By James Windell
When Jean Stein thinks about her 33 years on the South Haven Memorial Library Board, she can’t help but reminisce about how the library has been through rough times.
“We’re in really good shape now,” Stein says as she sits at her kitchen table talking about her years on the Board. “We have really good people on the Board and I don’t mind letting them take over.”
Stein recently retired from the Library Board that she joined in 1993.
She emphasizes that the Library Board doesn’t run the library. “We just handle the financial end of things,” she says. During her tenure on the Board, she served as President and Vice-President several times – although she cannot remember how many times she was in each position.
While on the Board, she saw the library go from a small library that had moved into the Mid-century modern building and has since become a flourishing community center with many activities for children and adults.
“Jean encapsulated the institutional memory of the Library,” says Library Director James France, “linking the past with the present. Her biggest accomplishment was being part of the Board that oversaw the recent renovations to the library building.”
Talking about the library, she displays that institutional memory mentioned by France. For instance, she recalls the library when she first joined the Board. “We didn’t have enough space to hold meetings,” she remembers. So, she and the Board had to renovate the building which required that the library temporarily move while construction was going on. Besides seeing the library enlarged during her career on the Board, there were a number of library directors hired – including one they had to fire. That, she admits, was not easy, but “it had to be done.”
She has considerable praise for the current director, Jim France, whom she describes as “a director who is very good.” She adds that France is good with the staff and is very competent in dealing with occasional problems that staff encounter with troublesome patrons. “If there is any trouble, Jim says to call him and he’ll take care of it,” Stein says. “He’s done a very good job for us. We don’t have staff complaints anymore.”
Jean Stein has lived in South Haven for more than 60 years. Although she wasn’t born in South Haven, but her late husband Chuck was. Chuck’s father, Ivan, had an orchard and he would say that he wanted the largest orchard in the area. “His orchard covered more than 700 acres at one point,” she says. Jean and her husband ran the orchard, with the help of their son Ross for 20 years, but when he died, she couldn’t handle it and the orchard was sold.
Besides serving on the Library Board, Stein has been a member of the South Haven Rotary for 20 year – as were both her husband and her father before she joined. She was also a substitute teacher in South Haven for many years.
Without the responsibilities of the Library Board, she says that she will have more time for quilting and reading.
Although she says she isn’t much of a quilter, still she enjoys the process and likes giving her finished quilts to her grandchildren.
