Lilly Fund Results from Years of Experience

A young woman in blue with flowers stands lovingly next to an older woman with glasses.

Judy Everson with her granddaughter Bethany outside of Lilly Library


Judy Leas Everson earned her bachelor’s degree from Indiana State University and her master’s and Ph.D. from Indiana University. She enjoyed a distinguished teaching career at the University of Illinois-Springfield (formerly Sangamon State University).

Through it all, she remains a student at heart.

“I've learned at age 81 that it is ever so much more rewarding to give than to receive. I relearn that lesson all the time,” she said after establishing the Everson Lilly Library Research Fund in the fall of 2023. The fund will support programs and initiatives within the Lilly Library to provide and improve access for researchers. It will be applied to costs associated with digitizing and putting digitized materials online, as well as for support for researchers who are not local. 

While the Everson Lilly Library Research Fund was only recently created, its genesis dates back several decades and has been carefully nurtured through the years.

A magical place

For Judy, coming to Indiana University Bloomington was an auspicious step. She became the third generation of her family to attend IU, joining her grandfather, parents, and uncles. Judy’s granddaughter, Bethany Everson, added a fourth generation to the Leas-Everson Hoosier legacy when she earned her bachelor’s degree from the Media School in 2023.

Judy marvels at her granddaughter. “When I see her on her first job thriving because of Indiana University, I say to myself, ‘Let's just keep it going. How can I be a part of that?’”

Judy arrived on campus well versed in the family’s institutional heritage. “Since I was about age three or four, I remember being taken by my mom and dad back to Bloomington,” she recounted. “It was imprinted through all their recollections as a magical place where IU was associated with their having a chance to meet and with what they had become -- my mother, a schoolteacher, my dad, a newspaper editor.”

Judy and Dave Everson

Judy met Dave Everson when they were undergraduates at Indiana State University. Since Dave was a year older than Judy, he began his graduate work in Terre Haute as Judy fulfilled her student teaching requirements. They married on August 29, 1964, and moved to Bloomington the next week to pursue their master’s and Ph.D's. at Indiana University.

The newlyweds were on their own path to fulfillment. They each landed a fellowship and supplemented their income through babysitting, typing, and summer research assistantships.

According to Judy, “We were the poorest we ever were going to be, but looking back, we were the happiest because we were doing the thing we loved, and IU was validating that we had chosen correctly.”

A pivotal experience happened in the fall of 1965 when Judy enrolled in Rudy Professor of English Edwin Cady’s graduate seminar Problems in the Study of a Literary Archive: The Bobbs-Merrill Papers. One of Cady’s colleagues told Cady about the Indianapolis-based publisher’s archives.  Consequently, when inaugural Lilly Library Director Dave Randall informed Cady that the Library had acquired the Bobbs-Merrill papers, Cady developed a unique, experiential learning opportunity for his students.

“We got to pioneer going into the archival materials. I had never worked with primary archival materials that hadn't already been cataloged by somebody,” Everson recalled. “We each chose an author. I chose Meredith Nicholson, because my brother had attended Meredith Nicholson Elementary School in Crawfordsville, and because Nicholson had come from Crawfordsville.”

This assignment yielded Judy’s first published article, "Meredith Nicholson: The Quest for a Literary Ideal," which is included in the eighth issue of the Indiana University Bookman, fall 1967, an IU Library journal for bibliophiles. She was thrilled to be published, and the Bobbs-Merrill project bore a lifelong appreciation for primary source research. “There is a particular smell and feel to manuscript material that has not been cultivated by anybody else,” Judy said. “Before, Meredith Nicholson only been the name of my brother's school. Now, he came alive for me.”

Black and white photo of two young women in the Lilly Library reading room.

Another woman talks enthusiastically with Sandra Taylor, former curator of manuscripts in the Lilly Library Reading Room in 1977. Photo courtesy of University Archives, P0029465


Prepared by Indiana University experience

This experience with uncatalogued primary source materials came full circle during Judy’s professional career when she served as president of the James Jones Literary Society. Jones was a noted mid-20th century World War II novelist, winner of the National Book Award for From Here to Eternity. Judy traveled to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin to examine some of their then-recently acquired Jones materials. This research was in preparation for a Jones Symposium in Paris.

In The Thin Red Line, the sequel to From Here To Eternity, Jones chronicles his experience as an infantryman in the Guadalcanal campaign, including the time he killed a Japanese soldier in one-on-one combat. Jones was so distraught about killing the soldier that when a photo of him with his wife and their baby fell out of his pocket, Jones kept and cherished it.

Warned by the Ransom Center that the materials she was examining weren’t cataloged, they asked Everson to let them know if she found anything of note. “When I was going through the folders, I saw this small envelope, unmarked, and I opened it up and out fell the photo.” No longer was the incident in The Thin Red Line only about suddenly having to defend himself or die. Seeing that photo added to the pain James Jones had written poignantly about.

“I was prepared for that moment by Edwin Cady and the Lilly Library.”

Developing love for IU

While Cady fueled Judy’s love for research, Robert Gray Gunderson had a similar impact on her approach to teaching. “He brought his passion for 19th century American history and rhetoric into classrooms with undergraduates. This was a guy, honest to God, I think he lived in his mind in the period that he taught and was writing on,” Judy remembered. “I will never forget how much energy and enthusiasm he brought to the task of teaching. He was a wonderful inspiration.”

Just as prolific faculty enriched Judy and Dave Everson’s academic experience, the campus landscape and resources provided a wealth of landmark moments. “I came from a series of small and smaller southern Indiana towns where I had never enjoyed a live symphony concert, an opera, or a foreign film. I had never seen real art, world-class art. My idea of a library was just a little one-room building staffed by volunteers, if at all,” she stated. “When I got to IU, I was like a kid in a candy store. For the first year or so Dave and I were walking around the historic part of the campus marveling at the auditorium, the Lilly Library, the Art Museum, and the Von Lee Theater.

“We made friends for life. We developed interests like opera, art, and foreign films that stayed with us. It was just a wonderful experience.”

Out of adversity comes opportunity

Indiana University did a remarkable job preparing the Eversons for their careers as professors in academia. This includes the fortitude to deal with an unfortunate challenge during Dave’s first stop at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Campus nepotism rules prohibited faculty spouses from also pursuing teaching opportunities at SIU.

“Two good things happened. Most importantly, I had our son Chris, and that was wonderful,” Judy said. “Then Sangamon State in Springfield, IL formed in 1970, and they were willing to interview Dave and me separately, to consider us individually on our merits and our credentials, to hire us into different colleges -- he in social sciences, me in the arts and sciences.” She felt like she was in utopia. “I got to use what IU had prepared me to use.”

Judy Everson feels that the interdisciplinary nature of her IU coursework distinctly equipped her to be among the 45 founding faculty at Sangamon State, which became University of Illinois-Springfield (UIS) in 1995. “They needed people with versatile training. I had this double doctorate. I could teach American history because of Dr. Gunderson. I could teach American literature because of Edwin Cady. I could teach public speaking because communications had been my other major,” she said. “In a way, my versatility was an asset as a founding member. I think if you're going to be a founder of anything, you have to be fluid.”

Judy points out that this pedagogical flexibility entrenched them in Central Illinois. “Through the years, Dave and I each had a number of offers to leave (Springfield),” Everson said. “We had expended so much intellectual energy into establishing that institution that the thought of separating from it was very hard. We just had too much invested here in the campus and the community and our son’s education and all, that we just couldn't let go.”

Just as Gunderson and Cady mentored Judy, hundreds of Sangamon State/UIS alumni can attest to Judy’s influence on their success. For example, Cheryl Peck was working as a journalist at the Decatur (IL) Herald-Review in the 1980s when she decided to pursue her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Sangamon State. She then became Director of Public Relations at UIS and endowed a UIS professorship in Judy’s name.

“I was absolutely flabbergasted and overwhelmed. It was a wonderful act,” Judy said. “Cheryl said that when she endowed that professorship, she wanted to pay tribute to how the classroom became a life-changing experience for her. Who knew that in the 1980s, when she entered my class on American literature between the World Wars, that it would come to this?”

Judy pointed out that endowing a faculty position broadens the field, changes a department, and in turn transforms the school. “It just snowballs. It's a wonderful thing.”

 

If we all do our part, IU’s aspirations will be realized

Just as Peck made a legacy gift to her alma mater, Judy thoughtfully and generously marries her IU family legacy with her IU philanthropy. 

“When Daddy died of pancreatic cancer (1988), I learned through his illness how tragically difficult that disease has always been to diagnose and to treat,” Judy said. “At that point, the survival rate for just a year or two was something like 5%. Daddy took six months to pass away. I thought, here I am, just a professor, my husband a professor. What can we do that might make a difference in alleviating that dreaded illness?”

By the 2010s, IU had become the leader in cutting-edge pancreatic cancer research. Judy was ready to answer her question by creating the Leas Family Pancreatic Research Fund in 2020.

Judy credits Chancellor and President Emeritus Michael McRobbie with imparting a valuable message in the Memorial Stadium President’s Suite during the 2018 IU-Penn State football game. When President McRobbie thanked her for her generosity to the university, she remembered telling him she only wished she had more to give, but that she and her late husband were only professors. She continues, “He put his arm around me and pulled me over to him. He said, ‘Don't say just professors. I was just a professor. That’s an honorable tradition to be a professor.’”

“That was a lesson to me,” she continued. “A modest gift may seem like small potatoes when compared to what others could do, but it is important to help the university continue to be aspirational. If we all do our part, its aspirations will be realized.”

In 2022, she was thrilled to shake hands with IU’s first female president, Pamela Whitten, at the  President’s Circle induction, a ceremony honoring those who have given at least $100,000 over their lifetimes.

The recently endowed Everson Lilly Library Research Fund ensures that scholars can have either on-site or remote access to the Library’s holdings. Like Judy’s experiences with archival materials at the Lilly Library and the Ransom Center, her fund ensures many such experiences for future scholars who are realizing their own aspirations.