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Beth Marie - A Professional and Personal Colleague
Beth Marie was a professional and personal colleague,
friend, and confidant. We worked together on innovative and critical projects
from her arrival in Iowa in 1994. We worked literally side-by-side at Central
from 2002 to 2007—eight hours a day and more in the office, in the car, through
countless meetings and consulting visits. From the time we first met, Beth
Marie contributed invaluable advice, ideas, feedback, and moral support for our
joint efforts, and independently managed complex programs that always came in
on time and under budget. Her attention to detail and grasp of library issues
kept our projects on course and fostered a comfort zone that sparked creativity
for us all.
Through those years Beth Marie became a close family friend. One of the interests we shared was movies, ranging from the latest Jackie Chan to fifties noir to classic art films. The last film we watched together was Sansho the Bailiff, the tragedy of a family destroyed in the political and cultural conflict of medieval Japan. The film ends with two survivors, mother and son, clinging to each other on a desolate beach. Their reunion is an assertion of love and spiritual longing over the irrational cruelty that pervades the film. The camera moves out and away, passing over the beautiful and quietly indifferent seacoast. That image has stayed with me in the days since Beth Marie’s death, reminding me of her calm and cheerful assurance.
ILA/ACRL Support Staff Workshop