I think Gail Schoettler's story is more important now, perhaps, than it has ever been.

She's really helped to make an impact in the state.

From helping to found the children's museum, serving on the Douglas County School Board, to becoming state treasurer, to becoming lieutenant governor.

To the work that she continues to do today in supporting women who are running for office.

Gail has shown women not to be afraid.

As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains, they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the grand plains they looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers, whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion, and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse, and these are the stories of Great Colorado Women.

Gail is a force to be reckoned with.

Gail is brilliant.

Gail is kind.

Gail is generous and thoughtful just being in Gail's presence, given all that she's accomplished and all that she's committed her life to is Inspiring in order to know where you're going, you need to know where you've been.

And Gail's story is a critical piece of that in Colorado history.

My mom grew up across an inflection point of social hierarchy where women were expected to be in very traditional roles she really believed that women were entitled to be treated equally, to have the same opportunities to participate in politics and to do all of the things that the rest of society did My mom was one of the people who created the conversations which opened up those opportunities Now, there's been A huge push forward in what it means to be a professional woman I met Gail Schoettler way back when we were in the formation of the Women's Bank It was a wonderful group of women, and Gail had been invited to join us I immediately was very fond of her She was the first woman to be state treasurer and lieutenant governor.

Her greatest accomplishment continues today in participating in electing women She wants to get more women at high Political positions by running for governor herself, she demonstrated her commitment to having women at leadership roles.

And I think she's really made a difference for a lot of women in this world Gail is probably one of the most instrumental mentors that I have had she is always ready with a listening ear, always ready to advise.

And not just to me, but to so many young women I know I think Gail's story is important today because in today's environment Many of the women's rights, the women's issues, That she fought for Are in some ways at risk There are always forces in any society that Find The old way more comfortable And Gail's story tells how hard it was to crack open the Opportunities for women In Colorado My mom grew up on a rural ranch in Central California It's been in the family for Five generations What my mom took away from the ranch was Probably the hard work ethic always doing things that mattered Growing up on a ranch you work all the time because there aren't people to do things for you.

So you do them yourself.

You know, cows having a calf and having trouble, and you go help pull the calf.

A fence needs to be fixed And you go Fix it there were only 500 people in the nearest town where I went to school.

So the community, everybody knew everybody else, and everybody helped everybody else Everybody had to participate.

So I know my grandfather.

Big Jim was on the school board for a number of years My grandmother, Norma, was involved in a whole bunch of community oriented activities My parents insisted that if you made a commitment to doing something that you would do it and part of our commitment was to our little town there's this feeling that you're responsible for everybody and you all help one another out.

And I think that's It's a value that is really deeply ingrained in me.

For small children.

It was wonderful My sister and I had ponies when we were little And every afternoon after school we'd come home and we would get on our ponies bareback and go out riding across the hills It was a wonderful place to grow up But also in a very small town, it's very restricted The roles are so defined for boys and girls and men and women At my school Boys took ag and girls took home economics And if you were in the home economics class, which we were required to take, then you became part of the future homemakers of America And one day, my teacher said to me, our district gets to elect the state president of the future homemakers of America, and you're going to run and you're going to be the state president.

So I did run and I was the state president I think it was probably a really close-knit place to be young On the other hand, women were expected to fill a very defined role as a mother or a secretary And there weren't a lot of opportunities One of the things I remember vividly about growing up on the ranch was wanting to Go anywhere else and everywhere else.

And I remember as a kid, small child, looking up at the airplanes flying overhead and saying to myself, I want to go wherever that plane is flying.

I want to see the world because my world was so small.

And I wanted to see a bigger world My parents took us to Stanford when we were eight years old And I never wanted to go anyplace else after I saw Stanford to John Schoettler and we moved to Santa Barbara He was going to work for his father in the oil business I of course, had no idea what to do with myself So I went over to the University of California Santa Barbara campus, which was 10 minutes away And I thought, well, maybe I'll take some classes.

And I flipped through a course catalog, and there was a graduate seminar in African history.

And I'd never heard of it before, so I took it, and I loved it.

And I just kept going until I eventually got a PhD in African history We moved to Colorado in 1969 because the oil business was booming in Colorado and was pretty dull and dead and in California Gail and I were neighbors Judi's husband and my husband were out walking our dogs one day.

They didn't know each other, and her dogs got in a fight with my dogs So she came up the next day with some flowers to apologize And in the process, she said, and by the way, we're starting a women's bank, and it'll only cost you $1,000 if you want to be part of our organizing group, and would you be interested Gail just was one of those people that had a just a determination to make a difference And she was dedicated to helping women in almost every way you could imagine And this bank appealed to her And I went, I got my checkbook, and I put together $1,000 and handed her the check.

And that's that's how I got started with the Women's Bank Many times people ask us why we started a women's bank, and when we look back now, we say, why didn't we do it sooner?

Women in those days could not get credit in their own names.

They couldn't borrow They had to have their husbands or their brothers or their fathers signed for them Women had to have a co-signer in banking all over the country.

It wasn't just Colorado.

That's how the national banking system was working then And so it's a very discriminatory situation for women Women were 80% of the employees in banking and less than 3% of management, even lower management positions.

And so women were not respected in the banking world.

I remember The big downtown banks saying as We formed the women's bank just let those girls go and they'll fail, but let them go do what they want to do and we'll just watch them fail.

well, we obviously were enormously successful, and that was because of LaRae Women's Bank was unique because we not only offered all the banking services that were available checking and savings accounts But we held Learning sessions in our boardroom where we invited women to come And we taught them about finance We learned about stocks and bonds.

We had different members of our board that would conduct these classes No other bank in town did any of that We change the world of banking for women in many ways all of a sudden, there started to be women bank presidents.

There started to be women in top management And it gained respect for women among the good old boy bankers who had sneered at us initially and hadn't respected women and their financial acumen and their resources.

It was another example of her seeing a need and coming up with a way to generate results and be impactful and lead it to the point of sustainability She has had amazing accomplishments throughout her life.

I know she was one of the founders of the Children's Museum, which is not at all surprising to me when I see her relationship with her kids and her grandkids, I think she probably saw a need and knew that it was something that would be well received and important in our community and she decided to create it She was the president and the chair of the board of directors for a decade after the Children's Museum was founded It's now in its 50-somethingth year of existence it currently serves more than half a million visitors a year.

So if you think about from the day that Gail was involved in founding it to where we are now the millions of children and families that have been impacted by the opportunity for hands on learning It was so much fun Walking in and seeing these kids running around having a great time kids just have such a good time and learned so much Gail understood the joy of play.

Gail understood the joy of bringing relevance to what was important In our learning I think she realized that she was a good problem solver.

She was a good uniter.

She brought people together I had never been interested in anything political But my kids were in school.

My father had always been on the school board And so I always thought Probably want to run for the school board School board in Douglas County was the first elected office my mom held And in her second term as a school board member, she was president I think the school board is the most important thing in terms of politics I've ever done.

I think kids' education, public education, is absolutely critical to a democratic society.

So I learned politics on the school board, thinking it was a nonpolitical job.

It's very political I learned how to run really difficult meetings in her time on school board, I think they only had maybe two votes that weren't unanimous.

So I think she was good at finding the common ground That was probably the first time that she had an inkling that maybe Her strengths would be useful in Public service I'm not sure how Dick Lamm got my name But my name came up and I went in for an interview I think Governor Lamm was impressed enough with her background and her abilities that he offered her a position in his cabinet as director of department of personnel It was a cabinet level job and it was running the civil service There were 58,000 employees in the civil service, not counting the University of Colorado employees.

And it was my job to run that system And I had a wonderful time.

I had a fabulous staff.

They were terrific people, very committed to state service, and I had a great time because of her time in, Governor Lamm's cabinet, I think she became pretty savvy in the sort of the political establishment at the time and understanding how you work within the structure I had talked to our superintendent of schools when I was on the school board and he had said, well, you should run for a statewide office.

I said, oh, you know, I don't know anything about that But I was downtown crossing A street one day and Judi was crossing the other way and she said to me, you've got to run for treasurer And I said, okay, well, I'll run if you'll be my finance chair.

So she said, yes, and I said, yes.

If you run for office You won't win on your own.

You win because you have hundreds, maybe thousands of people helping you I was involved in her campaign and did everything I could to ensure that she had success in her run for treasurer and she did win She did a great job of state treasurer.

She managed a number of changes in our fiscal policies in the state The state was in rather dire financial straits after the collapse of the oil industry the economy just collapsed people were quite desperate to figure out how they were going to survive, how their school districts were going to survive, how their towns were going to survive She went all over the state talking to different Communities about how much they needed to have their community bank well We did seminars primarily for the county treasurers, but also for school boards and county commissioners and city councils.

And we would get, I don't know, eight or 900 people who would come, and we've got experts to come and talk to them about how to do things.

So that was very popular and very successful Following two terms as state treasurer, she was on the ticket with Roy Romer as lieutenant governor When you run for Lieutenant governor, you're really not running on your own.

You're running as part of a ticket.

And so your ability to completely control the agenda is limited But I think that she carved out her own platform and made it clear to the voters that while she was running with Governor Romer, she was also running as an independent woman Well, the biggest challenge for a lieutenant governor is there's no job there.

You have to make you have to create your job Fortunately for me, we had a couple of huge cleanup issues that Romer didn't want to deal with, so he asked me to pick them up, and one was cleaning up Rocky Flats, and the other was cleaning up the Rocky Mountain Arsenal And I remember walking into the first meeting of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Group.

There were 250 people, and they'd been fighting literally for 20 years about how to clean it up The army was about to shut it down put a big fence around it and say, nobody gets to go here.

Roy didn't want to do that.

And so I walked in, and there were all these people, and after about two hours I finally got up and I said, I'm just going to write down everything everybody agrees on and everything everybody disagrees on and let's see where we go from there And we ended up solving The problem We cleaned it up in something like Five or six years instead of 30 years How exciting can it be to turn something extraordinarily toxic and difficult into a wildlife refuge.

That was great.

We did the same thing with Rocky Flats, which is more difficult because it's plutonium And plutonium is extraordinarily deadly for many, many years Rocky Flats produced plutonium triggers from the Cold War up until the late 80s we really needed through the Department of Energy and the Department of Public Health to come to some agreements about what we were going to do with that space and what was going to happen to it in its future While Gail was serving, she was able to negotiate an agreement And a timeline both for the cleanup and what was going to happen long term It was a wonderful thing for the state to get those two highly toxic areas cleaned up The third thing that Governor Romer had wanted me to do was to Develop what was called the school to career school to work program.

It was under Clinton The Colorado School to Career Partnership Was really designed to build public private partnerships around education across the state We wanted young people all throughout their school careers to know what it was like if they were learning algebra or chemistry or even English language arts, how might that relate to something that they would do later in life when they got through school and into a career?

This was a five-year grant, and the excitement around this initiative in Gail's leadership around this initiative helped us meet our five-year goals in three years I was working as the director of The school to career partnership when she announced her run for governor Well I thought that I had gained a lot of leadership experience, and I thought I could do a really good job as governor, and I had things I really cared about the more women you see in top jobs, the more Girls and women are going to say, oh, I can do that too.

And I'm sure that was part of what I wanted to do was to show girls they could do it.

They could do it too.

even though it had become somewhat mainstream to consider that Colorado might have a woman governor.

I think there was still some bias against against the idea that maybe women belonged in executive roles I had people who supported me, and all of my other campaigns say to me, I can't vote for a woman for governor I think women are expected to be Vice President, Lieutenant Governor, vice this, vice chair and so on.

It's different when you're running for governor.

I had to prove over and over and over again that I had the credentials to do the job You only have to live one day as a woman in executive leadership to know that it is it's different for men and women.

And as a consequence of that, candidates seeking higher office are often not taken seriously out of the gate in the same way their male counterparts are I think she faced all of those unique obstacles and challenges that women face who's going to take care of your family who's going to watch out for your kids?

Shouldn't you be at home?

Is this really a job for a woman she did receive some pushback, especially, I think, from rural areas of Colorado, about whether that was really a woman's place I think my mom realized that she had some convincing to do They came up with the idea that she was going to go back to her roots and ride a horse across the state There were a couple things about that.

One was that represented her upbringing of being on a rural ranch in California and riding horse every day of her childhood It represented the hard work that was necessary in ranch life, and it also gave her an opportunity to ride through a lot of very rural communities We started in Kansas and rode to Denver and then we went to Utah and rode back to Denver and it was amazing We rode average 27 miles a day in all conditions.

So it was hard.

But it was a great chance to sort of show who I was And I would stop in every little tiny town and we'd do breakfast, lunches, dinners, receptions, and so on.

So I would get to meet people everywhere Her campaign for Governor was very, very exciting.

We were all very thrilled to be supportive and we all pulled together and raised funds and went around the community.

We thought for sure that Gail was going to be elected.

We were dumbfounded when it didn't work out that way She ultimately lost to Bill Owens by a very, very, very small number of votes losing the governor's race was obviously profoundly impactful she was devastated, of course.

And after she caught her breath and said, all right, well, let's do something about this We started an organization called Electing Women Electing Women was started because Gail's loss in that governor's race was so close.

And what they knew is that in order to make up such a small margin, just a little bit more support coming from women could have made the difference in that race for Gail Gail and Judi were bound and determined to create a group of women donors supporting women candidates at high level so that they could give women candidates the resources that they needed to win.

We wanted women to write big checks because we wanted women to have access to power.

We wanted women to be seen as powerful Fundraising is hard.

It's really difficult.

to be able to come together for an hour over a lunch and share your platform and raise $30,000 in a day is a tremendous opportunity for candidates across this country that Gail and Judi choose to invest in through Electing Women and it makes a big difference for these first time people that are just getting going.

And now Electing Women is a national organization that has groups all over this country.

And we do something like 40 events annually.

And we now have something like 20 governors and senators that have been elected thanks to Electing Women's projects We want women to be making decisions for women and families And what we find is when women are involved on committees, even if it's just one woman, she speaks up, it changes the whole discussion, and suddenly women and families become much more important.

She has not only brought millions of dollars to women seeking higher office, but she has also connected dozens of young women with women in positions of power Gail was also one of the founders of the International Women's Forum The International Women's Forum grew out of an idea that a woman in New York had an The aim was to get women leaders to know one another so that we could start to build the status of women all over the world, improve the economic status of women, improve the political status of women and help women become leaders I was the first president of the International Women's Forum board and we went from the first five of us over two years to about 20 groups in five countries so we became international right away This International Women's Forum is a global organization And they're Examples all over the world.

I mean, Hong Kong to New York City, to Singapore Munich One of the things that I know about Gail is how much she loves to travel and how much She loved to see the world Her desire to travel and see other peoples and places was fueled by her appointment by President Clinton as an ambassador For telecommunications It was something called the World Radiocommunication Conference It's a global treaty conference that allocates the use of radio spectrum for every use Everything uses radio spectrum U.S.

military by far the largest user We needed to build coalitions around our issues Which we did We met with people constantly and One reception, there was a guy there from Senegal And I was talking to him about education in his country, and he said to this woman afterwards, I can't believe the U.S.

ambassador is interested in my little country.

I feel that's the most important thing an ambassador does And they are important.

People are important everywhere And I want them to know that I think that When the ambassadorship ended She And her Second husband, Don Stevens developed a Travel company We want people to have a deeper experience of the countries that we have gotten to know and love And the goal is to not just do a tourist trip, but to introduce them to business people.

We've set up meetings with factories and business leaders.

She really has had such an impact on so many people that have utmost respect for who she was, who she is, and The legacy that she's going to leave for others.

I didn't start hiking until I was 45.

She ended up climbing all of Colorado's 54 fourteeners.

it's hard to pin down one great achievement that Gail will be known for Gail would probably say that her greatest achievement is her wonderful family That's what fills our heart and means the most I think the greatest enjoyment she gets, despite everything else she does, and all the lives she's touched is with her kids and her grandkids I'm really proud of that wonderful people my kids have become, and I'm really proud of what my grandchildren are doing and becoming And I think I've been a part of that.

I think Gail Schoettler's story is more important now, perhaps, than it has ever been We certainly can't predict what's ahead, but we know that we need to continue to fight for our families and for our children And Gail has been fighting and advocating and supporting and elevating women for her entire life I think for women even now, it's a big challenge to believe in yourself to the extent that you know you can do the things that you dream about.

And I think it's a a real challenge to get other people to believe in you as a woman, and as a woman who's capable of doing anything Gail has shown women not to be afraid.

Gail has shown women that they can do anything that they set their mind to So our dreams have to be as big as hers to ensure that every generation of women thereafter has an even better opportunity we're definitely not living in a time where we can stop.

We have to continue to elevate women's voices.

We have to continue to support each other in order to protect our democracy and make sure that we're living in a community that feels like home to us and that we can be proud of