There are some people and places that you have a hard time separating; you just can’t imagine one without the other. The person has shaped the place, and the place has influenced the …
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There are some people and places that you have a hard time separating; you just can’t imagine one without the other. The person has shaped the place, and the place has influenced the person.
It’s like that with Nancy Roth and the Kalona Historical Village. Their fibers are inextricably intertwined.
But they weren’t always. It took a fire to bring them together.
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Go back in time to the 1990s and you’ll find Nancy a DMACC graduate not sure where she was headed. She had spent her early years growing up at Reif’s Family Center, the general store owned by her family for six generations. It was really all she knew.
“We grew up in that store,” Nancy says. “My brother and I would always go down with Dad on Sundays because he’d work on the ads for the newspaper on Sundays, and my brother and I would go and play. We’d push a shopping cart around and pretend like we were shopping, or we’d set up camp underneath all the clothes, or we’d dig the two-wheeler out and we’d wheel each other around on the two-wheeler.”
She’d worked at Reif’s as a teen but thought perhaps adult life had something else to offer. Then “practically on graduation day,” her dad, Steve Reif, asked her if she wanted to return to work at the store. With a degree in office management but no other plan in place, she did.
For the next few years, she lived in an apartment over the store, spending many nights hanging out with her dad, watching the activity in downtown Kalona, while her mom worked as a nurse. Then she married Cary Roth, moved to Wayland, and started a family, all while continuing to work at the store.
It was a gut-punch to receive a call one September morning that Reif’s was on fire. Nancy buckled her two-year-old into the car and “flew into town,” having seen smoke in the sky as far away as Washington. She handed the toddler off to a friend, ran down the blocked-off street, and “Dad and I were both ready to go barreling in there, and of course [fire chief] Jerry Zahradnek stopped us, and he’s like, ‘We’ll take care of it.’”
As the bookkeeper, Nancy was most concerned about her computer; Steve was most worried about his spool cabinets. “They carried out and handed me my computer tower, and then we started a fire line with his spool cabinets,” Nancy says. “We actually lined up and they started passing those cabinets out the door and we took them across the street.”
That was the end of the store, but not the spool cabinets. They found a home at Kalona Historical Village. And Nancy, well, she did too – but not right away.
“I became a stay-at-home mom,” she says, but that wasn’t a great fit. “I’m a social person and I needed adult interaction. I learned early on that I couldn’t stay home sanely with my kids.”
She eventually found herself with two jobs: she worked as a banquet host for the new Riverside Casino and took a part-time seasonal position at the Kalona Historical Village as tour director/event coordinator – the second at her dad’s suggestion, as he was on the Village board.
The Village had been operating on volunteer power. “Nobody was here on a regular basis,” Nancy says. Once her three daughters were in school, she “literally typed out a two-page job proposal” for the Village board, suggesting she take the role of managing director. The board agreed, and she became the Village’s first full-time employee.
Now Nancy has been at the Village for 20 years. “I’m still here and love my job,” she says.
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Nancy brought her retail/office manager self to her job at the Village, and while that was an asset, at first, it caused minor conflict. Volunteer coordinator Marilyn Woodin had been managing the gift shop, and “She and I had different opinions about what we felt that gift shop should be,” Nancy says. Marilyn wasn’t into souvenirs, for example, but Nancy knew souvenirs sold well at Reif’s.
Nancy’s strong opinions about giftware predated her work at the Village.
“[Dad] and I laugh, and I say that was probably one of the only arguments he and I ever had, arguing over what kinds of gifts we were going to carry, because I wanted to beef it up and have it be nicer stuff than just little doodads on the glass shelves and such.”
But the Village gift shop evolved into something closer to her vision, and Nancy found herself a student of Marilyn’s when it came to quilts, something she “Didn’t know one thing about, didn’t know a name, didn’t know anything,” she says. “I learned a lot from her.”
The Village is known for its quilt collection, which numbers over 1,200 quilts. Every year, Nancy creates seasonal exhibits for the English and Amish quilt galleries that highlight a theme, artist, pattern, or colorway. Creating exhibits like these is her favorite part of the job, and she’s even built an entire quilt storage system behind closed doors to maintain and catalog the quilts. But she still doesn’t consider herself a curator.
“I’m not educated to be a curator,” she says. “Everything here I self-taught myself how to do, just learn by doing. My college education is not in museum history or museum studies or anything like that.”
But she will admit her formal education has some relevance: “I think in a museum field, you’ve got to be organized.”
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Kalona Fall Festival is the Village’s largest fundraiser of the year; the money collected here through admission tickets and vendor fees is relied on to keep the lights on, the buildings maintained, and the staff paid. The event is also critical to the bottom line of the Mennonite Museum and all the organizations and individuals who come out to sell food, crafts, or antiques.
Fall Festival is also an important Kalona tradition with a 54-year history of fantastic food and heritage craft exhibitions. Locals and visitors alike expect apple fritters, soft pretzels, fried pies, and tenderloins; they plan on weaving, cornmeal grinding, and apple butter demonstrations. There are expectations to be met.
All of which means the pressure is on for the Village’s managing director every September.
“Fall Festival is always a challenge,” Nancy says. “You know, you’re always trying to keep people’s interest and keep them wanting to come back. I think some things do that themselves, especially the food. People come back for the food, that’s a given, but we still want to keep some of the old traditional things too.
“A lot of people don’t come to Fall Festival to go through the buildings, which they should, because we do try to change things out in the buildings and rearrange exhibits and stuff.
“So, Fall Festival is a challenge. It always makes me nervous.”
What could doom a Fall Festival?
“The weather makes a huge difference,” she says. “People get mad at me when we don’t have good weather, but I’m not sure how I’m supposed to control that.”
She doesn’t have to think hard to remember the “worst” festival in the past 20 years; it was the year “We literally had a monsoon,” she says. She recalls a photo of “this little old couple hunkered under an umbrella. They were the only ones sitting at a picnic table because it was just pouring, but they were hunkered under, sharing an umbrella, eating their food. And it just rained and rained.”
With vendor booths flooding and no end to the rain in sight, they shut the festival down early, finishing clean-up “soaked to the bone” that evening.
Usually one hopes Fall Festival isn’t blisteringly hot, but one year, “it was literally 45 degrees,” Nancy says. Visitors may have bundled up as they walked around, but for vendors unable to move around enough to generate heat, that’s freezing.
“It was a disaster because everybody started plugging heaters in, so all of the electrical was blowing everywhere because everybody was plugging in,” she says. “I remember one gal; she literally was head to toe in her snowsuit, and then she brought a propane tank with a heater bulb on it.”
Electrical was a huge concern for Nancy during her first decade at the Village; the existing system wasn’t equipped to handle dozens of vendors plugging in fryers, heat lamps, ovens, warmers, and fans simultaneously. It took a Riverboat grant of thousands of dollars to upgrade the system.
“All you worried about both days was somebody running, trying to handle the electric,” she recalls. “So, to me, every year is a good year if you don’t have an electrical issue.”
What would it take to make a banner year for Fall Festival?
“[Dad] seems to think that as long as it doesn’t rain -- every year the sun’s shining and the weather cooperates -- every year is the best year,” Nancy says.
A Hawkeye football game at night would boost attendance, Steve suggests.
“You could, usually on a Saturday, see black and gold up and down the sidewalk,” Nancy agrees. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
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After 20 years, has Nancy ever contemplated a change?
“There were some stressful times,” she admits, but ultimately, “I worked too hard to help build this place up to what it is. That’s what always deters me from completely walking away, because I feel like I’ve put a lot of time and effort here.”
Working for the Village gave her the flexibility to raise a family. It gave her the social environment she thrives in. It inspires her with ideas for new exhibits and new projects. And people appreciate her work.
“What’s satisfying is when you get the compliments from people that are coming in and touring and saying, ‘Wow, you’ve got a really great place here,’” Nancy says. “In the end, that’s what it’s all about, preserving our history. Beforehand, I would never have thought I would have had the interest that I do, but now it’s like, what you want to do is preserve what we’ve got here.”
In the end, Nancy and the Village are intertwined, and she can’t imagine herself anywhere else.
“I truly love my job. I really do,” she says. “I mean, that’s what my life revolves around, this museum and my family.”
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