Three weeks ago, Peter Butts joined the staff of the Three Rivers Public Library (TRPL) as the new children’s librarian. Upon starting, he immediately got to work helping fellow staff move into a new building. 

“When I came in, everything had been delivered,” Butts said. “And so, it was unloading 100 or more boxes and putting books on shelves and sorting craft supplies and program materials and pushing furniture around, that kind of thing.” The work “was a good way to get to know people.”

As he helps with unpacking, Butts’ focus is on the upstairs of the freshly renovated former bank at Main and Pealer Streets. That is where the youth areas of the new library will be. Butts said, “the young adult area is a brand-new space that I guess didn’t exist in the old building, so that’s kind of neat.” There are also children’s and teen areas.

Butts described the second story. “If you come up the stairs, there’s a second checkout desk so kids can check out separately, and then you walk through the picture books and the easy readers to the middle grade fiction.” At the front of the building facing Main Street, he said, “is where the young adult section is, and then there are program areas on both ends.”

Butts likes the new library. “It is great,” he said. “The space is well laid out. Everybody, of course, talks about the windows, and so the lighting is good. There are a lot of comfortable spaces, both for the adults and the kids.”

Amid the move, Butts has also been discussing how his work will play out with Acting Director Bobbi Schoon and other staff. “We’ve gone from empty shelves and figuring out where furniture goes in the new space to figuring out what kind of programming we can do in this interesting new world we live in,” he said.

There are logistical challenges to delivering programs amid the pandemic, especially younger children. “We’ve done a couple of things over Zoom, and that works better with the older kids,” Butts said. By means of a survey, he said, “I’ve been trying to get feedback from some of the families that have been with us over the summer to see what we can do differently with the little guys, because I think that’s probably a harder thing for them on Zoom.”

Butts said younger children have different needs when it comes to attention. “I mean, they’re much more tactile, much more distractible. You know, you want to be able to interact a little bit more directly with them than you can online.” For solutions, he said, “I’m hoping we can do some things outside. We’ve got a story walk going on Memory Isle, and that might be a space we could use. Maybe getting activities out that they can do with mom and dad, families.”

Raised in Mansfield, Ohio, midway between Cleveland and Columbus, Butts attended undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, where he was an English major and got his teaching certificate. Following that, he taught eighth and ninth grade English in Cleveland. 

However, his then soon-to-be wife transferred from the University of Michigan to Michigan State, “so I came up to the Lansing area and stumbled into a library job.” Butts said to himself, “this is great. How do I get the certification to do this?” He spent the next year getting his Master of Library Science at Wayne State, after which he “kind of worked my way across the state.”

Over a roughly 19-year stretch, Butts worked with young adults, middle schoolers, and high schoolers in Morency, near Toledo, as well as East Lansing and Holland. For the last 14 years, he was at two different public elementary schools in Portage.  “I have been a school librarian most of my career. I’ve been in every level from elementary to middle school, high school. I work weekend hours at Kalamazoo College, so I work with college kids as well.” 

Coming from Portage, Butts said, “I was able to take a retirement and roll back to a part-time position here.” He will be employed at TRPL on a 29-hour per week basis.

The choice to go into his line of work came naturally for Butts through his upbringing. “I grew up in a family of teachers,” he said. In addition to teaching, his father also directed a small-town art gallery. “It was kind of perfect marriage, the first time I got into a library position early in my career,” Butts said. “I work with teachers and kids, and I kind of develop the space. I get to build the collection, put up displays, you know, interact with people coming in and out,” he said. 

“The library is the key to whatever knowledge you’re looking for,” Butts said. “So, it’s great fun to have kids and families that are excited about learning new things, developing reading skills, and just you know, that curiosity and enthusiasm for everything that’s going on around them.”

Meeting that interest amid the pandemic will be a challenge for Butts, but his master’s work focused on how libraries developed youth programs during difficult times like the Great Depression and the Civil Rights era, studying how “librarians build programs to meet society’s needs.”

Now, Butts said, “here we are in this bizarre lockdown world and we’re using Zoom and we’re using social media and all these things to keep in touch with our patrons remotely. I get to live one of one of those interesting times, and so this was a great time to make the jump into public libraries after a career in schools.”

The position in Three Rivers will be good for him, Butts said. “There were a couple of other public libraries that were hiring this summer. This just seemed to be the best fit, you know, interviewing with Bobbi and Erin, who both have education backgrounds. I think we clicked around the need to deliver services to teachers and kids in the schools, and do what we could to collaborate with what was going on at the public schools.”

Butts and his wife were already familiar with Three Rivers. Butts belongs to the Kalamazoo Pipe Band, a bagpipe band that occasionally performs at local parades and at HarmonyFest, and whose membership includes a number of Three Rivers residents. 

“I’m excited,” he said. “There’s a lot going on in this community,” such as the farmers market, the festivals, and other activities. “I’m just excited to be a part of that.” His wife, who is in community development work, agrees, Butts said. “She’s just kind of eyeing this community, like, ‘there’s so many fun things you can do.’”

Butts was also able to learn more about local schools through a professional contact as he was considering the job here. Through work with a state professional organization for school libraries called the Michigan Association for Media Education, Butts said, “I got a chance to work with Arlene Wells who had been with the public schools for many, many years. So that was somebody I called up when this position came up and got some background into the schools.”

The move has kept Butts busy, but he plans to network with more people here. “I have this list of people I’ve been trying to get connected with. And every time there’s a new piece of furniture, the list gets put off to the next day. I’ve got people in the community I need to get a hold of in the next few weeks,” he said. “I’m sure there is a lot of programming we could do.”

The library is already planning a range of programming for both during the pandemic and after. “We’ll be able to do weekend programming and kind of after school time programming. Of course, the daytime programming, we’re going to stick with the Tuesday times for preschool and the young ones’ story times,” Butts said.

Some of this summer’s successful programming will continue. “The summer reading program was, you know, prizes and an opportunity to get credit for your reading. There were a lot of take-home crafts, and so we’ll be able to do a little bit of that,” Butts said.

He also said there will be a lot of checkout activities. Zoom story times on Tuesdays will include a 10 a.m. program for preschoolers, roughly ages two to five, an 11 a.m. program for “wigglers, which is the under-twos,” Butts said, and “an afternoon activity for the middle elementary grades, the six and up kids on Wednesday, probably about 4 p.m.” For the latter group, he said, “I may have something that they can do on their own during the week, but we’ll have a couple of online activities and games, that kind of thing.”

Although curbside loan service will resume at the new building starting next Monday, September 21, most other programming is tentatively scheduled to start in October. “I think the plan is to have some kind of soft opening,” Butts said, but firm plans will develop as the end of September draws closer.

In the meantime, Butts said, information and updates are available through the TRPL website and Facebook page. “We’ve got some things going up on Facebook. There’s information about the story walk on Facebook. We’ve put up a couple of teaser pictures. We’ll be putting the Zoom programming up on Facebook again.”

Butts said TRPL has received a request recently “to do a kind of a teddy bear stuffed animal sleep over. Libraries and kids’ museums have done that in the past.” Butts had some reservations about the pandemic, but said he “realized, no, this would be a great way to kind of promote the building. We’ll get the animals in even before the kids can come in so we can post some pictures and whet people’s appetite for what the building is like. So, that may be coming too, in the next couple weeks,” pending further developments.

In the meantime, Butts is settling into his position and his commute. “My family is in Kalamazoo,” he said. “So, I’m running down Oakland to Shaver to 131.” The drive gives him “a little bit more public radio time.” Butts will be at the library in late morning and early afternoon four days a week, including Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays, and then alternating each week between Saturday and Monday.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.