Lynda Hunter, children’s services librarian at the Delray Beach Public Library, plays guitar
and performs sing-along tunes to a packed room on June 29. Hunter is celebrating her 30th year at the library.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
By Rich Pollack
Lynda Hunter’s first day on the job at the Delray Beach Public Library didn’t go all that well.
A mother of two small children at the time, Hunter had noticed during one of her visits that the library was looking for someone to work part time, checking out books.
“The first day I was really bored,” says Hunter, who has a master’s degree in fine arts education and who had taught school in one of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhoods.
Three days after she was hired, however, the children’s librarian resigned and the library’s then director, Leslie Strickland, asked Hunter to step in.
Hunter has been anything but bored since getting the job 30 years ago this month and leading a vibrant children’s program focused on serving the entire community.
A musician with years of classical piano training but who began playing folk and blues guitar during the 1960s, Hunter began incorporating music and art into children’s programming at the library.
Realizing the library, then on Southeast Fourth Avenue, was serving mostly the children of the city’s more affluent residents, Hunter began taking her show on the road.
“I started outreach programs at daycare centers and after-school programs to read to children who weren’t coming to the library,” she said.
Now 68, Hunter is still taking her guitars and her books to Head Start programs, schools and summer camps, in addition to leading several story-time programs inside the library — all while running a growing department.
During a two-week period last month, Hunter and her team of two full-time and one part-time assistants put on programs attended by more than 3,000 children.
A self-proclaimed “old hippie still at heart” who in the 1960s hitchhiked to South Carolina to help register black voters — and later was escorted out of town by police officers — Hunter remains committed to reaching children throughout the community.
“My goal then, and my goal still is, for every child in Delray Beach to have a library card,” she said. “Even if it is never used, it’s a ticket to anywhere a child wants to go. It’s really their first credit card.”
Over her 30-year career at the Delray Beach Public Library — one of only two in Florida that are nonprofit organizations run by a board of directors — Hunter has reached thousands of children while at the same time earning her doctorate in fine arts education.
“I have mothers in my programs who were in my programs when they were little,” she said. “They tell me they want their children to have the same experience they had.”
Hunter and the library have made it a point to keep up with the changing technology that some predicted would make libraries obsolete.
“The opposite is true,” she says, explaining that the library is packed with computers that children can use and offers a wide range of children’s programs, ranging from science and geography clubs to the Paws for Reading program, where kids read to service dogs.
Now, Hunter is focused on making plans for a 5,000-square-foot expansion of the children’s area — funded through the library’s “Foothold on the Future” campaign — that will include a state-of-the-art computer lab for kids as well as a music production studio.
“When you get children used to coming to the library, you have a captive audience,” she says. “The expansion is going to help create a positive learning experience. We want to help build self-esteem because when children think they can do something, they can do virtually anything.”
Although change is coming to the library’s children’s area thanks to the expansion, there’s a good chance visitors will find Lynda Hunter surrounded by children who are listening as a story unfolds.
“I can’t imagine not doing this,” she says. “I believe I’m still making a difference and when I don’t believe that anymore, my days here at the library will be over.”
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