Family is important to Barbara Lee Myers. That is why, when her son-in-law Ken Hammond moved his family to Las Cruces, she joined them – even though she is not fond of the area’s desert climate.
Myers made her first gift to NMSU in 1996. It established an endowment for the purchase of scholarly journals related to Asian studies, the area of study her son-in-law taught in the history department. When the university was raising funds to remodel the YMCA building into the Conroy Honors Center, Myers made a gift to the building fund, naming the kitchen area in honor of her daughter Elvira Hammond.
Once the Asian studies endowment had sufficient funds to meet the department’s annual needs, Myers turned her attention to another area of the library needing support: the Rio Grande Historical Collections. She created an endowment that supports a special projects assistant to organize and catalog the boxes of personal histories donated to the library. “A student gets a practical job experience and the library has someone to relieve the backlog of donated materials so everybody benefits,” Myers says.
In appreciation of her many gifts, the University Library named one of the streets in the student family housing area of campus in her honor in 2003.
In the spring of 2007, she participated in a community outreach program sponsored by the University Museum. It gave participants a look at the behind-the-scenes work of a museum. In the process, she realized that the museum didn’t have the funding or facilities to adequately store its collections to preserve them over time. This inspired another gift of discretionary funds to enable the museum director to address some of these problems.
When asked why she has been such a strong supporter of NMSU, Myers, who earned her bachelor’s degree at Ohio State University, says, “I have always been impressed by the quality of the faculty at this university and, quite simply, NMSU needs it more.” She particularly supports the library because “they make me feel like I am a part of their family.”
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