Teresa Wilhelm, a Lantana resident for 67 years, is a longtime library patron and has spent more than 20 years as president of Friends of the Library. She visits the remodeled building with daughter Rebecca Wilhelm and granddaughter Reyna Acosta, 6. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Brian Biggane
Teresa Wilhelm has a favorite quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin that’s worth remembering: “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.”
Franklin himself would have a hard time keeping up with Wilhelm’s schedule. In addition to working four jobs, she’s president of Lantana’s Friends of the Library, a small group that’s trying to rebuild its membership post-pandemic.
Wilhelm said there’s a distinction between the two groups raising money for the library, the Lantana Library Foundation and her Friends group.
“The foundation is the one that raises tens of thousands, and the Friends raises nickels, dimes and quarters. We charge $5 a year to be members of the Friends, and all that does is show your support for the library,” Wilhelm said.
After an extensive remodeling, the library celebrated its reopening in March, and Wilhelm said the results were “up to my expectations and beyond. We didn’t have the technology before, and it took gutting the building and basically redesigning everything. Now we have an actual meeting room. We used to have to meet in front of the circulation desk.”
In December, the Friends will have a brass ensemble play Christmas music, which has been the case since Wilhelm took it over as president. “It was hard for people to study or check out a book with a brass ensemble playing. Now there’s an actual meeting room, which is beautiful, there’s sections divided off: teens, children, adults, a couple of small meeting rooms for tutoring or for a four-, five-person meeting.”
Wilhelm’s family moved to Lantana from Indiana when she was 3 years old, and she’s been a library regular ever since.
“It once existed in the bridge tender’s house, then they moved it to the land, and the women’s club started a library there. I went there as a kid, so I’ve grown up at the library.
When we’ve got a really nice library it’s really nice to get involved.”
Over the years, Wilhelm has always been at the council chambers to lobby the Town Council for money for books as it goes through its annual budget process.
Wilhelm, 70, took over as president of the Friends more than 20 years ago. She had some ambitious goals, including raising membership to 200 and bringing in guest speakers from a wide spectrum of cultural avenues.
“We’ve had authors, artists, musicians, painters. We had Mary Linehan address the group before she passed away,” Wilhelm said.
Linehan, a Lantana historian, left much of her life’s work to the library.
Friends membership, meanwhile, topped out around 250 before the interruptions caused by the coronavirus and construction. It has only about a dozen members now, with a membership drive set to begin this fall.
The library has served as a refuge from this summer’s brutal heat for parents and their children.
“They have story time for kids Mondays and Thursdays and they are swamped,” Wilhelm said. “We had summer programs in the past, but we didn’t have the manpower and the technology they have now. More parents were going to work then. Now parents are working from home and they can bring their little ones and sit at a computer and do their work while the kids are having story time. And the computers are very nice.”
As for what else occupies her time, Wilhelm teaches swimming at Superhero Swim Academy, teaches mobility to senior citizens at the YMCA, and tutors kids who need extra help in the PAL program, all in Lake Worth Beach. She also has an online wellness business.
A retired schoolteacher who spent 37 years at various schools around Lake Worth and Boynton Beach, Wilhelm volunteers at Lakeside United Methodist Church in Lake Worth Beach, serving as president of the teenagers group and the card ministry as well as leading the women’s doll group.
Former Lantana Vice Mayor Malcolm Balfour said Wilhelm “really is the Friends of Lantana Library. With the accent on the ‘is.’
“As long as I’ve known her, she’s always been involved in programs for kids, even going back to when she was young. Now that she’s a grandmother she’s still volunteering.”
These days, she and her daughter, Rebecca, and granddaughter, Reyna, can all visit the library together.
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