New Parma library manager waited years for chance to live in the United States
By Bob Sandrick, Parma Sun Post
February 13, 2010, 8:53AM
PARMA Nick Cronin was 19 when he first came to America from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was so impressed that he didn’t want to leave.
Cronin was here as a summer camp counselor. He taught outdoor sports to children in Maine.
Then they hitchhiked along the West Coast in California. Americans were excited to introduce Cronin and his friends to the United States.
“I fell in love with the landscape and the people,” Cronin said. “I always had it in my mind to try to come back here on a permanent basis.”
Cronin’s dream came true more than 10 years later, after he had started a career as a librarian in Northern Ireland.
KYLE LANZER/SUN NEWS
Today, Cronin, 47, is manager of the Parma-South branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library.
Cronin, who lives in Rocky River, took the reigns last month from Dodi Lettus, who retired recently after more than 30 years with the county library.
The road from Belfast to Parma was a precarious one for Cronin.
When Cronin was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Belfast was a war zone between Catholics and Protestants. There were riots, kidnappings and assassinations.
“You hear about people coming from troubled areas growing used to it,” Cronin said. “I suppose that was true for me because it was normality for me.”
“It was just the way things were,” Cronin said. “I never lived in any other kind of society.”
Cronin and his family, who are Catholic, lived in a relatively peaceful part of Belfast where Catholics and Protestants intermingled, but the violence wasn’t far away.
“You developed a street sense, to know where to go and what time to go, and areas you shouldn’t be going to,” Cronin said.
Cronin’s parents and grandparents were educators, so he decided to follow their footsteps. He received a bachelor’s degree in English and American literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury in England.
Then Cronin earned a master’s degree in Anglo-Irish literature at the University of Coleraine in Northern Ireland.
Cronin taught for a while but soon realized that it wasn’t for him.
“It was just a gut feeling that it wasn’t quite the right fit,” Cronin said.
Cronin’s parents had introduced him to libraries when he was a young boy so he decided to make a career switch to library science.
Toward that end, Cronin received a post-graduate degree in library and information science from Queen’s University Belfast.
Then Cronin landed a job with a library about 30 miles outside of Belfast. It had little money and few resources compared to libraries in America.
Meanwhile, Cronin had applied for a green card so that he could live in America, but the application process was a long one, taking several years.
“As I approached the age of 30, I thought it had become a pipe dream,” Cronin said.
In the 1990s, however, the system was changed. The names of green card candidates were chosen in a lottery. It shortened the process considerably.
In 1993, the second year of the lottery, Cronin’s name was drawn. He arrived in America the same year.
“I remember coming to America and feeling a sense of relief that (the violence) was no longer in the background,” Cronin said.
Cronin settled in Greater Cleveland because a friend lived in Euclid. That’s where he stayed at first.
It took Cronin two days to find a job at the Lakewood Public Library.
“When I called home, they thought I was making it up because unemployment at home was so high at the time,” Cronin said. “They couldn’t believe I had found a job in a day and a half.”
From Lakewood, Cronin joined the Cuyahoga County library, first as adult services manager at the Parma-South branch in 1999.
Then Cronin became manager at the Olmsted Falls branch and spent the last two years or so at the Parma Heights branch as manager there.
Today, when he isn’t working, Cronin plays soccer in a Brunswick recreational league. He loves to read about World War II.
Most of the books Cronin reads are borrowed from the library because the majority of his personal collection is back home in Northern Ireland.
“Books are one of the heaviest things to transport and I only brought the bare essentials with me,” Cronin said.
Cronin loves the whole experience of reading.
“You can lose yourself more in a book than by surfing the Internet,” Cronin said.
