106-year-old still vibrant after years as a librarian

Katherine Coulter Stanick is bookending her storied career as a librarian with the deep, rich tones of the cello.

Stanick, 106, has worked as a librarian in school districts, municipalities and state agencies and even for a while in Japan. She wrote several entries for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas, including the one for Hendrix College, where she was introduced to the cello as a student in the 1930s.

“A recent graduate of Julliard came to campus and my impression was that he was part of a federal program to bring culture to the hinterlands,” she says of her first exposure to the cello. “I enjoyed it and evidently did OK because I remember playing as a student in at least one concert on a Sunday before I left school.”

Stanick was in her 60s when she picked the instrument back up

“In those days, there were not a whole lot of people working in libraries who had a degree in library science. So, it was a very fortunate time for me.” — Katherine Stanick

and taught herself to play again. These days she practices weekly with a group of friends — four violinists, one violist and Stanick, on cello.

“We play mostly classical music, but we do play a little bit of contemporary music,” she says. “We just work on it and have a good time.”

Stanick grew up in Conway, raised mostly by her mother, a department store buyer, after her parents divorced when she was about 5 years old.

She left Hendrix a few months before graduation to take a job with a consolidated school in Bee Branch, filling in for a third- and fourth-grade teacher who left midyear.

“I didn’t know much about children — I never planned to teach young children,” she says.

The Depression was on and money was tight.

“I had put my nickels and dimes and quarters — the quarters were rare, but I had saved them — in what they called a Christmas savings account. When the banks failed, my $2-and-whatever went down the drain,” she says.

She laughs about that now. Back then, she barely hesitated to leave college for a job offering $50 a month for four months of work, though in the end the budget only allowed for $48. She returned to Hendrix in late spring to take final exams before graduating in 1937.

She taught next in Leslie, filling in for a friend who contracted tuberculosis, and was rehired there the next year. Stanick taught in Leslie until she got a library science job.

“That’s what I wanted,” she says. “I got a job as a librarian without any training or experience at all except what I did working every day at our college library, and I didn’t do much there except shelve books. But I had gotten a taste of the profession and it turned out to be a very, very good one for me.”

Stanick went to Peabody College, now a part of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tenn., the next summer to pursue a library science degree.

“In those days, there were not a whole lot of people working in libraries who had a degree in library science,” she says. “So, it was a very fortunate time for me.”

She was the librarian in Wilson for a while and then for North Little Rock High School.

She resigned to move with her new husband, who was in the U.S. Army, to Japan for almost three years.

“All I knew about Japan was what I learned in seventh-grade geography, which was not much,” she says. “I had opportunities that I never would have had in any other place or situation. I worked in Tokyo at the troop information and education library for a number of months while the regular librarian was on leave.”

One task from that job sticks in her mind.

“I had to call the Russian connection because they had books they hadn’t returned,” she says.

Other stations were in Fort Devens, Mass., and Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and they ultimately returned to Central Arkansas. B.L. Stanick died in 1979. They have one daughter, Virginia Stanick.

Katherine Stanick worked for the Veterans Administration medical library for a while, and for the Arkansas Department of Education and later for Metroplan. She was hired in 1974 as the first employee of the Arkansas Library Association, the statewide organization advocating for libraries and library staff.

In 2019, Stanick was robbed in a Little Rock parking lot. She saw a man reading papers on a bulletin board as she entered the store and felt him rip the purse from her shoulder when she walked back out a few minutes later. The robber was arrested within minutes and most of her belongings were returned.

“If I had to be attacked, it was the best-case scenario because the only thing I lost was my purse. The strap was broken,” she says.

That same year, at 102 years old, Stanick renewed her driver’s license. The clerk in the revenue office asked if she wanted to renew for four years or eight.

“I said, ‘What’s the difference?’” Stanick recalls. “She said, ‘Four years is $20 and eight years is $40.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s save that $20.’ I drove for about another year and then I decided it was time to give it up. I miss driving, though.”