Lisa Kay Speer

Lisa Speer, state historian and director of the Arkansas History Commission.
Lisa Speer, state historian and director of the Arkansas History Commission.

Time hangs over the state historian's desk, in nagging, red, erasable letters.

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Lisa Speer, state historian and director of the Arkansas History Commission.

photo

Lisa Speer, state historian and director of the Arkansas History Commission.

Lisa Speer flicks a glance at her marker board "Daily Schedule" of must do, should do, try to do, and remains calm. Water, tea, coffee? Here's a cozy set of chairs in which to chat. Does the guest mind if she shuts the door?

Lisa Kay Speer

Date and place of birth: Sept. 19, 1966, Fayetteville

Family: Husband Thomas Eaton, writer and teacher; two dogs, Lab-chow mix April and Lab-moose mix Merrie; father Clyde Speer of Malvern; one stepson and his family, including grandson Anthony.

My grandmother’s name is Miss Lisa.

Every Arkansan should know about the Arkansas History Commission. Because I hear frequently “I had no idea that this place existed.”

The strangest thing in the state archive is the cremains of Moses T. Clegg of Red Bluff (1876-1918), a bacteriologist who discovered how to culture the leprosy bacillus.

Arkansans should be proud that Arkansas was only the third state in the United States to form a state archives — after Alabama and Mississippi.

Our ancestors would be surprised to know how much we cared about what rank they held in the Civil War. At the time they were probably thinking, “Just let me live.”

All archives should be concerned about being relevant.

I collect things that have sentimental value to me. I’ve never thrown away a greeting card. If you sent me a greeting card in 1978, I probably still have it. And it’s in a folder under your name.

Everyone ought to keep recordings of the voices of people that they love.

I would like to learn Italian.

If I hadn’t become a historian I would have been a chef. I told my first-grade teacher, Mary Samson, that I wanted to be a cook because I didn’t know the word “chef.”

If I had 20,000 S&H greenstamps I would redeem them for more time with my dad and my relatives. There is never enough time.

One word to sum me up: Compassionate

The Arkansas History Commission is living people. Merely closing that door won't guarantee no knocking, but a hastily scrawled, "Do not disturb; meeting in progress" sign should help.

"I am an administrator," she says, apologetic, responsible in a world where a door is no defense. Two years into her tenure at the head of the nation's third oldest state archives, she sees herself "sort of settling into the job" and "a little bit less frantic." But there was a learning curve in moving from a laid-back, time-rich academic culture to the time-eating demands of a governmental agency. Sometimes she feels like a character in The Big Bang Theory, beset by Sheldons (Penny? Penny? Penny?).

Forget any notion that being director of the state archives and the Arkansas History Commission is like being an archivist or a historian.

"I wish my job was like that," she says, and means it.

"I mean, I love my job," she says, and means that, too.

"I think a lot of people probably do envision that an archivist's job is wandering around amid piles of old records and sorting them, then putting them in folders and boxes, and reading old documents. And I did have jobs in the past that were like that. I had the luxury of time to really immerse myself in historical collections and kind of get to know the people whose lives I was organizing decades and centuries later.

"But those days are gone by, for me."

Instead she is the boss of 25 full-time employees, at three facilities. She sets priorities. Writes policies, budgets. Approves acquisitions. Reports to the commission's board members, her seven bosses. Serves as secretary to the Black History Commission of Arkansas. Works with a grant writer. Seeks funding.

That last piece -- Penny? Penny? Penny? -- is not to be ignored. Her agency is part of the Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism and funded by the Legislature. "Our appropriation for this biennium is just over $1.8 million," she says. "Which sounds like a lot ..."

But take out salaries, insurance and about $400,000 a year rent on 40,000 or so square feet within One Capitol Mall. What remains, she says, is about $134,000 in general revenue per year to run programs at the state's main archives in Little Rock as well as SARA and NEARA -- the Southwest Arkansas Regional Archives near Historic Washington State Park and the Northeast Arkansas Regional Archives in Powhatan Historic State Park.

"That's not per facility, that's for all the facilities," she explains.

"She doesn't have a lot of resources to work with," says one of her bosses, History Commission board member Mary Dillard. "The state has underfunded and not really given the History Commission the kind of resources that other states provide to their history commission."

Speer credits her predecessor, Wendy Richter, with obtaining grants that set in motion steps toward modernization her staff continues. But also she admits to being "very pleased with how successful we've been," thanks to grants from the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council. Grants are essential.

"She's doing great," Dillard says, on her way to praising the 48-year-old director's focus and lack of ego: "She's really very professional."

"Her temperament is incredibly even. I don't know how she does it all the time," says Thomas Eaton, the short story writer and English teacher who has been married to Speer 10 years. "There are no random behaviors, and that makes things nice in a relationship. If she's upset with me, it's generally deserved. And I'll know why. She is very good about communicating. She has expectations, she puts them out there.

"Nobody likes to be yelled at because somebody's having a bad day. She doesn't do that."

Husband admires wife, surprise! But people she's not married to concur.

Timothy G. Nutt, head of Special Collections for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, was a presenter for her at an Arkansas Foodways seminar and is collaborating on a film project. He likes her "no-nonsense" attitude, but also, he says, although low-key, "she really is a funny, funny person."

STEWARDSHIP

To reach the digital age, Dillard says, Speer had the good sense to begin her tenure by ordering a hands-on, box-to-box survey of exactly what is in the History Commission's vaults -- because there was no comprehensive list. And these are big, climate-controlled rooms, packed with stacks, floor-to-ceiling metal-edged cardboard boxes, heavily bound books and folk music on CDs, DVDs, sheet music ... no gaps. And dark oil paintings, original flags, spinning wheels, marble busts, shell casings ....

The survey also benefits her, Speer says, because her job doesn't allow her "one-on-one time" with the collection. Having read the descriptions gathered by staff and volunteers, she knows what to tell would-be donors who arrive at One Capitol Mall bearing the contents of their parents' closets.

Dillard rattles off tributes to Speer's leadership: whittling down a "massive" backlog of uncatalogued acquisitions; pushing digitization so the collection will be more accessible to researchers; changing the public fee schedule, lowering some prices, providing 2 GB flash drives for $5.75; getting a grant to resume the stalled microfilming of 107 regional newspapers and make more than 2,000 titles also available to researchers at Powhatan and Washington, so they don't have to drive to Little Rock.

Everyone was offered free digital screening of family documents on every Friday in April as part of the commission's 110th anniversary celebration. Every ticket sold for the June 6 Roots of African American Foodways workshop at Pulaski Technical College. Next up: a World War I seminar in August, an Arkansas film festival in October.

The commission has its online newsletter and blog as well as new followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

So now it's time to look for broader horizons, Speer says. In June 2014, the commission rallied collections heads at universities, museums and libraries to create the Society for Arkansas Archivists and Registrars. Collaboration, she says, is the way out of their cash-strapped common predicament. There are big pots of money at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, but these granters want to see many agencies work together.

"So if we were able to partner with the University of Arkansas Special Collections or the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies or the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture, we'd have a far greater chance of being successful," Speer says.

Nutt says the archivists are talking about throwing in together to go after an NEH grant to digitize Arkansas newspapers, creating a keyword-searchable Internet resource free to everyone. "I can always call her up and run an idea by her or get her advice on something," he adds. "I have really appreciated that."

THE UNKNOWN HOMEGIRL

Speer sees such success as having won over "doubters" who two years ago greeted her appointment with dismay. "New historian's experience in Missouri rankles critics," read one headline in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Posters complained on the UA history listserv that the job should have gone to an in-state applicant, an Arkansas history specialist. Speer was a resident of Cape Girardeau, Mo., with 12 years as head of Special Collections and Archives for Southeast Missouri State University. Her doctorate is in American history. How would any of that help her recognize Arkansas faces in old photos?

She laughs but admits the dust-up blindsided her.

"I was in Missouri getting ready for work one morning, and my aunt calls and says, 'Don't you worry about what they're saying about you in the paper.'" (Speer's impression makes her aunt sound remarkably like actress Mary Steenburgen.)

"I said, 'What?' I was just so happy that I was going to get to go home. I'd been away 25 years. I'd lost my mom and both grandmothers in that time and an uncle that was really important to me. And my dad is 85 years old -- 83 at the time -- and I was ready to come home. ... I was leaving a job I really loved, but it was time to go. And my husband and I were both giving up tenure-track jobs."

"We're not hearing any complaints," Dillard says.

Speer's aunt Gay Hawthorne of Searcy figures the doubters simply hadn't met her niece yet.

"Her mother called her Lisa Kay, but we called her Lisa," says Hawthorne, who resides in Searcy but grew up in Malvern, one of seven children of Mary Agnes and James Carl Clift.

Speer's father, Clyde Speer Jr., worked for her grandfather at Clift Truck Lines at Malvern. He was at home every night. Her mother, Katie L. Speer, was a bookkeeper, a poet and trustee of the Roy and Christine Sturgis Charitable and Educational Trust in Malvern. The Speer Pavilion and Gardens at Ouachita Baptist University were named in her honor in 1995.

They adopted Lisa Kay when she was 6 months old. She knows her birth name from her birth certificate but has never used "archivist wiles" to search for her biological parents and never has wanted to do so. She knows her mom and dad. And she doesn't think her passion for history has much to do with being adopted.

"I was the geeky child on family summer vacations who wanted to stop at every historic site and museum. I was an only child. I had indulgent parents who were willing to stop and read every road sign with me. And I loved history in high school and had good history teachers.

"But I think the real turning point was college. I had the world's best history teacher, Lavell Cole."

THE WORLD AROUND HER

Cole's name graces an award at OBU for outstanding teaching, and he was a rare storyteller, without using notes. "At the end of the lecture you were just sort of breathless because, 'Wow, that was the most amazing story I've ever heard,'" Speer says. "I was an undergrad. I took every class he taught, and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up."

Cole assigned her to keep a daily journal, which she was to let him read so he could coach her past a tendency toward self-doubt.

On his advice she went to graduate school at the University of Mississippi for her master's degree and doctorate in American history, and he remained a source of advice when she went on to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for another master's, in library and information studies, from the University of Alabama. When she landed the archivist job at Cape Girardeau, she could pick up the phone and hear his voice.

"He died the same year my mom passed away," she says. "2004 was a bad year."

She keeps a copy of Cole's textbook, Arkansas: The World Around Us (MacMillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Co., 1985) on the sideboard in her office. "So some days when I'm sitting at that desk and I'm thinking -- sigh -- 'Can I do this job?' I look up and that's kind of him sitting there looking at me."

Speer is careful with the things she keeps but insists she isn't a collector. And that's right, her husband says. She goes through possessions periodically and purges anything she hasn't used -- except for certain sentimental things, like boxes and boxes of greeting cards, decades' worth, from anyone who ever wrote to her.

"I have moved five or six times in my life, which, OK, maybe is not a lot, but I come from a culture where you don't move," she says. "You get out of school, you marry somebody, you build a house, and you stay there. And I didn't."

Now her dad is 85. He lives 45 minutes away and yet there's no time for a good long visit. She came home to be closer to family, and there's no time to see her cousins, to visit her step-grandchild. No time to catch up with her best friend from Glen Rose High School.

Time strips connections ruthlessly. An archived pile of things can convey some stories from the past, but the people are gone forever.

"There's never enough time," she says. "For everything."

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