After 30 years away -- with her husband Rick, working as a nurse in Albany -- when Anne Iannello returned to Batavia in 2017 for retirement -- she gravitated to the Richmond Memorial Library.
After all, it's a place of childhood memories.
Soon, she was drawn to the Friends of the Library and started looking for a volunteer opportunity. She met Lucine Kauffman, head of the Library Visits program, who assured her she would love being a Library Visits volunteer.
"It's easy," Kauffman told Iannello.
"All you have to do was go out and deliver some books, chat up a little bit of conversation, check in with them," Iannello recalled Kauffman telling her. "Again, it's very easy."
A couple of Iannello's "easy" deliveries included bringing books during the pandemic to an elderly shut-in who told Iannello to come to her dining room window at the side of the house.
"So after we went through some pricker bushes, the window finally it started to rise up slowly and out came a fishing net," she recalled. "Now, I would have someplace to put the books. So, of course, again, I get some scratches from the pricker bushes wrapping the books in the fishnet, but once that was all set, I was like, 'hey, I can do this.'"
Another "easy" assignment was bringing some books to a woman who informed Iannello after she arrived in the woman's apartment that she needed to get her cat to the vet.
"Speaking of scratches," Ianello said at the beginning of her story, "if you know or have a cat, you know the cat's wonderful. It's the difficulty of getting them and chasing them in a small apartment and putting them in a box that's probably the worst part. She certainly let me know that. But there was a great outcome. So that was good as well."
Iannello's sense of humor and good cheer, along with her hard work and dedication, is why she was given the Friends of the Library Volunteer of the Year Award on Saturday.
"You make a difference when you volunteer," said Kathy Zipkin, president of the Friends Board of Directors. "You make life better for so many by delivering books and movies and by simply being a good listener with compassion. When you give your time to helping others, it shows your kindness, generosity, and quality, and character. I want you to know just how much your dedication to volunteering is so greatly valued by so many here at the library and beyond."
Iannello recommended the "easy" Library Visits program to anybody who wants to volunteer in the community.
"This is such a wonderful program, to reach out to these seniors in the community that are unable to come to the library, so we could bring the library to them," she said. "It's so important."
Photo: Anne Iannello and Samantha Basile, community and adult services librarian, with the plaque that now also contains Iannello's name as a volunteer of the year for 2022. Photo by Howard Owens.
