If Beverly Palau were writing this story, it would have a hundred photos showing the subject moving around the city. An accompanying video would interview someone, like this reporter, explaining how the subject’s work communicating the life of the city helped encourage more people to have a life in the city. And the press release would highlight what is to come as well as what is past.
Palau, the City of Greenbelt public information and communications coordinator, has retired after 32 years. No more will she post pictures on the city’s webpage or Facebook pages. No longer will she be the go-to person for questions about what part of the city does what. Soon there will be a new person in those roles, but Palau is moving on.
Palau grew up in College Park in the Calvert Hills neighborhood, surrounded by cousins. “We were not raised as typical Hispanic women,” she said, recalling how her father encouraged her love of sports.
Palau’s father was head of Spanish/Portuguese at the Library of Congress. Palau recalled, “My father and aunt and uncle all grew up in Cuba. When my father was 10, they moved to Puerto Rico. My mom lived in Ponce. My mother’s father was a doctor, [whose] office building was taken over and is now a museum.” As a filmmaker, Palau dreams of visiting Ponce to film the famous square where her parents spent time, to add it to the interviews she filmed of her parents before her father died in 2017.
Palau’s aunt, Graciela Palau de Nemes, moved to College Park to work with the University of Maryland foreign language program, where she met Juan Ramon Jimenez, a Spanish poet who became her mentor. As a translator and critic of Jimenez’s work, Dr. Nemes nominated him for the Nobel Prize, which he won. A building on campus is named after Jimenez, thanks again to Palau’s aunt.
Palau studied radio, television and film at the University of Maryland. The degree, Palau said, was “equivalent to communications” but included journalism classes as well as hands-on video and radio editing. Palau recalled, “We spliced reel-to-reel tape. In one exercise you had to splice every other word!” This education gave her a deep understanding of how to edit onto videotape, which was hard to explain to others who lacked similar experience.
Many Palaus have attended the University of Maryland since Palau’s aunt led the way. Palau’s son Jason Koebler, who studied journalism, is now editor-in-chief of Motherboard for VICE Media. Her son Jordan is an engineer with Clark Engineering. Daughter Taylor is still at UM in business administration.
Palau’s career began in the Motion Picture/Broadcasting Department at the Library of Congress, where she spent three years. She mixed the sound for live chamber music concerts, and worked to convert radio shows, recorded on large acetate disks, into more stable archival formats. She also worked five years in cataloguing before coming to work in Greenbelt in 1989.
“I was hired to produce the government access channel,” Palau said. “What I really wanted to do was make TV shows. I was just still trying to break into radio, television and film. I started right after Labor Day. My first job was to edit all that videotape from the Festival. It was a challenge to edit with two jury-rigged video controllers that were not very precise.”
One highlight of Palau’s career was the 2013 Partners in Preservation social media contest, which won $75,000 for the renovation of the Old Greenbelt Theatre lobby, while Celia Craze was the director of planning for the City of Greenbelt. “I got obnoxious on Facebook, and the Greenbelters went for it, and we came in third. I’m really competitive because of my sports background,” Palau laughed. Because of her job’s flexible hours, Palau was able to coach soccer, T-ball, softball, baseball and rugby for her children’s teams.
Palau created an award-winning game show with four different rounds, so that elementary school students from Greenbelt, Springhill Lake, Magnolia and St. Hugh’s could learn more about municipal government. Palau also went out to the schools to videotape the students giving their book reports and ran a video camp that produced commercials, talk shows or news shows based on campers’ own ideas. “Some of the interns I’ve worked with, they’ve gone on to work in real production jobs,” Palau said with pride.
She was responsible for overseeing the cable franchise agreements for the city. The original cable provider, Storer, promised an institutional network that would tie all city buildings together, which they did not accomplish. Because of that contract, later providers were obligated to build the communications network that links the entire city. Palau called this “a huge accomplishment that brought us more into the present times, and now our communications costs are so much less than if we had to build it ourselves.”
Palau plans to continue to work with technology and social media, perhaps to help out small municipalities that don’t have much of a web presence. She said, “Over the years the methods of communicating with people have become so diverse.” Under Palau’s leadership, the City of Greenbelt now reaches citizens through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and NextDoor. “New technology always excites me. I love software and new things. I just love to stay up to date and learn new programs. I’ll figure out how to do things because it’s a challenge,” Palau enthused.