She has a travel mug of coffee in one hand and there is a bowl of Snickers on the wooden table in her office. The student she is talking to listens intently as she gestures emphatically with her hands to make a point. Her tone is soothing but firm, her reassuring voice punctuated with hearty laughter. The student cannot help but join in, despite the fact that he was there to talk about a difficult time he was going through.
She is Dr. Eileen Wirth to Creighton, the chair of the Department of Journalism, Media & Computing. After a 25-year career at Creighton, she is retiring at the end of the academic year. She has led the JMC department for 19 years. She has taught and mentored hundreds of students over those decades.
Before coming to Creighton, Wirth worked at the Omaha World-Herald for 11 years as a reporter. She was one of the first three women writing for city news there.
“I had a duty to prove to my employers that women were just as capable as men, and I didn’t want anything I did to make it harder for future women to get hired,” said Wirth on working during a time when female journalists were not taken seriously. “I wanted to be the woman who showed them that their ideas about hiring women had been ridiculous.”
As a woman who has been a groundbreaker since she started working, Wirth recalls that she was always aware of the fact that if doors were to open for women, she could not ask for any special privileges. When she adopted her two children, Raj and Shanti Psota, she knew that it was virtually impossible to be a mother and a reporter at the same time. That was when she decided to switch careers and work in public relations at the Union Pacific Railroad, which had better hours.
Nevertheless, Wirth still did not have it easy.
“We had to be killer,” she said, reminiscing about how the work-family balance was brutal for women during her time. “I don’t think the career doors could have been opened if we hadn’t decided to play superwoman. I just got up every day and told myself, ‘You can do anything if you have to do it.’ ”
What a lot of people do not know, however, is the fierce loyalty and commitment Wirth has toward her loved ones. She describes the friendships she has built over the years as simply “I keep my friends forever… And she means it.
She has kept in touch with Jan Kreuscher, a retired lawyer who now lives in Indianapolis and whom she met during her undergraduate years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for around 50 years now, and she says they have never had an argument.
Kreuscher thinks back to when she had to go to Sioux City, Iowa, to attend a birthday party a couple of years ago, and she called Wirth to ask if she could stay with her for one night.
“Eileen told me to come to Omaha one day early, and we’ll have a dinner party,” Kreuscher said. “And she’s so generous that the next morning she work up early and drove all the way to Sioux City just to drop me off.”
JMC junior Madison Pottebaum is one of the many others who have been the recipient of Wirth’s kindness.
“I was going through a rough patch and almost transferred from Creighton,” Pottebaum said. “Dr. Wirth sat me down and talked to me and she did everything she could to help me. If I’m still at Creighton, it’s because of her.”
During her own undergraduate years, Wirth worked for the Daily Nebraskan, where Kreuscher was the news editor.
“I was really impressed from the moment I saw Eileen,” Kreuscher said. “I needed an assistant to keep me organized. Eileen was willing to do that. She was incredibly bright, very enthusiastic and very organized.”
The newsroom staff at the Daily Nebraskan became Dr. Wirth’s group of friends, a group that was known to be wild, according to Kreuscher. Most of them were more interested in the newspaper than going to class, but Wirth had a sense of balance. She went to class, and “suggested that we do the same,” Kreuscher said with a laugh.
“Eileen was the youngest out of all of us, yet she was probably the most responsible and the most mature one,” Kreuscher said. “We tried to corrupt her, but she was incorruptible.”
Kreuscher marveled that she didn’t know how the paper would’ve run without Wirth. She had an “unbelievable” amount of energy. The same could be said about Wirth’s energy today, some 50 years later, according to some of her colleagues.
“She’s always going a million miles a minute,” said Dr. Carol Zuegner, a journalism professor who has known Wirth for about 40 years. “Her leadership is one of consensus and collegiality and one that puts us in a good spot because we can work together to get things done.”
Nonetheless, Wirth said she has not always been universally liked. Growing up as a social outcast in small town Nebraska City where girls weren’t supposed to be smart, she was bullied during junior high and she never had a lot of friends throughout high school.
“I had nothing in common with them,” Wirth said. “I was a nerd, an oddball.”
She only came into her own during her second year of college, after meeting the newsroom staff of the Daily Nebraskan.
“It was like the sun came out,” said Wirth, smiling. “All of a sudden, after years of feeling like a misfit, I belonged, I had these wonderful, brilliant, hilarious friends. It was the happiest year of my life, it was the year when I knew journalism was for me, and it was the year I found myself.”