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Kandy Beebe, NS’s newest staff member, chuckles as she thinks of what she was like in high school. Growing up, Beebe never liked to read books; she read only when she had to.
Being forced to read books by teachers made her dislike reading. She continued to not enjoy reading until when she was a sophomore, when a friend of hers approached her with a book recommendation. While Beebe does not remember what the title of the book was, she remembered how the book made her feel.
“I read it and I was like ‘Oh, I didn’t know that I liked to read’, but it just changed my point of view because it was something that I was picking, and not something that someone else was picking for me,” Beebe said.
She has loved books ever since.
In high school, Beebe would have been voted class clown. Beebe was a cheerleader and on the drill team every year except her freshman year. She was on the student council as well.
“I was a good student but I was kinda here just to be here and have a good time,” Beebe said. She graduated in the class of 1989.
Gary Temple, Beebe’s high school librarian was an influential person in her life. She was his librarian aid. Temple helped Beebe make good decisions and was a great sounding board to the students of the school. He tried his hardest to lead all students, including Beebe, in better directions.
“If I could say anything to him, I would just tell him thanks for listening,” Beebe said.
Beebe has, in turn, been following his example by listening to the other students here. Beebe loves all of the different people and students that she gets to work with.
“The hardest part of my job is hearing the stories of difficult things in the lives of other people, and it really just breaks my heart,” Beebe said.
However, she is able to look at this through a fairly optimistic point of view.
“It’s amazing the things that people walk through,” Beebe said. “It either makes them a better person or it teaches them something in someway. Sometimes it doesn’t make them a better person, but I would say in most cases that people are really resilient to the things that they’ve been handed in this life.”
As a librarian, Beebe has a duty to take care of the books and help fix the iPads as well as taking care of the computers. Beebe works hard in the library and in every job she has had before.
Beebe has found herself wearing many different hats in her life. She has worked in the turkey plant, as a construction worker, a secretary, a motel maid, and a waitress. While none of these jobs were exactly her favorite, she did enjoy being a secretary. Beebe likes organizing things, which she is also able to do as a librarian. She moved on from being a secretary because she wanted something that was different, something with more human interaction.
Another part of her job is ordering the books for the library. She does this mainly through looking at magazines that are sent to the library and looking online at books that are recommended for teenagers. They also use a book recommendation box that the students can drop their recommendations in.
“It’s probably about half and half, we don’t get as many recommendations as we would like because when someone wants a book, they want it right now, not eight weeks from now,” Beebe said.
Beebe’s favorite book changes frequently, but currently, her favorite book is “The Dry Grass Of August” by Anna Jean Mayhew, a book about a young girl dealing with racism in the civil rights movement.
If there was anything that she could change about the library, she would want more kids to come into the library. She hears about juniors and seniors who graduate being in the library only a couple of times. She thinks that it is really just a great place for kids to come and talk with their friends.
“I love this job, I like working with the kids. I’ve worked in some jobs before where you have to work outside where it is cold or muddy, and I like it here. I work under very pleasant work conditions.”
