The Applegate Library’s Susie Beckham moves to Ohio in her retirement
Written by:
Diana Coogle
Many patrons of the Applegate Library feel that the library has lost its glow since the associate librarian, Susie Beckham, retired on May 1.
They miss the home-baked cookies she brought in too.
“People would come into the library and ask if Susie was here,” says Kat Gore, also a library associate at the Applegate Library. “I would say, ‘No, but Christine Grubb [branch manager] and I are here. Can we help you?’ They would just say, ‘No, thanks,’ and go away to come back when Susie was here.”
Susie knew the Applegate community so well that she would often come across a book or a movie she wanted to recommend to a particular person. “Here,” she would say. “I set this book aside for you.” She also built what she calls “a real bond” with the other staff at the Applegate Library, Kat and Christine.
“Susie set the bar high,” Christine says, “[she was] always doing something more than the job called for: going to the library during nonwork hours to open the door for folks who had locked themselves out of the meeting room; giving rides to a patron whose car died in the library parking lot or to one who couldn’t get to the library on a particular day; reading to kids whenever they asked, even if it wasn’t story time; providing sustenance in the form of baked goods, seasonal decorations, flowers, and genuine smiles to all who entered this building.”
Besides bringing in treats and checking out books, Susie ran the library’s story time, kept the bulletin board up to date, and scheduled programs.
Immediately after her well-attended farewell party on her last day at the library, Susie moved to Ohio to be with her daughter and four young grandchildren.
“As happy as I am about this next great adventure for her, I'm just so sorry to see her go,” says library patron Lynn Towns. “Her big smile and gracious greeting made her more like a well-informed hostess than a librarian.”
Before coming to the Applegate Library, Susie worked at Les Schwab. When she retired from that job, she thought about where she could volunteer: church, school, or library. The library won. “I always loved books and libraries,” she says.
Her volunteer days at the Applegate Library soon turned into a position as a part-time library associate with twenty hours of work a week.
Work? Maybe. Susie loved her job.
“I loved being with the public,” she says, but it wasn’t just “the public.” It was the Applegate family. “I have worked some at the Jacksonville and Ruch libraries,” she says. “That’s similar, but this is Applegate.” Enough said.
Susie’s own family has been in the Applegate since 1909, when her father’s parents moved from Sawyer’s Bar, in the Klamath Mountains, to the ranch on Brown Road, where her father was born in 1918, where Susie and her two siblings grew up, and where she has lived since 2005, when she and her husband moved there from Portland. (Her brother and sister have been living on the property as well.) It has long been a working ranch, with cattle, ducks, chickens—all the storybook features of a ranch.
Although it was emotionally difficult for Susie to sell the property, she recognized that the storybook aspect is fine for onlookers, but that in reality it was getting more and more difficult for her to run the ranch—caring for the cattle, irrigating the land, and seeing to all the daily and seasonal tasks. Then, just as she was beginning to think seriously about joining her daughter and grandchildren in the Midwest, she was approached by Jack and Allie DuFour, from the East Coast, who said they heard she might be interested in selling her place. The DuFours, with their two little boys, had found the Applegate on a map and thought it looked like the best place in the country to live, so they moved here. When she met them, Susie knew at once that they were the right people to take care of her land. The sale was made, and Susie began the long process of leaving a place where she had so many ties.
Perhaps Christine sums up Susie’s importance to the Applegate best: “She is the most gracious person ever! She embodies neighborliness.”
Diana Coogle
Photo 1: Susie at the Applegate School Carnival.
Photo 2: Ann Nguyễn, Christine Grubb, and Susie Beckham pose with their Peep Diorama, featured in the annual JCLS competition.
