Photo by Kelli S. Hewett.
Dana Polk, director of the Chelsea Public Library
Dana Polk, director of the Chelsea Public Library since its founding in 2001, stands among the stacks she has spent 26 years building — growing the library from a few thousand books in a shared room to a 30,000-volume community hub with 13 staff members and a packed weekly calendar of programs.
The woman behind Chelsea’s library learned her best customer service lessons under neon lights and cigarette smoke.
In the 1970s at the Holiday Bowl in Bessemer, a teenaged Dana Polk ran lanes and flipped burgers until 4 a.m., picking up the people skills that would one day anchor a small-town library.
“For a shy, growing-up child to come in and learn how to deal with people, how to handle money, how to be gracious when they’re not really very nice … that was my learning experience,” Polk said.
Those lessons in people, patience and pressure would shape the woman who has turned the Chelsea Public Library into one of the city’s busiest and most beloved gathering spaces.
Polk has worked for the city for 26 years and has been its only library director since the doors first opened in 2001.
Photo courtesy of Dana Polk.
Polk, in 2001, gives out Chelsea’s very first library cards to Lynette and Donald Shirley
Left: Polk, in 2001, gives out Chelsea’s very first library cards to Lynette and Donald Shirley.
“Dana is the longest tenure employee for the City of Chelsea, and her impact on our Chelsea Public Library is immeasurable,” said Chelsea Mayor Cody Sumners. “She has seen the library change locations four times, each time growing and offering more services. Dana’s work on the current library was nothing short of amazing. I don’t know where our city library would be without the influence, inspiration and vision of Dana Polk. She has created a public library that every citizen of Chelsea should be proud of.”
But librarianship wasn’t in Polk’s plans.
Growing up, she cycled through jobs: the bowling alley, a jewelry store in Bessemer until it was robbed — twice — by the same people in 11 days, delivering L’eggs pantyhose, working as a unit secretary at UAB. She went to the University of Montevallo planning to be a teacher, but one teaching lab showed her that wasn’t her destiny.
“I was not called to teach,” Polk said with a laugh.
Instead, she drove a school bus for 13 years, worked in a school lunchroom, sold Avon door to door and, for a while, stepped away from reading while raising children and juggling work.
Still, a seed had been planted long before, by a third grade teacher at Jonesboro Elementary in Bessemer.
“She wrote on my report card, ‘Keep up your interest in reading,’” Polk said. “That just kind of stuck in the back of my mind.”
Photo courtesy of Dana Polk.
Polk in 2018 at the ribbon cutting for the new Chelsea Public Library location.
Polk in 2018 at the ribbon cutting for the new Chelsea Public Library location.
It resurfaced at Liberty Baptist Church in Chelsea, where her mother-in-law led women’s missions and Polk noticed stacks of study books with nowhere to live.
“I said, ‘There has got to be somewhere in this church that we can store these books and make them available for everybody,’” Polk said. “I became the library director at Liberty Baptist Church.”
Through church library training offered by the Baptist association, Polk learned cataloging, processing, and the nuts and bolts of running a small library. She didn’t know it then, but the mayor was watching.
Polk and then-Mayor Earl Niven attended Liberty together. He had a vision for a town library and had seen what she’d built at the church.
“He got in touch with me, and he said, ‘I’d like for you to come to work with the city,’” Polk said. “And I’m like, ‘No. I’m good. I’ve got a job.’”
Niven kept asking.
Polk finally named what she thought were impossible hours that would let her keep her bus route and bowling league.
Niven agreed.
Photo by Kelli S. Hewett.
Polk reads a story during the library’s weekly Tot Story Time. Photo by Kelli S. Hewett.
Polk reads a story in March during the library’s weekly Tot Story Time.
On Oct. 1, 1999, she went to work for the town of Chelsea in what had been the First National Bank of Columbiana. A shared room with town hall became Chelsea’s first library in February 2001, with a wall of shelves and a few thousand books.
Since then, the library has moved from that shared space to City Hall, then to the “gray house” (now the Chelsea Historical Museum) and, in 2018, into the renovated former Renaissance Bank building — back where Polk first worked for the town.
“It’s just been a circle,” she said.
Today, the library holds around 30,000 books, employs 13 staff members and operates on a budget of about $600,000. But the library is so much more than what’s on the shelves.
“If we only had books, our doors wouldn’t be open,” Polk said.
The library circulates books, audiobooks, movies, video games, hotspots and MP3 boom boxes. A Wi-Fi hotspot program that began around 2013 or 2014 has become a quiet lifeline for many.
Programming has grown from a single toddler story time she once led herself — “the one that was not called to teach,” she joked — to a weekly calendar that includes story times, Musical Munchkins, two Dungeons & Dragons groups, a Pokémon trading club, chess club, STEAM programs, adult book clubs, crochet groups and quarterly trivia nights that draw around 40 people.
Polk’s staff said she is the kind of flexible, laid-back leader who values them and trusts their expertise.
“Her door is always open whether we want to offer ideas or express an opinion, which certainly can’t be said for all bosses,” said Lynn Thomas, a library staff member. “I respect Dana for having brought the Chelsea Public Library from its small beginnings when she was the sole employee to what it is today.”
On her wishlist, but not approved or in the works yet, Polk dreams of a new building in three to five years, more than triple the current 5,000 square feet, with real program rooms, quiet study areas, a maker space and even a small theater that could host movies and give the city’s theater community a home.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Polk said. “We’re going to make do with what we have and know that there’s something coming.”
For all the programs and plans, Polk says what has kept her here are the people, patrons and team members.
And then there is Polk’s own family — a quieter thread woven through the stacks.
She and her husband, David, met at Holiday Bowl when he was a mechanic with a hot-rodded '73 Chevelle. They have now been married 40 years. They raised three children — Jeremy, Chelsea and Julianne — and now have five grandchildren, with one due in May.
“I was the baseball mom, and I ended up more of a soccer mom than anything,” she said. “I wanted my kids to have experiences.”
Her approach to mothering isn’t far from her philosophy at the library.
“You start your day a certain way, with certain plans and certain thoughts, and it goes in a different way than what you had planned,” she said. “I’m just going to figure out what to do next. I’m not going to drive myself into a panic attack because something went wrong. I’m going to deal with it.”
As she looks toward a possible retirement around the end of 2027, Polk says she’s had “a blessed life” — and that Chelsea’s library, like its director, is far from finished growing.
“I just found my niche here,” Polk said. “And I think the next phase of the Chelsea Public Library is going to be amazing.”
