SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth:

Jan. 28, 1949, in Excelsior Springs, Mo.

Occupation:

manager, youth and outreach services at the Fayetteville Public Library

Family:

husband Larry Greenwood, daughters Jessica Pierce and Melissa Hammond, stepson Ross Greenwood, five grandchildren

One book I really want to read is

any mystery.

The biggest misconception people have about libraries is

that they have to be quiet in our children’s library.

My favorite sports team is

the Arkansas Razorbacks.

One thing I would like to know more about is

photography.

My favorite spot at the Fayetteville Public Library is

the children’s library, of course!

My fantasy dinner party guests would be

my ancestors.

My strangest habit is

I like to rearrange furniture.

The question I get asked the most is,

“Hey, didn’t you come to my school?”

A phrase to sum me up:

“When my staff asks if we can try something new, my reply is ‘Absolutely !’”FAYETTEVILLE - When young children start running in the Fayetteville Public Library, Lolly Greenwood smiles.

She doesn’t sternly warn the kids that they need to slow down. Nor does she hiss at them that they need to keep their voices to a whisper.

She smiles.

This is not the expected reaction from someone who works in a library. Aren’t people like that supposed to be stern, imposing types, as quick to shush someone as they are to lecture them about their overdue-book fines?

Not “Miss Lolly.”

“One of my favorite things is sitting at the desk and it doesn’t matter how old the child is, they come around the corner and you can just see the look on their face, ‘Wow!’” says Greenwood, the library’s manager, youth and outreach services.

“Whether they’ve been here once or they’ve never been here, the little ones hit the corner and run, because it’s so colorful and beautiful. It makes you want to come in and play.”

When those kids lay eyes on that gorgeous 16,000-square-foot children’s area and break into a sprint, it’s because they are excited to be at the Fayetteville Public Library. And their excitement is proof that Greenwood and her staff are succeeding at their mission of developing lifelong lovers of reading.

Two decades ago, this sort of popularity would have seemed unfathomable. When Greenwood first began working for the library on a part-time basis in 1991 at its former location, the children’s area was an afterthought - a 3, 800-square-foot windowless space in the basement.

There were two or three youth programs a month, and the scheduling was haphazard. Not one of the programs was aimed at babies or toddlers.

“It was underutilized, underused and underfunded,” says Greenwood, who has headed youth services since 1994. “There’s nothing I miss [about the old building].”

Today, there are youth programs five days a week, and the target audiences range from babies all the way to high school seniors. They’re at consistent times each week, making it easier for busy parents and caregivers to get children into the library, and they take place in an award-winning facility, which opened in 2004 and which Greenwood played a significant role in shaping.

Yet it’s not just the kids at the library whose read-ing habits weigh heavily on Greenwood’s mind. She has long been a big part of the library’s outreach program, working on matters like getting volunteer readers into local Head Start programs, so kids are getting exposed to reading at an early age.

“Lolly is really working from her heart,” says retired Fayetteville Public Library director Louise Schaper of Providence, R.I. “She’s giving a wonderful gift to the children of Fayetteville and the surrounding area. She’s concerned about all children; she wants to get books into their hands and get them reading.”

SECOND CAREER

In 2010, Greenwood won the Ann Lightsey Award for Outstanding Children’s Librarian from the Arkansas Library Association. It was the “nicest recognition of my career,” but hardly somethingshe had aimed to achieve.

Indeed, she never dreamed of a career in libraries at all. She didn’t work for one until she was already in her 40s.

“Some people are very focused,” says Greenwood, now 63. “They know in the third grade they want to be a doctor. Other people it takes longer to find out. I think a lot of times it takes being in the work world and working in different capacities to know what your passion is.”

By the time she was in college, Greenwood knew she wanted to work with people, but libraries didn’t enter her thinking. After graduating from North Little Rock High School in 1967, she went to Cottey College (Nevada, Mo.), before transferring to the University of Arkansas and completing her bachelor’s degree in sociology and social work.

Life-long best friend Carole Smith of Little Rock, who has known Greenwood since they were sixth-graders, says that even as a young woman, Greenwood had the same personality characteristics that have been so important to her success at the library, namely her empathy and calmness under pressure.

“She possesses a total sense of fairness, the ability to look for the best in every person and situation,” says Smith, who attended UA at the same time as Greenwood. “And she has a grounded sense of calmness about the world, which just causes her to be able to forge through, where you and I would be pulling our hair out.”

Greenwood’s ability to have what her best friend calls “a big-picture view of things,” would prove important as the new Fayetteville Public Library was being conceived in the early 2000s.

That was a long way down the road, though. Before then, Greenwood had what she calls “my first life.”

She got married shortly after graduating from college. The couple spent a brief time in Little Rock, then moved to Jackson, Miss., where they lived for seven years.

Greenwood worked for the Veteran’s Administration and then at a medical center. Itwas tough work. The clients she worked with at the medical center often had serious medical and financial issues, which took a lot out of her emotionally.

In 1979, with a 6-month-old daughter in tow, the couple moved back to Fayetteville. For around five years, Greenwood was a stay at home mom, but by the time her youngest daughter was 3, she wanted to get back into the work force.

Greenwood and her husband ultimately wound up divorcing, but she made it a point to stay on the same page with her ex when it came to their daughters - to make the split as easy as possible for them.

“They did a really good job of working together and sharing us,” says daughter Jessica Pierce of Austin, Texas. “She always made us feel like we were the most important thing to her; when she came home after work, we were her world.”

CONNECTING WITH KIDS

So by the mid-’80s, Greenwood knew she wanted to work again.

She also knew that she did not want to go back into social work. She wound up taking a part-time position at a preschool, working with kids between the ages of 3 and 5, which she loved.

“She is really great with children,” Pierce says. “[At the preschool] she got to see how they learn and what they’re motivated by, what makes them tick. I think that was a good stepping stone.”

Pierce adds that getting tosee young children in a classroom setting equipped her mother well for reading stories at the Fayetteville Public Library. Every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m., “Miss Lolly” heads up Preschool Storytime.

Preschool Storytime is a 30-minute program designed for kids ages 3-5. There are stories, puppetry, crafts and music - an engaging performance that does a good job of commanding the children’s attention, no easy feat at that age.

“Oh, the kids love their ‘Miss Lolly,’” says youth services librarian Alyson Low of Fayetteville, a member of Greenwood’s staff. “Her name was just made for being a librarian. They’ll come around the corner shouting, ‘Miss Lolly!’ She gets and gives a lot of hugs.”

These weekly reading sessions are one of Greenwood’s favorite parts of her job. She has always loved reading tochildren; Pierce remembers reading being a big part of the household when she and her sister, Melissa Hammond, were growing up.

Today, when Greenwood’s grandchildren spend the night at her Fayetteville home, she makes sure there’s no shortage of literary options.

“She reads constantly to our five grandchildren,” says Larry Greenwood, who married Lolly in 1999. “When they come to our house, I can’t tell you how many books she brings home - just bags of them.”

As a child, Greenwood enjoyed reading.

It wasn’t an obsession or anything. She wasn’t the kindof young person who checked out dozens of books at a time, then holed up in her bedroom and read everything under the sun, but she read “all of the standards,” the Bobbsey Twins and the Little House on the Prairie series, as well as the classics.

“I remember [our house had] a lot of professional books my dad had,” she says. “My mother was a big reader of nonfiction, Reader’s Digest condensed nonfiction. We had books, but it wasn’t as prevalent then to have as many books as people do now.”

The younger of two children, the former Lolly Herlocker was born near Kansas City, Mo., in 1949. When she was around 9, her family moved to North Little Rock. (Greenwood’s given first name is Laurel Lea, but much to her late mother’s life-long chagrin, she has been known as “Lolly” almost exclusivelyduring her life; her brother called her that when he was a toddler, and the nickname stuck.)

When her family first arrived in Arkansas, Greenwood thought “we had gone to a boonie little town,” but she wound up loving life in central Arkansas. She was a good student at North Little Rock High, where she was a cheerleader and dated Larry Greenwood. They broke up after high school and lost touch, both marrying and having children, only to reunite in the 1990s and marry in 1999.

“She was fairly quiet then,” Larry Greenwood says. “She was always cute, and alwaysvery sharp.”

STRONG PROGRAM

When it came to planning the new library, Greenwood took her studies seriously.

Led by Schaper, Greenwood and other staff members toured libraries all around the country in the time leading up to, and following, the successful salestax vote that, along with private donations, led to the construction of the new library, which opened in October 2004. They stopped at several in the Kansas City, Mo., area, and went on a trip that saw them go from Chicago to Minneapolis, stopping at several along the way.

“It really helped us visualize the things we’d like to see here, like picture-book bins,” says Greenwood, gesturing to the bins of books that are at waist level for adults, but the perfect height for young children. “That’s something we didn’t have at the old library; all our picture books were crammed together, spine out, and you couldn’t see them.”

Today, Greenwood is still looking for ways to make the children’s area more engaging to its target audience. The space, filled with natural light and bright, warm colors, is a great setting, to be sure, but she’s certain things can still be improved.

She stresses to her staff that there are always ways to get better. Whether it’s a petting zoo, a new children’s author, or anything else, Greenwood will rarely dismiss ideas from her staff.

“She does not say no; she always says, ‘Go for it,’” Lowsays. “She loves it when we come to her with new ideas. She says, ‘Absolutely, give it a shot, let’s see what works.’ She encourages us to think outside the box.”

Greenwood is quick to point out that the growth in youth services would never have happened without the unflagging support of the public. It was the voters who decisively were in favor of building a new library, and who have helped allow its annual budget for new youth services materials to grow almost 30-fold since the late 1990s.

Still, it took more than additional funding to make youth services what it is today. Long before the new library opened, Greenwood had begun dramatically transforming its programming.

In fact, Schaper says, when the library’s management was looking around the country, they realized that the one area they did not want to revamp was the youth programming. It was already better than other locations, because Greenwood had done things like allowing people to drop in on story time - rather than insisting they sign up beforehand - or refusing to cap the size of groups.

The goal was to make interacting with the library as easy and enjoyable an experience as possible for children and caregivers.

“Lolly is just exemplary at programming,” Schaper says. “[The community] has been really fortunate to have someone with those kind of skills, who brings people and families and kids in.

“Getting people in young and getting them hooked on reading is the goal. A lot of degreed librarians may not have the programming [component] that she has.”

On two occasions, Greenwood has been the interim director of the library.

She has never pursued the top position on a permanent basis. Part of her reluctance is that the library has grown so large - although people who know her insist that she has the organizational skills to handle the job.

“If you looked in the dictionary for ‘organized,’ it would be her,” Larry Greenwood says. “Our house is immaculate at all times. If I’ve been hunting or working the yard, and I walk in and start leaving grass, she walks in with a Dustbuster behind me.”

The real reason Lolly Greenwood has never had any temptation to be the director is because it would take her away from the kids.Whether it’s the ones who are excited to run into “Miss Lolly” out in public, or the ones who break into a sprint when they turn the corner and see all those picture books at eye level, their enthusiasm is what keeps her second career a great one.

“For me it’s the perfect job,” she says. “It took me a while to find it. Sometimes it takes us a while to find what we should be doing.

“My passion is connecting with children and making that impact with families, [teaching] the importance of reading, literacy and books.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 37 on 11/04/2012