Belvedere resident Bonnie Spiesberger was fierce advocate for local library

Belvedere resident Bonnie Spiesberger, whose three decades of volunteer service to the Belvedere-Tiburon Library included helping to raise funds for the library’s $18.31-million expansion, died of pulmonary fibrosis at her home June 12. She was 83.

Spiesberger’s involvement with the library dates to at least 1992 as a board member for the Library Foundation, the library’s nonprofit fundraising arm, said foundation Operations Director Michelyn Good. She held that role until 2010, when she joined the Library Agency board of trustees, which governs the library’s operations, and served until 2017, including a turn as chair from 2012 to 2013.

During that period, she helped usher plans to expand the library through a contentious public-deliberation process, with the town approving a larger two-story project in August 2012.

Spiesberger was also part of the library’s capital-campaign committee from 2006 to 2022, when the library’s ultimately smaller expansion was completed.

“Bonnie had an unwavering passion for the library and tirelessly dedicated herself to the capital campaign,” Library Director Crystal Duran said in a statement on behalf of the library and its foundation. “Her efforts enriched our community and ensured a lasting legacy of learning and literacy for generations to come.”

Debbie Mazzolini, Duran’s predecessor as library director, said Spiesberger had “just an amazing energy that she put forward to the library.”

“I just felt like the library was part of her community and part of her home,” Mazzolini said. “I got to know her like she was part of the family, of my own family. I’m sure she felt the same way about me.”

In addition to her volunteer work with the library, Spiesberger was a schoolteacher, principal and program manager for students with special needs and wrote books on education. She received honors from the state for her work, including the Golden Bell Award from the California School Boards Association for her work in designing core curriculum for special education.

Spiesberger was born Adelle Bonnie Borg on Nov. 4, 1940, in Waterloo, Iowa, to Joseph E. Borg and Ruth Lenske, according to birth records accessed on genealogy website FamilySearch.

Joseph Borg was from what is now Ukraine, then part of imperial Russia. He immigrated to Iowa in 1920 during the Russian Revolution, according to his 2004 obituary in the Tulsa World. Spiesberger was the third of the family’s four daughters, born after Rosalyn and Marcia and before Judith.

Spiesberger moved with the family as a child to Lebanon, Missouri, where her father worked as a civilian contractor for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1942 to 1946. The family then moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Borg bought a scrap iron and metal company that later became Borg Compressed Steel Corp.

She attended the University of Michigan, where she received her bachelor’s degree in education in 1962, according to university regents’ proceedings. She later received a doctorate in education from what is now Nova Southeastern University in Florida in 1986, according to the university’s commencement program.

After finishing her undergraduate degree, she spent a year in Paris before moving to San Francisco, where she met her future husband, investment broker Louis “Bud” Spiesberger, stepson Steve Spiesberger said.

The couple first met when Bud was working as a broker; Spiesberger was his second client, he told The Ark in a January 2023 article for his 100th birthday. They married in 1967 and first lived in Marinwood. Steve Spiesberger said they moved to Belvedere about 1972.

In her free time, Spiesberger was an avid bridge player, participated in book clubs and headed the library’s New Yorker discussion group since 2010. The Spiesbergers were also members of the Tiburon Peninsula Club and, before Bud’s death last year, had breakfast at Salt & Pepper on Main Street almost every weekend, Steve Spiesberger said.

“It was a marriage made in heaven and everybody that knew them knew that, and they were absolutely made for each other,” he said.

Spiesberger began her career in education in the late 1960s, working with children with special needs.

She was a teacher for 12 years before joining the Marin County Office of Education as an administrator. Spiesberger was a program manager for special education and principal at St. Vincent’s School for Boys in unincorporated San Rafael, and she was interim principal at what’s now Rancho Elementary School in Novato in 1986.

Spiesberger also opened an education-consulting firm, Spiesberger and Associates, in the early 1990s. She received a Golden Bell Award for designing core curriculum in special education and in 1994 co-authored the book “Transforming Schools: Finding Success for Students at Risk Through Systemic Change,” which called for analyzing critical issues, strategic planning and action plans at schools to improve learning environments for students.

Spiesberger joined the Library Foundation board some five years before the library opened at its current location next to Town Hall and four years before Mazzolini, the library’s first director, was hired.

Mazzolini said Spiesberger was one of the first people to enter the library and use it beyond “an intellectual sense, but just also in an artist sense.” Spiesberger was also part of the library art committee, helping raise money through its gently used art auction.

“She lasted the longest,” Mazzolini said of Spiesberger. “She was there from the very beginning and stayed with it for all these years.”

Mazzolini said Spiesberger was intellectual and playful, noting Spiesberger and her husband were often found on the dance floor at library fundraisers and parties.

Mazzolini noted Spiesberger was always willing to pitch in where needed.

“If there was a part of the library that she thought that she could help with and that she would enjoy, she just got her heart into it,” Mazzolini said. “I miss her.”

Spiesberger is survived by her stepsons, Steve Spiesberger of Sausalito and John Spiesberger of Philadelphia; sister Judith Borg of Miami; and five nephews. She was preceded in death by husband Louis Spiesberger and sisters Rosalyn Borg, who died in 2021, and Marcia Jankowsky, who died in 2003.

A memorial service was held June 16. Donations in Spiesberger’s memory can be made to the Belvedere-Tiburon Library.

Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634.