{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/wd3pv6ct0m/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["The Women Military Aviators Oral History Project"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/056/original/theirstory_mosaic_icon.png?1586871412","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Marcy Atwood","Margie Varuska","Zack Ellis"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2023-09-07"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["MPEG-4"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["TheirStory"]}}],"provider":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["TheirStory"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["TheirStory"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/056/original/theirstory_mosaic_icon.png?1586871412","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/207/786/small/open-uri20230908-125490-osp9hz_1694192411.jpg?1694192413","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20230908-125490-osp9hz.mp4"]},"duration":3420.544,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/207/786/small/open-uri20230908-125490-osp9hz_1694192411.jpg?1694192413","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-theirstory.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/207/786/original/open-uri20230908-125490-osp9hz.mp4?1694192410","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":3420.544,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["TheirStory Transcript (Paragraphs with Speakers) [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e The recording. So hi, everyone. I'm Zach Ellis, the founder and CEO of Their Story. And I am incredibly excited today to be joined by Margie Vruska and Marcie Atwood. Margie, a retired Lieutenant Colonel with the United States Air Force and Women's Military Aviators Historical Committee member, along with Marcy, retired Colonel with the United States Air Force. And so today, absolute honor to be interviewing, essentially, them both about their oral history project and kind of how it got started, what was the context, you know, what were challenges along the way, how they overcome those, how they've been using their story, lessons learned, all of the above. So hopefully, you'll all be able to have some takeaways as well for your own oral history initiatives. And at the very least, we'll enjoy, I'm sure, hearing about their story. So a little bit of housekeeping. One is that we're recording today's webinar, so if you do have to leave early, Jacob, you'll still be able to catch the rest of it, or for anyone who wants to pass along the recording to others. We're going to be preserving the recording at permanent.org and also making the recording publicly accessible on their stories aviary instance and WMA may certainly publish and use the recording however they might as well. So keep a lookout for that. And definitely, I wanted to get things started by having everyone introduce themselves. We have an intimate environment today and wanna make sure that you all take away as much as you can and what you're looking for. So I definitely encourage you to be engaged, be active listeners, put any questions or comments that you might have in the chat, and we'll field those as we're going and also leave some room potentially at the end. Also, please mute if you're not speaking because we are in an environment where everyone is on the call at the same time and wanna make sure that we can hear the presenters. So With that, as I kind of mentioned, the general arc of today's session will be a little bit about kind of following this sort of three-act structure, what the ordinary world looked like, Marci and Margie's background a little bit about WMA, what prompted the oral history project and then what did it really look like to get started? And how has that developed over time? And then we'll wrap with, what have we learned so far as a group, WMA, and looking to the future of what's next for the project. So with that, off we go, and I will turn it over to Margie to share her screen and introduce yourself Marcie and WMA. And I think you are muted Margie. I will.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=0.06,187.86"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, can you hear me now?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=197.94,199.7"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e All good.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=199.76,200.46"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e All righty. Well, thank you, Zach, and thank you for the opportunity to talk about women military aviators and our oral history project. We have been in existence for 40 years now, And our main purpose is to preserve, protect, and promote the role of women in military aviation. Marcy and I are charter members of WMA. And throughout the years, we've had many different positions in the organization, but about 20 years we came to inherit the historical committee and we've been working pretty intensely in that area ever since. We'll be talking about that today, but at first I thought you might like to hear a little bit about ourselves. For me, I grew up in Gainesville, Florida.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=200.9,246.86"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e And Margie, do you have slides that you wanted to share?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=247.54,250.98"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e I thought I was.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=251.44,252.54"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Oh, good.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=253.52,254.28"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Are you seeing a slide?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=255.38,256.74"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Not yet.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=256.88,257.66"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, I hit, let's see, I pressed play and it went on. You're not seeing that?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=258.18,264.84"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Not yet, yeah, in Zoom, maybe if you come back to the share screen again.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=265.02,269.68"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, let's do share screen again. Okay, let's try it again.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=270.56,275.1"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, we can see you","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=276.02,277.12"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e can hear me okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=277.12,278.26"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, can hear you okay can seniors, see your screen about now. Perfect.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=278.52,282.6"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e All right. Okay, well there's the first slide. And here's a little bit about me. As I mentioned, I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, and I guess I was about 10 years old. I had read a biography of Amelia Earhart, and I got the bug in my head to fly, and I've wanted to do so ever since. I really didn't know how I was going to get to do that, but when I was a senior in high school, I was very fortunate that year the government opened the service academies to women. And so I applied and got in. And in June of 1976, I entered with the first class of women at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Four years later in 1980, I graduated. And that first picture is all the women in our class. And I went to flight training right away in Del Rio, Texas. It was Laughlin Air Force Base. And I was very fortunate to get my first choice of aircraft. It was a C-141 four-engine jet transport. And I should mention at the time that women were not allowed to fly fighters, attack or reconnaissance airplane because of the combat exclusion laws. And that held, that was the law for quite some time, which we'll talk about a little bit later. I had quite a few different assignments. I flew the C-141 on a worldwide missions and was even involved in some contingencies such as Grenada. And after the bombing at the Beirut barracks, we helped out there. And actually we were involved in real world situations on a daily basis. I was doing that out of, I was flying out of Charleston Air Force Base, and then the Air Force sent me to get my master's degree so that I could teach at the Air Force Academy. So 10 years after I graduated, I was back there teaching, and I was also involved in the cadet flying program with the little Cessnas in training the cadets before they went off to pilot training. I then got a really interesting assignment with Defense Intelligence Agency and became an Air Force attache in Africa in the Ivory Coast is where we were based. And that's where the upper right picture is from. And I flew a King Air, it was called a C-12, all over Africa in support of the embassy and United States security assistance missions over there. And then the picture just below that, I believe that was taken in Niger when we were out doing some of our liaison work. After I returned to the States, I taught at the Defense Intelligence Agency Schoolhouse. I taught attachés before they went on station. And I retired in","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=282.92,459.18"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e 2000","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=459.48,459.98"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e and was hired by Southwest Airlines and flew for them for 20 years as a Boeing 737 captain. And just a few years ago, I retired from that. So now my husband and I live in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and I think that's enough about me. Marcy, how about you?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=460.88,480.14"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e So I joined the Air Force in 1980.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=481.36,484.26"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e I had been a high school band and choir teacher before that and needed a job and there were no high school jobs available. And so the Air Force recruiter was available and I talked to them and I selected Air Force because my dad, which you'll see in the top left corner of the slide, was a pilot during the Korean conflict stationed in Germany where I was born. So I got ahold of him and said, if I join the Air Force, what do you think? And he said, well, they'll take care of you and I won't have to worry about you anymore. So I thought that was a pretty good endorsement for the Air Force. My first assignment was the KC-135Q model. I was a navigator. I had no desire to fly. No, not like Margie where, you know, I read a book and wanted to fly all my life. It was just something I could do. So I did it. And the best flying I had was that Q model airplane that you see me at the bottom of the ladder for KC-135, a Boeing 707. And we were refueling the SR-71 doing operations all over the world. And I learned so much about navigation and airspace operations from that mission. I was very lucky, I got selected to be the command crew for the 15th Air Force commander, and that's the bottom left picture. That's me with the crew. And I had an interesting interface with the general, because one of the issues that women military aviators was trying to help each other with was uniform fit. And so I had this crusty old three star general, we were we were shuttling him around the world. And he took one look at the long, gorgeous red fingernails I had on and said, how do you even operate the equipment with those things? And I pulled out my glove, I put my glove on, I said, it's because these gloves are men's sizes, my fingernails now go to the end of the fingertips. So now I can actually use the gloves. And that kind of quieted him down a little bit, but that was one of the things that we were dealing with as women wearing men's gear in an airplane. I come from a family of service. You know, my dad was in the Air Force, he got out when I was very young, and joined the National Guard in Oregon and retired out of the National Guard there. My mother was a DoD school teacher and served overseas for 20 years before retiring. And then my brother joined the Navy and that's his commissioning picture with the three of us in uniform. And he served 20 years as a surface warfare vessel officer on nuclear carriers. So the top right corner is the WASP. And I think that this is the most exciting part of my career was having a relationship with the women air service pilots from World War II. This was the Congressional Gold Medal that they were awarded in 2010. And this is WASP Marty Wall from class 44 W10. Next slide please. So the WASPs are considered generation one. They were the women that flew military every airplane in the military inventory during 1942 to 44.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=485.38,695.78"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e And Jackie Cochran was their organizer of the WASP. Now what's interesting about the WASP is that They served and then they were told go home, thank you very much. They were civilian employees of the Department of Defense. They were not military members. So they went home and then some years later, like 30 in 1973, the Department of Defense did a press release that they were going to let women fly military aircraft for the very first time. Of course, that kind of got them all excited and They rallied together and they decided they needed to let the world know what they did during World War Two. So they, they bonded together they started working on their veteran rights and advocating that with Congress, and then they realized","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=697.12,749.84"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e that those young that those young women that were going through training starting in 1973,","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=761.06,761.199"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e would","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=761.199,761.209"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e really need the support, because they  be probably ones or twos","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=761.209,761.32"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e at each unit, and by themselves. So they organized a nonprofit organization called Women Military Pilots Association in 1978.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=761.32,771.36"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e 10 of","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=772.36,772.74"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e them got together and chartered that organization. And at the same time, a couple of years later in 1981,","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=772.74,779.66"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e a couple of the women that were at these units assigned by themselves, got together and decided they needed to have some sort of organization and communication between us, so that we could support each other. So they did a survey and came up with the answer that yes, we would all like to have some sort of organization. So they tried to start one at that time in about 1980,","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=781.06,805.44"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e 81.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=806.2,806.7"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e And then the wasp and those gals were connected. And they organized and became all one organization under the Women Military Pilots Association. The initial group of people, the stakeholders or plank owners, as we call them, or charter members included 86 Air Force women pilots and 126 WASPs were also charter members. So with that, we started the Women Military Aviators, the precursor to our organization. And at the same time, the Navy was also doing that. So next slide, please. We held our first convention in May of 1983, and we had a four ship of women pilots flying T-38 instructor pilots, flying T-38s that flew over the Indianapolis Speedway. So, Gen 2, this is what we define as Gen 2. It's some modern military women that started flying in 1973 that was led by the Army and the Navy. Air Force followed in 76, graduating in 77 and Coast Guard as well. And we flew for 20 years before the combat exclusion law was changed. So because we were restricted in which airplanes we could fly, that also restricted our opportunities for promotion. And it and it was through that process that that we had to live and work within the military system. So these are pictures of some of those things. I mean, we had the graduation of the first class from all the academies in 1980.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=807.5,909.88"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e We had the first in each of the services, They're pictured here, Yana in Coast Guard, Sally in the Army. Rosemary was in the first class of the Navy Gals. And then you see the Air Force first class of Navy Gals going through their training down on the bottom. Next slide.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=911.26,931.62"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e All right, is it my turn?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=935.62,937.66"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e Margie, you were supposed to talk to that last slide. I'm sorry.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=937.94,942.02"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e It doesn't matter whatsoever. I was just going to mention that at the time, during this first 20 year period, we changed our name, WMPA became WMA, Women Military Aviators, because we wanted to be more inclusive. We originally started as all Air Force members, and as Marcy said, the Navy joined us a couple years later, but then we opened our membership to the Army and Coast Guard and eventually the Marines as well. So, but we also, in addition to rated women, and that means pilots and navigators, we also realized that other aircrew members, female aircrew members, needed an organization to belong to, to advocate on their behalf. So we changed our bylaws to include air crew members from all services. And air crew members are engineers, loadmasters, boom operators from tanker aircraft, and other other positions that they may be officer or enlisted, but they all earn wings through a flying program. So today, our membership is over, well over 500 members, and we include members from the active duty, the reserves, the National Guard, retirees, of course, and even a few international members. We also have an associate membership available. So if someone is affiliated with a woman military aviator, or if they're just interested in learning about our legacy and what we're all about, a person can join as an associate member. We do a lot on a yearly basis. We get together at least once, sometimes twice a year for conferences and conventions. We also do mentoring to our younger pilots and transitioning from the military to the civilian world. We have a very robust scholarship program. We keep a quarterly newsletter, which Sophia Connerly edits for us, and we're also very active on social media. I'm going to go to the next slide. One thing that we are trying to embrace right now, since the organization was started with generation two pilots, we're trying to get more involvement from our Generation 3 pilots. And Marcy, why don't you go ahead and speak to that? Okay.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=942.26,1104.1"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e The combat exclusion law is the break point between Generation 2, which is 1973","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1106.58,1112.54"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e to 93, and generation three, which are combat pilots from 93 on. The combat exclusion happened because generation two, Margie and I were flying contingency operations around the world or expeditionary kinds of missions. And very often we were within firing range of air surface to air missiles, and we didn't have any way to shoot back. There's numerous examples from our membership and across the Air Force and all the other services of women being in positions where that was the case. And the biggest example that is Desert Storm One in 1991.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1113.32,1159.94"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e That conflict in the Middle East required all available resources, air resources, like over 171, 000 different sorties were flown in a six month period. The services could not field all those aircraft without the women. We were at that point about probably 12% of the force across the board and less than that in aviation. But we were key in various crew positions and they couldn't pull us out and fill us all with men in order to do that war. So even though we were not allowed in the combat zone, we were flying right up to it or technically over the line to provide a logistic support, bringing in all of the combat requirements for the Army and the Marine Corps, doing a reconnaissance missions overhead, all of those kinds of things. So when we got back from that war and Congress started taking an interest in why do we still have this combat exclusion law, The Rolodexes, as we say, because we're old, went out and we activated the women military aviators to take leave, put on their uniforms, go walk the halls of Congress with someone else who could advocate for us because we were there just to educate because that's a requirement when you're in uniform to only, to not advocate for anything with Congress except through official channels. And we were not on official duty. So we walked the halls and we told them the missions that we had been flying for the last 20 years. And we convinced enough of the congressmen through that education process to vote for the repeal of the combat exclusion. That happened in December of 1991 when President Bush signed that law. However, there was a clause in that law that it needed to be studied for two years to make sure that it was the right thing to do and how to implement the policy of that law change. So it wasn't until April of 1993 that the Secretary of Defense allowed women to fly combat aircraft. So on this slide, you'll see pictures of some of those gals who were either the first or have done significant things since being allowed to fly combat aircraft. And of course our Blue Angels and Thunderbird demonstration teams have had women pilots now, at least one in each of those platforms. Next slide.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1161.18,1327.1"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e We'll stop the history lesson here and talk a little bit about our historical committee. As I mentioned before, we directly support the WMA mission, which is preserve the past, protect the present, and promote the future. We're tasked to document and preserve the true story of women military aviators for researchers, for educators, and anyone who's interested in following the legacy by archiving our activities of not just our organization, but our personal members. We have two major initiatives right now. One is maintaining our official archives at Texas Women's University, Denton, Texas. And I believe we have one of the Special Collection staffs with us today, thank you very much. They have been instrumental in helping us preserve our past and we have many different projects going on with them. They maintain a website for us or a web page for us with digital information about our organization, and it is constantly growing and improving. They also keep our artifacts on file, documents, files, things like uniforms, flight gear, log books, personnel records, and so on. And all of this is so that researchers, educators, and eventually the public will be able to get a full, complete picture of the women who served in military aviation. The other big project that we have, of course, is the oral history program. And I think, Marcy, I was going to turn it back to you for that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1333.18,1443.9"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, yes. So, oral history. We were doing, it started in 2016. We have our conventions with the, in conjunction with the Women in Aviation International, Women in International Aviation, Women in Aviation International Conference every year. And in 2016, we, they put into their Hall of Fame, the first class of Air Force pilots that were women. So I took my little digital recorder, and I sat down with them at a roundtable and I just asked them questions about being the first class of women in the Air Force. And I still have not transcribed that transcript yet. So we have loaded it into their story, however. So then we start, we upgraded and we got video cameras and we would go to these conferences in any of our Hall of Famers that were inducted, we would then sit down with them, try to in a quiet place with our video recorders and ask them questions and try and do an oral history. And then COVID hit. And I had joined the Society of American Archivists as an associate member since I don't have a degree in that area. Because I wanted to learn about archiving and I didn't know about the oral history organization or I would have joined them as well. But at they decided that year because of COVID to do their conference virtually. And so I was delighted with that, because I could never get off work to attend. But I went to the virtual conference, and there happened to be a seminar on oral histories. And so I was sitting in on that, and was introduced to the fact that there was this upstart brand new company called Their Story, and that they were looking to help support people and organizations that wanted to start an oral history program. So I took down the name Zach, and I made a phone call after the conference and talked to Zach, and he worked with us and enabled us to start working with him and gave us a subscription for a year, and then helped work through our learning curve on how to use the system. Because while we were technologically advanced in running the aircraft systems, sometimes technology with simple things like recording and websites sometimes baffles me. So that's how we got started with our oral history program.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1447.2,1608.94"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, thanks to Zach, we got started. It was actually very easy. Zach, you and your staff are incredibly easy to work with and very responsive when it comes to any questions that we have. We found that their story and our oral history project, it's a perfect fit and it has been a game changer for us, truly. We are now able to collect so many oral histories and conduct interviews virtually. And so while we were maybe recording six to eight with our old video camera one-on-one, now we can get, we could get probably 20 or 30. We're not quite there yet. But, and that includes not just recording the session, but also a transcription. And that is key because it would take hours and hours of us trying to transcribe an interview and with the background noise and all, it was just terrible. But we've expanded our initial efforts with their story. We were just doing one-on-one, but then we took advantage of the solo sessions and we will sometimes pick a topic like where were you on 9-11 or what was your role in the combat exclusion law repeal effort, where a person can access a link that we give them and then just talk right to the camera about their experiences. We do continue to do mostly one-on-one interviews, but sometimes we'll do group interviews. Let me, there we go, So that we can record conversations between people because what we found is that when you have at least two people in addition to the interviewer, they feed off each other and they can ask each other questions and clarify. And on this slide, you have several examples from their story of things, projects that we have been working on with our individual members. I think this pretty much wraps up an overview of what we've been doing. I hope you know a little bit more now about women military aviators, who we are, what we do, and our connection to their story. This slide is very dear to Marcy and I. It shows the three generations of women military aviators. The first woman is Sarah Hayden, a WASP. Marcy is at the back representing generation two, and the Army aviator in the middle represents Generation","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1611.42,1776.48"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e 3.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1776.76,1777.26"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e We're extremely proud to be part of this group and to work on our oral history program. And Zach, we'd like to turn it back to you now. And if you have any questions, we'll be happy to answer them.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1778.5,1791.02"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Absolutely. Well, thank you for the overview and both in terms of the history of the organization and really coming about. I mean, while you're maybe one or two, you know, women in a group at a time and WMA and kind of originally the WASP program coming out of creating more of a community and support. You know, I'm curious, once you started going with the oral history program itself, you started with in-person interviews, COVID hit, moved to experimenting with remote interviews in different ways. How have you found what some of the similarities, differences, advantages, disadvantages have been of in-person recording versus the various styles of remote recording that you've done.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1791.74,1840.32"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Marcy, you wanna take that?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1841.92,1843.36"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e Oh, sure. So in-person, the advantage is you get to read their body language. You know, you might ask a specific question and you can see that they're uncomfortable. And in our case, I really think a lot of us have mild cases of PTSD because of how we, especially Generation Two, because of how we had to survive in a man's organization being the only female. And, and so, by that body language, it's a little more personal when you're in person. You can still see that on video. The advantage of video is that, you know, doing it online is that our members are all over the globe. And trying to pin them down or trying to physically get together at the same location is becoming increasingly difficult as we age. So we have to take the aging factor into into account, but the ability to do it online, I think greatly outweighs for the convenience of it, the ease of it, because it just takes an internet connection and we can talk people through, you know, getting the best internet connection and getting them online with us. But that clearly outweighs being in person other than other than the fact that we can't hug each other.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1843.58,1931.62"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e I might mention that we still do video camera interviews, because at some of our conferences, we'll get a fairly large group of women together. For instance, a class of aviators that has been inducted into the Hall of Fame. And that way we can get them all around a table. And with our video camera, we can record their discussions. However, with their story, we can upload all of that information and transcribe the session. So their story comes in again, even when we're still using the old fashioned video cameras.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1932.88,1965.84"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, I love that, that you're, you still have the flexibility of being able to record in person and when that is the way that makes sense and you can hug and but also still have the ability to not miss out on the opportunity to interview anyone wherever they may be. What have been some of the challenges that you've had along the way with the program? How have you overcome some of those challenges? Anything from technical to even whether it's like reservations that people have about sharing their stories, whatever some of those might be, I'd be curious to hear about that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=1967.74,2011.82"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e You hit the nail on the head, Zach. The reservations that people have about sharing their stories, a lot of times, especially the generation three, the younger women, they're still on active duty and they seem very hesitant to share their stories, whether they're afraid of perhaps recrimination or they just don't think their story is important yet, but of course it is. And it's very important to get these stories recorded while they're fresh in your mind. And because what Marcy and I have found out is that as we do age, you know, you remember the stories a little differently and or you forget them entirely. But I guess that's our job as interviewers is to pull those memories out and get people to talk about them.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2012.44,2053.679"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e And how have you addressed that when someone says, what's the significance of my story? Like, what do I have to share? How do you address that? Marcy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2055.6,2068.219"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e I make the argument that history, especially military history, is written from the perspective of Department of Defense, and it's focused on the operations, and it's not focused on the individual human side of the story. And to, to build the story to tell our stories, enables future researchers to, to understand the impact on humanity of military operations. So I build that argument and then I say, you may not want to say some things about some of the people that you serve with. And that's understandable because for those of us that are retired, we are still liable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for anything that we could be charged with under that code, as long as we live, because we're receiving retirement pay. So that argument also inhibits people from speaking. But the safety valve for that is that within their story, we can control who has access to that to those stories to those oral histories. We can take excerpts out of an oral history that are non-controversial, we can keep the rest of it secure and we can guarantee those individuals that it will not be released without their permission. And Texas Women's University supports us with that as well. We can do the same with them if we if we give them a copy of the oral history from their story. So that enables some sort of security in their minds, that if a story they want to tell it had an issue with an individual that they don't want that individual to know about. Maybe that stays sealed until that member dies, and then it's open to the public. But the end result is researchers in the future need to be able to have access to all of these stories. And so that's the argument we try with our members to communicate. Another issue for some of them is, oh, I have to get my resume out. And then I have to take notes and I have to remember the stories. And so for that, we just say, hey, just let's get together and have a conversation. One of those last slides you saw me and Claudia, Coast Guard gal doing an oral history on my video camera that we uploaded into their story. She did not want to be by herself on the video. And I have another one that was like that as well, who did not want to talk about her military career. And I said, let's get together and talk about our flying at Beale, because both of us were at Beale Air Force Base, and we both flew the tankers against the SR-71. So in that discussion with the two of us on camera, I got her to talk about her career a little bit just by talking about our flying experiences. So every bit that you get down on video is important for researchers in the future. And every story is important for every organization and every human being.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2069.5,2264.12"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e I love that. And one, having the argument about how is this going to be used, be beneficial for future research, having that safety valve of, hey, we can have Anything that you don't want to have shared, you can keep that private, just release things that in the short term that are safer to share or easier to share. Yeah, I think that that approach sounds fantastic. Margie, anything that you wanna add to that? I do have some other questions, but I","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2266.88,2304.14"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e wanna give you a chance. Just one thing in that a lot of women or anybody think their individual story is not important, but when you take them collectively, you get a much better picture of the group at large. So we try to emphasize that point as well.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2304.14,2320.94"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah. In that vein, I'm curious what some of the themes are that have emerged from the collective of interviews?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2322.04,2333.66"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e I'll start, Mark. The main theme for Generation 2 and Generation 3 that we can always get the ball started with is bathrooms. There are usually not good women's bathrooms and there were none in our generation in the early days in hangers. They were all men's bathrooms. In alert facilities, they were all men's bathrooms. And so if you say, talk, let's talk about bathrooms, all of a sudden, I mean, even generation three, even the last year, you know, in a contingency operation forward, and they set up the bathrooms, and there wasn't a female bathroom. And so all of those kinds of, I mean, just that common little thing then gets them started and rolling onto other topics.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2335.12,2382.54"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e That's great. Yeah, finding that common ground also as a way to get the ball rolling and get people comfortable. Was that something that you expected, like coming in, you're like, oh, I'll hit him with the bathroom question or topic and that'll get them going and we'll get started. Or was that something that you kind of figured out as you had started to conduct more interviews?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2384.6,2409.38"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e I think with one of our very first group interviews, we had women from the very first class, 1973, speaking with women who probably didn't get their wings until 30 years later. And they're still talking about the same problems or similar problems that have spanned two generations now. So we have picked up on that, those types of themes of the recurring problems that really haven't fixed themselves.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2412.12,2439.66"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah. And","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2440.14,2440.94"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e part of that is our own background. We both flew over 20 years, you know, in the military. And then the other part of it is I'm still in the Department of Defense, I still work for the Department of the Air Force. So like two years ago, the chief of staff of the Air Force made this huge announcement that they were going to, that women deserve to have uniforms that fit and flight gear that fit. And so he was doing a big push and making this big, huge announcement about it. And the staff brought that to my attention. And I looked at him and I said, 40 years later, well, it's not too late, I guess. So some things take a long time to get addressed for various reasons for funding for, you know, quantity of scale, there just weren't enough women to make it worth the money to get G suits to fit them. And so it's things like that, that we keep a keep an eye and ear out in Department of Defense news releases that allow us to then ask those questions.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2441.04,2505.86"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2506.5,2507.0"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e I'm going to frame two questions here because just looking at the time, one is I'm curious what have been the biggest impacts, The biggest benefits that you've seen from using their story, whether from transcription to whatever it might be, what are the biggest impacts? And then separate from their story, the thing that I wanted to start to get to around lessons learned are, if you were to start the oral history project or program again from scratch, what would you do different if you were to start again right now? So impacts and then let's talk, shift to lessons learned a little bit.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2510.86,2553.9"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, I think the biggest impact which we've mentioned before is the sheer number of interviews that we can do. And we've learned that it's better just to get as many interviews as we can. We may not be able to transcribe them all. Actually, their story does transcribe, but we still have to go back in and edit the transcriptions. But what we try to do now is just get as many as we can recorded, and we'll transcribe them, hopefully, with our new intern a little bit later. As far as if we started over, I think I was a little tentative about doing my first interview. I think it took me a month, First of all, to find somebody to agree to be the guinea pig and then to go through it. And then once I did, it was easy. But I think I would encourage people to jump in as soon as you can, because it's very user friendly and you'll start seeing the benefits immediately.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2554.74,2613.26"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e I think starting over, we would have sought you out at the beginning and not done the whole video camera thing. But we actually did seek you out as soon as you were available or just shortly after you had started, maybe within eight or 10 months after you had started. So I think that would have saved us tons of work And the ease of using your platform, especially virtually across the globe, really takes away the argument of people not wanting to do the interview because it's so simple to do and so easy to do. Easy to do.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2615.58,2656.1"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, thank you. Yeah. Well, it's been a pleasure to work with you both over the last couple years and now for five more, which very, very excited about. Haley, I also see your comment in the chat. Haley wrote, well, Haley, do you want to unmute and maybe share?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2658.3,2679.94"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Audience Member:\u003c/strong\u003e Sure, yeah, no, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate y'all's approach to the interviews because I did quite a few oral history interviews, eight, 10, 12 years ago now with World War II veterans. And so many of them, they were like, well, I didn't do anything special. My story is not important. It's not the movie story. And so, you know, we had to do a lot of like reassuring and telling them that, you know, yeah, we want to hear about what the mundane thing was like carrying the mail or whatever, you know, mundane job you thought you had. Because it mattered. It made you know, the wheel spin and it made sure that people got what they needed and all the things worked. And so I appreciate that that's kind of your approach because I think a lot of people don't do it that way. I'm a military historian by training and a lot of people are like, oh, they're not the exciting person, we don't really care. But if you don't have those stories, then all you have are the exciting exceptions. And then you have a lot of people who say, well, I don't fit that. So obviously something's wrong with my service. So I appreciate your approach that way. Thanks.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2683.04,2748.74"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Thank you, Hayley. I'm curious, as we start to wrap up a little bit, you know, their story aside, and the tech and all that aside, what have been, what's been the impact to you, to the members that you've interviewed, to the organization? I mean, what have you seen as the benefit of doing the oral history program itself? I'd be curious to hear a little bit about that and what's next for the project and your hope for the future of WMA and the oral history program.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2750.38,2792.02"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, the impact is great because when you look at the number of interviews and transcriptions that we can collect and then archive, we are fulfilling our purpose of preserving the past. So as I mentioned before, it's been a game changer for us, truly. As far as the future, we have signed on for another five years with their story and we're planning a five-year plan of getting more interviews and more people involved with trans helping with the transcript transcript editing because that's a that's one of our more time consuming pieces right now. And So I think we're going to try to expand exponentially when it comes to collecting these interviews and stories. Marcy, did you have something?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2792.98,2844.98"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e I think you said it very well. I would add that, including the transcriptions, we also try and footnote everything from a military perspective, because someone just doing research may not understand the military terms. So we footnote locations, we footnote airfields that maybe no longer exist, We footnote acronyms. So the hope is in our transcriptions that are resident at their story, there will it will be a complete package. So a and also kind of point to where to look next for some of those references that the person may talk about, because that helps a researcher, almost like a finding aid inside of the transcript, that helps the researcher know what we're talking about and give it scale and scope and location. You know, like if you say pack fleet, a Navy gal is gonna know what that means. But you know, what is that? That's the Pacific fleet. And that allows people then to go, oh, I need to look that up. And we're also trying to gather up where all the other archives for our members are resident, because some of our members have given things away to museums. And so all of that's important as well to annotate in these transcriptions.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2845.76,2929.42"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/68","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Fantastic. Any last questions from the audience, from folks here on the call? Anything else that you'd wanna ask Marcy or Margie?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2931.54,2943.28"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/69","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e I'm good.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2946.42,2947.18"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/70","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Jacob, Jacob has a question.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2948.04,2949.64"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/71","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Audience Member:\u003c/strong\u003e I mean, yeah, thank you. It's fascinating. And I, sorry, this is a dreaded, more of a comment than a question, but I just wanted to, well, I just wanted to follow up on what you were saying about, and as Hayley mentioned as well, absolutely the value of kind of non-memorable stories or of typical stories, because yeah, when you're doing moral history you get that a lot and people say well what have I got to say and let's just talk And because often for an outsider, for someone who isn't embedded in that world, a mundane detail helps the outsider get a sense of that world. But also there's often really interesting detail buried in there that people don't realise. I said I work with the team at the British Library, we have a project called National Life Stories and these are specifically to record longer life stories, so we do really long interviews, they're about eight to ten hours, not all in one go, I hasten to add, but a session for people to narrate their whole life story. And part of the benefit for that is that you get that kind of granular detail and an understanding of what people were. The transcription is a bit of a bear, I will agree with you on that, but I just wanted to kind of say as well that, put my hand up and advocate for the importance of longer, less exciting interviews as well as a value to the historian. But no, this sounds, this all sounds really fascinating and I suppose have you had anyone work with these materials yet? Or is it just a case of building the archive and building it and they will come?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=2951.32,3071.68"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/72","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Actually, we have done a good bit of work. This year marks 50 years of women military flying, the modern military, not the WASP, and 30 years of women being able to fly in combat. So there've been celebrations going this entire year long. And fortunately, we've had a lot of, we've been able to record interviews about those subjects. And a lot of that information has been used.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3072.54,3101.02"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/73","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Heidi, I see your hand up. Do You want to try? Can","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3104.62,3108.12"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/74","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Audience Member:\u003c/strong\u003e you hear me okay?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3108.12,3109.14"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/75","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3109.2,3109.7"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/76","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Audience Member:\u003c/strong\u003e I was just wondering about preservation and you know the format of the recording and long term kind of archival stuff and how do researchers access this from the their story platform or do they go in or they access it through the archives as it being kind of archived at Texas Women's? What's that kind of long term?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3110.34,3133.12"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/77","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e That you can probably answer for their story. Texas Women's University does archive our information. Right now, we have not made that much of it public because we have to go back through and sanitize a lot of the information that's been given to us. And plus, we need to have the permission of each individual member who has a collection, and a lot of that takes time. So I would say we're primarily in the accumulation stage, but Zach if you wanted to talk about what their story does to save information.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3133.14,3165.74"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/78","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Sure, sure. Yeah, happy to share my screen in a briefly. Yeah, so, so ultimately we just released actually a couple weeks or","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3166.22,3191.022"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/79","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e couple of days ago, take that back, a new capability that allows organizations to create view-only accounts. So you could essentially","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3191.022,3191.458"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/80","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e give access to a researcher, but for the most part, organizations have used their story as their private hub, if you will, for streamlining collection, AI transcription, transcript editing, I'll show that really briefly in a moment, and then getting that data out and getting that into whatever preservation or access systems the organization is using. And we just adhere to kind of metadata standards and interoperable formats and so on. But you can, as you organize recordings kind of following the visual paradigm of Google Drive here, you can actually add recordings to more than one, say, folder. And so you can have a folder that is just for internal use, and you could have a folder that you give access to for, say, researchers or someone in particular. And so you can manage all of that just through kind of the settings within a given project where you have the different types of users, view only being one where they could then, if they were view only, they couldn't add content, they couldn't launch a call, they couldn't upload new materials, but they could come in and say, search for a term that they're looking for and get back all the results where that terms in the title, the description or tags or the participant names, or even if it's down to the level of the transcript. And so they could, or even index or clips that you're identifying. So in that way, you could actually find what you're looking for, whether that is, you know, in the index, maybe it's not spoken. You know, someone could talk about segregation for 10 minutes, but never mentioned the word segregation. So how do you pull out some of those cross-cutting themes or down to the transcript that's connected to the media. So if I double click on a word, it'll skip to that moment and more easily find what you're looking for that way. So long-winded way to say mostly private hub, but as of actually a couple days ago, you can now give like view-only access to individuals.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3191.458,3311.02"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/81","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e And Heidi, even though we're in collection phase, if a researcher needs information, they can sure contact us and we can figure out what we can give them access to. And in addition, we'll be working with this new function in their story to start figuring out what we can put up for the public use as well.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3312.1,3330.6"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/82","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e I think that answers Mason's question about public access. That's something that we're working on right now.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3331.06,3337.4"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/83","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Audience Member:\u003c/strong\u003e Sounds great. Thank you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3338.96,3340.18"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/84","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Any other questions before we go to last comments here? Awesome. Marcy, Margie, anything else that you'd like to share before we wrap anything you feel remiss not to share before we wrap up for today?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3341.94,3359.04"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/85","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Go ahead, Marcy.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3360.76,3361.62"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/86","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Marcy Atwood:\u003c/strong\u003e Sorry, I do want to thank you, Zach, and your team, because you really have been patient with us as we've had a high learning curve with their story. And we look forward to working with you for the next five years, and we're very excited about it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3361.78,3374.34"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/87","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, Zach, thanks so much. We wouldn't have the program we do today were it not for you and their story.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3375.84,3383.42"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/88","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Zack Ellis:\u003c/strong\u003e Thank you. Absolute honor to work with you both. And yeah, no, here's to another five years of telling the stories of pioneering generations of women military aviators. So thank you to you both. Thank you everyone who joined today and for being really engaged and chiming in, asking questions. I hope you all came away with what you were looking for and are feeling a little more inspired to keep going or get started with your own oral history projects. So have a great Thursday, everyone, and take care.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3385.24,3417.54"},{"id":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786/transcript/49582/annotation/89","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003e Margie Varuska:\u003c/strong\u003e Thank you.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://theirstory.aviaryplatform.com/collections/926/collection_resources/106962/file/207786#t=3419.44,3420.18"}]}]}]}