Embodying wisdom and charity, service and grace, Barbara Benson received the Athena Award for 2006.
Family and friends lured her to the 12th Annual Athena Award Ceremony, held last Wednesday at the Traverse City Golf & Country Club, on false pretenses. As last year's Athena Award winner, Trish Fiebing, detailed Benson's extensive list of accomplishments and family — and service-centered biography, Benson began to cry. She realized that she was not there to support a friend being recognized, she was the one in the spotlight.
"Thank you so much, I'm overwhelmed and honored," Benson told the audience of 220 people. "I'm just honored to accept this on behalf of anyone I've ever dealt with in any organization."
Benson joins a list of notable Athena Award recipients dating back to 1995 when Mary Lee Lord, the recently deceased executive director of the Women's Resource Center, won the first award. Subsequent Athena Awards have gone to Susan Bondy, Dr. Jayne Mohr, Marsha Smith, Karen Strom and Jan Warren.
Hailing from the civic-minded family of Art and Mary Schmuckal, Benson led the drive to acquire the All Faiths Chapel as a permanent home for the Women's Resource Center. She also champions the homeless, serves in her church, St. Patrick, and promotes education for women to allow them to achieve their potential.
"Our Athena's parents' example of giving back to one's community was business as usual," noted Fiebing of Benson's strong family background in community service.
Another Traverse City accomplished woman presented the keynote address at the event: Martha Teichner, a 30-year veteran journalist with CBS News. A Traverse City native, Teichner's resume and story list reads like a history lesson of the past three decades. She has covered the war in Bosnia, the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and his political rise, the Persian Gulf War as an embedded journalist and the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Since 1994, Teichner has been a correspondent for CBS News Sunday in New York, where she resides.
Speaking to an enthusiastic and sympathetic audience, Teichner sketched her formative years and the influence of her mother, whose professional accomplishments during Teichner's childhood ranged from successful to health-breaking.
"My mom worked from the late 1930s to the early 1980s," she said. "Women of that era had a pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you approach and she cautioned me to never trust another woman."
Her mother, widowed young when Teichner was nine, anguished over cruel or difficult female bosses. Teichner, however, as part of the first wave of feminists, learned a different lesson as she carved out her own career beginning in the early 1970s. She spoke at length of her commitment to mentoring, what it meant to her and what it can mean to women in the work world today. She also acknowledged that her mother was her first mentor and that she never managed to convince her mother that women could mentor and support each other.
"What you get from your mother, you carry with you into the world: good, bad, indifferent," she said.
As Teichner began her career, discovered broadcasting and began to rise through the ranks at CBS news, she found no female role models and for years she was the only woman correspondent. So she copied men and later began the process of learning to be herself and still be successful.
Now that women have won their place in many fields and industries, Teichner cautioned the audience that they must be vigilant to preserve this success.
"Now we have to preserve the territory that we've taken and make further advances," she said. "And as mentors, we must pass it on."