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Baldwin Middle School Librarian Ends Half-Century Career

Betty Lema is leaving Dr. Helen Baldwin Middle School in Canterbury after 50 years as the school librarian.
Betty Lema is leaving Dr. Helen Baldwin Middle School in Canterbury after 50 years as the school librarian. (Janice Steinhagen / Courant Community)

Even though she has been working at the Dr. Helen Baldwin Middle School library for half a century, Betty Lema hesitates to call herself a librarian.

“I don’t like to use that term. I don’t have a MLS [master of library science degree],” she said. “But people use it freely.”

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After 50 years tending the school’s collection of books, Lema retired at the close of the school year. School administrators and staff organized a celebration of her career, complete with an assembly where students wore “Lema 50” T-shirts in her honor. Lema was presented with a memory book, with personal notes, cards, and clippings from colleagues and students.

“During my time here, I came in contact with every student in the building, because I also had recess and lunch duty,” Lema said. “Thank God they respected me. I usually didn’t have trouble with them.

“I’ve seen three generations of more than one family. Those kids and myself have a very good rapport. They’re like grandchildren to me.”

Lema grew up on a Canterbury farm and attended Baldwin School herself. After graduating from Griswold High School in 1955, she attended Becker College in Worcester, Massachusetts and went to work as a secretary and, later for the post office. She became involved in library work at the invitation of her former teacher, Elva Lovell, who was assembling Baldwin’s first library.

“She called me to type the card catalog cards,” Lema recalled.

The library was situated on the school’s stage – there was no other space to house it – and eventually it filled the stage to overflowing.

That project led to regular volunteering at the library, and when Lovell retired, Lema was asked by then-superintendent Dave Boland to take over the post. At the time, her two sons were school age.

“I thought, well, when the kids are in school, I’m in school. I wouldn’t need a babysitter,” she said.

It fell to Lema to pack up the library in boxes for two moves: first, to a portable classroom space and then to the current library space, which now houses an estimated 8,000 volumes. In the course of her career, she also earned an associate’s degree from the former Mohegan Community College in Norwich.

Lema has seen a host of changes to her job over the decades, none more momentous than the 2012 switch to electronic cataloguing of books and a collaboration with the Canterbury Public Library.

“Instead of costing several thousand dollars to convert, it was much cheaper for us to be a subsidiary of the public library,” Lema said. “The way I looked at it, we could share our resources and we didn’t have to duplicate a lot of resources.”

Canterbury Elementary School is currently undergoing a similar process, she said.

There were personal changes, too: she was Mrs. Coderre at first, but a few years after losing her husband, Albert, she married Don Lema, who died a decade ago. She also lost one of her two grown sons.

The end of the school year didn’t spell a long summer vacation for Lema.

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“I always did extra work over the summer,” she said. “There’s a lot of time-consuming work involved in running a library” – projects like processing new books, conducting inventory and creating new sections like the Young Adult and Mature Young Adult classifications. “I called it my community service hours – but people used to wonder ‘Gosh, what did she do?’”

Lema has been working in recent years with fewer volunteers than she used to have, but she plans to make the change easier for her successor by volunteering herself. She also hopes to have more time with extended family and longtime friends.

“I never thought when I started working here that I would be here this long,” Lema said. “I wasn’t trying to set any record. But I truly enjoyed my job. I enjoyed working with the kids.”

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