The South Central Regional Library marks its 60th anniversary this week with a gala trivia night in Morden on Friday.
In the weeks leading up to the celebration, the Voice sat down with two very familiar faces to anyone who has ever been a patron at either the Morden or Winkler branches of the regional library network, which got its start in those two communities back in 1965 before expanding to include locations in Altona, Manitou, and Miami.
Esther Penner and Dorothy Martens were both fixtures at SCRL before their retirements, Penner working at the Winkler library from 1985-2013 and Martens in Morden from 1991-2024.
The pair have over six decades of service between the two of them, and had a front-row seat to virtually every technological advancement, facility move, and service improvement that’s come down the pike for the two libraries in recent memory.
This week, Penner shares a few of those memories. Check out next week’s Voice to hear some of Martens’.
“I’ve always been reading”
For Penner, an avid reader, spotting the newspaper ad in late 1984 for a library clerk seemed a stroke of luck.
“I had been working in the church library for some years, and I loved it. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always been reading.”
She typed up her application on an old typewriter that had an unreliable key or two on it (“I felt a little bad about that,” she laughs) and crossed her fingers.
It took a bit of time before she got a response—so much so that she had all but given up on the idea.
“It had been awhile, and I hadn’t told anybody about it,” Penner recalls. “Then I got called in for an interview and I was dumbfounded … and I left it feeling, ‘Nah. Never going to happen.’ But the next day they called and offered me the job.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Penner went from being a stay-a-home mom to joining the Winkler Library team. Back then, the library was tucked into a corner of the Winkler Civic Centre. It didn’t move into its current building across the street until 2006 when a human chain of volunteers moved the collection from the old space to the new by hand.
Penner started out as a clerk and eventually worked her way to branch librarian and then into the cataloguing department, where she closed out her career.
“I was there for 29 years and 10 months,” she says. An introvert by nature, more comfortable behind-the-scenes than at the front desk, Penner is quick to answer what it was she loved most about the job: “The books. Always the books. Seeing the new ones coming in, that’s like Christmas every day.
“It was a dream job. Not something I’d ever aspired to, because I hadn’t gone to university or anything like that, but I took an awful lot of courses after I was hired.”
Recall, if you will, what libraries were like back in the ‘80s. Computerized cataloguing was still a decade away—the old card catalogues were how you went about finding anything.
“I don’t think people realize in the old days before there were computers how hard reference work could be, how hard it was to find something,” Penner says.
Librarians were the guides. On the hunt for a specific author or title? Looking for information about any topic imaginable? Needing a meaningful poem or quote for a speech? You’d ask the librarian for a helping hand or a nudge in the right direction.
“We had books that listed every book ever written, just in case somebody asked,” Penner recalls. “You looked it up and it was this wee tiny print.”
During her first days on the job, she recalls one little girl coming up to the desk for help in finding “the berry books.”
“I took her to the section where you’d learn about berries, growing things. But, no, no, no that wasn’t it. I finally had to ask her, ‘Could you go ask your teacher to write it down for me so I know what I’m looking for?’”
Turns out, the child was looking for books with the Newbery Medal symbol on them, a prestigious award for children’s literature.
“I was new and I was still learning,” Penner says, laughing at the memory of being so baffled as to what that girl had been looking for. But she dove into the reference guide and brought herself up to speed on all the Newbery-winning books to date to ensure she could help the next child who came asking.
“I loved doing the digging of finding something that someone would enjoy,” she says. “And when you get to know people and you know what kinds of books they like to read—when someone would have a favourite author and we got a new book in, I would phone them and tell them it’s here, would you like me to put your name on it?
“I remember in my early years one town councillor thought we were all volunteers and all we did was read and sign out books … but you’d go home at the end of the day and you’re just shaking with tiredness because you’ve been on your feet all day and lugging heavy books around, helping people find what they were looking for.”
In the early 1990s, computerization and the slow demise of the card catalogues marked a major shift in library operations.
“It took us awhile to let go of them. We didn’t trust the computers,” Penner says, chuckling. “But in the end, it was time to let them go.”
(Though perhaps not entirely—Penner purchased a bank of those old card cabinets. “They’re still in my son’s garage, full of screws and nuts.”)
Computers truly revolutionized everything.
“It changed the face of the work,” Penner says. Not just in how people found what they were looking for, but behind the scenes as well—books could be scanned rather than painstakingly stamped in and out, and cataloguing suddenly required a whole lot less paperwork than ever before.
“Computers just made it that much easier when you didn’t need all the cards anymore,” Penner says, observing that weeding books out from the collection today is a far cry from how it used to be done. “You’re getting new books in, you need room—we used to go through the shelves book by book … you’d look at the card—when was the last time it went out? How old is this book, how useful is this book, is the information current? Book by book. Nowadays you can ask the computer to spit out a report.”
Beyond an increased reliance on and embracing of technology, Penner notes community engagement has grown in leaps and bounds as well.
“[Back then] we had the summer reading program, we had story hour,” she recalls. “There wasn’t much else.”
Today the library is a hub of educational workshops spanning just about every topic imaginable, public speaking events, book clubs and other community groups, and even Nerf gun battles to get people through the doors.
“It was wonderful to see more people coming into the library,” Penner says.
But while the job may have changed to meet modern needs, the dedication of the people who work there has not.
“I’m amazed at all the people who come and work at the library and do such a wonderful job every time,” Penner says. “There’s so many of them—over the years they’ve come and gone, and every one brings new ideas. It’s just marvelous what all goes on there nowadays.”
