Bill Finley Special to the Arizona Daily Star

When you’ve grown up on a wheat farm in northeastern Colorado, 25 miles from the nearest town, you remember the little things.

It might be the summer serenade of the cicadas … a moon so close you could almost touch it … the special warmth of a fire on a cold Christmas Eve.

For Amber Mathewson, the short list includes the sound of the Sterling Library Bookmobile pulling up in front of her small country grade school.

“I was amazed I could ask for any book I wanted, and the next month they would bring it to me,” she recalled last week. “There was something magical about it, knowing that book was just for me.”

Books have held a special place in Mathewson’s heart ever since, and even now — two weeks after she retired as director of the Pima County Public Library — they are very much on her mind.

People are also reading…

“Maybe it’s time to write one,” she confessed. “I’m thinking about it, and it would definitely be fun to find it in a library someday.”

One thing for sure: Mathewson would know where to look.

She worked in the libraries of her middle school and high school. Even when studying to become a doctor at Colorado State, she had a part-time job in the university library.

“It wasn’t my plan to become a librarian,” Mathewson said, “but for some reason I kept finding myself coming back to library work. Eventually, I decided it must be my destiny to heal people with books.”

In her 34 years with the library system here, she worked in seven branches, managing three. She drove the bookmobile in Arivaca. She was the head children’s librarian at Green Valley. She helped open the Miller-Golf Links branch in 1999.

By 2012, Mathewson was the library’s deputy director of strategic initiatives, and in 2016, she became the library’s director — its 15th since the first library opened on the second floor of the old Tucson City Hall in 1883.

“I started as a customer service clerk at the Wilmot branch in 1991,” Mathewson recalled. “If you had told me then that this is how my story would go, I would have laughed out loud.”

The Pima County Public Library is a sprawling network of 27 branches scattered from Ajo to Bear Canyon, Catalina to Green Valley. It has 400 employees. Its budget is now $58.5 million.

“They don’t teach you how to do this in library school,” Mathewson noted. “You have to understand budgets, you have to understand people, you have to understand politics … where the money comes from and where it flows. You’re a librarian, yes, but you’re also the CEO of a pretty good-sized company.”

Even in tranquil times, it would be a lot, and the last nine years have hardly been that.

Mathewson introduced new tools to help the growing number of visitors needing social services. “There’s a reason all libraries all have a Help Desk. We’ve always been very good at connecting people. That’s what we do.”

She steered the library through a barrage of right-wing attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of access. “We’ve had book bans and challenges for years, but nothing on the scale of what we’re seeing now.”

She coordinated the library’s response to the pandemic, which shuttered branch libraries for months and led to a completely new delivery system for library products and services. “Back in the day, we waited for people to come to us. Now, especially since COVID, it’s important for us to go out to them — both digitally and physically.”

Someday, though, Mathewson’s tenure may best be remembered for the public conversation the library initiated last summer about the “library of the future” in Pima County.

In a draft report that went to the Board of Supervisors Aug. 16, the library board proposed the relocation of the Valdez Main Library downtown and the closure of four other branches. Citing budget and staffing shortages, the library said the moves would enable it to pursue new ways to serve the affected areas.

The proposal created a firestorm of public protest, especially from those areas affected by the closures, and led to a series of public forums to identify what role the library should play in the future.

“It wasn’t an easy time, but what heartened me was the number of people who stepped forward and wanted to help,” Mathewson said. “We all heard loud and clear that people don’t want to lose their libraries. Now we have friends in the community we didn’t know about before.”

The library has moved forward with plans to relocate its downtown location — it will move into the former Wells Fargo building after the purchase is finalized and renovations are made — but the “what next?” conversation is still underway elsewhere.

No one will be more interested to see where things go than Mathewson.

“What’s interesting is that everyone who loves the library has their own thoughts on what a library should be,” she said. “How do we take all that and then figure out what a library could be? It’s great that so many people are thinking about that now.”

As for Mathewson, there are all these books to read … and maybe a few to be written.

“I have met so many lovely people over the years, I’m wondering if I could write a book called ‘Who I Met Today,’ with a different chapter for each person. Or maybe ‘Everything I Know I Learned Playing the Accordian.’ We’ll see. I’ll have time to think about it now.”

Footnotes

— Mathewson guesses it will take two years for the downtown library to complete its move across the street into the old Wells Fargo Bank building.

— 283,000 Pima County residents hold library cards.

— The Himmel Park Library will close on Monday, June 30, for a renovation that will require 18-24 months to complete. All holds still on the shelf June 30 will be sent to the Martha Cooper Library at 1377 N. Catalina Ave. The Cooper branch re-opened last September after a similar renovation closed the library for two years.

The top stories from Sunday’s Home+Life section in the Arizona Daily Star.


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