Sisters Library manager to retire

After dedicating more than 30 years of service to library patrons of the Sisters area, Sisters Branch Manager Peg Bermel is retiring.

It was in the summer of 1979 that Peg began her duties as Assistant Librarian in the "old," or "first," Sisters Library, with herself as a staff of one and five volunteers, enjoying 30 hours a week at the overwhelming salary of around $3 an hour.

"I took down all five books, and dusted the shelves, and did storytelling," Peg jokingly says of her first duties.

But that was close to the truth. Although the library did own about 100 books, Peg says, "most of the items the patrons had access to were from McNaughton's, a book dealer that rented books to small libraries like ours."

In the late '70s Lundgren Lumber Company - who operated a small sawmill in Sisters - donated an office building that would become the tiny Sisters Library and moved it near where the present Depot Café is on the north side of West Cascade Avenue.

It is still standing as a historic building behind the "middle" Sisters Library that is now the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce office.

"A year after I started as the assistant librarian, the county and city got together and decided to move the old library to its present location," Bermel remembered, "and that was wonderful, as that was when we built on the bathroom."

That was also when Sandy McDonald joined the library, but the county, who held the purse strings for all library activities and purchases, still operated the book-lending business with the McNaughton rentals. When a new library fund-drive started in 1985, under library director Ralph Delmarter, Bermel pitched in eagerly to help the newly formed Friends of the Sisters Library (FOSL).

Bob Brockaway was president, and members included Bob Bronson, Diane Jacobson, Nellie Zook, and the library board. By 1989 the citizens of the Sisters area had plunked down over $115,000 into a new library building fund that the county matched.

Books on tape were available, along with about 10,000 other items for patrons. Linda Kurtz joined the library, and with Peg and Sandy, the library services we all enjoy in Sisters were welded into a cohesive operating system. But the county was still holding the purse strings, and when money was tight, the first place they cut was the library.

That's when Michael Gaston came into the picture, replacing the retired Delmarter. As the new library director, his first item of business was to get the library on solid financial ground.

With can drives and "Bucks for Books" campaigns, he and the Sisters community, along with library staff, Friends and board, raised over $8,000 for books and other items patrons enjoyed. But Gaston wasn't satisfied with the county having the say on how the library would be funded, so he began a successful drive to create a special library district.

"We still have to maintain our fiscal responsibility in operating the library," Peg says, "but we have greater latitude as a library system and can maintain the library to fit the needs of our patrons - even in these tough economic times."

Then, looking into the back room of the library with its stacks of unsorted books, she said, "And nothing would work without our fabulous volunteers. In 1979 I had five, today we enjoy the help of over 50! What really made things run smooth for me were the volunteers, and mentors like Nellie Zook, a retired teacher, Diane Jacobson, who taught in the Sisters Elementary School, and Ardis Swift, the Redmond Library manager - and the love and help my husband, Doug, gave me and our daughter, Melissa."

With a solid financial base supporting the newly formed Deschutes Public Library System (DPLS), Gaston and the library team began building new libraries, and one of them was what we have in Sisters today, a grand library with over 83,000 square feet of space.

At last, Peg Bermel was no longer the assistant librarian - now she was a full-blown Branch Library Manager, and had enough money in the budget to support two more staff; Charlotte Nitcher and Zoe Schumacher came on board and thousands of new items were placed on the shelves for district-area patrons, now including Camp Sherman.

And Peg was still doing Storytime for children and parents in the new Sisters Library.

Now Peg's daughter, Melissa, who was three when Peg started with the library in the old Lundgren office building, is a mother of two, a boy and a girl.

"I'll have grandmother time now to be grandmother," Peg says, with a happy smile.

When asked what she sees for the Sisters Library in the future, Branch Manager Bermel says, "I think it will be when the library becomes that third place we all need as a community. We have our first place, our home; then the second place, our businesses; and then a third place for us to gather. The children's section, the adult and youth reading rooms and the large community room of the Sisters Library all are becoming that third place for the community to gather."

At the end of her interview with The Nugget, before helping a library patron, Bermel turned back and said, "One of the most rewarding things for me was when high school graduate Sam Fullhart, upon receiving the FOSL library scholarship, said, 'Do you remember me, Mrs. Bermel? You used to do storytime for me.'"