Certainly, a large number of the town's children and parents will know her by name, but even they may not know much more than that about the woman who has made children's and youth literacy and library use an enduring mission in life.

"There hasn't been a day I haven't looked forward to going to work," Lynda says with a sincerity in her voice which is unmistakable. She found her niche in life, as she puts it, and has apparently never been tempted to take it for granted. Co-workers recognize the quality of Lynda's commitment, Branch Manager Peggy Bryant describing it with the praise: "She's my right and my left hand."

As Lynda recalls it, she came to library service accidentally. Working on her advanced degree in anthropology as a graduate student at San Bernardino State University, she took a job in hometown Yucaipa's library to help pay for tuition. Putting it figuratively, she walked in and never left.

By the time she finished her studies, she had earned a master's degree in library science and information, and has been happily pursuing that credential's career ever since.

Actually, the interests in anthropology and library work aren't so mutually exclusive as they might seem, or at least they aren't from Lynda's perspective.

Her focus in anthropology was always on culture, and very much of what we know about human culture through time comes to us in the form of story. As storehouses of many stories, libraries share with anthropology this preoccupation with and even need for narrative record. Both interests for Lynda come together in an abiding appreciation for stories of every kind, and this manifests especially in her love for story-telling.

Lynda's mother grew up in a family of eight children who told stories to a deaf father. For the sake of his lost hearing, they practiced to make their stories tell themselves in animation. The story for people in her family, therefore, was and always has been full of life, and young Lynda was never far from this influence. Neither was she very far from the family inheritance of degenerative hearing loss.

Somehow, there is an almost sublime complement between Lynda's hearing challenge and her love for story and story-telling. The oral tradition of story has the human voice for its medium. The medium for Lynda's understanding of the world around her is the mouth - most particularly the lips - that give the voice its intelligibility.

She is a gifted lip-reader, according to her audiologist, and despite her diminished capacity for hearing sound, she knows the stories spoken all around her in daily life. More relevantly, though, she knows how to tell many stories of her own in such a way that listeners - usually young but not always - are inspired to continue listening ... and learning.

When Lynda isn't in the library, her interests run a wide range, from photography to travel, from public speaking to refinishing antique furniture. A hopeful author, she has finished several installments of a series she's writing about special occasions her deaf grandfather shared with his children. As for favorite foods? Jelly beans. What else.

Lynda is mother to three children, and grandmother to four. Husband Bill has his own computer business.

By Mark Wheeler, Hi-Desert Star