The influence of one person is sometimes all it takes to change a life.
For alumnus Gary McKown (BS Chemistry ’60 and PhD Chemistry ’65) and wife Jill Meuser, their education and the teachers they met along the way shaped their lives forever. Now they want to pay it forward.
Growing up on a farm in rural Wood County, McKown never planned to go to college. Instead, his aspirations were set on a vocational education and a career as a carpenter. At the start of his junior year in high school, a timely question from his homeroom teacher changed the course for the rest of his life: “Do you know what your IQ score is?”
“She said I should be in the academic program,” McKown said. “She dragged me down to the principal’s office by my ear, and I signed up for all the math and science courses I needed for college.”
With the help of college textbooks gifted from his next-door neighbor (a recent West Virginia University graduate), McKown raced through the college preparatory curriculum, graduating from high school at the young age of 15.
“I read all his college chemistry texts, worked through all the problems and thought, ‘I could do that,’” he said.
Choosing the college path took some encouraging, though.
“His dad graduated from eighth grade, and we don’t believe his mom attended through the eighth grade. While they were very intelligent people, they didn’t have an educational background. They came from the ‘hollers’ of Calhoun County,” Meuser reflected. “Teachers from the high school had to meet with his mom and dad to explain college and help them wrap their brains around their son going to college. His parents embraced it and fully supported it. I don’t think his mom was all that thrilled about sending her barely 16-year-old son off to the big city of Morgantown. But if there is an example of how one person can change a life, it would be his homeroom teacher.”
The support from his parents and several scholarships made college possible for McKown. “To this day, I still don’t know how my parents afforded to send me off to college,” he said. “I thankfully received a few small scholarships, which helped with the bills.”
Arriving on a campus where most of the other students were at least two to three years older than him, McKown grew up at WVU.
“I never lived in the dorms – we couldn’t afford that. I had to cook for myself. I learned to focus on studying. The whole campus atmosphere was totally different than the place where I was born and growing up on a farm,” he remembered. “I enjoyed the entire experience, top to bottom.”
He quickly got involved in the chemistry department as an undergraduate researcher and working part-time as a work-study, even spending a summer as a research fellow at the University of North Carolina. That experience helped him realize his aspiration to pursue a doctoral degree and learn how to focus his research.
“I never lived in the dorms – we couldn’t afford that. I had to cook for myself. I learned to focus on studying. The whole campus atmosphere was totally different than the place where I was born and growing up on a farm.”
– Gary McKown
“To me, undergraduate research is important. It helped me determine which career path to pursue,” McKown said. “The summer fellowship was in analytical chemistry, and it convinced me I did not want to be an analytical chemist. Too messy – too many chemicals. My PhD research and later postdoctoral appointment ended up being almost entirely instrumentation – solid things!”
After earning his PhD in chemistry, McKown became a physical chemist, first testing explosives for the military and then investigating and assessing the environmental impact of military operations. During his 39-year career, he earned two patents and worked on 22 military sites in 14 states in environmental remediation.
“Gary spent the first part of his career literally blowing things up, trying to figure out how blasts propagate. If a blast goes off in one location, how far do you have to be for something else not to blow up?” Meuser said. “One of the projects was the explosive triggers used to detonate atomic weapons. They were determining how far apart and what kind of containers were needed to ensure no explosive accidents during production. They built simulations of buildings and intentionally blew things up and analyzed the data. That’s a really cool part of his career.”
In chemistry, opposites attract. The same applies for McKown and Meuser. While McKown was purely a physical chemist working on instrumentation, Meuser began her career in analytical chemistry analyzing the material in space shuttle heat tiles for chemical impurities.
They met while working for a field investigation at Battelle, a research and development nonprofit. McKown was the project manager, and Meuser was the quality assurance officer.
“I showed up in Virginia, and Gary laughs because all these people on this field project were totally disorganized. When I first arrived at the lab, I started sorting and organizing the materials and delegating jobs. Ever since then, he’s called me Sally, like from Peanuts,” Meuser recalled. “We worked together for three weeks with a whole field crew, eating out, going on field trips on the weekend when we were off. That’s how we got acquainted – an environmental investigation at perhaps the least-contaminated site in the U.S. There wasn’t a lot of danger.”
Since then, even though she holds a Master of Business Administration from rival Virginia Tech, Meuser considers herself a “Mountaineer by choice.”
“Dr. Gee often talks about what it means to be a Mountaineer. For me, I’ve experienced unconditional welcome and true joy,” she said. “To be so accepted as an outsider as part of the family, I want to express that even though I didn’t graduate from WVU, I appreciate all that WVU is and brings to its graduates and the community.”
“Dr. Gee often talks about what it means to be a Mountaineer. For me, I’ve experienced unconditional welcome and true joy.”
– Jill Meuser
Following retirement from successful chemistry careers, McKown and Meuser wanted to find ways to support students in the same way they had been – through education.
After McKown’s parents passed away, they used the inheritance they received from the estate to establish a scholarship for future teachers in WVU’s College of Education and Human Services.
“Yes, there’s doctors and preachers, but being a teacher was the highest calling there is to his parents. The first thing we did with our portion was establish the education scholarship in their name because of how much they valued education,” Meuser said. “We established it immediately because teachers don’t earn a lot of money, and my parents were teachers, too. That was the genesis of that scholarship – to honor his parents and the value they put on education and the difference that education has made in the lives of Gary and his brother, David, who is also a WVU chemistry graduate.”
They have since established another gift to support students in the C. Eugene Bennett Department of Chemistry through their own estate planning. It supports both student scholarships and undergraduate research.
Because they don’t have children of their own, McKown and Meuser consider the scholarship recipients as their “kids.” They enjoy returning to campus to get to know them and encouraging them to pay the scholarship forward in the future.
“Whenever we meet with our kids, I tell them, you didn’t realize it, but there’s a condition attached to your scholarship. From the first year after you graduate, you have to donate $5 back to WVU. Their $5 is a checkmark, the same as our checkmark. As they become successful, we encourage them to increase that amount,” Meuser said. “I’ve found that if you establish that habit early, it keeps going. I explain how vast sums are not necessary. We, by far, are not major donors, but the appreciation expressed to us has been equal to any other gift.”
Brenden Honaker, a May 2020 chemistry graduate and current dentistry student, was the first recipient of their chemistry scholarship. The support allowed him to conduct undergraduate research for two years.
“The scholarship made a world of difference during my undergraduate experience. Having the financial aid necessary to complete my work allowed me to enjoy my college experience without worrying about how I was going to pay for school,” he said. “This experience has given me insight to the amazing and complex world we live in and made me even more dedicated to further my knowledge and abilities in life and my field of study.”
Looking back, McKown and Meuser recognize not only the importance of education in their lives, but the value of a well-rounded education through both the liberal arts and the sciences. Meuser opted to earn a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry rather than a Bachelor of Science, and McKown completed enough humanities courses while an undergraduate to qualify for Phi Beta Kappa.
“We’re big believers in a liberal arts education. In my experience, many of the young people who worked for me could not write. It was so hard to convince them that running the analytical instrument and getting a good number out, while important, wasn’t enough. If you can’t communicate what you’ve found verbally and in writing in a way that your peers can understand, you are going to be self-limiting in your career,” Meuser said. “Gary had the ability to integrate not just doing good technical work but communicating it. Working in the environmental field, he had to participate in public hearings. You’re talking to mothers who are scared their kids are going to get leukemia from the groundwater. If you just talk in ‘science,’ you sound as if you are trying to hide something even though you’re not. That ability to integrate history and communication with the science equipped us to be successful.”
To learn more about leaving a legacy gift of your own through a planned gift in support of Eberly College student scholarships and more, contact Assistant Dean of Development Pat Moline at Pat.Moline@mail.wvu.edu or Senior Associate Director of Development Amanda Wood at amanda.wood1@mail.wvu.edu.