Renee Swartz
Make no mistake about it. Renee Swartz is a ground breaker, a pioneer, a leader, and a very smart lady who decides something needs to be done, then promptly goes about making sure it happens.
But even after a lifetime of donating time, talent and innovations to her causes, all of which focus on the importance of books in everyone’s lives, this indomitable lady is not taking a back seat to any of it…she is merely stepping down after 23 years as the Founding Chair of the New Jersey Center of the Book, the affiliate with the Library of Congress along with 49 other Centers representing each of the states, the Center she founded in New Jersey 23 years ago.
It is the occasion of this retirement that is the cause for the gala celebration planned for Wednesday, July 19 at the Molly Pitcher Inn. The celebration will honor Renee for her years of service to the NJ Center for the Book and is open to the public. Tickets are $95 and available by e-mail to Marianne.gaunt@comcast.net or at the door the day of the event.
For Renee, it all began because she raised her hand.
Looking back now at her many years of volunteerism, Renee, enthusiastic, loquacious, and loaded with fond memories and poignant reminiscences, can laugh and blame it on her parents, her years earning her degree at Barnard College, her children, and how they all tie in with her belief that books are vitally important to everyone.
The daughter of a highly respected physician in both Monmouth and Middlesex counties and a mom who was a teacher and emphasized the importance of learning, Renee also believes she inherited a natural love for learning and keeping herself informed. She readily admits that as a child growing up in Keyport, she literally read her way through the borough’s small library by the time she was in fourth or fifth grade.
Then she eagerly sought out other sources. She also believed diversification is necessary in reading, be it biographies, knowledge, science, nature, history or simply comedy and children’s stories. To this day, there is always a book beside Renee’s bed for a last-minute chapter before settling in for the night. Right now, the book is Horse by Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, a novel set in the 19th century at the time of the Civil War.
It is this Keyport native who went on to Barnard College, met her husband, Harry, now the late beloved physician of Monmouth County, and the couple settled in Middletown where the doctor had his office and Renee brought up their sons and daughter with the same love for reading she has.
There was the day Renee was asked to volunteer as a survey taker for the American Association of University Women, as a way of determining what educational resources would be offered to the growing population of Monmouth County.
So Renee Swartz raised her hand and agreed to serve.
Since then, her advocacy for libraries has been felt at all levels of government. At the national level, she was Chair of the NJ Delegation to the White House Conference on Library and Information Services task forces, serving as national treasurer and permanent representative.
She was on the NJ State Library Advisory Council, the American Library Association Advisory Board for the National Office of Information Technology Policy, and numerous other national, state, and county committees, task forces, and communications offices. She wrote and developed The People’s Bill of Rights, which was subsequently adopted by the New Jersey Library Association and was an amendment to the White House Conference in 1979 as the Preamble to the Second White House Conference.
So when the only county library at the time was a bookmobile, Renee knew she had to do something about that as well. When asked for volunteers to working on expanding the library, well, Renee Swartz once again raised her hand.
In 1966, she raised her hand when asked to join the Monmouth County Library Commission with a goal to make it bigger, better, stronger and more involved. She became the commission chair in 1976 and remained in that position for the next half century, accomplishing, or ensuring that would be accomplished, all that she dreamed a library should be.
Renee’s idea was never to have a library be a quiet place where children could research essays in school or pick out a book for a scout activity. A library has to be more than that, she insisted. Actually, she smiles in remembering, she would tell everyone involved that a library should not be just a library…it is a Community Center. That is why she initiated jazz festivals in the library in those early years; today, the sound and history of music and dance are popular regular attractions in the main county library and all of its branches in Monmouth County.
What’s more, she went on, not satisfied that a library should be just a community center…”it has to be the corner store for the mind.” That means, she explains, everything the mind needs should be as easy and readily available at the corner store.
That is how the Monmouth County evolved to the point today, it is truly a corner store with all its branches making it close to neighborhoods throughout the county offering everything from yoga and story times for kids, to concerts and interviews with authors.
Then there is the Center for the Book. This is the organization created as a designated center affiliated with the Library of Congress to promote reading and literacy. In 2001, with First Lady Laura Bush as eager as Renee to ensure libraries would always abound, New Jersey was not one of the forty-three states with a Center for the Book. Ms. Bush saw that New Jersey’s Renee could change that, and she was right.
New Jersey became the 44th state to create a designated Center in affiliation with the Library of Congress, and Renee went on to chair it until this year. Content it has now achieved her original goal, and confident of the capable hands of her Board of Directors, the tireless lady has decided to put the chairmanship into other hands and relax a bit to enjoy other aspects of her life, which still includes those children and now grandchildren, as well as a quieter less active life still only a stone’s throw from her favorite library Eastern Branch on Route 35 in Shrewsbury.
Simply citing some of the accomplishments of New Jersey’s Center for the Book is describing Renee’s goals …
The nationwide reading-writing initiative for youth in fourth through 12th grades has had nine national winners from New Jersey’s Center; Red Bank’s Two River Theater has been designated a New Jersey Literary Landmark together with such other representatives of prominence in specific fields including the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies and the Grounds for Sculpture; authors and others who demonstrate exceptional dedication to literacy who have earned the state Center’s coveted Literary Lions Award, or the Route 1 Reads Initiative, the partnership of 16 affiliate Centers for the Book that promotes and commemorates important aspects of the state so motorists can learn even while traveling.
The New Jersey Center’s Poetry Indeed! Event at Rutgers gives student authors an event to present their poetry and illustrations, the popular New Jersey Center exhibit in the pavilion of States exhibit in the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress in Washington, the lecturers, the awards to outstanding librarians, the grant initiatives that are rewarded, the art exhibitions even the Food for Thought program in Monmouth County where the Center teamed up with the county library system to promote the importance of nutrition literacy for better health.
New Jersey Center events made science fun for kids attending programs at the Liberty Science Center and the Clothespin Doll Project brought out ingenuity, color, and excitement to youngsters invited to participate in depicting all the immigrant backgrounds of America’s residents by decorating clothespins in native dress.
All this has been made available through Renee’s efforts, through the New Jersey Center’s hard work, and through that idea of Renee’s that the library should indeed be the corner store for the mind.
That Renee Shwartz has been successful in all she sets out to accomplish is well proven. It did not take the honors she received by President and Mrs. Bush. Nor did not take her being named by the President to the Institute of the Museums and Library Board. a federal agency of the executive branch which administers funds to 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums across the nation. Nor even more recently, did it take the naming of the children’s Library at her beloved Eastern Branch in her honor.
All are honors she has received and cherished, all are blended with the many other accolades she has garnered over the years of pursuing her goal to make libraries and books a part of everyone’s life.
But indeed, they, too, are among her collection of signs and symbols. Renee Swartz may never have earned a degree in library science to be a certified librarian. But she knows how to create a library that answers people every day of their lives.
It all started because she raised her hand.
