Peggy Lane and Valerie Zimmerman usually let their husbands make the headlines. But the newest first ladies of Emporia are far from shrinking violets.
Indeed, it’s been a busy life for both of them. Lane teaches at Emporia State University’s business school. Zimmerman is the coordinator for the Emporia Literacy Program at the Adult Education Center. Lane serves with the William Allen White Community Partnership, Zimmerman with the Emporia Arts Council’s board. They’ve made themselves a space in town that’s more than just “the wife of new City Manager Matt Zimmerman” or “the wife of new ESU President Michael Lane.”
But don’t use the word “just.” Even among their other accomplishments, both see that last role as the best of all.
“I married my best friend,” Valerie Zimmerman said. “When things go wrong, he’s the first person I call. When something goes right, he’s the first person I call. I never get tired of being with him. Sometimes it’s dead silence. Sometimes we chatter like magpies. But through it all, he’s there. He’s my best friend.”
“Our tastes are similar and I think our vibes and beliefs are very similar,” Peggy Lane said. “The ethics part of who we are and what we are — family, friends, doing the right thing, what the right thing to do is — there’s a lot of business that life can hit you with where we just matched. It’s been about 14 years. It’s just there. How do you define what is there and what it is? It’s hard.”
Partners. Friends. Leaders in their own right.
It’s time to meet them.
Peggy Lane
As a child in Arkansas, Peggy Lane knew exactly what she wanted to be: an astronaut, a librarian or a beautician. Teaching didn’t really make the list, even though she used to make up practice exams for her younger sister.
“Of course, she never took the exams,” Lane said with a laugh.
Born in Fort Carson, Colo., Lane’s family moved to eastern Arkansas when she was little — and then again to Batesville, in the northeastern part of the state, before she started high school. That may have been where her love of travel began, one that would survive many moves as an adult and a number of trips abroad to Russia, China and elsewhere.
It’s also where her love of computers began. A physics class at Batesville High School required her to do some work at nearby Lyon College on their minicomputer. She wrote her first program on it and was hooked.
“My physics teacher said ‘You should take engineering in college,’” Lane said. “I looked at the engineering options, said ‘Oooh, computer science,’ and never looked back.”
There was one moment as a junior where she considered switching to a computer-focused business major instead. But then she weighed the graduation requirements. The engineering degree required lots of math, lots of physics. The business degree required a speech class.
Speech? No, thanks. Lane had been terribly shy as a child and still didn’t consider public speaking a thing to desire.
So she went into programming. And she enjoyed it. But after six months, it just didn’t seem to be enough.
“I thought ‘This is fun, but it’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life,’” Lane said. “‘I don’t know what I want to do, but this isn’t it.’”
It was while taking courses for her master’s of business administration degree that she first got a chance to teach. It was the last thing Lane had wanted to do as a graduate student. But she soon found it was a perfect fit.
“You use a lot of the same skill set,” she said. “In programming, you have to have the big picture and then break it into pieces and solve each of those sub-pieces. When I teach, I’m doing the same thing.”
The enthusiasm was even great enough to overpower her fear of speaking. Besides, this didn’t feel like giving a speech; this was sharing a passion.
Lane took a teaching job even though it meant a slight pay cut. Most of the rest of her life, she would either be teaching at universities or as a project manager in private industry. And by the early ’90s, she’d have a partner while she was doing it.
She met Michael Lane at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. She was the newest professor, he was an associate dean who had been there for about 10 years. The two were part of a group of 10 or 12 Bradley employees that would get together every so often for dinner.
“One night, Mike showed up and nobody else came to dinner,” she said. “I showed up and nobody else had come. So we decided we might as well go to dinner.”
She still swears it was not a setup.
By the end of her second year, the two were married. They proved to have a lot in common, right down to the furniture in their respective homes (a discovery made while they were dating). And of course, there were the big things, like a passion for education and travel. That last was perhaps fortunate since her husband’s job changes took them to Indiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, back to Arkansas and then to Emporia.
“It’s a lot like the military,” she said. “To be promoted, you have to move. The only difference is the Army supplies you with housing. We still own our house in Arkansas.”
She’s been fascinated by the new Banner computer system going in at ESU, an overarching system intended to take care of everything from class schedules to parking tickets. It’s an area that she knows quite a bit about — and has been very careful to keep herself out of the way of. She’s seen president’s wives that got too involved in university operations, she said, and that’s not what she wants to do.
“They were so far along anyway, that there was really nothing I could have contributed that would have been worth anything,” Lane said.
Right now she’s enjoying teaching classes, walking the family beagle Lucy and keeping up with a reading list that includes John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and the Harry Potter books. But the best part of all? No hour-long commutes to work like she had in Pennsylvania.
“I now walk to my office in 10 minutes,” she said. “It’s wonderful. I tell my students ‘If it snows, I will be there.’”
Valerie Zimmerman
It doesn’t take long to get a sense of Valerie Zimmerman’s energy: a quick step as she walks, a burst of enthusiasm in her conversation. For her, it’s a natural result of being one of six kids and having a super-energetic mother.
“I tend to walk fast because I had to keep up with her,” she said, smiling.
Zimmerman grew up in Joliet, Ill., the daughter of a chiropractor and a waitress. It was never a dull house. Five of the six children were girls, so there was always someone to get hand-me-downs from, always someone to help with homework, always someone to fight with.
There were also solid rules and curfews.
“I was lucky,” she said. “I had parents that cared and asked tough questions. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Who are you going with?’ And if I came home late — calamity! You don’t raise a family of five girls and let that happen.”
On top of that her dad had a passion for Shakespeare. The family used to have a game, Zimmerman said, where they would thump open an edition of Shakespeare’s works, stab a finger on the page and ask “Who said it?” Her father was the reigning champion.
“My father could tell you who said it, who he said it to, what was said before it, what play, what act and what scene,” Zimmerman said. “We only stumped him once, when we asked him who said ‘Good my lord?’”
Growing up, she wanted to be a secretary. It just sounded like fun to be in the middle of things, taking calls, sorting files, helping people. That took her a lot of places — the secretarial pool of Argonne National Laboratory, office manager of a real estate investment trust and eventually a six-year stint as an “administrative coordinator” for McDonald’s.
By then, she’d started studying for her associate’s degree at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Ill. At that point, she knew she had to make a break.
“I left McDonald’s because I knew if I didn’t leave soon, I would never leave,” Zimmerman said. “And I’d have an education I would never use.”
By then she had been married and divorced and had two boys and two girls, the youngest of which is now 19. She met Matt Zimmerman in 2001 when they were neighbors in the same township complex. As they dated, it became spooky how much they had in common. He was also the third of six children, born in the same year she was. For that matter, both their fathers were born in the same year. And both their mothers.
Why fight fate? They married a year later.
“You know that commandment about love thy neighbor?” she said, grinning. “We got it down really well.”
Of course, not everything was a perfect duplicate.
“I wake up very slow and he’s Mr. Sunshine,” she said. “By nine at night, he’s winding down and I’m bouncing off the walls. ... It took two years of being a married couple to learn not to talk to me for about an hour after I’m awake. Part of that is that I’m a mother and raised children — you’re used to being up later hours.”
When the chance came for her husband to try for the Emporia job, Zimmerman encouraged it. It meant living Illinois, which wasn’t easy for either of them. But it would be closer to their grandchildren. It was a chance for her to go on to a bachelor’s degree. And professionally, it just seemed like the right move.
“I said ‘You’re the one who has to do the job,’” she said. “If it makes you happy, do it.”
He did.
Zimmerman has now enrolled at Emporia State University, but not in the field she expected. When she first started going back to school, her love of children and reading had suggested elementary education. But as she reviewed the course catalogs at ESU, the ones that kept appealing to her were the sociology classes. Something about them called to the inquisitive side of her nature
“I have always been accused of staring at a person,” Zimmerman said. “I say ‘That’s not staring. That’s field research.’”
She’s not quite sure what she wants to do with the degree yet. Right now, she’s just trying to get a little more understanding of some of society’s problems. Meanwhile, she’s quickly falling in love with her literacy job.
“I think reading is the most extraordinary thing,” she said. “It takes you places you could never go, it stimulates your mind. It’s such a gift. I want them to understand what it’s like to read.”
Her own reading has led her through classics such as Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Ubervilles” and more modern works like Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper,” about a child who was conceived to be a bone marrow match for her older sister.
And there’s still time to explore town on her hot pink bicycle and start getting revved up for classes.
“I’m so excited!” she said. “I get to take part in student life, which was a part of my life I completely missed. I’m excited about wearing an ESU sweatshirt and going to the football games — Yay!”
admireed (anonymous) says...
Not only did Emporia hit two home runs with Matt an Mike, Valerie and Peggy make it four for four!
July 14, 2007 at 2:12 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )