It’s good to be Priscilla Grew
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BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
Growing up in the ’40s and ’50s, Priscilla Grew would get sick at the thought of a speech. She was that shy.
One Sunday night, at a youth group at her San Antonio church, she had to get in front of everyone and role-play with a boy about how to act on a date.
She laughs.
Age: 67
Position: Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, which includes Morrill Hall on the UNL City Campus, Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park near Royal and Trailside Museum of Natural History at Fort Robinson State Park near Crawford; former vice chancellor for research at UNL
Recognition: One of 21 Bryn Mawr College graduates from the Class of ’62 to be featured in a recently published book, “It’s Good to Be a Woman,” by fellow classmate Alison Baker. The book chronicles the lives of these women, part of an “in-between” cohort of women born during World War II who were the vanguard of the feminist movement.
“But I had never had a single date in high school the whole time. It was horrible.”
Her freshman year in the Gothic halls of Bryn Mawr, an all-women’s college in Pennsylvania, she didn’t do much better. At one mixer, she stood at the side of the room and didn’t talk to anybody.
A classmate asked why.
You have to “make conversation,” the classmate told her, and from that night on, she took Priscilla under her wing and taught her how. The classmate was a daughter of a Dutch diplomat who had come to Bryn Mawr from a top girls school in Europe. They became best friends, and that classmate got her through that first year.
Luck like that, Grew says, helped her evolve into the woman she is today — director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, a professor in the Department of Geosciences at UNL, a former vice chancellor of research, a former “first woman to …” for many things on her academic resume, which spans 45 years and 20 pages.
And, at 67, she can look back on her career and say, yes, she did get lucky, going to Bryn Mawr, finding the right mentors, switching from physics which she hated, to geology which she loved, taking the right risks.
But she made her own luck, too.
She learned to make speeches, no matter how shy. She learned to make conversation, no matter how hard. Even with boys.
When her doctoral dissertation came back from Berkeley with a note saying, “Well this really isn’t what we would expect,” she cried her heart out. Then submitted a second draft.
She said yes in the 1970s when California Gov. Jerry Brown asked her to be director of the state’s Department of Conservation – 300 employees and an annual budget of $13 million – even though she had no experience in government.
She read up on “Robert’s Rules of Order,” so she could chair meetings.
She made a zigzag path through her career despite mammoth-size fears.
And it’s been good.
But it’s not just been because of good luck.
“A lot of women feel this way – that it’s been all luck they got this far. I look back and, yes, I had a lot of lucky breaks. But I tell my women students it’s also having the courage, if something presents itself, to do it.”
Now Grew is one of the women from her Bryn Mawr Class of ’62 featured in a recently published book, “It’s Good to Be a Woman.”
Alison Baker, a classmate, wrote the book about Grew and this small cohort of women who came right before the Baby Boomers. She proposed the idea to Grew at their 40th class reunion in 2002 while standing in a cafeteria line.
Often called the fault-line generation, Baker writes, women from this cohort were babies during World War II. They saw their moms lead households while the men were away. They saw women as capable and strong.
This group of Bryn Mawr women are important because they were part of the vanguard of the feminist movement, Baker writes, knocking down walls for generations of professional women who followed. She writes:
“The Baby Boomers have dominated the conversation, through sheer force of numbers, ever since they grew up to become the sixties generation … Meanwhile, the class of ’62 has gone through life more quietly, always just one step ahead, part of a little-known ‘in-between’ generation, neither hippies nor housewives, difficult to define, more reticent than the boomers who followed, less angry, more confused, perhaps more thoughtful.”
In October of 1957, while these young women were writing their applications to Bryn Mawr, Baker writes, the Russians sent the Sputnik satellite into orbit. This scared the United States into improving math and science education for all schoolkids. Before Sputnik, Baker writes, girls had been discouraged from doing math or science. After Sputnik, doors started opening wider for women in science.
And other in other ways, too.
One Bryn Mawr classmate became the first full professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University’s medical school.
One classmate became the first woman partner in a New York law firm, and the first to head the city bar association.
Other classmates were the first in their families to live as a lesbian and to live with a man out of wedlock and to divorce instead of just sticking it out.
And one painfully shy classmate named Priscilla Grew stepped over the threshold, despite her fears.
She walks from her third-floor corner office down the hall and turns left, into the Jurassic Dinosaur exhibit. The kids love this room, she says. Nebraska was covered by water during much of that period, so the state has plenty of sea monster fossils, but few dinosaur fossils.
“We” finally did find a dinosaur fossil, she said She points out the fossilized footprint, taken from Jefferson County.
She walks down the hall, stopping at a small exhibit in the middle of the hallway. It touts the museum’s partnership with Nebraska Educational Television in a grant to produce a documentary and museum exhibits for ANDRILL, the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic drilling program. The program is about researching climate change. By studying ice sheets there, she says, we can learn a lot about global warming.
It’s an $11 million project that’s headquartered at UNL, she says proudly.
She walks into the Explore Evolution room, which the museum took a lead role in developing for the National Science Foundation. It’s been duplicated in five other museums across the nation.
She walks over to Fly Karaoke, an exhibit about flies. It explains how each fly has a song and each song is unique.
She pushes a button and a fly song plays. Then it’s her turn to try to duplicate the song.
She buzzes loudly.
She laughs as the exhibit plays back her fly song. But there’s no embarrassment, despite other people in the room. She’s clearly having fun.
On the main floor, she walks through Elephant Hall, home of Archie the mammoth, the most famous exhibit at the museum.
One way to tell the difference between mammoths and mastodons, she explains, is by looking at their teeth — mastodons have sharp teeth, mammoths have flat teeth.
“I think this is one of the most wonderful museum spaces. It’s one of the best collections of fossil elephants anywhere.”
She didn’t know anything about running a museum when she took over in 2003, she says. It seemed daunting, not just because of her lack of museum experience. The museum had just had its budget cut in half by the Legislature. Tenured museum faculty members were fired. Morale was low.
Despite decades of accomplishments, she hesitated. Could she do it?
She talked it over with her husband, a geologist in Maine — they pioneered long-distance relationships, she jokes. He reminded her that the job would draw on everything she loves — science, fossils, minerals, nature …
“Initially, I didn’t think, ‘Oh, this is the most fabulous job.’ What I thought about was, ‘Oh, would I be able to do it? What would people think?’”
She took that step anyway.
Grew recently went back to Bryn Mawr for her 45th reunion. A major topic was retirement, and how to make the transition: Do I retire and do volunteer work? Do I keep working?
“I think we all felt that going through the changes we had experienced in our lives, all these paradigm shifts, that maybe it prepared us to deal with at least one more big transition about what we’re going to do.”
But she doesn’t see herself retiring soon, because it’s good to be her.
Colleen Kenney is on leave. Reach her editor at 473-7210 or features@journalstar.com.
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a complimentary woman wrote on September 9, 2007 2:53 pm:
Outdoors Indian wrote on September 9, 2007 9:38 pm:
Ralph Thomas wrote on September 11, 2007 5:44 am:
Alison Baker wrote on September 27, 2007 2:09 pm: