New chapter for Julie Meier

WALKING AWAY from family is not what Julie Meier expected of herself. But on Nov. 19, that’s just what she’ll do.

After 23 years as the director of the Coeur d’Alene Public Library, Julie is leaving.

“It’s hard for me to leave. The staff is like family,” she says. “I fall in love with the people. I love the little kids, the old people, the staff. Twenty years of my heart is here.”

The library will miss her physical presence, although she’s a petite package. But Julie’s touch will stay, and it’s everywhere.

“Oh my goodness, there are so many programs. The huge club for the deaf is incredible, and signing for babies, special speakers, gatherings at Winton Park,” says Ann Smart, chairman of the library board of directors. “She’s done a remarkable job of bringing these things together – she and her staff.”

The library was in a two-story brick building that had once served as a hospital when Julie arrived in 1981. Her office was in a closet with the door removed. The two directors who had preceded her had lasted six months each. Part of her job was turning on the furnace and shoveling the walk during winter. She didn’t mind. She knew she was where she belonged.

Julie had grown up in libraries. Her family had no money for entertainment, school activities or extras during her childhood in Hilo, Hawaii. Books provided her travels, lessons, fun.

“The library was my life. That’s where everything was,” she says. “I’d stay from opening until closing.”

The University of Hawaii turned her into a teacher, but libraries pulled her everywhere she worked. She helped develop a resource library in one school, then was moved from a classroom to the library in another. She finally returned to college, earned her master’s degree in library science and directed the Northwest College library in Kirkland, Wash., for two years.

Her husband’s illness brought her to the Inland Northwest. He was from Spokane and wanted to be near family. Julie applied for the director’s job at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library. She almost wasn’t interviewed because the library board was certain it had found the perfect man for the job. Coeur d’Alene attorney Norm Gissel was on the library board then.

“Her interview was just absolutely marvelous,” he says. “Her poise, her intelligence clearly showed. She was so focused and knowledgeable.”

A moment after the board excused Julie after the interview, it offered her the job. Norm considers her hire among his best decisions. One of her first successes was eliminating a communication chasm between the library board and the City Council.

“That was a fundamental change in the direction of the library,” Norm says. “Once we had reunited with the city, then all else was available to us.”

Under Julie’s direction, library hours grew from 36 to 42, 55, then finally 62 over seven days a week in 1998. She found the building on Harrison Avenue when the library outgrew its space on Seventh and Lakeside, and she provided the City Council with a list of the costs to turn it into a library. When the library moved in late 1985, Julie predicted it would stay on Harrison at least 20 years.

“Little did we know how prophetic that was,” she says now.

The building could hold 60,000 books. The library has 72,000 now, but Julie made the building work.

“The big thing isn’t the building, it’s the people,” she says.

Everything she did was for people. She pushed for a wheelchair ramp between the main floor and the basement, where the children’s books are. When she saw a mother in a wheelchair happily helping her children find books after the ramp was in, Julie was ecstatic.

She suggested organizations that wanted to help the library buy large-print and audio books for the deaf. She expanded children’s programs to 15 each week and started a reading program for infants and their parents. She rejected voicemail in the library because a patron once told her on the phone that Julie’s was the only human voice she ever heard.

Julie even started a book delivery program for homebound people after she befriended an older woman who walked to the library regularly in any weather. As the woman grew unable to continue her walks, Julie began taking her books on her lunch hour. The two became close. When the woman, Emma Seagraves Van Laken, died in 1997, she bequeathed the library enough money to build its entire children’s area. Julie turned her home delivery into a volunteer program , Books to You, that gets books to homebound people all over the city.

“She was absolutely the right person for the job at the right time,” Norm says. “It’s hard to see her go. She’s an important part of the culture in our community.”

Julie won’t work in the new library, but evidence of her will be everywhere. Her programs and people philosophy will continue. The names of her son, Mark Meier, and daughter, Melody Michaelson, will adorn two fireplaces planned for the new library’s second floor. Mark died in a car crash in 2000. He was 39. Julie’s passion for her work helped her endure the heartache.

She doesn’t consider her departure retirement, although she’s 71.

“I will stay involved in activities that benefit the community,” Julie says. “I want my departure to go seamlessly. Patrons won’t know I’m gone. But there will be days I will miss this library.”