Two longtime Mat-Su librarians leave after decades of service

What you need to know:

• Two longtime Mat-Su librarians left their posts in August. Geri Denkewalter retired after 40 years at the Talkeetna Library, while Julie Mitchell left the Willow Library after 16 years there and about 30 years in the profession.
• Both librarians helped make their libraries community gathering places. Denkewalter became a fixture in Talkeetna, while Mitchell helped lead the yearslong effort to build Willow’s new library.
• The librarians are leaving under different circumstances. Denkewalter is retiring with plans to remain in Talkeetna, while Mitchell said the job was very rewarding but that personal attacks and threats over library materials made it no longer enjoyable. She is now considering what career might come next.
• Short on time but need the local news scoop? Get free weekly news in your inbox for Mat-Su, from Mat-Su.

WILLOW and TALKEETNA — Longtime Mat-Su Borough librarians Geri Denkewalter and Julie Mitchell said they believe a library has never been just a place to borrow books.

“It’s a community place where everyone is safe and everyone is welcome when they come in,” Denkewalter said.

That idea has guided much of their lives — and shaped the libraries of Willow and Talkeetna. Both women left their posts this summer, marking the end of an era at their branches and the start of new bookish adventures for each community, they said.

40 years at the heart of Talkeetna

Geri Denkewalter moved to Talkeetna in 1977, when the town was a very different place. The first place she visited was the old library building on Second Street. There, she met Betty, who was working as the library assistant and would become her best friend for the next 50 years.

“I just started helping out,” Denkewalter said.

Today, winter in Talkeetna still brings calm as tourists and summer workers go home, but that was even more true in 1977, she said. There were only a handful of winter jobs, she remembered, and sometimes four people seemed to do them all.

“We cooked in the kitchen, we shoveled the roof, we did inventory, we helped out at the post office,” she said.

Denkewalter wore plenty of hats herself, working as an EMT, at the school and alongside her husband in five different air taxi businesses.

But it was her willingness to help in the library that turned into a 40-year career after she moved from volunteer to staff member on July 1, 1986.

For generations of Talkeetna residents, Denkewalter became a familiar presence — helping people find books, solve problems, share stories and, perhaps most importantly, feel welcome. Today, the library property includes Geraldine Circle Trail, a walking path constructed by the Friends of the Library and named by the staff in her honor.

With her retirement official early last month, Denkewalter is taking a friend’s advice on how to spend her time: Have a project, learn something new or return to something you once loved, read for an hour every day and follow one more important rule.

“You cannot volunteer for anything for six months,” Denkewalter said.

Regardless of how she ends up spending her time, it won’t include moving away from Talkeetna, she said.

“This is my community,” she said. “I am not going anywhere. This is the center of the universe.”

‘A dull roar’

Mitchell has never been afraid to make some noise in a library. In a previous role at a library in California, she was honored by a county board of supervisors with a distinction she wears proudly: “the loudest librarian they knew.”

And when Mitchell arrived at the Willow Library in 2010, she brought that same energy with her.

“We kept it to a dull roar,” Mitchell said. “We still tried to make spaces for people who needed quiet.”

Sixteen years later, Mitchell is preparing to leave the Willow Library, marking the end of a 30-year career capped by what she said was her dream job.

“If I could have written my dream job description, being the Willow librarian would have been it,” she said.

One of Mitchell’s biggest accomplishments was helping Willow get a new library. For nearly eight years, she and others worked through fundraising, development and borough discussions until the community finally got its new building.

But her legacy can also be measured through the people who grew up knowing her. When a 14-year-old learned she was leaving, he asked, “What are we gonna do? You’ve been the librarian our entire life. Many of my childhood memories include you.”

Mitchell laughed. “Dude, you’re only 14. You’re still a child.”

Her career began almost by accident. “When I graduated high school, I had no clue what I wanted to do,” she said. Her father suggested she pick something to tell people. So she did.

“I said I was gonna be a librarian.”

Willow offers a unique posting. Patrons arrive by boat, helicopter, snowmachine, side-by-side and even a cart pulled by a reindeer. Once, a girl brought her sled dogs to the old library, Mitchell said. The lead dog escaped its tie and followed her inside, with the rest of the team nearly joining it.

For Mitchell, libraries are places where everyone can belong. “Libraries open the world to anybody,” she said.

While working as the area’s librarian has brought a lifetime of joy, it has also been very difficult over the last several years, she said.

Community members with strong opinions about what materials should not be in the library lobbed personal attacks against her professionalism and even made indirect physical threats, she said. One individual told her she “should be taken out and drowned,” she said.

“I’ve realized that things are hard, and I don’t enjoy my job anymore. Life is too short to keep showing up for something that has no redeeming qualities,” she said.

She said she has not reached retirement age, but is not willing to face those kinds of attacks anymore.

“It is really easy to feel isolated when you’re going through something like this,” she said. “I’m not old enough to retire, and right now, the thought of working at another library makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t. It’s just not fun anymore.”

Now she is figuring out what comes next. Maybe museums. Maybe research. For now, she is comfortable not having an answer.

“It’s easier to just say that I’m retiring,” Mitchell said, “but I’m just shifting gears.”

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