RETIRED LIBRARIANS CHECK OUT WITH A CENTURY'S WORTH OF IMPACT
Maplewood Memorial Library gets a different kind of facelift
By Mason Levinson
Sometimes words aren’t necessary to convey what someone means to you and your community.
“I had a young kid yesterday who put his arms around me and just sobbed,” Jane Folger, head of children’s services at the Maplewood Memorial Library, said in late August, just days before retiring. “I mean, it was wordless. But boy, I’ll tell you.”
There were a lot of tears shed at the library this spring and summer as five longtime employees called it a career, taking with them 106 years’ worth of institutional knowledge and thousands of memories. What remains is each employee’s indelible imprint on the community, their former colleagues and the striking new building that stands as a reflection of their collective expertise and vision.
The retirees include Folger (29.5-year tenure); Robyn Whalen, senior information specialist (24); Joanne Beckerich, program and publicity coordinator (20.5); Cindy Mondino, senior library assistant (19); and Robert Nealon, head of technology (13). They could have left much earlier but endured through what library Director Sarah Lester says was “a period of incredible change.”
“First it was the pandemic, and then we closed the main library and had interim services on Boyden Avenue,” Lester says. “It was just this interesting but really hard time, and all these people wanted to stick through it and be a part of re-opening.”
Maplewood Memorial Library completed its $24 million renovation in July 2025. With a climate-resilient design, including solar panels that offset 58 percent of its annual energy use, the all-electric building is the first public library in New Jersey to earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification.
Visitors to the expansive, light-filled new library may see organizations or individuals using its 10 high-tech private meeting rooms; students printing documents in the self-service business center; a discussion with a noted creative (such as screenwriter and The New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan) in the large multimedia-capable Community Room, which holds up to 200 people; or toddlers enjoying a snack or book time on the new veranda and patio that look upon Maplewood Memorial Park. There’s also a makerspace with 3D printers and a local history room.
“People are using the building in a way that they never did before,” says Whalen, the now-retired information specialist, pointing to the new study areas that have drawn in younger adults. “We always had kids. We always had older people, but the 20-somethings just really weren’t coming into the library, and now they do.”
The current building opened in 1955, but the library itself is more than 100 years old. The retirees were part of the team that reimagined it – and readied it – for the next century after enduring Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and Hurricane Ida in 2021, the latter of which flooded the library basement with seven feet of water just before renovation was set to begin.
Whalen, who retired at the end of April, was particularly proud of finding, organizing and supervising about 40 community volunteers to unpack the 1,875 boxes of books that had to be placed on the new building’s shelves. It was a monthlong effort.
“Because they were in storage for much longer than we anticipated, there was a lot of weeding that needed to be done,” she says. “Every book literally had to be touched and dealt with, so it was a lot of work. The community really did come together.”
Beckerich, who retired May 1 and a month later moved down the shore to Manahawkin, spent time during the renovation drumming up ideas for programming in the Community Room and new Forum, which contains rising tiers of seating (and power outlets) and connects the first and second floors. She says she was most proud of creating hands-on and educational programs that “people left smiling, telling me how much fun it was.”
Fun aside, the library served a crucial community need during Sandy, when it was dubbed a “beacon in the storm,” maintaining power while much of Maplewood went dark for more than a week. “Finance guys who had never been in the library before in their life came in,” says
Lester.
“I remember one guy brought in his entire desktop setup – like 16-inch monitors,” says Amanda Eigen, the library’s assistant director.
The building held up but also showed its age. Patrons’ electronics were plugged into extension cords that were plugged into other extension cords that ran everywhere in search of a free outlet.
“The library really saw from a technology standpoint where we were lacking,” says Lester.
Knowledge gained through decades of service informed the planning for the new building. Nealon, for example, played a key role in equipping it. He wrote the technology section of the 2020 grant application that eventually brought in $8.3 million as part of the New Jersey Library Construction Bond Act. He then spent the next six years seeing it to fruition before retiring on July 1, 2026.
“I was planning on retiring last year and I realized that it’s such a big job, I needed to stay longer,” Nealon says, noting the time needed, even after re-opening, to get the kinks out of the new technological infrastructure. “Now, they have a new person [William Louigene] who has taken over and is very good. The library is in a very good place.”
The Wi-Fi system, which had four access points before the renovation, now has 35, including several outside. There are almost 500 hardwired connections to the library’s network, from computers to security cameras and sensors.
Folger, better known in the Children’s Room as Miss Jane, was the most public facing of the retirees. Though she stepped down at the end of the summer, she says it was a year-long farewell for her as so many people visited the new building, many of whom grew up in Maplewood and returned to see the renovation.
“I feel incredibly lucky, because I get to see the results of my work, and most people don’t,” she says. “When you work with families and you work in a community for a long time, it’s incredible. We’ve all had a beautiful influence on each other.”
Folger also pointed to the “incredibly talented” people who are taking over for the retirees, including Natasha Osborne, a senior librarian whom she hired four years ago and is now replacing her as head of youth services.
“She’s going to go her own way, but the basic thing you need here is a love of people,” says Folger. “You want to be sort of heart driven, so that people feel like they’re dealing with a human being. It’s a real community.”
Maplewood’s libraries – which comprise the new building and the Hilton Branch – employ the equivalent of 24 full-time employees, including 10 who are librarians with masters of library science degrees. More than 100 resumés were submitted for some of the openings, says Lester, noting the creativity of the broader Maplewood community as a drawing card.
“It’s a level of intellectual curiosity that you don’t see in a lot of places,” says Lester. “These people are totally interesting, really smart, really curious and professional. A lot of them are artists because Maplewood attracts that. It’s true of the people who have retired, and it’s true of the new staff too.”
Nealon, for example, is a painter who’s planning to dedicate his retirement to his art. Bridget Mendoza-Velez, recently hired as a library assistant, is a talented multimedia artist who is helping with design work and art projects for the library. She’s also a singer in a band. New Communications Director Christine Dall, a former volunteer who was promoted from within, is a former actor.
Others who filled open positions are Carolyn Quimby, program and outreach librarian; Louigene, systems administrator; and Sigfredo Montijo, business administrator.
“We have a very smart, very creative, very talented staff, and that’s been the case for years,” says Lester. “We continue to be a place where people want to work, because of the community, because of the staff, and now because of the building.”
Folger, for one, says she intended to move away from the area, though her immediate plans included simply spending time outside of the library walls she called home for so long.
“I’m going to go for a nice 4-mile walk with a friend, in the daylight,” she says. “I can’t wait to be outside for big periods of time.”
Mason Levinson, a two-decade reporter at Bloomberg News, is director of content at Maplewood-based PR firm RoseComm.
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