A member of the Dressler family has been working at Kent State University continuously for the past 75 years.
It was the fall of 1948 when Byron Dressler first came to Kent State, working for 30 years as a mathematics professor and serving as director of the university’s first computer center, which was established in the early 1960s in Merrill Hall.
Fast forward to today, when his granddaughter, Virginia “Ginnie” Dressler, is employed as digital projects librarian and associate professor for University Libraries.
In the years in between, Ginnie Dressler’s mother, Laura Dressler, served at the university in various administrative capacities in
several departments from 1976 to 2001, and her stepmother, Jane Dressler, was a professor of applied voice in the Glauser School of Music from 1987 to 2020.
"We've joked that we've had a Dressler on the books at Kent State since the 1940s,” Ginnie Dressler said. In addition, Byron, Jane and Ginnie Dressler all received tenure as university faculty.
Byron Dressler, who retired in 1978, died when Ginnie Dressler was just a year old, so she never got to know him, but she channels him every day in her work using scanners and computers digitizing the University Library's many collections.
“My dad always told me that I must get it from my grandfather,” Dressler said. “I've often wondered what he would think of where the age of computers is now, and how heavily technology plays into my job.”