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02/07/2023 09:03 AMFor many of its older staff, Hagaman Memorial Library is like a second home. That is according to Elaine Sammarco, one the few working members of Hagaman who has still been helping its patrons for close to 30 years.
“It’s funny. We’ll come into work, and we’ll go, ‘I’m home!’ And it is,” Elaine says. “It is like a second home. [I’ve] definitely made many, many good friendships with patrons, as well as staff, throughout the years.”
Elaine spends most of her time in the children’s section of Hagaman, where she has been since 1994 and has a number of tasks and responsibilities in her position.
“Circulation desk function: helping people with basic computer questions, checking their books in and out, making recommendations, mostly for the children,” Elaine says. “Of course, we have to do other clerical things, like I do the bills. I also enter all of the new books that come in…I check them when they come out here and label them and everything before they get on the shelf.”
Some of those responsibilities, most obviously answering and solving computer issues, relate to the technological shifts she has seen Hagaman experience since she began.
“Years ago, everything was written down. You had drawers [for] how to get a library card. Now, you can actually get it online for East Haven residents,” she says.
A shift in the ages of patrons has been most evident in the library’s children’s section; many patrons of the downstairs part of the library are no longer as old as junior high schoolers but now commonly elementary school age.
“Because there was no free preschool in East Haven, we used to do show-and-tell, storytime, but now we don’t really get that audience — we get the babies and toddlers,” she says. “Our audience down here…is birth to third-grade.
Regardless of these changes, it is most important to Elaine that the children’s section, and the library as a whole, continue to be a homey and welcoming space for very young attendees.
“We make a very relaxed atmosphere. This is like their den or their living room,” she says. “I like them to feel that way. Sometimes, with some of the little kids, the parents will tell them to ask me a question, and I’m like, ‘No, you don’t have to be afraid to ask me a question.’ If I know the answer, I know the answer. If I don’t have the answer, then I’ll try to find the answer for you. As time has gone on, I see a lot of young adults that have children of their own, that I remember when they were little coming to the programs.”
Elaine was born and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst, her strong accent of the borough coming across in her voice. Her upbringing in the neighborhood, known as Brooklyn’s own Little Italy, carried over culturally as she attended St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, where she majored in math. Deciding that her initial career choice as a math teacher wasn’t the right fit, she became an actuarial analyst with Mutual of America Financial Group on 5th Avenue. Even before Hagaman, she found herself surrounded by good people and pre-digitized work responsibilities.
“I liked it. The job itself was boring, working with a lot of statistics,” she says. “But the people made it a lot of fun, and it was way before Excel. It was old-fashioned spreadsheets with a pencil, the eraser, and the calculator.”
After leaving the company in 1988, she relocated from New York to Norwalk and finally to East Haven, where she acquired her now 29-year-long residency at Hagaman. She recalls getting the jobs and the staff at the time.
“It was advertised in the New Haven Register, and Bill Basil was the director then, and Nancy McNicol was the assistant director,” she says.
While Elaine enjoys talking with Library patrons and assisting them with the information they need, she accomplishes this by being a meticulous individual to the best of her ability, a skill she has maintained since her hands-on work with statistics in New York. She describes herself as “detail-oriented, organized,” and likes to “keep things in order.”
Leading up to 2023, she has taken care of not just the desk in the children’s section on Saturdays but has also been a part of Hagaman’s Homebound Delivery Service. She says that many seniors participating in the program enjoy having someone to talk to about their day.
“Most of the people, because they’re homebound…I talk to them; they’ll tell me what they did for the week. They tell me their troubles, and I tell them my troubles,” she says. “They like to hear from me on the phone and chat for a little bit.”
She is also involved in outreach and book collection to senior bookworms at the Village at Mariner’s Point, which is active with Hagaman with their own book club. She collects requested books for the assisted living facility’s residents and continues to engage in conversation with East Haven’s eldest well-read community members.
Through all of her work and time at Hagaman, Elaine recognizes the importance of its staff in further cultivating the living room-like space of the library. They are what makes it a special location in town, with an attentive ear on the public.
“People come, I think, because of the camaraderie...And they like the informalness, the laid-back atmosphere,” she says. “We really try to give our all to the patrons. [We] try to say, ‘What does the community want,” she tells. “We have a small budget...]we try] doing things as fiscally conservative as possible, but to give the community what they want.”