This is an archived UW-P news item,
originally posted: 3/17/2009.
We have a winner!
No, the contest Anna M. Stadick recently won wasn't nearly as financially lucrative as winning the Powerball drawing.
But as Stadick, the new University of Wisconsin-Parkside archivist, astutely pointed out, the contest she won -- naming the new UW-P faculty/staff e-mail system -- took a lot more creativity than winning the Powerball drawing.
"With the Powerball, you can hardly be creative with it," Stadick light-heartedly reasoned. "The Powerball, it picks numbers for you, or you pick numbers. So this was a greater philosophical victory than the Powerball."
Indeed it was, and Stadick got her inspiration from, of all things, the classic 1980s pilot film "Top Gun."
Stadick's winning choice was "Ranger Zone," a play on words to the "Top Gun" theme song, "Danger Zone." As Stadick explained, "Ranger Zone suggests a place where one does one's 'rangering,' staying connected and working via e-mail, instant messenger and other forms of communication."
"I'm one of those people who, having heard a song, I always remember it forever and ever, with all the words and everything," Stadick said. "I'm not a 'Top Gun' fan by any means, but I do have that song in my head. So I was hearing it once and thinking, 'Oh, danger, Ranger.' And so when this contest came up, I thought, 'Oh, Ranger Zone.' So that's about as easy as it happened."
Simple enough.
But the road Stadick took to becoming UW-P's archivist was anything but simple. In fact, it's a pretty fascinating tale.
Stadick became UW-P's interim archivist on Dec. 15, 2008, and now holds the position full-time. Her path started long ago as a Pre-Med major at the University of Minnesota before winding through Germany and back to Wisconsin.
After some time in the Twin Cities, Stadick moved to Waukesha, where she joined a religious group, the the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary, in 1989. The group is currently composed of about 3,000 members in about 20 different countries.
Stadick began studying archives in 1995 and became an archivist for the Schoenstatt Sisters. She eventually received a Bachelor's Degree in History and a Master's Degree in Public History with a concentration on archives administration from UW-Milwaukee, finishing her education in 2000.
From there, it was off to Vallendar, Germany, where she worked in the archives of the Mother House, the central house of the Schoenstatt Sisters community there, from 2001-07. One of her main jobs was to archive the works of Father Joseph Kentenich, who founded the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary in 1926.
Kentenich is in the process of canonization for sainthood in the Catholic Church, so Stadick coordinated the efforts of 20-25 people, many speaking different languages, to get the approximately 100,000 documents written by or about Kentenich into a database, listed, photocopied, boxed and sent to Rome. Some of the most fascinating of these documents, Stadick said, were the 6,000 illegal letters Kentenich wrote from Dachau Concentration Camp, where he spent three years after the Nazis viewed his growing religious influence in Germany as a threat and sent him there. Kentenich was released when the Americans liberated Germany in 1945.
Stadick decided to come back to Waukesha in 2007 to work in the archives of the Schoenstatt Sisters' Central House of the Province. When her work in that smaller archive was completed, Stadick decided to move on, which brought her to UW-P.
Being an archivist at a university certainly entails working with different subject matter than being an archivist at a religious community, but Stadick said the same records management issues and preservation issues must be dealt with.
In her time at UW-P, Stadick, who's still a member of the Schoenstatt Sisters, said she's loved working with students and professors.
"I like the atmosphere of the university a lot," she said. "You have a lot of opportunities. There's all kinds of lectures, meetings, things going on that you can take advantage of. The people here are great. The people I'm working with, the people in the archives, the library, have been really nice. Without exception, they're great people to work with."
It might be interesting to note that Stadick's work at UW-P is much more than dealing with university records. The UW-P archives also house public records from Racine and Kenosha Counties. The idea is that even though public records belong to the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, they're housed close to the people of various Wisconsin communities at archives residing in the UW system. The UW-P archives, of course, are one of them.
So Stadick's work in archiving documents from all eras in all parts of the world has given her a breadth of knowledge not easily found among most people.
And knowing the theme song to "Top Gun" turned out to be a plus, too. After all, it helped her win a contest.
