In his third semester of college, Jerry Meyer called home to say his life had changed directions.
It was 1984, the year entertainer Marvin Gaye died and President Ronald Reagan was reelected. “Ghostbusters” debuted that June and became the second highest grossing film of the year.
That year, Meyer, now the director of the Nebraska National Guard Museum in Seward, was out of money and searching for direction. His second year at the University of Northern Iowa had begun as uninspiring as the first. He needed change and found plenty.
That fall, Meyer picked up the phone and delivered the news to his father. He heard a crash, then listened as his mother picked up both pieces of the broken handset.
“What did you say to your dad?” she asked.
“I’m dropping out of college, going into the army and becoming a teacher,” Meyer said. “She said that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
But he did it anyway. He joined the Army National Guard, took two semesters off school for training, then finished a degree in education at UNI.
Today, Meyer directs the Nebraska National Guard Museum in Seward, a position he has held since the museum moved from Lincoln to Seward in 2014.
Meyer was raised in Eagle Grove, Iowa, a farming town about halfway between Des Moines and Minnesota. His parents were both teachers. His father taught chemistry and physics at the local high school and his mother taught elementary students.
Meyer graduated in 1983 and left to attend UNI, where he studied accounting
before switching majors and joining the National Guard, a decision he attributes to his first and only accounting professor. In the middle of Meyer’s first class, the man
told him to leave when he admitted he was only in the major for his parents.
“He said, if you don’t want to be here don’t be here,” Meyer said. “I wish I could get that guy some money. Best advice I ever had.”
In 1989, Meyer graduated with a degree in education. Despite his initial difficulties and three years on active duty for the Guard, Meyer managed to find his first job teaching history in Iowa at Exira High School, an hour east of Omaha.
Meyer spent two years there before moving west, teaching U.S. and world history at Columbus High School in Nebraska. He spent 13 years there, leaving in 2003 for his first tour in Afghanistan.
He left for good in 2007, going on active duty full time at bases across the United States until his second deployment in 2010.
He spent the next two years in Afghanistan, training local soldiers and police.
His return brought him to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he recovered from a shoulder
injury suffered in a suicide bombing.
Today, the 52-year-old father of three spends his days in Seward at the Nebraska
National Guard Museum, where he plans new exhibits and shows Nebraskans their
centuries-old military history.
The old uniforms and relics provide Meyer with plenty to talk about with visitors.
“This is my classroom,” he said, referring to the museum’s exhibit space. “I have an office, but I’m never in there.”
Despite his parents’ protests, teaching is something Meyer said he was born to do. After growing up with two teachers, four years of college and 15 as a public school teacher, he said that he, like other great educators, was naturally drawn to the profession.
“All the training stuff didn’t train me,” he said.
“It was all the stuff I’d been around all my life.”
