Women’S Lib Is Old Hat For This Longtime Fighter

If Jo Webb was ahead of her time, she didn’t notice.

She breezed past barriers she didn’t know existed and unwittingly widened the professional road for women.

“What this generation and even the previous one doesn’t know is that the 1930s was a very exciting time for women,” Jo says on the eve of her 80th birthday. “Girls had role models in the movies, and heroines. I assumed women’s rights, in general, had been achieved.”

So Jo forged ahead politely. She had so much faith in her expectations that few people had the heart to stop her. She smiles at the long list of her accomplishments, compiled for friends to read at her birthday party in City Park Saturday.

Graduate of Purdue University. Design engineer. Laboratory director. Research engineer. Keynote speaker at the second International Conference of Women Engineers. North Idaho College’s 1989 administrator of the year.

“I was absolutely shocked when my two daughters were in high school in the 1960s and counselors told them not to study too hard because they were going to get married anyway,” Jo says.

Advice was much more encouraging for her two granddaughters, who are in high school and college, she says.

Jo grew up believing women could do everything because her mother did.

Jo’s father died in World War I. Her Hungarian-immigrant mother worked as a self-taught social worker in New York.

Jo’s older brother taught her about amateur radios, science and cars and encouraged her to enroll at Purdue. She followed her future husband, Herb, into engineering in 1936. She was one of five women in a class of 1,000.

Westinghouse snatched up Herb after graduation, but not Jo, telling her it had no training program for women.

It was her first exposure to discrimination.

Westinghouse courted Jo a few months later after the United States entered World War II and the stateside male population thinned.

Jo worked with Herb at various electrical engineering jobs.

The Webbs teamed their talents in their own engineering consultant business in Coeur d’Alene until Herb’s death in 1986. By then, Jo had expanded her world to include NIC.

At the age other people are pushed into retirement, Jo was hired as assistant to NIC’s president. She worked until she was 72, raising money to build NIC’s beach and helping to start the school’s foundation. Her formula? Polite determination and high expectations.

She still volunteers on the foundation and speaks to high school girls about careers.

“I tell them the sky’s the limit,” she says.

“There are lots of opportunities, if you look for them.”

Jo’s party begins at 4:30 p.m. in Coeur d’Alene’s City Park gazebo.

The Coeur d’Alene Marimba Band will play. Refreshments will be served.

Alley cats

Send your kids to hang out on Moscow’s streets Saturday. The Latah County Historical Society and the Appaloosa Museum plan to take kids on a walking tour of Moscow’s streets and alleys.

This tour won’t be a snoozer, says Mary Reed, historical society director. No analyses of architectural features and biblical recitations of house owners.

Kids will find pie plants and porte cocheres and see how people used to keep their horses.

Hour-long tours cost $1 and leave at 1:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. from the McConnell Mansion, 110 S. Adams. Only 20 kids fit in each tour, so call ahead and reserve space, 882-1004.

Safety first

What a Saturday! McGruff the Crime Dog, the Crash Test Dummies (not the musical group), Smokey Bear and Sparky the Fire Dog all together at Coeur d’Alene’s Silver Lake Mall, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. It’s safety day - take the kids.