If you’re curious what kind of effect a substitute fourth-grade teacher can have on a young life, just ask Charlotte Baldinger.
Baldinger will retire from a nearly 43-year career at the Seward Memorial Library on Friday, Jan. 14, and her love of literature came, in part, from that one fourth-grade experience.
“I had a teacher miss school for over a week, and I had a sub who would read to us. It was life-changing,” Baldinger said. “I loved the books she read.”
One of them was “My Father’s Dragon,” written by Ruth Stiles Gannett in 1948, about a boy who runs away to an island to rescue a baby dragon.
“I fell in love with the book,” Baldinger said. “I went and got it at the library, brought it home and had my parents read it with our family. Then I read it to every classroom I ever taught or subbed in if I had the opportunity. I read it to my children. I read it to my grandchildren. Now they own it. I took that book everywhere. That’s the impact of a sub in fourth grade.”
Baldinger hails from Detroit, Michigan, but made lasting ties to Seward when she graduated from Concordia College (now university).
She and her husband Ken both found jobs in New York City. She knew she wanted to be a librarian, but she majored in English and taught elementary school for three years.
Those three years in the city were enough.
“We knew we didn’t want to raise a family in New York City on cement,” Baldinger said. “I loved the people, but I always felt like a visitor.”
They moved back to Nebraska, where she took a job as a preschool director in Lincoln. Part of her job was finding 16-millimeter filmstrips to show the kids.
“That’s how I got in here (in the Seward library),” she said. “They would show the movies at story time, then I’d come get them and show them to my preschool children, so I was in here on a weekly basis.”
When Baldinger left the preschool to raise her family, the library hired her for a part-time, seasonal position helping with story times and summer programs as needed.
That was in June 1979, and she never looked back. In June 1986, Baldinger became permanent staff.
The early days
Baldinger began her library career in what was then the Seward Public Library, housed in the Andrew Carnegie building at the corner of Fifth and Main Streets.
“Back then, it was a typewriter, and it was pencil written in the back of the book on cards,” Baldinger said. “We’d alphabetize them at the end of the day and count them.”
The library was much smaller then, and the staff workspace even more so. The director didn’t even have much of an office.
“I worked with patrons at the desk, then turned around and there was the microwave,” Baldinger said.
There was no space to host community speakers, book clubs or summer programs. All the summer activities took place off site. Kids were bussed to the zoo, nearby rock quarries and museums, and the library used the youth center and other meeting spaces around town.
“We were so limited,” Baldinger said.
The staff made it work, though, until Frank Vrbka came and sparked an evolution.
“Frank Vrbka came and introduced us to computers for the first time,” Baldinger said. “That was traumatic. And then the next traumatic thing was the internet.”
She still remembers the patron’s question she searched for an answer to the first time she ever used the internet: “Do you know if I can get wooden pallets somewhere close by?”
The answer was yes.
Writing the next chapter
After the internet came plans for another big change – a new building.
Baldinger was there in 1990 for the first day of what would become 13 years of planning for the current Seward Memorial Library building at 233 South Fifth Street, just across from the Carnegie library.
She remembers when the land was purchased and when the houses occupying the space were burned down.
She was part of the team that dug into the dirt for the official groundbreaking ceremony in 2002.
She was there in 2003 for the famous book brigade – three days of patrons of all ages passing books one at a time – in shelf order – down the steps of the old building, across Fifth Street, up the steps of the new building and onto the shelf. She passed the first book as it left the Carnegie building.
“Somebody was at the other end knowing exactly where it would go because Becky had measured how much space everything would take,” Baldinger said.
Becky Baker, the library’s current director, oversaw the entire building and moving process.
Baldinger said she could see the new building, but it was hard to fathom working in it after more than a decade of planning.
“I would have never thought it would take that long to go from that to this, but then when we did it, we had it all. We had the money. It was state-of-the-art, classic, beautiful, timeless. It’s a treasure,” she said. “On opening day, the whole thing was just a dream come true.”
That was only part one.
In 2013, Baldinger was part of the team that opened the lower level of the new building – transforming it from wide open concrete storage space to a second level of cherry wood stacks to house the Fiction section, along with a new conference center and kitchen, genealogy room, study spaces and meeting rooms.
Life happens
Baldinger has seen a lot happen in the library unrelated to books – everything from the announcement of newborns to the wedding of a couple who met as teens at the Library After Hours program to senior graduation photoshoots among the books to medical emergencies with grim endings.
“Life happens here. All phases of life,” she said.
Baldinger played host to countless community programs in her decades at the library. She would help plan and promote the programs, introduce the speakers, and then get to sit back and enjoy the presentations.
“Charlotte contacted many speakers for us because she knows a lot of people in the community,” Baker said.
She bonded particularly well with author Gary W. Moore, who visited the library for one of its first All Seward Reads Together programs on his book, “Playing with the Enemy,” a biography of his father.
Just before Moore left the Chicago area for Seward, he dislocated his shoulder.
“You know what happens if you’ve just dislocated your shoulder? You can’t drive a rental,” Baldinger said. “So, I got to be chauffer for him. I picked him up from the airport, took him out to eat, drove him to his hotel, took him to Lincoln to another program…I got to know him, and he was an amazing person.”
Baldinger also hosted the monthly New York Times Bestseller book club, reading a whopping 204 books with the group.
She would find enough copies of the book for everyone in the club, then compile information about the author, editorial reviews and discussion questions. The only requirement was that the book was on the New York Times Bestseller list at some point.
“It could be nonfiction, fiction, anything. We mixed it up,” Baldinger said.
Her personal favorites were nonfiction accounts of inspirational heroes and overcomers – “The Boys in the Boat,” “Thunder Dog” and “Unbroken,” to name a few.
Baldinger led years of additional programs for both kids and adults: Closet Crafts, new book Sneak Peeks, Dial-a-Story, Line Dancing in the Library, Coffee and Cards, Writer’s Workshop, Computer Club, Book Review Bingo, Speed Reviews, All Seward Reads Together, One Book One Nebraska, LEGO Club and more.
One of her favorites was Poetry Break during National Library Week.
“I would run into classrooms, ‘break in’ and act out a poem from Shel Silverstein, then run back out,” she said.
Another favorite was walking through local stores or running into people on the street and asking them for their library card. If they could show her their card, Baldinger gave them $5.
“Your library card is valuable, you know? They would be thrilled,” she said.
Baldinger spent a lot of time reading to other people, too. She hosted Literary Lunch at the middle school, reading to youth during their lunch break, and Listening Hour at Ridgewood Rehabilitation and Care Center, reading uplifting and humorous stories to groups of residents.
Baldinger is perhaps most well-known, though, for the Read At Home program. For decades, she has delivered books to patrons in nursing homes and the Seward Manor, and to those enduring extended hospital stays.
Becky Reisinger started the program, and Baldinger took it over in the late 1990s. Since then, she’s made thousands of stops on her delivery route.
“In the last 10 years alone, she has visited patrons 14,672 times,” Baker said. “She has built a lot of relationships there, and that has been a positive thing for the library.”
Baldinger got to know those patrons and adapted their deliveries to their preferences – hardcover or paperbacks, regular or large print, audio books or magazines. She recommended books in different genres based on their interests and even kept track of who had already received which books so as not to deliver duplicates.
Beginning the epilogue
A retirement party in Baldinger’s honor will be from 2 to 4 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 14, at the library.
Baker, who has worked with Baldinger her entire library career, said the library will be different from now on.
“She’s going to leave a huge hole in our staff because she does so many different things for us,” Baker said. “We probably won’t know all she does until she’s not here.”
After her last day of work, Baldinger is not sure what she’ll do with her time.
“Maybe it’s grandkids. Maybe it’s the community. I don’t know,” she said. “I have no title on the next chapter yet.”
