A St. Michaels Notable Says Good-Bye

by Bill Peak

We moved to the Eastern Shore thirty years ago, when my wife accepted a position at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. During those first months, Melissa was always coming home excited about her new workplace and the people she was meeting. I heard stories about the colorful characters who hung out in the museum’s boatyard, the watermen who frequented its repair facilities, and the people she met in town.

One day Melissa came home singing the praises of a lady she’d just met at the St. Michaels library. Shauna, she told me, was the library’s branch manager, and she was—she assured me—amazing, treating Melissa from the outset as if she were an old and dear friend.

Long experience has taught me that my sweet wife tends to exaggerate the good in people while ignoring the bad, and—as I’ve always assumed this explains how I managed to win her heart—I kept any skepticism I felt about her judgment in this particular case to myself. When you’ve landed in clover, the last thing you want to do is suggest a lawn mower.

When I went to work in the Easton branch of the Talbot County Free Library ten years later, it didn’t take long to realize there must be something to Melissa’s enthusiasm for Shauna: patrons from St. Michaels stopping by the main library were always going out of their way to say something nice about her. And then I met the lady herself.

I can’t really remember that first encounter, but I’m sure Shauna greeted me then as she still greets me (and everyone else): a gentle smile, followed by a slow, careful “Hello.”—the last syllable drawn-out as if to emphasize the pleasure she feels in seeing you.

It has been my privilege to work with the woman for some twenty years now, and when I say “privilege,” I mean it. She has long served as one of my primary role models, a staff person who demonstrates excellent patron service every day: always friendly, always welcoming, always helpful.

Which should explain the shock I felt when I learned Shauna will retire in March. I can’t imagine the St. Michaels library without Shauna: she is synonymous with the place. Say “St. Michaels” to me and I see her face. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

The St. Michaels library first opened in 1981, in a tiny store front on Talbot Street. Shauna was hired three years later and, by 1986, had become branch manager. That first building was long and narrow, with but a single window at the front. As book shelves covered both walls and there was a short section of shelving down the middle of the room, there really wasn’t any place to sit comfortably. A small children’s section occupied the back of the space, and there was a staff room behind that. Despite the constricting circumstances, Shauna—characteristically—still manages to come up with a positive take on the place. “It was really quite cozy,” she assures me.

But in 1988, the landlord decided to sell the building, so the St. Michaels branch moved into its current location on Fremont Street, which up until that time had served as the town garage. From 2003-2004, while the building was being remodeled, the branch moved yet again, this time into the town’s old firehouse at Muskrat Park. The branch opened in this temporary location in August of 2003, just in time for Hurricane Isabel to come up the Bay in September and inundate Muskrat Park.

To save the collection, Shauna and her staff raced to place all the books in grocery carts borrowed from the old Acme Market, hoping against hope to keep them above the reach of the flood. And it worked. When the waters finally receded, they left a sheet of mud 18 inches high around the interior of the building, but only a single sign-in notebook had been lost to the storm.

For forty years now, through all these changes and disruptions, Shauna Beulah has stood at the helm of her ship, directing staff and volunteers, keeping everything shipshape, making everyone smile.

Shauna’s final service to the people of St. Michaels and the Bay Hundred has been her supervision of the remodeling and expansion of the Fremont Street building over the past year. Shauna took me on a tour of the new facility not too long ago, and while I intend to describe it in detail in my next column, let me say here that the place has taken on an entirely new aspect. If before it was a beautiful, if delicate snowflake of a building, it’s now a fully-fledged library battlewagon: modern, comfortable, and state-of-the-art.

It seems kind of sad that Shauna should be leaving just as the library she has shepherded through so much has blossomed like this, but if anyone deserves a healthy, restful retirement it’s the little girl from Lancaster County, Va., who has done so much for St. Michaels and the Bay Hundred. She took a small, hideaway branch library and turned it into a force to be reckoned with in the community it serves, in the process becoming something of a local icon herself.

The beautiful, newly renovated St. Michaels branch library is scheduled to reopen on March 21. If you get a chance, please do stop by that day and let Shauna know how much you appreciate all that she has done for us.