Town Honors Retiring Library Director

Dozens of her closest friends and associates joined town officials this week in honoring retiring Library Director Betty Coats for her decades of service.

Mayor Jody McLeod presented the 77-year-old Clayton icon with the prestigeous "Order of the Long Leaf Pine" to commemorate "her extraordinary service to our community."

"She will be greatly missed," the Mayor said. "She's touched the lives of generations here in Clayton."

Town leaders also presented the woman affectionately known as Miss Betty with what they called a "Miss Betty Book" of cartoons, illustrating her decades of work on behalf of the library.

"We wanted to have something that would help us celebrate her contributions to the citizens of Clayton," said Deputy Town Manager Nancy Medlin. "It's really a cute book."

The book, the work of a local artist, will be available for viewing at the Library--and it includes space for library patrons to leave a short, personal message to the retiring director.

After 38 years of building Clayton's library from a one-room collection of books in the old town hall to today's modern facility, Miss Betty moved into retirement this month as one of the town's best known and loved citizens.

And what will she miss most in retirement? "I'll miss the people," she said. "And the children."

Though all the growth and accomplishment is impressive, Miss Betty says her greatest thrills over the years have come from watching children at the library.

"If you come to a "Story Time" and watch the children's faces, you feel 10-feet tall," she said. "And to have a small child come in and ask for a book, and we have it, to see the look on his face. It's something. It's really something."

New Library Director Christie Starnes wasn't even born when Miss Betty took the job that became her life work.

"I've seen it come from nearly nothing to what it is now," Miss Betty said. "We've come such a long way. Back then, it was a lot of westerns and romances. Now, just look at what we've got. It's amazing."

Reflecting on the success of the library, Miss Betty said officials felt it had become a huge success when it reached 12,000 volumes checked out yearly in the 1990s after moving into its downtown home named for the Hocutt and Ellington families. But that's modest compared to the 14,000 volumes now checked out each month.

"I'm so proud that we've come this far," she said. "I just look around and say "golly." But, you know, if it weren't for all the support of the community and the town, this wouldn't be here. I've learned over the years what this community will do for each other."

Though her last few weeks were busy, she found time to tell a few stories about what it was like to see the Library grow. One of her favorites is the one from 1981 about how they got 7,000 books moved from a room in the old town hall into the new Hocutt-Ellington Memorial Library building more than a block away. She said the Boy Scouts "were all lined up" from one building to the other, forming a human chain that passed the books from one arm to another all the way up the street to the new building. "It was a sight to see," she said.

Miss Betty took over Clayton's tiny one-room library in 1973 after a year as an assistant librarian at Clayton High School. But it took lots more than the Dewey Decimal System to be successful in the job, she said. It took discipline, fundraising and a constant push for growth and expansion.

"It was slow, but we've come a long way," she said. "We were lucky."

Miss Betty says she plans to "breeze around" in retirement, though she says a lot of her time will be spent at the library as a volunteer.