Interview with Violet Meek

July 9, 2020

SPEAKERS Dr. Violet Meek, Hannah Stoll

Hannah Stoll 00:02 The following interview was conducted with Dr. Violet Meek on behalf of The Ohio State University for the Knowledge Bank and the Voices of Women Oral History project. It took place on Thursday, July 9th, 2020, via Zoom Video Communications. The interviewer is Hannah Stoll.

Hannah Stoll 00:18 Hello, Dr. Meek. How are you?

Dr. Violet Meek 00:20 I'm just fine. I'm waiting for the first question.

Hannah Stoll 00:25 Tell me about why you decided to enter higher education and then later teach and work in the same environment?

Dr. Violet Meek 00:36 Well, it's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about it in a long time. I think it was something I just always thought I'd do. I was a chemistry major as an undergraduate and then went on and got graduate degrees. And I was really impressed with the faculty. I had in particular, my advisor, who I suppose in modern terms, whatever, was a polymath. He knew a great deal about a lot of things, worked on the Manhattan Project, did all kinds of stuff, and had a firm grounding in philosophy, the philosophy of science, and I thought, oh, well, if that's, if that's what that is, I'd like to be one of those, please. And I don't think I ever really wanted to do anything else. I went on, got a PhD, always knew that I wanted to teach in a liberal arts college, or at least in a college like that. And that's what I did. I started out at Mount Holyoke, got married. My husband was on the faculty at Ohio State in the chemistry department. So I got a job at Ohio Wesleyan. And then I discovered something. I love teaching. I still do. But after you have been around a while, you start and you're responsible for the students in your class and your advisees. And then I was department chair and I was responsible for a larger group. And then I was a dean and I thought, well, this isn't bad, and being responsible for something bigger was important to me, because you could make a difference.

I went off to Washington, worked for the Council of Independent Colleges on programming. My husband and I intended to go to Washington – he'd been talking with the National Science Foundation. His health took a turn for the worse, I came back, worked at The Ohio State Research Foundation. He

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died in 1988. And there I was at the Research Foundation and that was fun too. And I discovered it was different. But it was something I enjoyed doing. And one of the things that happened was, I was responsible for research support on the regional campuses. So I got to know the folks at Lima. And as I suspect you have figured out, that was a time when there was a certain amount of upset at Lima. And if you look in the development officer book, it says the best place for a development officer to be in circumstances like this is somewhere else. So I worked with the campus but it was clear that things were upsetting. And then one day I got a phone call from the provost, who said "How'd you like to go to Lima?" And I thought, ah gee, really? You know, I'd have to stay there. And what was it? 13 years, 12 years, something like that, later I finally left. So that's the short version, as you might suspect, there's a lot to be told about those early years and I probably will grab the baton and tell you at some point, but that's how it happened. But I've always enjoyed my job. I always enjoyed teaching, but I've always enjoyed teaching all of a student, not just little pieces, and that's what administration meant to me. It still does. And I went and did things that are sort of like that afterward, but that's, we don't need to go there right now. That enough? Okay, now it's your turn.

Hannah Stoll 05:02 What were your first impressions of your college experience? How did being a woman affect your experience?

Dr. Violet Meek 05:13 I was blessed, I think, at my undergraduate institution, because it was remarkably open. Now that may just have been the chemistry department, but I'm not the only one from that era who thought so. It was assumed I was interested in this. My parents were, well, my dissertation is dedicated to my parents and the dissertation goes to my parents, who didn't think it was so unusual. I was the oldest of three, and I'm not sure my father knew I was a girl until his first grandson was born. You know, we just did things. And so it didn't – I suppose it did in ways that I might not have recognized at the time – but I never really felt that there were things I couldn't do. Now graduate school was different. I suppose I should have noticed because St. Olaf College, which was my undergraduate school, had the chemistry department had pictures of all the people who'd gone on to PhDs, and it's one of the undergraduate institutions that is usually first or second in PhDs in chemistry over time, so, and I'm proud of it. Now, I probably should have noticed that there were only two women on that list before me, but there are great many after and I, as I said, I didn't recognize that. When I got out, I remember at an institution, let's just leave it at that, we were discussing awards for students for graduation and someone said, well, can a girl get that [unclear], and I allowed as how, yes, and she was going to. But now I'd be outrageously naïve if I didn't say that, of course, there were problems. But when I was getting my feet down, I didn't see them. And so I was in a much better position to deal with it when it finally happened. There were research groups in my graduate school that did not accept women. Well, too bad for them. Which is kind of how I felt about it. So anyhow, okay.

Hannah Stoll 07:48 What would you have changed about your early college experiences?

Dr. Violet Meek 07:55

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Hmm, not much, actually. I mean, now, you'll have to admit that if we had gone back for our reunion this year, it would have been my 60th. So there is a possibility that I've blocked a lot of things, but I've always been grateful for it, and I have used some of what I learned about administration, what I learned about students, through my whole career. I mean, there have been times when I've been very grateful that I had that background. Truthfully, when I got to Lima, I was particularly grateful because I had worked for the Council of Independent Colleges, those are the small liberal arts colleges. I had worked at two liberal arts educational institutions, and of course, I had my own experience, and so I had a sense of what you needed to make things work, and I will say that when I first got to Lima, I reached out for a structure or something that, of course, wasn’t there, and fill the hole because it wasn't. And then it would be on my list of things we have to fix. Because the size of the institution clearly has an impact on how students respond. Some students are happy as clams at a huge institution, and we're lucky that that's true. Some students do better in another kind of place, and I wanted to be sure that we were one of those places where students did better.

Hannah Stoll 09:39 Describe what you love most about chemistry? What was your experience with teaching students about this science?

Dr. Violet Meek 09:52 It's fun. Now that sounds like, you know – I like solving puzzles. I like finding things out. Way back when, and I mean, like, when I was maybe 12 or 13, I thought the colors were kind of neat! And I'm a transition metal chemist, and that's one of the places where you find some really lovely colors. There is a particular color that you can get from copper ions and ammonia that is this simply gorgeous Lapis blue. And I thought, oh, isn't that neat, you know, and then I got into it and I was just fascinated by the theory more than other things. And one day in graduate school I thought, I should have really pursued that, and then a light went off and said you ninny, you know now why that – but I liked the people, I found they’re, I enjoyed – chemists tend to work in groups. And I didn't understand introvert/extrovert in those years, but it turns out that I do better in groups. And so the fact that group interactions were important was important to me, too. So it's been so long since I've been actively involved in chemistry that I'm not sure I think of myself that way anymore. I've had a number of careers, enjoyed them all. The trick is to know when to leave.

Hannah Stoll 11:28 Please describe the positions you held at Ohio State Lima and in what units and over what time period?

Dr. Violet Meek 11:36 Oh, gracious. Well, I came up to Lima in the spring of 1991. And I left in 2003, I think. I think that's close enough. Maybe it was '02. I could look it up if you want to, but you've got the data. And I was dean and direct– well acting dean and director and then dean and director the whole time. So I got a job and I'd like to I kept it. Is this the point where you want me to describe those early years? And how that all happened?

Hannah Stoll 12:18 You can if you want–

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Dr. Violet Meek 12:20 Is that going to be one of your questions?

Hannah Stoll 12:23 Yes.

Dr. Violet Meek 12:24 Okay. We'll take it your way for a while. Go ahead.

Hannah Stoll 12:28 I'll ask it right now. What was your greatest challenge personally or professionally in leading OSU Lima during the time of the administrative split with Lima Technical College?

Dr. Violet Meek 12:40 Well, I don't know how much you really understand, because that's a long time ago and you weren't here. And let me go back a little further, I think. OSU Lima was founded in 1960. It met in the high school for a while and then slowly but surely came out to what is now the campus. And then about ten years later, under some pressure from the state, I think, Lima Technical College was founded. At the time, the dean and director of OSU Lima was simultaneously the president of the technical college. And it was Lima Tech in those years, and I, if I slip and refer to it that way, because I know it's Rhodes State now, that's the way it was when I worked on it. I think it is and was important to have solid technical education available to students and I feel that as strongly as I feel anything. I came from a town – I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – which had a very strong technical base. It was a German town and you know, you could go the technical schools in high school. And so that made perfectly good sense to me. And at some point, it's still does, but the structure was, in hindsight, one that was headed for trouble right from the beginning. Because it caused a certain "schizophrenia" in the person who had to fill that job, because in one position, you were the dean of a regional campus at a university that wasn't quite sure why it had them, and wasn't at all certain what they were for. And at the other, you are a college president. You are treated differently in those two roles. And it takes real strength of purpose to keep it straight and keep that from twisting you, and over time it got worse. And although Jim Countryman, who was the president of Lima Tech, when things blew up, was a person who meant well for the community, I think the pressures of the two roles was finally unsupportable and that's what happened. To this day, I don't know exactly what the final straw was. To be truthful with you, I never asked because that way I could say, darned if I know. It was better that way.

As I said, I was minding my own business working as an associate director over at the Research Foundation, when I got a call from the provost. Normally provosts don't call people in the Research Foundation, they call the director of the Research Foundation. So the provost is on the line. Oh crap, what did I do? [Computer dings] Excuse me, the computer is acting up there. Just a minute. Right. If I knew how to stop it, I would! Oh, well, anyway, to shorten it considerably, he and the president, Gordon Gee at the time, had flown up to the campus, because in those days it was a lot it was further than it is now, roads weren't as good. And they had told Dr. Countryman that he was no longer to be, or act as, the dean of Ohio State, declared the position vacant, and asked me to go on up there because they

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were going to name me as the interim. And he said, at the time, now, of course, you could apply for the permanent job, and I thought I'd never do that, which shows you that I'm not really good at predictions. It was practically a shooting war, I don't mean that literally, but it sure felt like that. And so the first thing I had to do was not look at long-range plans. It wasn't any of those things. But sometimes when you've got a fire going on, your first job is to put the fire out. And that was what I needed to do in that first year. And I'll tell you a little bit about how that worked, but [coughs] excuse me, but in those first few years, every time I thought I'd get one fire out, another one, somebody would start another one. We finally got it settled so that a little more planning was possible, but it wasn't as though we didn't know what we were doing.

We knew who we were. Our job was to be Ohio State in Lima. And if our name is Ohio State, then we've got to be sure that the education, our students, and I still think of them that way, but the education our students get is as high quality as they could get anywhere. And we are Ohio State. We are the state's land grant institution, that's baked into our bones. I get a little weepy, even now, when I think about it, we were supposed to be the place for the sons and daughters of the artisans and mechanics. That's Lima. It's also Van Wert. It's all the folks in Paulding, it’s Wapak, it's the whole, you know, it's that part of Ohio. And that was our job and we always knew it. But sometimes we’d get a little bit sidetracked putting the fires out. People were angry. Because Jim had done what any sensible dean would have done. He'd gotten out into the community and talked to people. And they thought, for reasons which are historical, but perhaps accurate, that when he left, the university wasn't going to pay any attention to them. Well, they'd gotten the university's attention if nothing else. Jim's notion was, I think, to take Ohio State Lima out of the system and make it an independent community college. He obviously had been working with people at the Board of Regents about that, because you don't do that entirely on your own. And so when I got there, it was not allowed to use Ohio State Lima stationery unless you sent something to the Columbus campus. Otherwise you had to use some stuff they ginned up that was Lima campus stationary and that's why when people talk about Lima campus, university, people tense up because I'm still remembering when that was a way to take us out – it isn't anymore – but yet we all have our own sensitivities. The faculty were rightly concerned that a university faculty is not what they wanted. These were folks who wrote the books that other – [phone rings] dear gracious and goodness – these are people who were – I unplugged the phone but I forgot about – wait a minute. I kept the iPad open in case I had to look up something. The faculty was upset. The grounds people, who are Ohio State employees, were upset. They were talking union. And there I was, kid from Minnesota.

So the first things that we did were to say, well, maybe we ought to listen to see what the problem is. So I spent a lot of time just listening. I had, actually, the director of the United Way, who turned out to be a good friend – she's not living in town anymore – she helped sponsor and I would meet with community people for fruit and cookies, and talk. And some of them were pretty blunt. But that's okay. We really needed to pay attention, and that, paying attention to the community, and I mean communities broadly more than Lima, or more than Allentown, was a hallmark of what we did in those years. Because it was crucial. If you go back to what the Lima News said, when the campus was first formed, if you're multilingual, you can see the problem right away. People in the community were talking about "Oh, and we'll have an engineering program," because there were lots of businesses where that would have been important, and we'll have this and we'll have that. And the university

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people were saying, "Oh, yes, access, access." They were talking right past each other. But they didn't speak each other's language. Some of it was artful. Some of it was just that they really didn't. And that meant that we were heading for trouble. It just took a while to happen. We had to make people understand who we were and how big we were. We send out campus Christmas cards – holiday cards – with a picture of all the faculty. Well, I did that for two reasons. We had two psychologists who used to stay in each other's offices. And for a while, I couldn't tell one from the other. And I thought, I want a picture. But beyond that, it said, "Here are the people. These are the ones when you see them on the street, this is one of them. And no, there aren't 400 people out here, so we can only do what this many people can do." And that was important too. And slowly, but surely, we started to expand it. So we would take our local board of trustees, which came a little later, but we'd take them out and meet in high schools, so that people could see and they could talk.

I told you that we had to worry about the union for our groundstaff maintenance. Well, in those years, the dean's office was over in Galvin, and my parking place, which I treasured, was down the hill right off Galvin. And so, I would come in through their area, and sometimes I'd stop and have a cup of coffee, but I talked to them. And then I'd do funny things for them that they kept saying, she mean that? And the answer was yes, I did. For example, we were building what became the administration building, however named. And so for a long time, we lost a bunch of parking places along the entrance there. And students couldn't walk on the sidewalks because there were machines there. And we wanted them to walk on the road, but I was afraid that was a problem. So I had the guys paint yellow bricks, and told them they had to walk on the yellow brick road, to call out a guff from the maintenance folks. And then they decided it was kind of fun to work for a crazy lady. And so that turned out to be really great. One year, they won one of the town awards for campus beautification. That wasn't the title, and so I asked them about it, because I was proud of them and proud of us. And one of them said, we're Ohio State, we should do that. And I thought, you got it! Because it's not a mission if nobody knows what it is. Oh, dear, well, I'm blabbering on, but after that, there were a couple of other fires, one of which had to do with continuation of this business of wouldn't you be better as a community college? No. Here's the short answer. But that's enough for now.

Hannah Stoll 25:43 Tell me about your leadership identity. Was there a certain point or incident in your life that made you realize this passion?

Dr. Violet Meek 25:54 No, I think it just sort of came on. I'd get elected to things and I never did understand why. I'm relatively verbal, so I suppose that was part of it, but– And then things would happen to say, oh, yeah, well, maybe I should do that, then – this happened at Ohio Wesleyan and I've got to fudge it a little bit because I think there may still be a few of those folks with us. But I was the president the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, and we were dealing with some rules changes because we had a person who was embedded who would not bring to the group potential members, because they were of low moral character, i.e., they supported the civil rights movement. Mm hmm. Well, I'm sure he didn't look at it that way. But then he would have meetings and not include the president. Except the secretaries all liked me, so they all called me when the meetings were. And I thought, well, that's how you do that. And then I thought, yeah, that just means being polite to people. Oh, yeah, well, my mother had told me that so

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that was okay. But it was one of those times when I began to understand what it meant to be able to make a difference outside of your discipline. Those were interesting years. I chuckled– when we built the administration building, I made sure that the dean's office has a back door. I don't know whether they're still using it. But there's a backdoor in there. And everybody who had been a college administrator or a college faculty member doing during the ‘60s knew exactly why it was there. So you can get out. The things we fought about, the things that we talked about in those years, were important. I'm sad that we're still doing it. But it's a little different this time and we'll keep making progress. So, okay, enough for now.

Hannah Stoll 28:13 Please describe, if applicable, a time or times when you experienced "chilly climate" in a professional setting because of your gender. How did this incident affect you?

Dr. Violet Meek 28:23 [ringing] Oh, I unplugged this silly thing. I don't know how it's – alright. Oh, there was one dean in Columbus. A guy I just had a terrible time working with, you know, he was hostile from the day I walked in the door and I needed something from him, or the campus did anyway, and I finally discovered that if I sent the associate dean down there to deal with him, it worked better. And there was a part of me who said, oh, for crying out loud. But in a couple of years he was gone and I was still there. So I figured it was alright. It happened, but I knew even from the time I'd been at Wesleyan, that if I had been a man, the chances are pretty good that I would've moved in administration and ended up a college president. I wasn't, I didn't, and if I had, I wouldn't have been at Lima and that was one of my favorite parts of my life. So life takes the turns it takes. Yeah, we've all got scars. Some of them I'm not likely to talk about, but, no, just that. You kept going. And you looked around and there were other women pushing too, and women my age, almost all of my friends who are professionals of one sort or another have got well- earned scars from being the first woman to–. Okay, well, somebody had to be we did it so you wouldn't have to be. I did it so that my daughter wouldn't have to be. She lives in a world where people occasionally can't keep their mouths shut, lost a job and they said, well, we wanted a man. And I thought, well, I'm not actually going – that's what I thought, I'm not actually going to tell you what I wanted to say. But it does – you know, it still happens. Everybody got to be better than somebody. I believe that comes from Kris Kristofferson.

Hannah Stoll 30:55 What has been your experience with acting outside of gender expectations and leadership positions?

Dr. Violet Meek 31:14 To the extent that I could, I was just me. I remember complaining early in the women's movement – that would've been probably when Phyllis Schlafly was torpedoing the Equal Rights Amendment, somewhere in there, I suppose – I remember speaking firmly to a colleague, a male colleague, you know, I'm an experimental scientist. If I make a prediction, and the experiment says, no, that's not the way it really works, I get real data. I'm allowed to say all kinds of stuff. I probably shouldn't say that there's something wrong with that molecule. There's probably something wrong with the theory I was using, and it's my job to go back and find it. Well, that was the time period when if you didn't follow gender norms, there was something wrong with you, not with the norms. And there were a lot of us who

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said that sort of thing, felt it. And all I could do, that's what I decided at the time, I think, was all I could do was be who I was, mother of two, all of those things and say, this is what a woman looks like. If you think we look some other way, well, blessings upon you, go find one, but this is what it is. I think if you look realistically those sorts of things, the differences within groups are much larger than the differences between them, and as long as you recognize that, then some of the gender discussions people have now about it being on a continuum that, well, that makes sense. People are who they are, they are products of their own backgrounds in genetics and trying to stereotype them based on any single measure is fruitless and we really ought to stop that. But it's been going on for a long time, some of it, based on rational things, you know, if you are a hunter gatherer living on the savanna somewhere, well, one kind of person is the kind that actually produces children and nurtures them, has the way to feed them, the other one doesn't. If there are differences based on that, that makes perfectly good sense. If you then conclude that since a person has those organs, that person must have a defective brain, then we got a problem. Larger, well, anyway, as I said, most women my age have the scars, but you can't spend your time worrying about them. All you can do is try to help the next one.

Hannah Stoll 34:32 How did your approach to leadership change over time? Is there anything you would have done differently?

Dr. Violet Meek 34:40 Oh, yeah, there are. It's more a question of experience and saying, oh, okay, that's the way that works. Okay, that probably was not so good. Oh, yeah, I should do that one again. So I would say that it's growth through experience as much as anything, paying attention to what you do, analyzing it. I said when I got to campus that we spent a lot of time putting out fires those first couple of years. But as it settled down a little bit, as the community came to accept us as who we were, and we got out into the communities, so that they could see it, then it was possible to spend more time thinking about leadership, thinking about leadership questions. You know, what are they learning from what we do? If our only solution to all problems is to say I'm bigger than you so get out of here, well, I'd hate to see people learning that one.

I did have a group that was very effective in talking about – there was what we called the Women's Leadership Group. We met for, gee, fifteen years, we still meet occasionally. But all of us are retired and several of us have been widowed more than once, and so it's a different kind of group now. But we spend a lot of time looking at leadership. We had one member who actually was a leadership development person, but she was a member of the group who also grew up in Milwaukee, so we know about places. But as I said, that gave me a chance to articulate the way I saw things and, sometimes you get really convinced and one of the problems about being a dean, or any place where you're sort of at the top of the local level, is if you aren't real careful, people won't contradict you. I never had much of that problem. I had people who'd say, we shouldn't do that. Oh, why? And sometimes they were right, and sometimes they weren't, but we could talk about it. But having this outside group was very useful because everybody needs someone trustable so that at the end of the day, you can call up and say, "You will never guess what x did today." And really, you don't want anybody to solve the problem, you just want somebody to listen to you, so you can get it out! Because you can't lead if you're still sputtering, or at least I couldn't. So that group was very useful. And as I say, some of us are still

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around, we still meet. Talk about the grandkids and in one case, the great-grandkids. I don't know how that happens, they're about this big, and then the next thing you know, they're having children and I don't know how, well I do. Made me think of when I was pregnant with my son all those years ago. And the reaction of my students, it was like, we didn't know anybody your age knew about that. I think they themselves had been delivered by the stork, that's the only thing I can figure. But well, having an outside group was important. And having an outside group that actually talked about the problems of leadership was crucial.

My husband, I told you, I remarried, and my husband is a psychologist and bar none one of the best administrators I've ever seen, and so it was very good to have somebody at home who can say, "Okay, now that you got that out of your system, let's talk." Just somebody to keep me from spouting off. I do and that's not bad. But you have to know what you're doing, and when they keep your darn mouth shut, and when it's entirely important to say, I can't believe you did that, or something. And a lot of the time, it's important to have somebody to know when it's time to say, gee, that was the best thing I've ever seen. Because you probably do more of that than the other, or at least that's the fun part.

Hannah Stoll 39:36 How did being a woman administrator on a regional campus change over the years you were the dean at OSU Lima?

Dr. Violet Meek 39:42 Well, a lot. Some of it depends on who's the president. When I talk about the campus, when I talk about the early years, that was a long time ago. And there have been some real changes in some of the external groups. There have been real changes at the university. So I need to be careful that you understand that when I'm talking about these time periods, it's not the same. One of the biggest changes for the campus came from Lima. The department in Columbus of education had put a four- year teaching degree in elementary ed on the campus. So you found a respectable number of people in Lima who had a four-year degree from Ohio State all right, but it was in elementary education. They didn't have– they had no intention at all of teaching, but they needed the credential and they could get it. Okay, fine, but that's not really serving the community.

Well, then, one of the fires in the early years was that the department of education, the Ohio State department of education, decided they were going to go to a master's program. Now truthfully, I think that if you could take the long view that's probably right, but at the time period, what it meant was that the leadership in elementary education went to Bowling Green. Because if you're a student without a whole lot in the way of resources, sticking around for what became six years, and getting it in four, and in these financially stressed school systems, you know, you could get somebody who then you can get for a whole lot cheaper than if they had a master's degree. They've gone back now, at least is my understanding, and they've shifted out. But they came to believe that they owned the campus. The first summer I was there, one of the education people came in and said, "You know, I just got my check for the summer teaching, and I thought I was being paid this, but here's what I got." And I said, I don't know. Let me find out about that. Well, it turned out that the summer courses had to be assigned through the Columbus campus. I don't know why, it was tradition. And so they taxed summer salaries for money that then went into a travel fund for which our faculty were not eligible. Yeah, I didn't think too

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much of that either. And so come the next year, I said, no, we'll just do it. Oh, no, you can't. We can, and we did.

But it became clear very quickly that we needed to have other options for students. And the first one was in psychology, partially because it is the most popular undergraduate degree in the Big Ten, because you can do so many things with one. English just fine, don't misunderstand. But it's flexible. Do all people who have psych majors turn out to be psychologists? Ah no, most of them don't, but it's a flexible degree. And we had some very good people on the campus. And I knew the folks in psychology because I had been their development officer, and I knew the department chair. So I went down and said, Jim, James Naylor was his name, what we have to do to offer all the courses? He said, well, they had a process, and they had a committee, and we worked our way through the committee. I say we but it was the folks who were on campus at the time who worked their tails off to get it done. And they said, okay, well, here, these are courses that we know you can teach, and they fit a psych major. And if they present those, we will call them psych majors because the department owns the major, and it should, because that's how you control quality. That's how we do it anyway. So we did, and we were the first ones. Did I tell people in Columbus what I was up to? Maybe not all of them. I never lied. But we just really had to negotiate that with the department. I mean, nobody else had to be involved, right? That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Anyhow, once we had that, then the folks over – I think the next one was probably Mansfield – folks over at Mansfield said, how did you do that? Well, you know them, you go do it. Oh, yeah, we can do that.

And I think the next one was history because I'm kind of an avocational history buff. And we had some very fine people doing really interesting things. I'm assuming that you're going to talk to Allison Gilmore because she helped [unclear] that. She's in South Dakota now, I think. So, the history major was because that's what a lot of lawyers major in as undergraduates. As a very young faculty member in chemistry, I could not figure out where pre-law was because I was used to pre-med not – and I could tell you what pre-law people had to – but lawyers were different. It took me a while to figure that out, but I did. And so it came.

And by the time we left, I think we had ten of them. And they spread out. We got into the sciences because we got the new building built. And then of course, there were the master's programs that came along. And by that time, distance education had become possible. You understand that when I went up to Lima, we had a fax machine that was so slow, that I swear I could have driven them up faster. Which wasn't all that bad, you know, out of sight, out of mind. You say things like, oh, you mean we really can't do that? Oh gee, well, we got students involved, so we're got to have to keep our word right? There are days when I think I was just too dumb to know how dangerous things were. That's not really true. I did know but it was important.

Serving the students in our communities was so important, I was willing to put up with a lot of guff. It wasn't gender related, it was just what people thought the regional campuses were. I could keep you here all day telling stories about that it's – you don't need to hear them – but there was a lot of misunderstanding, not even misunderstanding, it was lack of understanding. And so we decided, I decided, well, if they don't know who we are, how about I tell them, and we did it that way. No, no, this is what regional campuses do. They do it this way in Pennsylvania. Wisconsin does it. And if I was

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really tough about it, OU does it. Slowly but surely– the best thing that ever happened to the regional campuses was Gordon Gee. Ed Jennings, his immediate past predecessor, had made some differences that ultimately helped us. Because under Jennings, we could begin to dream in ways that we hadn't been able to before. But Gordon Gee understood, as well as anybody how important the regional campuses were for the university at the political level, because each regional campus has associated legislators who want good things for their communities. So do we! And he knew how to use them. And once you've broken the path, then others can follow, some are better at it than others. But it made a difference. It was for the first time, people actually saw a value to the university.

And that was important because the Columbus campus was changing. When I came, they were still fighting the battle of selective admissions on the Columbus campus. We're land grant; to some people, that meant you can't shut the door. Well, we had had selective admissions for a very long time on the Columbus campus. The problem was that the admissions committee was the post office. Because what happened was, you sent your application in and they would take them and process them, and you needed to have, or have by the time of admission, a high school diploma from an Ohio high school, and if you'll forgive me, a pulse, that was it. So when we were full, we were full. And they would say, that's it. And that number kept going earlier and earlier, so if you didn't get your application in by sometime in September you were in trouble. People who had good advisors, of course, got in early, people with fewer resources in their high schools didn't, and if you don't think that had an impact on all kinds of things, it did. Not only was it nonsense, but it was not fair to the students. Because when I first came, the average ACT on the Colum– or on our campus was something like 20.8 and on the Columbus campus It was about 21.5. They were darn near the same. Those are averages. That means that there are lots of kids who aren't even there. And what happened was you’d bring them in, and they flunk out in two quarters, maybe three, or they’d just quit. By that time, they had debt and worse than that they knew they were failures. Now show me how that fits the land grant mission and Ed Jennings fought it. The regional campus are and remain the access point for students who had a really great time in high school but have what it takes to do well at university courses. Someday I'll talk, maybe at the end, I want to come back to what that meant to us. But finally, we were beginning to show the legislators what it meant to have a world-class university in the state. We'd always been that way, but we hurt students by sticking to a model that wasn't fair to them. And I was glad that it changed. I was glad that there was a place for folks who are going to be overwhelmed. You know, the kind who could adjust to college or to High Street, but not both, or at least not at the same time. It’s just different. We'll talk about that at the end. Okay. War story.

Hannah Stoll 53:04 What work were you involved with regarding institutional change at OSU Lima? What did you do and what was the outcome both personally and institutionally?

Dr. Violet Meek 53:12 Well, probably the biggest single thing had to do with advancing the number of four-year programs. I think that probably as much as anything and now I told you before that sometimes I'd reach for something and it wouldn't be there. So the other piece was building up the structures that you have to have to run an institution like Lima. When I came, we had a quarter-time public relations person and a quarter-time development officer. No. And the problem was, both of them were shared with what was

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Lima Tech. Well, that put them in a heck of a position, especially if we were knocking heads, which we were. So we moved both of them, the development person, we finally ended up sharing half-and-half with Columbus. And that changed over time and those offices grew, our Continuing Education office grew – things that were related to student services. We kept working on how to make it work on a joint campus.

The fact that the new exercise building [Perry Webb Student Life Building] that's not its name, but you know, the fact that that's there, we– I started working on that, oh, gosh, maybe seven or eight years in, that one was hard to shift because we needed money for so darn many things. We finally fixed up the theater and communication part of things. The old theater was built to the regents’ specifications and they put a wall right through the middle of what would have been the performing section to keep it small because regional campuses couldn't have theaters. What? Who's going to do Shakespeare if we don't? Who's going to do things like outreach to schoolkids? That's what universities do. It says to kids, yeah, you can learn through television. It's fine. I've been watching the Metropolitan Opera ever since the quarantines started. But it's not the same as being in the audience. It's great, but it's not the same. How will people negotiate the world if they never know why people think there was anything special about Shakespeare, Ibsen, or choose your person. It made a difference. And so Ed Jennings said that you can grow in people's estimation by big art and big science. Well, we got a new science building. Tell you how we did that. And we got, finally, the Farmer Center, the science building. Somebody from the regents came up and they weren't not particularly– they just didn't think we'd need it. He's a very large man. And I took him over to the chemistry section, which was on the third floor in Galvin, I think, at that point. And they had a stockroom. Now I know what chemistry stockrooms smell like, they smell like chemicals. And I got him in there to see it. And then I got between him and the door and kept talking and he's breathing this stuff. Now I knew he was alright. I wouldn't have put him in danger. But it was pretty clear that this was not a good place and certainly not a place we wanted our students. He was a true believer by the time he came out. Now it took a while for that to work. That's the kind of stuff we had to do in order to get the resources we needed. I'm not sure that's the answer to your question, but it's where I'm going to stick to it.

Hannah Stoll 57:28 What were your favorite experiences working with the Lima community?

Dr. Violet Meek 57:34 Oh, gee. Well, I told you that I had to get out in the community. And so I probably did more of that, well, I know I did, I did more of that because we had to establish a presence. So I was on ArtSpace's board and I chaired the Symphony Board and, with Crafton Beck, we started the Lima Symphony Chorus, which I sang in. And that was fun. Those are great memories of the arts organizations. Because that's a way to reach people. I can't go into classrooms, one person, well you can, but one person can't do it. But you can reach lots of people that way. You can reach people through television, and I was a regular on the noon news. I read Christmas stories at Christmastime, kids’ stories. Actually, that showed up– I was also on the radio a lot. It was being out and getting to know people and saying, we're here. If you need something, we can help you. If you don't need something, we'll work till we figure out how, I mean, I worked on other things, I was on the foundation, well, I chaired the Chamber of Commerce, which is kind of an odd place for someone like me, but I did it. And that helped me get to know people in some

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of the other places so that I could say, hey, we can help with that. Or no, we can't but I can show you who does.

So it's probably the interesting, interesting people we met, and all over not just in Allen County. There was a person over– ah! Barbara Thompson. She was over in Van Wert. She was our first English major, the very first. And I was filling – as you may know, I'm a Lutheran pastor these days, and I filled in for somebody in a little church in Columbus, got to talking to someone, and it was Barbara's daughter. And talking about – her mother's gone now – but about how proud she was of that degree and how much it made a difference, and it was one of those– darn! That's what makes it worth it. It's all those people that– somebody else might have done the same thing, but I was the one who did and, knowing that we could change lives. How good was that?

I remember the year we had people up from the Ohio Arts Council and did a whole series of lectures on the Civil War. We had people who, you know, they’re historical impersonators, so we have somebody who was Lincoln and somebody who was Grant, and we filled a huge tent on the campus. We were going to have something ahead of time. Allison Gilmore, in fact, was going to lecture and we had reserved some space, I think in the area that is now the Farmer Art Gallery, that was one of our few meeting rooms. So many people turned up that we had to quickly turn on all the lights over in the theater and do it there. And I remember her getting up and saying, "You know, this is a lecture don't you?" Yes, they did and they were all excited. I thought, yeah, that's what we're for. People who want to learn and we're here to help. Goodness gracious, you put a penny in that slot, didn't you? I'll go on, stop now.

Hannah Stoll 1:01:44 What remains to be done relative to the progress of women at OSU Lima or higher education in general?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:01:54 Well, if I had a complete answer, I'd be running for something. Mostly you just have to keep at it. There are some practical issues that are slowly changing. Childcare is a particular issue. And now as we're dealing with– if somebody looks at this later, we're right in the middle of a pandemic. People are lecturing from home. Schools are closed. Childcare– understanding what that means to a family or to the individual parents, is vital. When there were only a few of us, we could bootleg it. As more and more women work outside the home, we've got to quit pretending that oh, gee, that's your problem, you fix it. Somebody said that to me when my kids were preschoolers and I thought, well, and never mind what I did about it.

But either we are going to assume that half the world isn't going to have an opportunity to fill their full potentials or we've got to look seriously at how to take care of that. I mean, we have lots of ideas, and one of them is you could try paying teachers more. But some of the lowest-paid people are the people who do the six weeks through kindergarten, the early childhood folks. I work with a group down – go in and volunteer every week – it's a long story. But they're marvelously dedicated, wonderful people and we pay them peanuts. Is that what you really want? I mean, I'm at the age where a lot of my friends are in retirement centers and whatnot now. Do I want to look up from a gurney and say, hmm, this is the

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person who's going to take care of my physical being for a while, is this person really happy with the job? Have we chosen the very best, brightest person to do this? Sure as heck not now. There are people of wonderful grace and strength who choose those jobs, because they want to serve and I'm glad, but we have no business exploiting that and that's what happens. So I suppose that's the one that affected me probably the most.

These things don't happen overnight, but they're sure there are many more women in places like this, than there once were, I mean, after Ohio State's first woman president left, some of my friends and I thought, oh crap, it's gonna be, it's gonna be thirty years before they'll try that again. It wasn't; the new president is coming. She is a woman. Yay! I don't want her to be hired because she's a woman, either. I want her to be the proper person who has what it takes to do the job. Everything I read says she does. I'm not sure that that was the case for the first person. I think they put her in over her head, and it wasn't fair. On the other hand, she was a grown up; she could have said no. We can do more of that at some point, but we don't have to do it here. As I said, though, if I had– my grandkids were in here, I actually have a magic wand in this room. If I had one of those that I could just click, I would, but it's just hard slugging. All I can tell you is the world I live in now is not the one I lived in, certainly as a kid. When I got my first learner's permit to drive, my father had to sign it. My mother was not allowed to sign it, only the male parent could sign it. And some of the mothers of some of my friends were war widows. They had to attest to the fact that they were widows. I don't know what they did with the people who were divorced. I'm not sure they knew that that happened. It was a long time ago. I'm going to start complaining about the cameras in another minute!

Hannah Stoll 1:06:55 How did you or other women in your field balance academic life and private life?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:07:02 We made it up as we went along. A solid, supportive private life is crucial. If I had not had my husband– there were times when we were under attack by one person or another, things were going on, and I don't think I could've– well, I probably could have but I wouldn't have been as effective. So how do you do it? It's individual. I don't think that there's anything that you can say, well, here's the magic wand. I can tell you things that will make it harder. If you have a support system that doesn't support, you're going to have trouble. We ran a program in the late ‘90s, it was called WIN "Women in the ‘90s" - and then we had to change the name consequently, it wasn't the ‘90s anymore. But some of our women students were returning after having been out of college for a while, or out of school for a while. And they had family structures that actively sabotaged– And we had to do something so that you could say, okay, this is the safe place. We think you can do it. We'll do whatever we can, but we had to put it together. So it's always true that if you and your support system are moving in the same direction, probably it'll be better. If they're moving in two different directions, it's hard.

People make compromises, do it all the time. Now we - with two-career families, that happens because sometimes one person in a family, and it's not always the woman, but more often in the past, it has been will say, okay, I can't do the professional things that I was trained to do or wanted to do, so I am going to make my life in this community based on volunteer work or something else. And some of those women have done incredible things. Was it enough? I don't know, I'm not walking in their shoes. It

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wouldn't have been for me, it wouldn't have worked for me. But in terms of us, my mother used to shake her head at this because I was widowed in my late forties and married again in my early fifties. Translation: we're not kids some of the things – for one – we're not kids and they're going to be no new ones, and that makes a difference. Because what happened was we had two big houses. My husband was on the faculty down here and I'm in Columbus right now, and I obviously was in Lima. There were people who thought I lived in Columbus. There are other people who thought he lived in Lima, because we did a lot of things in the house. We got this great big old house so we have people in it. That was something of a sacrifice because we weren't physically there. We paid the phone company an awful lot. This was before cell phones. And then that did wear on me after a while. I got so tired of that drive. Now fortunately the road got better. It was two-lane when I first went up. Two-lane with fierce state troopers, you had to watch them. Only got caught once. But that was a problem. In two-career, two point places are difficult. I don't know what to do about that, some of those things are not fixable if you're in it. If you're an academic, you kind of got to be where universities are, and they aren't everywhere. And even if they were more so, you know, it depends on perfectly rational things that don't have to do with people being mean, if you don't need one of those. I tried, whenever I could, to make sure that we could find places for trailing spouses of whatever gender that that's better for everyone if you can do it, but you can't always. Lots of things don't have immediate answers. I will say that some things are easier if we had been able to talk over Zoom or FaceTime or one of those, that would have made the physical separation easier. Not perfect, but easier. You can drive. Anyway. Okay.

Hannah Stoll 1:12:10 Tell me about why you decided to become an ordained Lutheran pastor. How did being a woman affect your experience?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:12:18 Well, when I was in college, that was literally unthinkable because there weren't any women Lutheran pastors. There are various varieties of Lutherans. I happen to belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; we're the only ones who do ordain women. I have always been active in the church. I ran things, usually in the larger church body more often than in the congregation. I never did belong to the Ladies Aid, because I never had time. I planned conferences, that sort of thing. So that by the time– well, what happened I guess is I– the group that is southern Ohio, there are smaller groups, this is called the synod for us. For the Presbyterians in the group, it's different from that. I had helped plan the constituting convention and had been part of a lot of nationwide stuff. And so when our bishop was retiring, and it was time to elect a new one, somebody asked me to keynote the convention. Ask me to speak and tell me you'll give me lunch, I'll do it. And I was a layperson. So I did, and I had forgotten that somebody had said the seminary – which is Trinity Lutheran Seminary, it's here in Columbus – I'd forgotten that they said, would you be willing to have us put your name in to be on the board of Trinity? And I said, oh, sure. I figured that they just need to tick the box that says woman, old. And so age was important. And I honest to goodness had forgotten I was up for it. So I gave the talk. They liked it. I could tell. And they recognized me, so when the vote came, because sometimes, you see, you get with a group that big, you think, who the heck is this? Well, they knew who I was.

So I ended up on the Trinity board. Well, that was interesting. I know how to do boards. So that was that was okay. And I learned things and what I discovered was at that particular time period, there were

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a lot of little small congregations without pastors. And as I say, I've been active, I was on the board for Lutheran Social Services. I have checked a few boxes. And so then some of the faculty said, well, you know, you could do this. There's a way that we can send people who are not ordained out; you could do that. Yeah, well, wait until I retire from Ohio State before we talk about that. Well, somebody said, you know, there's a way for people to be ordained if they've already got degrees and don't really want to spend four years at the seminary, which was a good thing because I have all the degrees I need, thank you very much. It turns out that you can do it but one of the requirements is that you admit that you are more than forty-five years old. I would have had a lot of trouble convincing anybody that I was younger. So I did it. It's an abbreviated process, but I'm also the graduate of a church college. I had had theology courses, you betcha. And so I did. That wasn't what I was intending to do. I was intending to just go out and help one of these little congregations because I knew I could. I knew how to speak in front of groups. I figured it couldn't be that much different than writing a lecture. It turns out it is, but that's okay. I– turned out that I know how to do that too. Wait a minute, I've got a computer acting up. This thing will sit here quietly forever and then as soon as somebody is on it, it acts up. So that's how I went down to this little church in Logan– outside of Logan, Ohio. Now, people say what town is it in and I say, well, it isn't. Well, where are the crossroads? Well, we don't have one of those either, just in the middle of farm country. And I was incredibly lucky. They were the dearest, sweetest people– quirky, oh my gosh, were they quirky. But it was a love affair again. I had a marvelous time and I've retired again, finally. And now I just fill in for people sometimes when– everybody needs a vacation and I come cheap, so I enjoy it.

And it helps me connect to some of the public service things that are still important to me, and that's important too. I stayed a Rotarian, I joined Rotary in Lima, but I stayed a Rotarian because here in Columbus, we work with the public schools. And so I'm in the schools a lot. We give out lots of scholarships. I met a young man the other day. He is a senior VP of some variety at Chase, the kind who has two tuxedos, which suggests to me they send him to the big places. And we were talking, I don't know how we get on the topic of Rotary. He said, I got a Rotary scholarship and I thought, yup, there it is. I kept thinking– I had to be kind of careful because hopping up and down is, you know, the drink would have spilled. But anyway, so I keep doing that. And I'll probably keep doing that as long as I can drive. Afterwards, we'll think about it. But the self-driving car should be functional by then and I intend to be a little old lady with a chariot.

Hannah Stoll 1:18:49 What aspects of your career did you find most rewarding?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:18:57 I have loved almost all of the parts of my career. And I guess the best way– I can't answer it the way you ask it, but I think the best way to answer it is to say that in each of them, I found something that got me excited, that got me out of bed and into harness in the morning. And I had something that happened or something that made it clear to me when it was time to go. And so I will always say, well, the best part’s the one I'm in now, whatever that whichever one that was then. I'm blessed. I'm proud of what we did in Lima. It was a joint effort and I– although I've been talking about my participation, none of this, none of this happens alone. There were people whose names are well known on the campus, and I couldn't have done it without them. But each time it's oh, this is, this is wonderful. And now, oh, I

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couldn't do that before, but now I can. So it was– I think what runs through it probably is service needs. I take these pencil – or, I don't need more – but I'd take these stupid pencil and paper tests, and they always come out that way. And that probably has as much to do with the fact that with my spiritual education will ever, and I feel that that's part of my responsibility. There are people who need help. I can do it. I should. And there are people who need to be alone, and that's a little harder, but I'm working on that one. Oh, wait a minute. I cleaned up my office just a tiny bit, because I knew you could see something, but I have to show you. Oh, shoot, where'd I put it? Well, I evidently cleaned it too well, but it's a little plaque that says, "In order to love a butterfly, you must care for a few caterpillars." And that is the thing that I have remembered for a very long time. I've had my share of caterpillars, but as a consequence, I can see the butterflies and if we are close to the end– are we? I wanted to tell you some–

Hannah Stoll 1:21:43 I have about two more questions.

Dr. Violet Meek 1:21:44 I'll come back.

Hannah Stoll 1:21:45 Okay, that's fine. What advice would you give to young women who want to be successful in professional fields?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:21:55 Keep going. There are all kinds of practical pieces of advice. Some of them depend on the field, some of them don't. Some of them were very important when I was doing it, and I hope are somewhat less important now. Presentation is important. And I know that younger people are going to scream blue murder – what difference how I look – well, it does. It's the truth. When I was a young woman, it made a difference that my voice is low. Do you think that's on purpose? Um-hm. But I'm hoping that as time goes on, those are less important, that as we move along, the advice that you give to any young person is pretty much the same. Now women are going to, for the foreseeable future, have to deal with childcare issues. Certainly young men are much more involved, or many of them are much more involved in parenting than their fathers were, certainly than their grandfathers, and so that's going to change too, but nonetheless, almost all the pregnant people I know are women. There are– even that wasn't true recently, I was reading a story. But so there are issues that they're going to have to deal with and they're going to have to look straight at them and say, okay, this is the world I live in. Try and change it for your daughters if you have them.

But it is always important to keep at it, not to get professionally stale. To be wise about human interactions and how you can communicate clearly. My daughter and I've been talking about that; she's sheltering in place with us and decided that since her employer will pay for it, she's going to take some courses. She has a master's degree already. She has an MFA. So she is and we've been talking about how to facilitate communication and understanding what that means at a more theoretical level than most of us do. It does not mean talking very slowly and very loudly. That's not the point. But show up on time, do the work. Remember deadlines, all of the stuff that you say and it's just so obvious. Will you

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run into roadblocks? Yeah. Do men run into roadblocks? Yeah. Because we talk about the entitled men, and they're out there. And they're more of them than there are entitled women, but they're out there too. But if you look at it, as I said, the differences within the groups are bigger than the differences between them. Most men have to live lives that don't end up quite where they thought they were going to either. They don't get the promotions always they want. Is it because a woman got it and shouldn't have? Maybe. If the woman didn't get it, was it because a man got it and shouldn't have? Maybe, or maybe somebody who is just better showed up.

These sound like platitudes, and they are because they're based on what we've always seen, and I wish I had a different kind of– I can give advice to a specific person who comes and says, this is the issue. Okay, we can talk about that. This is the person you need to know to unlock this corner. Sometimes what my grandmother used to say about catching more flies with sugar than vinegar is something you need to consider. Sometimes standing your ground and saying you're not running over me is what you need to do too. And I can't tell you in the abstract, which it is in any one place. And I think I'm continuing to talk because this frustrates me. The question’s too broad for me to give you a useful answer, except I suppose when you go to sleep at night, ask yourself whether whatever you've done today is something you'd like to have in your obituary. If it isn't, you probably shouldn't keep doing it. I think more about those than I used to. For your age, maybe you could think about, well, would I want somebody to put this in Who's Who or something like that, or on the web.

Hannah Stoll 1:27:26 And then the final question is, is there anything else you would like to talk about?

Dr. Violet Meek 1:27:31 Oh, my goodness, you got it. It was always my last question in interviews. Well, this made me think about so many things, about very, very happy years, very frustrating sometimes, about people in Columbus who sent their own kids to Ivy League schools but were perfectly happy to say that somebody from Paulding, oh, this would be good enough. And I've heard that “good enough” from people here in Columbus. So much so that I'm a fairly pacific person, but I thought, I wonder if they'd catch me if I socked them. And I guess that's one of the things that made those years so special is– I told you that some students who came to us didn't want or were a wrong fit for Columbus. But they were good people who had a good sense of work ethic.

And what I think the regional campuses are, and what we tried so hard to make us, is– maybe it's got to do with where we are you know, Lima sits on the bottom of the Black Swamp, bottom half geographically, the Black Swamp, its way on the eastern edge of the prairie. And what we were supposed to be was a light on the edge of the prairie. So that if young people, and not so young ones, could find us, or if we could find them, we could get to them before their lights went out. If they came to the campus, they would finally find other people who were as bright as they were, whose lights shone. They would find people who talked about ethics and meant it, who talked about beauty and recognized it. And so it was our job, for some of them, to make them, maybe for the first time, feel at home. And maybe what we had to do was give them the chance to let their wings dry out just a little bit so that they could fly on their own. And we tried so hard to make that happen, and sometimes it worked. Sometimes we'd see these kids learn to flap their wings a little. And then sometimes later, you could look up and

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there they'd be, turning arabesques in the sky. And that made it worth it. This has been fun. I'm glad we had a chance to do it.

Hannah Stoll 1:30:52 Yes, me too. Thank you so much.

Dr. Violet Meek 1:30:56 You’re welcome. Let me know how it all comes out. I'm kind of curious.

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