Helen Kate Says Goodbye to Popular Director
Jen Stock, outgoing director of the Helen Kate Furness Library, with a portrait of the library’s founder.
One thing is clear: the patrons and volunteers of the Helen Kate Furness Library will miss their outgoing director. Jen Stock, who led the Wallingford library since 2013, left in late December for a new job overseeing the Upper Darby Township and Sellers Memorial Free Public Library. The despondency in the building on Providence Road shortly before her departure was palpable.
“She’s leaving,” lamented Judy Voet, a library volunteer and Rose Valley Borough Council member assigned to the library board, when I stopped by one afternoon last December. “I can’t stand it! She’s the reason I’m here.” Voet recalled her first impressions of Stock: “She was herself.” And: “She didn’t whisper.”
“It’s difficult for me to whisper,” Stock agreed.
A Librarian’s Legacy
When Stock arrived at Helen Kate from the Marple Public Library in Broomall, one of her first changes was to give the volunteers more responsibility and autonomy, empowering them to function more like staff. She established a quicker system for picking up holds. She replaced the old cigar box where money used to be kept with a cash register. (Some long-time volunteers didn’t like that, but it made the accounting add up.)
On the programming side, Stock added more events for adults and for tweens. She oversaw the organization of coloring afternoons, Italian-speaking evenings, and a mah-jongg club. “The library as community center,” she explained. Then she adds, “I always liked Andrew Carnegie’s view of the library as the people’s university. It’s still something we see. There aren’t as many autodidacts, but we are a place where folks from the literacy council come in and tutor.”
Stock’s musing on the various functions of libraries was interrupted by a brother and sister coming up to the desk to speak to her. “My mom told us you were leaving for a different library forever,” the girl said.
“Well, maybe not forever,” Stock replied, then explained that the new job would be closer to where she lives.
“You work here,” the brother told her, “but you sleep at your house.”
“That’s very true,” Stock said. “I try not to sleep here.”
Originally, Stock’s favorite part of librarianship was advising readers: “If you liked that [book], oh, there’s this one!” But she came to enjoy the social-service aspect too. “You can learn a new language, or you can learn how to read,” she observed. “You can learn to get from point A to point B using the internet, so you don’t have to worry about paying for a GPS.”
The Upper Darby job will involve managing three libraries in a much bigger and more diverse community. “[There are] fifty plus languages spoken in the school system,” Stock said, waving goodbye to a volunteer heading down the steps while she talked. She seemed to notice everyone coming and going and to recognize most of them.
The Making of a Librarian
“I remember wanting to be like a librarian I knew in elementary school, Miss Pippit,” Stock recalled. “She...read us stories, and she put us in order. And it was fun.” This was in Buffalo, New York, where Stock grew up. (“They have a great library system.”)
One summer, Stock worked as a bathhouse attendant at the pool, which was just behind the public library. It was a boring job, so she would ride her bike to the library on her way to work and check out books to read between handing people baskets for their personal items.
Another function of libraries: a balm for youthful boredom.
And yet another: a place to test one’s growing maturity.
In the library of her childhood, Stock recalled, “you were allowed to sit on one side, because you were a certain age. I remember, at a certain point, sneaking over to the other side. Because I thought: I don’t want to read these books anymore! I want to read those books. And no one stopped me.”
If the librarians in Buffalo were anything like Jen Stock, though, chances are they noticed.
