Inside Iowa State

November 5, 2004

Past lives of your ISU co-workers revealed

by Karen Bolluyt

Martha Isaacson

Martha Isaacson has expertise on many of the voting and ballot issues in the news during the last month because she was Marshall County's auditor before moving to Ames.

Before her days in elected office, she managed and co-owned a gourmet shop in Valley Junction. And before that, she was director of the Iowa Drug Abuse Authority during Gov. Robert Ray's term in office.

"My career has been interesting and full of surprises," Isaacson said.

Jane Henning

Jane Henning's job as extradition officer for the State of Iowa during her seven years in Gov. Robert Ray's office was mostly a desk and paperwork job. Today she often works, as a volunteer, with people incarcerated in the Story County jail. She helps visitors go through the necessary procedures to visit inmates.

Henning says she likes the chance to make a difficult time a little easier for friends and relatives of inmates.

Jerry Stewart

When Jerry Stewart's students practiced their skills on some of North Dakota's less traveled roads, some of them got a bonus lesson. The lesson: this is how to slow down and retreat so as not to spook a herd of buffalo into a stampede.

Stewart says the interpersonal and communication skills he needed as a driver's education and music teacher also are essential for law enforcement officers.

Jim Trow

For two years, traveling between Idaho and Alaska, Jim Trow was a commercial salmon fisherman and licensed big game guide.

"The hunters generally were wealthy people and some of them did not like living in the woods. And none of them liked it if we didn't see game. So I learned some customer relations skills, which continue to be useful. I carried over some scars, too, from the uncooperative horses I shoed."

Debra Marquart

Debra Marquart was a road musician with rock and heavy metal bands. The living was precarious and, for a while and not too successfully, she sold tombstones to supplement her income. Those days are the topic of her 2001 book The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories.

Today, Marquart's poetry finds its way into the music of her mostly acoustic band, The Bone People.

Sandra Gartz

For six years in the '60s and '70s Sandra Gartz was a TWA airline hostess based out of New York City and Kansas City. In her last year or two, she worked some international flights--assignments she calls tiring and "not as glamorous as they look." On the other hand, the free international trips during her time off "were great!"

Gartz says she had fewer passengers than do today's flight attendants, so she could pay special attention to children--giving them coloring books and, before the days of heavily secured cockpits, taking them to meet the pilots.