After 16 years as the librarian at the Winslow Public Library, Docia Blalock is retiring at the end of the year. She said with her newly acquired free time, she would be visiting museums, seeing concerts, and spending time with her husband Dennis.
The staff at the library will miss Blalock and her attention to detail. “I have quit jobs before, I have been downsized, but I have never retired before. This will be a different kind of leaving. Being involved in the daily life of library customers that I have been privileged to be a part of, I am going to miss.”
Blalock is a fascinating lady with a story to be envied. She grew up in San Diego County and attended a high school with a graduating class of only 18 students. She went to Berkeley University in California and earned a Bachelor’s degree in English. While she was there, she witnessed huge events in American history.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took place while she was in college, as did mass protests of the Vietnam War. “It was an interesting time to be there, they didn’t even have a graduation ceremony the year I graduated, they were afraid there would be riots. It was pretty upsetting what had been coming down that spring of 1970,” Blalock recalled.
She explained that she didn’t involve herself in protests, “I was involved as I was walking through the campus, but I was too busy coping with being out on my own and learning as much as I could.” She continued, “It was an interesting time to be alive, I’m glad I was there, I witnessed some important things but I didn’t give it my heart in terms of commitment to the revolution.”
She began her library career in 1977, after completing the Master’s program in library science at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. She had already received her Bachelor’s degree in English from Berkeley when she decided to embark on the adventure of being a librarian. She took a job at the Atlanta Public Library for a time until she decided, “Public library wasn’t a good fit for me at the time.”
Blalock then worked part time at the Emory University library and part time trimming trees learning more life skills. “Not all learning is academic,” she said.
Blalock has worked many different jobs, picking up skills along the way. Aside from job skills, she mentioned her learning of interpersonal skills is just as important. Blalock spent time doing technical support during the dawn of the personal computer age and worked as a sales and support representative for a software company that put the process of ordering books on a five inch floppy disc.
She recounted a story of a company picnic while working with the software company. “They usually threw bean bags or something, but this year they said, ‘let’s have mud wrestling.’ I, of course, volunteered. I’m the kid in the white blouse and they don’t really know me. My opponent was Vicki who drove the forklift in the warehouse, I was still pretty strong from tree trimming and I was doing martial arts at the time. She never put my face in the mud and I would say it was more of a standoff, but after that, everyone knew my name.”
In the early 1990’s Blalock went back to library work. She said, “The for-profit people are driven so differently than public libraries. It took me three jobs and one of them absolutely miserable before I realized that public library is where I wanted to be.”
She then went to work in an up and coming rural county in Georgia in a small department in the library district called the Center for Special Needs. “We had a grant funded department set up and they already had one department head and she bombed so they had a vacancy. I learned how to use reader scanners and other equipment in the special needs area.”
Blalock explained that working with people with disabilities was rewarding in that she got to know them and their stories, and realized that working in the library offered her the opportunity to enrich people’s lives.
Blalock came to Winslow in August of 2001, when her husband decided to attend graduate school at Northern Arizona University. She began making community connections by volunteering at the Winslow Library. By December of that year, the head librarian had decided to retire. “I thought, I have a little experience and I applied. In January I started the job.”
Blalock has a lot of reverence and love for the community of Winslow. She said, “There is a word in Spanish, querencia, that means a comfortable, or hospitable place; sort of the place from where you view the world. This library has been my querencia.”
