Anne Everts’ farewell tour

Anne Everts, the popular librarian aboard Mobile Number One, is making her farewell tour over the next few days. She’s packing up and leaving us, breaking apart the team of Anne Everts and Dave White.

Over the years, Anne has become something of a literary counsellor to people in communities all over Queens and Lunenburg counties. She remembers the reading preferences of virtually everybody who comes aboard the mobile library, and will cheerfully offer suggestions as people search through the shelves of books. She knows what is going on with her people, and will ask after their children and parents.

Anne is retiring. Her last stops in Queens County will be this weekend. On Saturday, the bright red book bus will bring Anne to Pleasant River between 9:40 and 10:15, Caledonia between 10:30 and 12:00 noon, Kempt between 1:00 and 1:25, South Brookfield between 1:40 and 2:05, and North Brookfield between 2:10 and 2:40.

Anne spent 19 years with the South Shore Regional Library. Originally from Baden, Ontario, she came to Nova Scotia to attend university, earned a teaching degree, and ended up staying. She married Richard Lindh, who is now an award-winning builder on the South Shore, whose homes have been featured in magazines.

In 1992, Anne teamed up with Dave White to run one of the two mobile branches of the South Shore Regional Library, which maintains fixed branches in Liverpool, Bridgewater and Lunenburg, and mobile service to the rest of the communities in Queens and Lunenburg counties.

Cathy MacDonald, who is in charge of mobile libraries for the South Shore Regional Library, said the team of Anne and Dave has been through a lot together, ranging from storms to vehicle breakdowns. Once, when the bus broke down near Pleasant River, Dave had to walk to a house to use the phone and call Cathy, who drove out to collect them.

Today Mobile One is equipped not only with cell phones, but with computer connections, so that books signed out can be done electronically, via broadband access.

Cathy says the regional library will really miss Anne. She describes her as a very creative person, one who is always aware of people and their feelings. She is also the kind of person who would go far out of her way to help her friends.

When Mobile 1 leaves North Brookfield on Saturday and rolls back to library headquarters in Hebbville, Anne will climb off and begin a new stage in her life. She loves traveling, and will be able to get some of that in. She and Richard have two children, Charlotte in Alberta and Owen in Ottawa, and she will be better able to see them.

In the meantime, the regional library is interviewing next week for a replacement for Anne. Cathy Macdonald says they will tell applicants that being on the mobile is like having a second marriage, since the two on board work so closely together.

People in our two counties give an enormous amount of support to the two mobile libraries, and indeed to the library system as a whole. The mobile libraries are in danger, though. Despite their brightly-painted façades, they are growing elderly and it will cost close to $20,000 each to replace them. Mobile One is already 12 years old, and Mobile Two is 17 years old.

I thought of that when I read in the newspapers the other day about the province’s $50-million dollar sport and recreation infrastructure plan. That is an excellent program and right up there at the top of what I would consider priorities for our tax dollars.

Libraries too, however, ought to be at the top – and there is no money whatsoever in the provincial budget for capital construction for new libraries or bookmobiles. And apart from the wealthy metro region, libraries across the province are making do with inadequate operating funding that is not increasing, even though costs are increasing, and the consequence will be cuts in the materials that can be placed for use by our people.

We need to look after not just our physical health, but the health of our minds.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at tsheppard@tdcmail.ca