Island Profile: Finding friends in the Heights and between the bookshelves

Sue Hine, now chair of the Friends of the Shelter Island Public Library, has had a home in the Heights with her husband, Charles Clarkson Hine (known to everyone as Joe) for several decades, and loves it there.

“We love the house, the way you can walk to everything, the Chequit, Stars, it’s a little community here. And more and more people are coming out and spending more time, wintering here, so it’s nice when you get off the ferry and drive up, you see lights on that you never saw before.”

And four years ago, the couple gave up their city apartment and made the transition to year-round Island living. But to begin at the beginning …

Sue spent her first 11 years in Winchester, outside Boston, and then moved with her family to Anchorage, Kentucky, a few miles outside Louisville. She went to a small, private girls school — 20 in her graduating class — “so I empathize with the school situation here.”

She went on to Cornell, something of a shock. “I really didn’t know what I was getting into and spent four years there not knowing what I was really doing.” But at the end of the four years, she married Joe, whom she’d known for five, and they went on to have three children and now numerous grandchildren, several of whom summer with them.

Joe’s parents were retiring just as he was getting out of graduate school, the Columbia Business School, and were looking for a new home. They found Shelter Island through friends who had invited them, and they bought an old farm house on Cobbetts Lane, built in 1775.

Joe and Sue visited often, first as penniless graduate students but eventually as a prosperous family with growing children. However, as Joe puts it, “It was a lot, to descend on people living a quiet life with our young children, it was time for a place of our own.” Although Joe’s business connections and a life in advertising anchored him in New York City for years, and in Chicago for another decade, they never gave up their apartment in the city or their attachment to the Island. And now they’re happy to be here, immersed in Island life.

Although Sue has been involved in a number of Island activities — the Mashomack Dinner Dance Committee, the board of the Shelter Island Educational Foundation — her deepest commitment is to the Shelter Island Public Library. She was a member of the Friends board when the group’s major obligation was to act as custodians of the monies that several Islanders had raised in 1981, at a time when the library was not supported by taxpayers, to provide funds for special projects.

When the more recent plans to expand the library were not approved by the community, a revised Friends of the Library came into being, with the intent of raising the necessary funds — if not to expand the library, at the very least to renovate the existing space and redesign it. A year and a half ago the group’s bylaws were changed and a membership organization came into being that has been actively fund-raising ever since.

“The renovation is in the planning stage now,” Sue said.  “We’re hoping that in September we can begin the renovation project for the whole downstairs, opening it up, dividing it up in different ways, looking for flexibility. The floor plan won’t be ready for a couple of months.  The impetus for this is really the failed expansion plan. People said, ‘No, why don’t you do something with what you have before you expand.’ So we will do this and then I think we will just keep on fundraising, with an eye towards future plans.”

The projected goal for the project is $700,000 and they have over $500,000 already; they expect to have the rest in hand by the end of the summer and not have to borrow any money. “We’re very cramped here,” Sue said. “You can’t do anything without stepping on someone’s toes. It really needs to be made more of a welcoming activity center. The book sale people work all year round, that operation makes around $15,000 a year, but needs to be streamlined a bit.”

The Friends have an ambitious program of almost monthly events scheduled, each one either a fundraiser or a program to bring new members into the library. “The student art show is the first event in the calendar year, then the photography exhibit and silent auction, which last year netted $4,000.  We’d never done it before, but it was met with a lot of enthusiasm and this year it’s scheduled for May 1. We hope it will become a destination event.

“The book and author luncheon with Willy Geist will be held at the Pridwin on June 11. Then in July there will be a week of events under the tent, starting with something musical, then a children’s event, then a panel about writers with recently retired Simon and Schuster senior editor Fred Hills on how to get published, and then the Book and Author Festival on July 12.” This year the program will expand to include North Fork authors and others who have participated in library events.

There will be some sort of community yard sale, with antiques, sometime in the fall and then the great splash-in on Thanksgiving weekend, which last November “just took off and raised $15,000,” Sue said.

Sue is pleased; “It’s so wonderful to see the community support the activities we’ve come up with.” But that’s not all that’s wonderful. The group, the Friends of the Shelter Island Public Library, and its $700,000 effort — now that’s really wonderful!