RUMFORD — Sue Marshall, who led her staff through the COVID-19 pandemic, is retiring as director at the Rumford Public Library on May 19, which is her 63rd birthday.

“I’ve worked since I was 16,” she said. “I started at the hospital and I’ve worked ever since, except for taking time out to have a set of twins. So I would like to do something else. I don’t know what, but something,” she said April 27.

The resident of Rumford Center has been with the library for 18 years.

“I started as a library aide, then became the assistant children’s librarian,” she said. “Then children’s librarian for five years and director for the last three years.”

Her biggest issue as she retires is what to do with all the costumes she wore during library events.

“I have one of those free-standing closets in my house and it’s full of costumes,” she said. “I did make all these costumes myself. Most were just pajamas I added to.”

The idea for the costumes began Children’s Librarian when Ginny Todd and Marshall would visit schools, Marshall said.

“We would dress up to go out to the schools just to try to capture the kids’ attention,” she said. “They really liked it. We went out in the public afterwards and I was being approached everywhere by kids. I did it as a reminder for children to come out to the library for their summer program. And it kind of went from there.”

Marshall said her favorite character was Pete the Cat. “He’s so laid back and nothing bothers him,” she said. “Pete the Cat says, ‘It’s all good.’ Kind of a good motto for life.”

The pandemic began shortly after Marshall was named interim library director.

Town Manager Stacy Carter called her to say officials were closing down everything.

“That actually helped us out a lot,” she said. “We got a lot of books moved around downstairs, a lot of things straightened out down there and up here, refreshing the collection. It was kind of a mixed bag. It was bad that we had to shut down and couldn’t have people in here, but we got so much done.”

The Maine State Library system was holding meeting about the pandemic and had a lot of webinars about how to freshen up libraries and how to provide services in a new way.

“We started the curbside service so we could bring books out to people so that there was no contact,” Marshall said. “And we had all kinds of programs started that we could access online. We did Storytime online for a long time, and that really attracted a lot of attention and kept us in the public eye.”

Marshall said when things became more normal again, staff learned they had lost a lot of patrons, particularly older people. “They either stopped coming in or died during the pandemic,” she said.

“We did lose a lot of our teenagers during that time,” she said, “and I think it had a lot to do with the schools giving them computers and hot spots and things so they could do all that at home because they used to come in and use our computers a lot, and we don’t as much of that anymore.”

She said they also came up with a way for people to “send messages to our email so we could print things out. A lot of people didn’t know how get things off their phones onto a computer into an email so they could get them printed. We can get things off their phone now. We have ways to do that. And we do a lot of that.”

Marshall said she is proud of the fact the staff did a lot of programming during pandemic. “They were here every day and did a lot of heavy lifting.”

They are Abbey Austin, circulation supervisor; Mary Ann Fournier, reference librarian, adult librarian and teenage librarian; Serena Theriault, library aide; and Meghan Malone, the children’s librarian who has been putting together a summer program.

Marshall said they lost their IT person, Tom Currivan, and haven’t found a successor.

Perhaps the library’s most popular event was the Downton Abbey tea party when the very popular British historical drama was broadcast on PBS for six seasons from 2010 to 2015.

“It was starting to go out and we knew that people would really miss that, so we threw a tea party, like the old English tea parties,” Marshall said. “We had a photo booth with all the old jewelry and the fascinators for the hair. We had such a crowd here. They were incredible, with all the women coming in. It was most mostly women. We had a few men, which was nice, actually.”

She said they also had an Alice in Wonderland tea party to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the movie.

“That was phenomenal because we had families coming in, had dads coming in,” Marshall said. “We had the tea cups all set up. We used real china tea cups. Women in town used to collect tea cups and things, and they just donated their tea cups. Some we returned and some they said we could keep.”

Marshall said storytime was her favorite day of the week. “Storytime was something we worked really hard to build up, and it was going so well before the pandemic.”

To better connect with the community, the library started a garden project last year.

“On Waldo Street, they had all these gardens on their porches,” she said. “Somebody was growing corn on their porch, which I thought was so amazing. So we decided if they can do that, maybe we can do that, too, to kind of show them we’re at the same place that you are and we’re trying to help.

Last year, they started a vegetable garden, but really didn’t get enough produce to give away.

“This year, it’s going to be a bee and butterfly garden because bees are under such attack in this world and without bees, this planet just cannot last,” she said. We’ll have a butterfly house that someone is making for us.”

An open house to mark Marshall’s retirement will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. May 18 downstairs at the library. Library patrons, friends and family are invited to thank her for her years of dedication and leadership as director.

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