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Terry Lucas: Making the Shelter Island Public Library a place for adventure

JO ANN KIRKLAND PHOTO Terry Lucas and the rest of the library staff are currently in the process of going through all non-fiction books, revising and refreshing the library collection to ensure that every volume earns its keep.
JO ANN KIRKLAND PHOTO | Terry Lucas and the rest of the library staff are currently in the process of going through all non-fiction books, revising and refreshing the library collection to ensure that every volume earns its keep.

A few days after Christmas, Terry Lucas, director of the Shelter Island Public Library was home sick with doctor’s orders to stay there, and it was driving her crazy.

She refused to let a voice like Darth Vader stop her from keeping an appointment with the Reporter. When reached by phone she warned that her cats, rescued when their owner moved away, were roaming the house fighting each other, and apologized for the yowls and the sound of a falling lamp. She croaked, “I need to keep busy.”

So much for the stereotype of the noise-hating, order-loving librarian.

When Terry was named director almost a year ago, she brought with her an atypical skill set. To go with an education in library science and years of library experience, she also has a law degree and 10 years of practicing business law. But she’s best known as the owner of The Open Book, an independent bookstore in Westhampton Beach, from 1999 to 2011.

Born in Auburn, California, Terry grew up in Sacramento with two sisters, Lori Spiekerman, who now lives in Santa Rosa, California and Kelly Schupp, now living in Park Rapids, Minnesota. Her father and stepfather both passed away this past year, but her mother, Marilyn Kurtz, still lives in Sacramento and her stepmother Julie Zickefoose is in nearby Placerville.

“We all end up in different parts of the country these days,” Terry lamented. “No one stays in the same place.”

She grew up in a home that was completely permissive when it came to books; anything she was able to read, she was allowed to read. Her family went to the library once a week. At one point she vowed to read every book in the kids section, starting with “A,” although she admitted she skipped a few. “I lived in a suburb, a really conventional world,” she said. “In the library, there was freedom, adventure, exploration.”

After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Terry spent a summer in Aspen, Colorado before going to law school. A summer became six years when she found she loved Snowmass Village, just outside Aspen, and the life of a ski bum, even though she could only afford to ski a couple of times a week. To support herself she tended bar, did construction clean up, catering and sold cowboy hats and belts with very large buckles in a Western store.

“I learned a lot about sheepskin,” she said,

Deciding she needed a challenge more involved than putting perfect brims on cowboy hats, Terry went to Boston University School of Law and then to New York to work for a high-profile firm in 1989. She enjoyed studying law but discovered she disliked practicing it. Five years of working crazy hours and the arrival of her daughter Rachel brought things to a head. Her husband at the time, Frank Lucas, was offered a job in Westhampton and Terry went to work as a lawyer in nearby Riverhead for another five years before leaving law forever in 1999.

Rachel is now 24 and working for the Sarasota Opera as a stage manager. Terry’s younger daughter, Sara, about to turn 20, is a student at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont.

Terry discovered Shelter Island when, after moving to Westhampton, her daughters starting making day trips from Greenport in the late 1990s with friends. With the Heights cottage of their friends’ relation, “Aunt Mame” as their base of operations, they explored the Island and went to the beach. Terry got to go along once or twice and found she had a special feeling for this place, which struck her as “New England-y” and “away.”

In 1999 when Terry started running The Open Book, independent bookstores were already under pressure from large chains and Amazon. In spite of this, her store paid the bills for a number of years and provided experience and a quality of life she had not had in her legal career. “I raised my kids in the bookstore,” she said. “I learned a lot about people and managing, enjoyed meeting the authors, had to scrub the floors and fix the cash register.”

By 2011, The Open Book was no longer making enough money to sustain itself and Terry faced a crisis. When a sale of the bookstore fell through, she decided to keep going against all odds and finally ended up systematically closing it down, including attempting to find work for the one remaining employee and a place for hundreds of unsold books. “I still have 1,200 books in my garage,” she said.

She worked for a few years as a librarian at Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton.

On April 15, 2014, Terry became director of the Shelter Island Library.

In some ways, running a bookstore couldn’t be better preparation for running a small public library, she said. “The shelf is precious real estate — you have to make sure it’s full of things that people want to read.”

As in her store, she’s sensitive to the experience of library patrons. “You have to take your cue from the people who come in,” she said. “Some people want to find that book that jumps off the shelf and some people come in with a list.”

Nothing makes her happier than seeing “the kids trooping in from school in the afternoon even if it does get a little loud sometimes.”

Her goal for the library is 100 percent community participation. She cited some recent statistics that of the 2,300 or so people living on the Island, about 800 do not have a library card. “My goal is to get those 800 people to come to the library.”

Terry said Friday Night Dialogues, which draws anywhere from 25 to 100 people, is an example of the best kind of community-based programming. Started under her predecessor, Denise DiPaolo, these events are extremely popular and often bring people to the library who might not otherwise have visited.

Terry pointed to the Cookbook Club, a popular new activity that is “a book-oriented, community-oriented program that makes people happy.”

Organized by library employee Jeanette Flynn, each month she chooses a theme (such as “soups and stews” for January), identifies a group of cookbooks, asks each participant to prepare a recipe and bring it to a discussion and tasting at the library.

Terry believes that although the building itself may be small, the impact of the library is great when librarians welcome everyone. In that spirit, a new entrance is planned for the library to be constructed this winter.

It’s all about “turning outward,” she said.