesday, dedicating a library book to retiring assistant library director Lucy Haskell and recognizing her for her nearly 38 years of service.

“On behalf of the Fort Lee Library Board of Trustees, we very much not only want to thank you for your service and your dedication and your patience and your sense of humor, but we would like very much to dedicate this book in your honor,” board president Paige Soltano said to Haskell to open the board’s monthly meeting.

The book, Broadway: The American Musical, by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon, will now feature a dedication to Haskell, who officially retired Aug. 1, having worked at the library since 1973—just a month shy of 38 years—and who seemed almost embarrassed by the attention Wednesday.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Soltano said. “Congratulations, and be proud.”

Haskell told the board she had no specific plans for retirement—although she did tell Patch she’s already started looking into taking some classes and doing some volunteer work—and that it hasn’t really sunk in yet that she’s retired, having only been off for about 10 days so far, making it feel “more like a vacation.”

“Up until recently I’ve had a wonderful time; I’ve loved it,” Haskell told the board. “It’s who I am; it’s not a job. So the thought of not coming here is kind of strange, but it was time.”

Haskell also told Patch it was a “strange feeling,” not only to be recognized and appreciated by so many people, but to be walking away after so long with one employer.

“Thirty-eight years is a long time—more than half of my life,” said Haskell, who started at the library practically right out of library school—about a month, in fact, after graduating from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany’s Master of Library Science program. “But it’s wonderful that they wanted to do this for me.”

Back in 1973, not long after the library had moved to its current location from across the street, Haskell answered an ad in the Bergen Record for a children’s librarian, and the rest is local history. She would go on to serve as the library’s children’s librarian for the next 12 years, and said she “pretty much built the children’s collection up to the point that I worked there.”

“There was practically nothing in that children’s room then,” Haskell said.

After 12 years in the children’s room, Haskell moved up to the reference department and ultimately continued serving in the role of reference librarian while also performing the duties of assistant library director.

Asked how things have changed in the library world over the past 38 years, Haskell said, “tremendously.”

“When I first started there was no technology,” she said. “There were typewriters. Everything was done by hand. It was labor intensive. We made the cards [for the card catalog]. We filed everything. We checked out things with stamps.”

She added that in her opinion technology has changed the game in both good ways and bad.

“It’s definitely helped in information retrieval—no more going through magazines, and kids cutting up the articles,” she said. “That’s all online now so that makes it very simple. But people still need help getting books. The older people are still not using the computers quite like the younger people. It’s still information retrieval, but it’s just a different way of getting information. Granted our circulation is still huge. People are still taking out books, and the children’s room is phenomenal.”

But noting that newer, younger reference librarians often don’t even use books to look up information anymore, Haskell admitted that she’s not “a computer person,” and that it’s one of the reasons she decided it was time to retire.

“I know what I need to know to do my job, but it doesn’t come easy to me, and people expect me to know everything,” she told Patch, later expressing a similar sentiment to the board.

“I just didn’t feel I was contributing as much as I used to,” Haskell said. “I just kind of felt like it was time.”

She said she’d been considering retirement, checking her finances and knowing it would be tight, and she called the 24 hours leading up to her final decision “agonizing.” But she also said that once the decision was made, she knew it was the right one.

Haskell’s fondest memories revolve around people—the people she’s worked with and the lives she’s touched in some way. She said she received a lot of positive feedback from parents from her days in the children’s room and related stories about people coming back years later and thanking her for the impact she had on their lives.

In one instance a young woman told her she never would have gotten through high school were it not for Haskell’s patience and kindness while helping her in the children’s room. Another example Haskell gave was the woman she hired years ago even though she “had issues” because she “saw something in her—I just knew.”

“And she said to me it changed her life because I gave her a chance,” Haskell said, adding that the woman, who visited her recently, eventually moved on and is now working as an accountant while raising her seven-year-old son.

“That’s probably the most gratifying thing is all the lives that you touch, and you don’t know that you do,” Haskell said by way of summing up her career with the Fort Lee Public Library. “It’s the people. I think of the thousands of reference questions I’ve answered and the schedules I’ve done, but it’s the people. And being 38 years in one place, some of these policemen I had in story hour here. So it’s the interaction more than anything. It was very satisfying helping people like that. And you don’t realize that you’re doing that much, and then somebody pops up and reminds you.”