After 25 years of service at the public library in San Marino, Rex Mayreis has decided to retire.
He will officially step down from his position as Librarian III at the Crowell Public Library on Sept. 29.
“I believe that the public library is the lifeblood of any healthy community and I am happy and proud to have been connected with the Crowell Public Library these past 25 years,” Mayreis said.
“He does the work of about three people,” said City Librarian Irene McDermott, who has been working alongside Mayreis for the past 19 years.
She continued, “He does all the book processing and makes sure that all gets done. He’s got a special relationship with the Chinese Club that gives us a grant every year to buy books in Chinese. He is a supervisor of the Reference Desk and he buys all of the non-fiction in the library.”
Mayreis said retiring from the library was a hard decision to make.
“Right now I feel very comfortable with it,” he said. “I know when I get closer to the date, I’m going to think, ‘Gosh, this is really coming to an end.’ I have a lot of side interests and I just need more time.”
He plans on spending more time with his wife, Joan, who retired last year.
“These last four or five years, we would see so little of each other between her job and my job and the hours not corresponding,” Mayreis said.
He said he’s going to catch up with some home projects after his retirement. Mayreis said he and Joan may do some international traveling, but they enjoy also taking trips to more local places, such as Mammoth Lakes. His plans for retirement also involve spontaneous “whimsical day trips” like hopping on a train to Santa Monica.
Mayreis, who was born in Burbank and later moved to Pasadena, first got to know the City of San Marino when he was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service from 1978-86. While San Marino wasn’t his normal route, he worked here briefly as a substitute. During his time as a letter carrier, he attended Cal State Los Angeles where he was pre-library as an English student.
Mayreis said he considered a career working at the library, which he said was a place he always enjoyed being.
He began attending UCLA in 1987 and obtained his master’s degree in Library Information Studies.
Mayreis’ first job as a librarian was at the Los Angeles Central Library, which was at a temporary location along Spring Street because of the devastating April 29, 1986 fire followed by another fire in September of that year. He was in the Science and Technology Department and spent most of his time helping people over the phone.
“They were people from everywhere with questions across the board,” Mayreis said. “This is before the internet and we were trying to use the collection as it was. Some of it had been lost in the fire and water-damaged.”
He said he longed to deal with the public on a more personal level, as opposed to the vast collection of Southern California callers he spoke with daily at the Los Angeles Public Library.
He spent two years at Los Angeles Central Library from 1989-91 before starting at San Marino Public Library, which re-opened in its current building as Crowell Public Library in 2008.
“It seemed like a good fit and I thought this was definitely worth a try,” Mayreis said. “So I did. I never knew that I’d be here 25 years later.”
When Mayreis began working at San Marino Public Library, he was volunteer coordinator and did the cataloguing. He’s also been responsible for the Chinese-language materials collection.
“When I first started, we had a small collection of books that the library had bought,” Mayreis said. “I think a bookstore had made suggestions on what to get. We also borrowed books from the L.A. library. In those days, they lent a chunk of their collection to libraries that didn’t have non-English collections. So they would just send it out for six months to 12 months and we would make them available for check-out.”
He said San Marino Public Library staff chose to obtain its own larger collection of Chinese-language books and media. Because there were no Chinese-speaking staff members who could assist, Mayreis relied heavily on volunteers and committees to choose pieces for the library’s Chinese-language collection.
“I’ve been very, very fortunate over the years to have at least a few volunteers who would help select books,” he said, mentioning long-time volunteer Jenny Chu’s commitment to the library throughout the years.
Crowell Public Library also has a small Spanish-language materials collection.
Some of the other notable programs in which Mayreis has been involved with are Opera Talk and Helping Hands with Hand-Held Devices.
Crowell Public Library began Opera Talk in 2010 as a series held once a month on Sunday during Los Angeles Opera season, working with the opera to arrange speakers who discussed its current productions.
“The speakers have been very interesting and informative, and they include video clips and recorded music,” Mayreis said.
Helping Hands with Hand-Held Devices brings teens from San Marino High School together in the library to help people use and understand their smartphones, iPads and other technology.
“I started this with SMHS student Billy Liu three years ago,” Mayreis said. “At times, it was very successful, with appreciative adults and teens who felt good about helping. However, we’ve had to end, or at least suspend the program because of difficulties getting students to commit to these sessions to satisfy the high number of people who want help.”
Another program that Mayreis has helped coordinate in the community is the Rose Pruning Workshop, which he’s partnered with City Environmental Services Manager Ron Serven on for the past 22 years.
Mayreis also worked with John Axume of the San Marino Music Center and Friends of the Library to fund two to three musical performances annually at the library.
Mayreis listed his favorite book as “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” by Anne Tyler.
“This one is about a quirky family,” he said. “One of the family members opens a restaurant and it’s just this little place where everybody is welcome to come.”
Mayreis said patrons don’t often request book recommendations anymore, but sometimes ask what’s good to read on a subject. He did say that people almost expected recommendations when he first started because the person he replaced, Bev Nairne, was popular for her suggestions.
“She had a whole entourage of people who would ask, ‘What should I read next? What should I read next?’” he said.
However, Mayreis never took over Nairne’s fiction section when she left, because another librarian wanted it and was better versed in it.
“I got non-fiction, which was probably more up my alley, too,” he said.
Mayreis’ time at San Marino Public Library spanned from the time when it had just one computer for public use to the boom of increased access to the internet.
“In those days, we started to have internet classes when we’d show people how to use search engines,” he said. “It was quite an exciting time and it really changed the boundaries of the library very much.”
Mayreis said he’ll mostly miss the people—both colleagues and patrons—of Crowell Public Library.
“For the most part, people who come in the library are really neat people,” he said. “I just feel a lot of kinship with them.”
McDermott called Mayreis “a distinguished man of valor” and “a true gentleman.”
“We’re going to miss the hell out of him,” she said.
