Woman’s computer skills help to lure visitors
Team of Midewin volunteers lauded with national award
Homewood’s Carol Ference remembers starting her computing career using mainframes that were bigger than refrigerators.
“I worked on some of those,” she said. “Now, my phone is more powerful than the computer that I worked on when I started programming. It’s been amazing.”
The technology has gotten smaller over the years, but her skills have gotten larger.
From training on those old behemoths, through decades in the working world, through retirement, Ference has kept up her computer skills, and they have continued to pay off. Most recently, she was a part of a team that won a National Grasslands Award this spring in the category of grasslands research and technology.
The team of volunteers from the Wilmington-based Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie put together a series of self-guided interpretive tours of the facility that helped increase visitor participation from 7,000 in 2019 to 44,000 in 2020.
“The award recipients were selected based upon innovativeness of the research or technology transfer, the quality of their partnerships with grassland managers, and the ability to document the success of their efforts on the grasslands,” said Veronica Hinke, the USDA Forest Service public affairs officer at Midewin. “They have gone above and beyond their position to provide exceptional research and technology transfer support to grassland managers.”
Team members did research, shot photos and provided content, and Ference worked her magic tying it all in.
“Sometimes it felt like we were making a movie,” she
said. “My job was to be the pull-it-all-together person. If you ask me what my role is, it’s that other people provide the content, and I pull it all together and create the finished product and get way too much of the credit.”
Ference admits that she can be a perfectionist at times.
“I fiddle with it a lot,” she said. “I tweak it a lot.”
The 69-year-old started volunteering at Midewin in 1998 and said she always had a love for nature.
Ference, a Hammond native, attended Morton High School and Purdue University, where she majored in math and computer science before heading into the working world as a software engineer.
She wanted to give back,
too.
“I asked a friend where I can volunteer, and she said to keep my eyes open,” Ference said. “I saw an article in the Chicago Tribune about Midewin and saw that people were harvesting seed and volunteers were planting and weeding and I said, ‘I can do that.’ ’’
Her first day of volunteering had her hooked.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “People were friendly and talked to me and put me to work, so I kept coming back. I was gone for a little while and came back 2007 and been there ever since.”
She thought she said goodbye to computer work, but projects came up at Midewin, and her skills were needed again.
“What I do now is fun stuff,” she said.
Ference started volunteering in the infant stages of the massive Midewin project, which is celebrating its 25th birthday this year.
Started in 1996, this 9,000acre preserve with 33 miles of trails is the first national tallgrass prairie in the nation. It has a ton of history.
Hinke said one of the new tours Ference worked on highlights the Illinois Prairie plants that New Yorker magazine writer Eliza Steele wrote about in a journal in 1840.
Another tour highlights 120 of 275 native Illinois prairie plants species that Midewin is restoring.
There is also the Prairie Farmer Tour, which tells the history of families
that farmed on the land before World War II, when it became the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant, which closed in the late 1970s.
The plant itself, which historians say made more than 926 million bombs, shells and other explosives, has some fascinating history including an explosion in 1942 that resulted in 48 people dead or missing and was felt as far away as Waukegan.
Those who roam the grounds might see bison along with the remnants of the ammunition plant and farmhouses.
The 2020 pandemic and shutdown helped the popularity of Midewin, Ference said.
“Visitors were up dramatically,” she said. “People were
looking to recreate and get out of the house. Our Iron Bridge parking lot was full all of the time, and people were at home researching Midewin tours on computers.”