Retired Librarian Rose Peda leaving legacy of love

Kelly Kenoyer

Sometimes it’s best to start at the beginning.

Once upon a time, in Cupertino, Calif., a little girl loved books so much she created her own library in the family’s garage to share literature with all the neighborhood kids.

She cherished the city’s Bookmobile, which gave out silver dollars to every child for reading. And though her family had no tradition of higher education, that love of books would carry through many years later to a long career of caring for her communities with literature.

Rose Peda is the star of this story.

The Sweet Home library director is retiring after nine years on the job, after taking a path to Sweet Home that was anything but inevitable.

She moved from California to Seattle, Wash. when she was 18, eager to live in a big city and willing to take any job to make it work.

She got a job at an electrical construction company, first as a clerk, then eventually working her way up to electrical estimating. That’s where she became savvy with budgets and numbers, she said – a skillset she has applied to her work in Sweet Home with vigor.

But when she was laid off from that job after more than a decade, she said friends encouraged her to become a librarian.

Somewhat ironically, it was her organizational skills that convinced them she should go for it. Her employees in Sweet Home would laugh at the idea decades later, as Peda’s office is filled with inscrutable piles and files of documents and papers.

The public part of the library was a different story, said Library Assistant Joy Kistner. “When it came to her library, everything had to be perfect.”

Attending college classes after more than a decade in a different field was sometimes a bit strange, Peda said. The first of her family to attend college, she did well.

“When I went to class I was as old as some of my professors,” she said. “I don’t think the reality actually hit me until I saw my mom and she hugged me and said she was proud of me.”

Peda started working for the Seattle Public Library system after she graduated in 1996, having interned there while working on her degree. In her position at the branch in Holly Park, she worked with patrons from all over the world.

“There were Chinese, Somalians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Vietnamese, and Samoans, just a real melting pot of people,” Peda said. “It was fun and it was challenging, because we didn’t know a lot about their cultures.”

She received cultural training that opened her eyes to how other cultures operate. She still remembers the names of some of the refugee families she served: an Ethiopian mother named Enat and her three kids.

“She didn’t have any family members with her, so she often relied on the library staff to help her with her children,” Peda recalled. “And she understood the necessity for education, and she wanted them educated. She often said the library staff were the children’s other mothers.”

Peda said she worked with a lot of kids at that job: When school got out, three busloads of children would run into her library at Holly Park.

“It was enough to put fear into anybody’s heart,” she said with a laugh. “Quite often when we had substitute librarians they didn’t want to come back.”

But Peda was committed to serving those children, and spent a lot of time helping them with their homework, she said.

“I hate to see little ones struggle,” Peda said. She never had kids of her own, but devoted a lot of timing to helping young ones. She pointed to Enat’s children as an example.

“They didn’t choose to come here. Their mother brought them here for safety,” she said. “They’re yanked out of their own civilization or their own homes and everything and they’re brought here to a new place, and I don’t know how people viewed them in the Seattle area, being immigrants and all.

“Little ones just need that kind of protection and that kind of help from people making disparaging marks and things like that about them. It’s not the child’s fault.”

Peda is so committed to other people’s children that she budgeted $2,500 a year for food, at Sweet Home Library, Kistner said.

“For the teenagers, because they eat a lot!”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Kistner added, the entire back room of the library would fill up with teenagers after school.

“This room was a teen hang-out,” Kistner said. “She had food and she had drinks and she knew what they liked. And they’d be sitting on the floor or back there doing homework or over there chatting or doing my discards, and she would say ‘Oh, they’re just volunteering!'”

“She bends over backwards to get books and materials for them. She’s really awesome. I learned from her how to be a very generous librarian,” Kistner added.

“I just think little kids just need all the support that they can get,” Peda said. “And if I can do it, I’m more than happy to help.”

Peda left Seattle after about 12 years to move closer to her sister in the Rogue Valley. She ended up with a job in Douglas County, where she stayed for about another decade.

“The branch staff were absolutely amazing and dedicated hard workers. They really, really taught me what community libraries could be like,” she said. “They really had a heart for their communities and they were very involved in the events that went on in the community and they knew all of the kids, the children’s names and their summer readings.”

At the same time, Douglas libraries were losing funding every year as the county adjusted their budget; in 2017 the libraries were defunded.

“It was horrible to watch and go through,” said Peda, who was in Sweet Home by the time that finally happened. “It seemed like eventually there wasn’t going to be a library, and, it turned out, I was right.”

Peda packed up and headed to Sweet Home in 2011. On the third day at the new job she found out the library wasn’t in good financial standing.

“They showed me the budget and I looked down and thought, ‘that number is red!’ Even I know that’s not good on a budget!” So she told then-City Manager Craig Martin that such a budgetary problem would never happen again. “No matter what it takes this will not happen again.”

Over time, she dragged the library back into good financial standing, and as of now it has 13 months of operating budget saved up, she said.

Peda also developed a knack for grant-writing, and found funding for the library and library projects all over.

“Now we have the two education computers because of her grants,” Kistner said. “She has a vision of what this community could need, but they don’t even know.”

She noted, as examples, the summer programming, which brought in music and art and culture from all around the world to Sweet Home. Or Peda’s convincing a local parent to teach classes about science, technology and engineering once a month on weekends.

Before Peda took over, library programming was somewhat scattershot. Before long, programming had to take place in the Boys and Girls Club because more than a hundred people would show up to participate.

It was the individual touches that staff and patrons cherish most, said employee Sarah Smith.

Like the time a deaf homeless man came to the library looking for his lost cell phone, and staff came in the next day to find a brand new phone on the desk with a note saying “Please set this up! He’ll be coming in later!”

Or how Peda bought origami books for Henry Hodgson, whose mom Paula Crowder volunteers with the library. PEda convinced Henry to run a program teaching origami to other kids.

“She’s always been really encouraging to the kids,” Crowder said. “She really brings them out.”

Or how she instantly bought materials she heard a patron asking Library Assistant Diane Golden about a book.

“It’d be very normal for me to be like, well, ‘I’m sorry, I can put the request in’ and then I can hear from the background, ‘I already bought it!'”

And then there was the time Peda overheard Smith’s son say he wanted to build something he’d seen in a book.

“Next thing I know, there’s this giant grocery sack full to the brim with stuff.” Smith said. “She had to go to, like, 10 different places to get all these things so Hayden could make a crossbow.”

Her son put it together, and it worked so well, her other kid wanted to make one too.

It took Peda less than a week after retirement to start training to become a Court-Appointed Special Advocate for Children. She plans to stay in Sweet Home for a while and get more involved in the Rotary Club, and in her PTO group, which provides scholarships for women.

She has some advice for whomever replaces her as library director: “Adapt to the job, and then see what you can bring out of it.

“It was an honor and a pleasure working with the library and serving the community.”

Total
0
Share