Library director announces retirement

MONONA — Christine Bee had no idea that her part-time hobby would become a long career. Soon that career will come to an end.
Bee announced recently that she will be retiring after working at Monona’s Murphy Helwig Library since 1993, including the past 23 years as its director.
“My husband’s been retired for two years and he made it look really good,” Bee said last week. 
Bee came to the library as an assistant and later as the children’s librarian after having spent the previous 15 years as a stay-at-home mom. 
“I had always been a library user all my life,” she said. “I always brought my children to the programming they had, I’d always enjoyed it, and then when a position came up I applied for it. I was in a position in my life that I could spend a few hours outside the home and enjoy that.”
Bee said she worked as few as 10 hours per week at first, though that part-time position morphed into something much bigger when Director Inez Kirkeberg started hinting about retirement.
 
“She kind of introduced me to the workings of how a library is run – the book buying and what her job was, which is managing the money and the operation of the library,” Bee said.
Read the full article in the Wednesay, January 17, 2018 edition of The Outlook.

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