University Daily Kansan, April 8, 1981
Page 3
Nancy Shontz
Curiosity leads Shontz to city involvement
By PAMHOWARD
Staff Reporter
Shontz, who has lived in Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, moved to Lawrence when her husband accepted a position in the department at the University of Kansas.
One of the first things she did after arriving in Lawrence in 1980 Shonz said, was to attend a City Commission meeting. She also met meetings were then in the afternoons.
Getting involved in politics just didn't interest Nancy Shontz before she moved to Lawrence.
"I walked up to the Watkins Bank (now the Watkins Community Museum) and climbed the stairs, not knowing where I was going or whether I was welcome," she said. "I shoved on through the door and there were five men all starring at me. I plunked myself throughout the entire meeting because they couldn't figure out why I was there."
"Things would happen politically that would stick in my mind," shortz said. "I think the seeds were there . . . but I never got involved in any governmental activity here." "I was young, was starting a family and had other interests, too."
Similar Holocaust programs will be
SHONTZ SAID the only other people
Hillel sponsors Holocaust memorials
The 6 million Jews who died in Hitler's Holocaust will be remembered tomorrow in the first of a series of expositions at Hillel, a Jewish student organization.
The events tomorrow will include a luncheon and film presentation, and a photographic exhibition will be held at Satellite Union throughout the week.
sponsored by Jewish organizations all over the United States during the month of April, a spokesman for Hillel said yesterday.
"All these programs are gearing up for Holocaust Memorial Day, on May Jane Litwin assistant director of Hilliard University's group of thing people want to forget, because it's so hard to deal with. These programs will educate people."
The luncheon and film presentation will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m. in Cork 1 of the Kansas Union. The film, "Memorandum," "documents the return to Germany of a group of Nazi concentration camp inmates" for the 20th anniversary of their liberation
The series of posters and photographs will be exhibited at the Satellite Union until Friday. The posters provide a pictorial history of the Holocaust years.
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“As soon as their business was finished, they left and I sat there. There was great puzzlement, but I never explained why I was there,” she said. “When the meeting was over, I left. But I found that to be a very good experience, and it stayed in my mind all this time.”
in the audience were two men, who were there because they had business with the commission.
The meeting was a good experience, Shontz said, because it made her wonder why city government was such a private affair. She wanted to know why anyone wasn't interested in what their government was doing.
"Then I discovered the League of Women Voters, and I joined it. I had heard of their organization before, but I didn't know very much about it."
Shontz said she immediately became active in the League and learned about local government as well as local, state and national issues. She later became chairman of the League's city government committee.
"I began to realize that the city government needed to be modernized,"
she said. "The League pushed for evening meetings, so that more people could come, and for published agendas, so that the public would be aware of what's going on and might show a little more interest."
IN THE EARLY '70s, Shontz was appointed to a group called the Citizens Advisory Council.
"It was a rather large group of citizens," she said, "who broke up into smaller groups to concentrate on developing a Goals for Lawrence" program from the citizen standpoint, what we thought needed to be done for the city in the future. I worked on transportation."
She also joined the Douglas County Environmental Improvement Council, of which she is still a member.
"That's an organization composed of individual citizens mostly in the city, although county people are welcome. There is a lot of interest in good land-use planning."
As a City Commissioner, Shontz said she would make decisions in a calm deliberative manner, stressing research and data and opinions from a
wide range of people interested in the issue.
"I do not like this sudden hit-or-miss type of decision-making that I see happen too many times," she said. "I prefer being given options with supporting data for each option to choose among."
CITIZEN COULD give the city the valuable ideas and opinions needed to make appropriate decisions, Shontz said.
"I'm very much interested in what anybody in the community who has lived here many years and who has personal experience and knowledge has to say that would be beneficial on the particular issue involved," she said. "I am also interested in people who are new to our culture and in finding the benefit of their experiences in another city. I think that is very valuable input."
Shontz said that she would like to have the city conduct study sessions to discuss goals for Lawrence. These sessions would include commissioners, staff members and any citizen who wanted to attend.
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