Beth King

Beth King

Interviewee: Beth King

Interviewer: Jeffrey Boyce

Date: August 27, 2019

Location: Institute of Child Nutrition

Description: A native Oxonian, Beth King has never lived anywhere else. King was educated in the Oxford, Mississippi, public schools before earning multiple bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and then taking a PhD from the University of Mississippi. She worked at the J.D. Williams Library for a number of years before being recruited to move to the National Food Service Management Institute, now the Institute of Child Nutrition, where she helped develop the Institute’s computer technology.

JB: I’m Jeffrey Boyce and it is August 27, 2019, and I’m here at the Institute of Child Nutrition with Dr. Beth King. Welcome Beth, and thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

BK: Thanks. Thanks for inviting me.

JB: Could you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you were born and where you grew up?

BK: Well, actually, I was born in Oxford, Mississippi. I have lived here my whole life.

JB: You’ve really seen some changes in this town then.

BK: Yes, I’ve really seen some changes in this town. So I grew up in Oxford, went to school there, I went to Ole Miss, I worked at Ole Miss, so I’ve just been here the whole time.

JB:  So you did elementary and high school in Oxford, and then bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD at Ole Miss?

BK: Um-hum.

JB: What were those degrees in from Ole Miss?

BK: Well, I did the bachelor’s degree in English and sociology. Then I had been working at the university library when I was going to school, and I was offered a job when I graduated. And they said, “You will go to library school won’t you?” And I said, “Ok, yea, I’ll go.”

JB: Was this still when Ole Miss had the library degree?

BK: This was when Ole Miss had the library degree, so I started working on a master’s degree in library science. And I was still working at the library, and we got a new director, and this director had wanted to do something with computers. This was in the late 70s at the time, and he asked me if I would be willing to take some computer science courses. So I started taking computer science courses. I should back up a little bit and say that after I finished my master’s degree in library science I started taking some home economics classes. So I was taking some home economics classes and thinking I might go for a master’s in home economics. And I was working on that and then he asked me to take the computer science classes. So for a while I was taking both computer science and home economics, and I ended up first with a second master’s in home economics, and then I went back and I finished up a bachelor’s degree in computer science. And when I finished that degree I began to think about ‘Well, what would I like to learn about next?’ And this was about the time my husband had decided to go to work on his administration degree. He was a school teacher at the time, and then he decided he would go into administration, so he started working on an administration degree. And I decided, ‘Well, I’ll see what I can do there.’ So I began to work on a degree in educational leadership. And I got a PhD in educational leadership in ’94. So for a while there I was working and going to school.

JB: How long were you at the library?

BK: I was there for about twenty years, well, twenty years full-time. I had worked previously as I was going through undergraduate school, so I worked there for about three years when I was going through undergraduate school. I finished my bachelor’s degree in three years.

JB: So then after the library did you come directly to the Institute?

BK: I did. I was working in the library and we had been working on computerizing the online catalog and the circulation system. And I got this call one day from somebody about a job at the Institute, and I had no idea about what the Institute was like.

JB: And back then it was called the National Food Service Management Institute.

BK: Right. It was. It was probably in November or December of ’90 that I got this call about if I would talk to them. So I talked to Dr. Phillips and Mr. Reeves. I knew both of them. And they were telling me about this job. And then they began telling me more about it and they said, “Well, we think we may work with the National Agricultural Library.” And my ears kind of picked up because I thought ‘Whoa, that would be interesting.’ So in January of ’91 I went with them up to Beltsville, Maryland, to visit with the people at the National Agricultural Library.

JB: That’s a big space. I toured that about ten or twelve years ago.

BK: Yea, it is. And I was kind of blown away with that, and they talked to me about the possibility of a job. I really, really wrestled with the fact of whether or not to make the move to the Institute, because I was at the library, I had tenure. The Institute was brand new, and what is it going to become? So I wrestled and wrestled and finally someone said to me, “Well, the Institute is going to always be there.” And I thought really?

JB: Well, you were taking a risk. At that time there was only a five-year grant, right?

BK: Right, right. And so I thought ‘Ok, I’ll do it.’ And so I moved to the Institute.

JB: You must have been employee #3 or something like that.

BK: Well, maybe I was. I was maybe three or four. I guess I was four, because Beverly Cross was working, and Dr. Phillips, and Mr. Reeves. And I think I came on board in February, and then Carolyn Hopkins was hired later.

JB: This was 1990?

BK: 1991. Dr. Hellums was on board too. I’m not sure where Dr. Hellums fit in all that, but yea, I was one of the early ones.

JB: Well, as we’re getting ready to celebrate our 30^th anniversary tell me about those early days. What was it like when you first came? Were you still over at the Home Management House?

BK: Oh yes. We were at the Home Management House. When I was first employed I was employed as the acting director of Technology Transfer, and we really didn’t quite know what that meant. But then later I became the clearinghouse coordinator, which was sort of a special library kind of thing. They were interesting times, very interesting times, because it was so very new, and it’s kind of like a startup company I guess. Because some people had the vision of what it was going to become –

JB: But then you had to create that reality.

BK: We really did have to create that reality. The people around me talked in acronyms that I had no idea about. They would say things like GAB and RETAB, and I would think ‘What are these things?’ And ASFSA. I did learn what some of those things meant, but it was just like every profession has its own language.

JB: Exactly.

BK: So we had our own little language and we began to do work. We really needed to get things going right away, so everything was moving at a fast pace and we were working really hard. And Dr. Martin, our executive director who had come on board during the summer, she was a really, really hard worker.

JB: Oh, so you preceded Dr. Martin?

BK: I did. I wasn’t on board long before she came, but yes, I did. We had so many things that we had to do. We started out; we needed to have some kind of brand. I remember when we did the logo for the Institute. Somebody had done these logos for the Institute and Dr. Martin put them around on the wall in her office and we looked at them and we voted on which one we thought would be best, and we took that all from there. We started from the logo. We had our first set of training materials that were called BLTs – Breakfast, Lunch Training – and they were designed to be really short training sessions. The Education and Training Division worked on those, and we presented those at the first American School Food Service Association that I had ever attended. I didn’t even know about American School Food Service Association before I started working. But we had this conference in Las Vegas and we presented it there, and it was just received so well, so well. And from the Technology Transfer Division we did satellite seminars. And satellite seminars, this is pre-internet days in the early 90s. I think the first one we did may have been in ’92. And we did one that introduced the Food Guide Pyramid to the whole school food service community. And we were funded by USDA, so they were kind of helping us along to know what they needed to have done. In doing that satellite seminar we had had to figure out a way to let everybody know about it and then know what to do, so we created something called the satellite network. I don’t remember the official title, but it was a network of working closely with State Agencies. We got someone in each of the state offices to be our state satellite coordinator. And Mark Miller, who was working with the video side of things, was the one who was in charge of contacting these people and letting them know about the upcoming seminars. We would create our handout materials that would go with the seminar and we would send each coordinator a packet of information. And then when they got that packet of information their job was to reproduce it and send it to each of the sites that would be doing the training. So it was kind of a dispersed kind of way of getting information out without our having to deal with a lot of paper.  

JB: Now who identified each of those sites? Would the state coordinator of each state do that?

BK: They did. The state coordinator in each site was responsible for identifying places that would be a receiving site. And we beamed up the program to the satellite and they got it down from the satellite.

JB: Did it go through public television or anything?

BK: No. It was some private satellite company.

JB: Oh, ok. Would they watch it on a TV monitor through a certain channel?

BK: They would. 

JB: I have vague memories of elementary school watching something like that. I guess it was educational programs.

BK: We had no clue what it would be like in an internet world. This was before internet.

JB: Cutting edge it sounds like.

BK: Well, it got the job done.

JB: Do you remember roughly how many audience participants there would be for the seminars? I’m assuming it grew over time.

BK: It did grow over time. This morning I looked back at a little interview with Dr. Martin, a little clip from her interview, and within a couple of years we had I think like 80,000 watching. 

JB: That’s quite an audience.

BK: That was pretty good.

JB: What were some of the other topics you did on those seminars?

BK: We did things on food safety. We did things on food preparation. We did some that were emphasizing cooking to the line, so that food would be fresh. We did some with chefs. There was a time in the mid-90s that there was a push to have chefs in school food service. We filmed some here downstairs. We started out pretty small in terms of production costs. I mean we had hardly any budget for the first satellite seminar or two, and they were more like talking head, or panel discussions. And then we got more into more production, and we brought in a production company and somebody who was a script writer. So we became a lot more sophisticated in what we did.

JB: So what other kind of projects did you work on?

BK: Well, I worked on the web. I worked with the person who did our first website. And then we had another person who came in to do the next one. It kind of went back and forth in terms of my involvement with the website, so sometimes I was really involved, and sometimes not quite so involved with that.  But we started our first website I think in about ’95. I was around for the first helpdesk, helped to implement and hire people to work in the helpdesk, which was in the mid-90s. I did some Education and Training things. I did some computer instruction kind of things, working with a development company that did some CD-ROMs.

JB: I guess in the early days a lot of the work would be showing people how to use the internet. What was the emphasis of your first website? What were you putting online?

BK: Well, we were putting online information about who we were, about some of our materials. We were putting some of our research projects and that kind of thing out there. Early on we didn’t have our training materials there and we didn’t have any video, but we had text, and if we did newsletters we put the newsletters online. There wasn’t anything interactive about it. It was just there for people to pull down and use. And later we were still doing our satellite seminars, but we were using the internet to distribute our handout materials. So they could just download them at the sites and use them, and then view the program. We grew over the years and so some of the programs that we worked with grew over the years. When we first started out we didn’t work with the Child and Adult Care Food Program, but then we began to do materials for them.  

JB: So at first was it strictly school breakfast and school lunch?

BK: Pretty much.

JB: And you mentioned the helpdesk. What sort of questions were you getting in the early days? Was it about regulations, or food preparation, or –

BK: Well, if it was about a regulation we had to refer them back to the State Agency, because the State Agency was the one that was responsible for interpreting the regulation. We could be getting questions about anything, and sometimes people would be calling to kind of fish for the right answer. If they thought they had the right answer to something they were trying to get a little bit of support for their answer of how to do something. Many times Dr. Phillips would talk to us and she would say, “I want us to be able to provide information to somebody who’s in Pope, Mississippi,” and what she meant by that was in a small school district – she really had the vision of our being able to help somebody right at the school level. And it turned out that I don’t think that’s really what our target audience was in those early days.  Our target audience probably needed to be more at state level, or at the school district level, just because they were more of the decision makers. Those people needed the material that would help their end user, but I’m not sure the helpdesk was really set up to help those people at the school level as much.

JB: On the line.

BK: Right.

JB: Ok. Any other positions you held at the Institute?

BK: I was acting director, Technology Transfer, and then I was clearinghouse coordinator, and then I was back to acting director, Technology Transfer when I left. In the meantime, we had this – it wasn’t a position – it was just a role really, of publication review committee, and this one was sort of a quality assurance group that I headed up and we had a group of staff members, and we reviewed all the materials that our colleagues had written. We would mark them up as much as we could, not to be critical of them, but just to try to make it the best product that we can make.  

JB: Polish it.

BK: Yes. So I worked with that committee for many, many years.  

JB: Did you publish in-house, or the university, or how did that work?

BK: We worked with Publications on campus. In the very early days of the Institute we actually created our materials in-house using WordPerfect. That was not a good way to go.

JB: I remember WordPerfect.

BK: But anyway, I don’t remember if it was our first or our second BLT that was done in-house, and it looked OK, but if you have a different program, and one that really is designed for publication, it looks a lot better. 

JB: Tell me a little bit about how the staff grew, how you went from a handful of people in the old Home Management House, then staff was added. I understand Dr. Martin brought in three double-wide trailers at one point.

BK: Well she did. When we started out we were in the Home Management House, and then we began to grow. In the early days administration was downstairs and Technology Transfer and Education and Training were upstairs.  And then we brought on more people; and we did have a room over in the Home Economics building, and that was where we assembled our materials. Then we got a double-wide trailer, which we put behind the Home Management House.

JB: Kind of out of sight?

BK: It wasn’t really out of sight, it really wasn’t, but anyway we had one out behind the Home Management House, and it was for Education and Training, so Education and Training moved out there. And I think we probably grew administratively and some of the administration moved upstairs in the Home Management House. And then as we began to develop the helpdesk, when we got more funding for a helpdesk, we moved another trailer out at the end of the first double-wide. And that one was for the helpdesk and the rest of Technology Transfer. Helpdesk had fallen under Technology Transfer, and we really were without a director. Dr. Phillips was our director at the time; she was like acting director. She was in the – we call it The Big House – she was in the Home Management House. So we put the helpdesk out there. In one room, you’ll be interested to know, we did set aside for the archive materials, so there was one little room in there that had archival materials, in no order, but they were in there, so that they wouldn’t be destroyed. And we had – I don’t remember where our sales trailer was. Somewhere along the way we had realized that we couldn’t just give away all of our materials. We could give away a little bit. We didn’t have the budget to distribute a whole lot. So we would sell them. We would develop them and we would sell some. So we developed a sales division, and we had a staff that worked in the sales division.  How it had grown was that we had the director of Education and Training, the associate director, and then we had several people who worked with Education and Training, and a secretary for that department. And then we had in the helpdesk, Clearinghouse area, we had the clearinghouse coordinator, a clearinghouse assistant, the satellite coordinator. We had a person who was the secretary for the helpdesk. And we had two or three people to actually man the helpdesk. And the helpdesk was modelled after something the American Dietetic Association had done. I took a fieldtrip to Chicago and visited with the American Dietetic Association up there. And they had a room and they had lots of people who would answer the phone all the time – answer questions that were related to whatever somebody wanted to know from the American Dietetic Association.  And then they would get together and they would assemble their responses to those questions. So it was kind of modeled around that. And then I went to one of the ERIC clearinghouses in Illinois and talked to them.

JB: Another acronym. What is ERIC?

BK: Education Resources Information Center – a clearinghouse for collecting esoteric materials related to education. Different clearinghouses had different focus. So I visited with someone there and learned about how they dealt with questions and what they were doing, and came back and we worked out a structure for how we would do the helpdesk. It turns out that that particular structure, for our audience, wasn’t quite – maybe we were a little bit ahead of our times in what to expect from that. But we didn’t get a whole lot of response. We did get people calling when we had satellite seminars. They would call our helpdesk and ask questions. But we didn’t get a whole lot of response from the helpdesk. We began to do more things that were related to dissemination of information. Instead of being sort of reactive we became proactive in giving them information that we thought they might need. And then if they called we could refer them to something we had already done. So it turned out to be more working in that kind of way. So we had the helpdesk and it grew. And we had the Home Management House and two trailers, and the university needed our spot. The university wanted to build the Ford Center, so we had to move. And we had in the works that we were going to build a building, but we didn’t have anything built, and so it turned out that there had been a building that had been partially completed and it was available for us to move into. And it was right across the street [from the current building]. So we equipped it as our office space on the top floor and our sales space in the basement. We did move one of our double wides over to use as the administrative suite of offices.

JB: It’s still there.

BK: It is still there, yea. So we were fixed for a while. We were there until we could get our building built.

JB: Do you remember when that was?

BK: I don’t remember how long we stayed there. I think we moved into this building maybe in 2000 or 2001. We might have moved there in ’97 or ’98.

JB: Ok.

BK: I don’t remember how long we stayed there, but we were there for a few years.

JB: So you were actually across the street watching this building go up then.

BK: We were, yea, we were.

JB: Do you remember the process of getting the building approved and all that?

BK: I remember a little bit of the initial planning of it, because I was kind of involved in some of it. The funding came from both State sources and Federal sources. I think it was maybe 50-50, I’m not quite sure.

JB: I think you’re correct.

BK: Some of the planning for the building was drawn from the Culinary Institute of America. Charlotte Oakley and I had gone, and I think Dr. Martin had also gone earlier. This was at the time there was really emphasis on culinary techniques and so we went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and we looked at their facilities. The auditorium is actually kind of modeled after one that they’ve got at CIA. I don’t recall how the prep kitchens came to be, but it may have also come from some of that. I think the plan at first was to put some of the Archives upstairs, and sales was going to be at the end of the building, where Archives is now. But then that plan changed and Archives was moved to the end of the building and sales was moved off to another place off campus. And I don’t know, there’s probably not still a sales division.

JB: No, there’s not one anymore.

BK: So that served its purpose before there was really a way of distributing information quickly over the internet, so it served its purpose for that time. As you make a plan for a building, things always change. When we first planned the building we had a bunch of lockers downstairs in the hallway. And then there was concern about people putting stuff in lockers, for security reasons, so I think they took those lockers out. Divisions moved around and so things changed in terms of planning. But as far as the approval process, I really wasn’t privy to what the approval process was.

JB: Do you remember moving into this building?

BK: I do remember moving into this building, yea.

JB: Was it an exciting time?

BK: It was. We were kind of all grouped together in cubicles together at the front, but being in those cubicles we didn’t really have access to windows, so that was kind of a challenge. I was trying to think how we had been before, and how we were over here, in terms of functions. And we were pretty close actually. We had Education and Training and Technology Transfer on this floor, and we didn’t really have anybody downstairs. We had the executive director over in the corner, and we had some of the administrative people down the hall.

JB: Do you remember about how many employees there were then?

BK: There were probably about twenty of twenty-five.

JB: We’re about double that now.

BK: Are you really?

JB: We’re looking for space.

BK: Really?

JB: What was a typical day like? I’m sure it evolved over time.

BK: It did. 

JB: Early on you must have just been trying to figure out how to make the vision operate.

BK: It was really a matter of what kind of project that you were working on. And what day of the week it was. We would tend to get together for staff meetings early in the week, the full staff, and then go off and do whatever it was that we did. So a lot of the work in the later days, by the time we had gotten over here, took place on the computer, so you logged onto the computer and checked your email to see what needed to be done, what kind of things you had gotten from people who needed information, or projects. Some days you might spend the whole day reviewing a document that somebody else had written. Another day you might spend the day reviewing a – if you were working on a project that was computer instruction you might spend the whole day trying to work through that program to see if there was anything that was wrong with that program, do all these buttons work, does all this do, so it was kind of that quality assurance kind of thing. And then there were meetings with colleagues about what kinds of questions have you had, or where’s a good place to find and answer to this question? There really wasn’t a typical day. It just depended on what the project was that you had going on.

JB: Anything else you’d like to share with me about your experiences at the Institute?

BK: I have sort of a funny experience to share with you. But before that, what I learned about the Institute, was when I came into the Institute I had no idea about what people in school food service – I knew what people in school food service did, because I had eaten in the schools. I had been a consumer of school food service, but I had no idea about what they did behind the scenes. I had no idea about the culture. I had no idea about the politics. I just had no idea about any of it. And I was reflecting on that this morning, thinking about if I had to tell somebody who was just starting here at the Institute, who did not know anything about child nutrition, what would I tell them? And what I would tell them is find a way to go out to the school and to find out what’s going on in the school with school food service people. Find out a way to get into the State office and find out what’s happening in the State office and how they work. And maybe even find a way to get to Washington. Now I had been to Washington. I had talked with people who worked at USDA, but I had never been in the time that I worked at the Institute. I hadn’t been at the State office. And I hadn’t really worked that much – I hadn’t worked behind the scenes at the school. Some of the people that I had worked with, their background was child nutrition, and they had actually worked there, and they knew it, and I could ask them questions about what it’s like to actually be there. But at a time when I heard a former Mississippi state director of child nutrition talk about how they felt their responsibilities, I didn’t realize just where they were coming from, because they felt such a responsibility for the people that they served. And I don’t know, it just hadn’t really clicked with me. I just didn’t know where they were coming from. So I think the more you know about that culture the better you are able to serve your clientele. Other than just actually being there and doing it, I don’t know how you get it all. But even having sort of an overview for a new person, I think would be helpful. I remember when Dr. Martin first came on board we had a meeting, and she brought in someone, I think from the State Agency where she had been serving, who went over a whole bunch of stuff about regulations and child nutrition and all of this, and quite frankly it was just way over my head. It wasn’t anything I could relate to at the time. But I think if I had heard from somebody at a State Agency about what they felt like, or the responsibility they felt to the people they served, that it would have gone a long way. And I’ll go back to my funny story, and then I’ll come back with something else, but the first time we went to the American School Food Service Association and we had our Breakfast Lunch Training, we had this banner that we were putting up on a wall. This was in Las Vegas, our meeting. And there is a picture on your website at that ASFSA meeting and the banner. But we were putting it up on the wall, and there were some chairs along the wall.  It was too high up for us to really reach, and so I stood up on a chair. And the chair was sort of a folding chair. And Jim Reeves had his pocket knife out and he was hammering. I think he had it open because he was trying to deal with some thumb tacks or something. And he had his pocket knife out and he was hammering, and I was in the chair holding the thing up, and all of a sudden the chair began to collapse on me. My legs were just kind of going down, and Jim realized I was falling down, and he grabbed me, and he still had the pocket knife, and when it was all over the blade of the pocket knife was kind of pointed at my chest, and for me it was like, well, the news back home can be ‘Alderman stabs principal’s wife in Las Vegas.’ Nothing happened; it was just a funny thing. But that particular first time to go to Las Vegas and see all those people, I think that’s probably the most memorable event of my whole career while I was at the Institute. But then the other thing I wanted to say about child nutrition is that while I was working at the Institute, and I talked about the culture, but I came away with such an appreciation for both the compassion and the passion the people in school food service have. It’s just an amazing, amazing thing.   

JB: I’ve learned that doing oral histories. Some of the people you just marvel at. They’ve dedicated their lives and careers to feeding the nation’s children.

BK: Yep.

JB: Anything else you’d like to add?

BK: Well, it had been a while, quite a while. I don’t know when I had last looked at the website of the Institute until this morning, and it’s really remarkable when you think about what’s happened in the last thirty years. It’s really remarkable.

JB: Well thank you. It’s changed a lot in the roughly fifteen years I’ve been here.

BK: It’s changed a lot. Did you know that I hired the first archivist?

JB: No, I didn’t know that.

BK: Yea, I did. When we first started the Archives I was tasked with putting together the personnel. So anyway, I hired the first archivist and then we hired some more staff to go along with it, and Meredith helped get things going in the Archives, and get things organized, and so I feel a connection to your Archives.

JB: Well good, I’m glad you got us started. Be sure and go back to our webpages and check out some of those oral histories.

BK: I will.

JB: We’ve got some great stuff there. And we just hired a new person in IT and we’re about to put up a lot more photo collections too.

BK: Well great, great.

JB: So check those out.

BK: How many people are working in IT now?

JB: We’ve got between twelve and fourteen I guess.

BK: Really?

JB: We went from the smallest division when I came on board in ’06 to the largest division right now.

BK: Fantastic.

JB: Everything has gone online.

BK: That is fantastic. I am so excited.

JB: We do our best.

BK: That is wonderful.

JB: And feel free to critique if you have any suggestions for improving the Archives webpages. We’re about to do a lot of work on them. Well thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

BK: You’re welcome. I enjoyed it.

JB: Thank you.