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ANDERSON, S.C. (AP) — The teen room at the Anderson County Library was set to open at 2 p.m. Wednesday. Before it was to open, Lois Buckman had her first regulars show up.
"Hello Amani," Buckman said, looking up at the teenage boy. In a minute, he is joined by another boy. Buckman knows them both by name.
She hands them a key so they can unlock the door.
Rain is pouring outside, but for a bit, the two teenage boys hang out at the library, hunting for books and playing video games in the teen room. Buckman sees a lot of familiar faces here, she said.
"The other day, Amani hung out and just talked for 30 minutes," Buckman said. "Sometimes, they come just to talk. During the break, I have had about six to eight kids every day. Some days, there's a special needs kid who comes in. And he gets to socialize with other kids his own age."
Originally from New Jersey, Buckman lives in downtown Anderson. She moved here from Texas to be closer to her family about three years ago.
In those three years, she has walked to work to the county library, where she helps oversee the library's programming for teenagers.
"I retired for about a month," Buckman said. "Then, I heard the teen room was closed here at the library. And I love kids. So here, I am."
For the teenagers, when they come here, their goal may be to talk, to play games or find a book.
But Buckman's mission is always to encourage reading and to listen. It's what she's been doing nearly her entire career, which began more than 45 years ago.
It is simply a continuation of the work that she did as a teacher, a school librarian and a reviewer of young adult books.
Buckman said that as a teenager, she wanted to be a biochemist. She loved biology and the idea of conducting research. But her father, whom she cared for while he battled cancer and her mother worked to pay the bills, made her promise to gain an education in the teaching field.
"My father was dying and he made promise that I would get elementary teaching certification," Buckman said. "With that, he knew I would always have a job."
What she discovered, she said, is that she loved working with middle-school age children. For 13 years, she taught in New Jersey schools. Then, she moved to Texas where she continued teaching for 12 years and then became a school librarian for 22 years.
She earned her bachelor's and her master's degrees, and eventually became a young adult book reviewer. National publishers like Random House, Hyperion, McMillan, and Simon & Schuster started sending her books for young adults — often before those books could be purchased in stores.
All the while, her passion as a librarian and a teacher was to open up a world of reading to her students.
That really became her focus, she said, when she taught students at a school district in Texas and realized how starved they were for books and print material.
The students had little access to books in their homes.
"They were poor as poor could be," Buckman said. "They had a beautiful library at the school. But it never occurred to them that they could read. When I gave them some of those new books to keep and take home, this one boy cried. He said, 'Is this mine?' I read those big lugs fairy tales. And I learned that no one had read to them."
So Buckman's classroom became a place filled with books.
She kept a library in her classroom thanks to the books she received publishers and some that she purchased herself. Buckman said she knew that often students would lose interest in taking a book home between her class and the library. So she made sure to keep books on hand in her classroom all the time.
Through the years, she has sent books — hundreds of them — to schools here in Anderson County.
She estimates that she's given around 500 books to Westside High School through the years. When she had grandchildren in school at Lakeside Middle School and McLees Elementary School, she would send books to those schools.
Now, she donates books to the Developmental Center for Exceptional Children, which serves children with special needs, and she's given some to Robert Anderson Middle School.
It is not uncommon, she said, to find her riding around with a box of books in her car that are destined for a local school.
"It is important to me that kids have books. There's no greater feeling than when you match a kid with a book and they realize that book can be a friend," Buckman said. "You can build on that, and they become lifetime readers."
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Information from: Anderson Independent-Mail, http://www.andersonsc.com
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