Allan Appel Photo
Pedro Torres & Gladys Genovez on Thursday.
Giggling while coloring between the lines — and doing a really excellent job of it — is much more than it seems for Gladys Genovez and Pedro Torres.
The Hill Regional Career High School seniors were having fun Thursday afternoon, relaxing after a long session of utilizing the Fair Haven branch library’s computers and other resources to fill out stressful college and scholarship applications.
That was the scene Thursday, a typical weekday after-school afternoon at the public library branch at 182 Grand Ave. near Ferry Street.
A library, especially the cozy intimacy of the fairly small Fair Haven branch, is, to use Pedro’s phrase, almost “like a second home” for both of them.
When she applied to participate in the city’s Youth @ Work program two summers ago, said Gladys, and location assignments were being handed out to the 200 participant kids, staffers asked who patronized the Fair Haven branch.
Gladys, who lives not far away, on Fulton Street between Fair Haven Heights and the Annex, had actually grown up at the library. She recalled visiting first while holding her mom’s hand, then becoming a card holder and patron on her own, and now an employee.
Because she loves mysteries, at that time Gladys remembered checking out Wish You Were Dead, by Todd Strasser and another book for her mom in Spanish. Because she had used the library most recently, she secured a Youth-at-Work position at the Fair Haven branch.
She has now worked at the library for nearly three years, mostly in the children’s section (hence all the coloring pens and kid activity materials), ten hours a week during the school year and 25 in the summer.
“People at the front desk saw me grow up,” she said. As Gladys recalled, one long-time librarian there put it this way: “Nice to see a shy girl become an outgoing employee.”
“I feel really comfortable here talking to the security guard, to the parents, seeing how much fun the kids have at activities. I like it when the kids come in [especially in the summer] to cool off in the A.C.,” she said.
Pedro, who met Gladys while the two of them were putting in community service hours at the Towers senior complex, frequently uses the Ives Main Branch Library but also often comes to the Fair Haven branch because Gladys, who knows the collections and resources well, is helping him apply for tuition assistance and other grants.
He recently switched his declared major at Gateway Community College, which he’ll attend in the fall, from the automotive program to mechanical engineering. “I wanted a more secure job,” he said, and working with Gladys and on the computers helped him sort through tuition questions and send in the correct documents.
Like Gladys he’s actually a library-lover from childhood — and he works at Career High’s school library, where he particularly enjoys orienting the freshmen — and has affectionate memories of walking around the Fair Haven neighborhood with his grandmother. Both he and his grandmother utilized the Little Free Libraries — those miniature collections on a pole urging you to take a book home to read and even to keep if you put another back in its place.
“I used to just love them,” he remembered, “to take one and put one back. Lots of kids don’t return them, but I did.”
“My mom,” Gladys added, “used to read from the Little Library while we played and sometimes she read to my cousins.”
Coming to the Fair Haven Branch is like a “stress reliever,” Pedro added. “If you just go home, you’re tired, you want to sleep, nap, cook. Here you do your work, you read, you relax, you color, it clears your head, and then you head home.”
Because of their work experience in libraries they both plan also to apply for jobs at their respective future college libraries: Gateway for Pedro, and the University of New Haven, where Gladys will enroll in the fall.