Â鶹´«Ã½

---

Podcast: S9 Ep. 18
Date: July 07, 2026
Title: LU Moment: Center for Resiliency presents first SETX Resiliency Digital Collection | S9 Ep. 18
Host: John Rollins

---

JOHN ROLLINS: Welcome to the LU Moment, where we showcase all the great things happening with Â鶹´«Ã½ faculty, staff, students, and alumni. I'm John Rollins, Associate Director of Community Relations and Public Affairs here at LU, and I want to welcome you all to this week's show. Today, we'll be sitting down and talking about the inaugural Southeast Texas Resiliency Digital Collection presented by the Â鶹´«Ã½ Center for Resiliency. We've got two LU Honors students, Jud Ripper and Matt Ard, here today to tell us all about the project. Jud and Matt, it's my pleasure to welcome both of you to the show.

JUDSON RIPPER & MATTHEW ARD: Thank you for having us, sir.

JOHN: Once again, thanks for joining me. So, I know you're both juniors here at Lamar, both honor students, as we just said, and Judd, you are majoring in mechanical engineering, and Matt, you're majoring in accounting. So, let's hear a little bit more about both of you before we start talking about this collection. Whoever wants to start, you got it.

JUD: Yeah, I came to Lamar during my junior year of high school with the Texas Academy, and I've been with Lamar ever since. I'm taking mechanical engineering, that's my major, and just started with my time at the Center of Resiliency recently. So, I'm very happy to be here.

JOHN: So, what's your role at the Center for Resiliency? It's probably both, you all have the same role?

JUD: Yes, student worker, student assistant is our title. Yeah, we've been working on this project for a good three or four months now, so that's been our role.

JOHN: How about you?

MATT: So I live in Silsbee, so I'm like right here, and I came here on a presidential scholarship, and I was going to go for nursing, and then I don't know, I just thought about, like, actually, you know, being in a nursing career, and I just, I just didn't think I would like it, so I just switched to accounting, but now I love it, and I've like way, way less homework than I would have, so you know that gave me more time to do stuff like this, you know, to work at the Center and stuff, and I'm glad I did. It's been a good time.

JOHN: Okay, so let's start with kind of a big picture overview of the Southeast Texas Digital Collection. Let our listeners and readers know what it is… it can be an elevator pitch, you can go a little more in depth, and then we'll talk a little bit later about kind of the parts and pieces of this collection as well, whoever wants to start.

JUD: Yeah, so this project has been focused on showcasing resiliency in the communities of Southeast Texas, so showing how Jefferson, Jasper, Hardin, and Orange Counties have pushed through hardships and proved that their community is very resilient and hardworking and passionate about the lives that they formed there. So, what Matt and I have done is gone around these counties and found different historical documents, photographs, things that tell these stories, and we've worked on digitizing these things, creating data, finding out information about these photos, and putting that into one big collection.

JOHN: Okay, so when you do that, are you going straight to libraries? Like, what is the approach there?

MATT: Whenever we started, it was like late January, beginning of February. We kind of, what I did is like, we called and emailed anybody we could think of. It'd be like libraries, churches, like historical societies, stuff like that, from every county, like museums, really anything. And then anybody that had anything at all that could help us, we would just drive over there and, you know, get it from them and stuff, and talk to them a little bit. We got a lot of oral history and stuff, too.

JOHN: There's a unique component to this as well. You're tying it to America's 250th which we're seeing everywhere. Everybody's celebrating 250 years, right? You want to talk about that a little bit?

JUD: One of the ideas from the very start was to find some way to link 250 years with our project, and our final goal, which ended up working out perfectly, was having 250 unique individual items that we find and have that in the collection, so our final tally for items in our collection is 250. It's a mix of, you know, old documents and photographs and letters sent, so there's a big variety in there of different time periods.

JOHN: So, I believe this sort of planning began in November. So you came on a few months later. Do y'all happen to know how this idea for this project came about? Because this is the inaugural year, so it's not like it's happened before.

MATT: I think it just started with Dr. Gjoci. She was, because she's so big on, like, don't let a good idea just be an idea, let it actually come to fruition, like, put on, like, it's so good. And so that's that was kind of her thing, like, I'm pretty sure it was her idea, right? She just wanted to, because she reached out to the Honors College, and so we had been sent an email from Dr. Jordan from the Honors College about, like, it was like November, about an on-campus job, because she wanted, like, you know, she was saying, like, she wanted honor students, like people that would be, like, accountable to actually help her to make it a real thing rather than just an idea.

JUD: And it also kind of serves as a foundation for something new that's been going on at Lamar, you know, this is with all the things going on with the library, they're going into new sort of collection systems that they have using D Space and other software to create a database where you can easily find these photos and read about them and access these images, so it's kind of serving also as like a trial run where we can figure out how to use these systems and make it, you know, easily accessible for everyone, so using that as kind of a, you know, trailblazer for that system is really, really exciting.

JOHN: Yeah, that's a really good point. Because there are a lot of changes going on on campus, and the library renovation is probably top of that list right now. That's pretty cool that y'all get to tie in with that. You kind of answered my question a bit ago about Dr. Jordan emailing out and seeing who was interested. But I was going to ask, because when I would think of students who would be tied to a project like this, my brain was thinking either history or art majors, y'all totally aren't that, so I think that's really cool that you were able to get involved with it, and you spoke a little bit about the experience of collecting the images from all over the region. As a student, you know, juniors in college, how do you think that'll help you in the future, that resourcefulness, and that sort of being able to put yourself out there to collect all of these items.

MATT: What it was for me was like I was able to just meet so many different kinds of like people, and now we have so many connections of like, you know, like important people that like, like know the community and know the area and everything, like at our disposal, you know, I've, you know, I think we made friends with everybody that we went and saw, so like that's a big advantage for like literally anything we would want to do. I feel like I also grew to like appreciate the region more than I did, you know, not like I didn't like where I lived or anything, like I live in Silsbee, I don't know, it's just, it's like a new perspective, I guess, of, yeah, you know, just how much like everything has changed, and how some things have stayed the same through all the years, kind of opened your eyes a little bit, yeah.

JOHN: Well, and you bring up a good point, because it is, there are networking components to this as well, you're out there meeting people, and y'all probably learned a lot about, I mean, I think back to Hurricane Harvey, which really wasn't that long ago, what, 2017 about nine years ago. I'm sure there's lots of photos around that. I'm just guessing, right? But yeah, so are there any significant images that maybe stand out to you that you'd want to mention on the podcast?

JUD: Let's talk about the ones you ask for. You can absolutely talk about, yeah, or experiences, yeah. Let's, yeah, that was Jasper, was one of the best places we worked with. We met some fantastic people, Miss Gail Meigs from the Jasper Historical Commission, yes, and then all the team from the Jasper Historical Museum, close names, getting to see some of the pictures there were amazing, because they were from over 100 years ago, and I think the standout image there was of downtown Jasper in rubble after the downtown had burned down, yeah, gone, a couple like brick structures half standing, and you see a team of men standing there cleaning the rubble.

JOHN: It was a fire?

JUD: Yes. Oh, the story goes that two robbers were trying to break into a safe in the town general store. They miscalculated the amount of dynamite that they would need to break into the safe, they blow out that building and the wall next to it, which happened to house the town's armory. And so, a chain reaction of events leads to the half of the downtown catching fire, and I don't believe they were caught.

MATT: Right, everybody that there was, she said there was like one guy that was somewhat like involved in the planning, everyone else died, like everybody was gone. There was like one guy that could have been like related to all that, but it said he I think he was found either not guilty or he was like not charged anything, something like that. He didn't suffer any consequences.

JUD: It also provided a chance for Jasper to rebuild on like stronger roots, because before all the buildings had been wooden, that's why they all burned down. So, beyond that, all the buildings were built from brick, and we have pictures of those new buildings built maybe 10, 15, years later. So, very cool story to be told.

JOHN: That’s something you wouldn't have really known about had you not been part of this project. Like I said, I didn't know. So, whenever y'all were kind of, whenever you dove into this project, was there a specific time period that you were looking at? I know I brought up Harvey, and I may have misspoke, because I think y'all told me it was a little bit more specific of a time frame, so sorry about that. But what kind of were y'all looking at when you were securing these images?

MATT: We were aiming for, like, Hurricane Rita, which was semi-recent, and then we would go back as far as we could. We ended up our oldest images from 1866 and it's a document that is swearing somebody into an elected position in the Orange County government.

JOHN: That's pretty cool.

MATT: Yeah, that goes way back.

JOHN: Yeah, for sure. Any other significant images y'all want to bring up while we're still talking on the podcast?

MATT: So, this was also in Jasper. I'm pretty sure this one was from the museum instead of the commission. This time there was a, it was a picture of like a team roster of an all-black minor league baseball team called the Jasper Steers, and in the picture it was super cool, because you could see like some of their uniforms weren't the same, like they had like other hats, so they like they were working with like not very much, you know, funding and stuff. And then there's other pictures that we have of like newspaper articles where they won three series titles in a row, like three back-to-back years. Like, it's cool to see, like, you know, just exactly what it is that the resiliency that took to like be able to beat out everybody, despite not having the resources, or even like the same uniforms for everybody, you know, super cool.

JOHN: What a neat story. Yeah, not even matching hats or uniforms or anything, but they still won the whole thing. Hey there, you go. That's a resiliency story for sure. So, why do you think they're so important to highlight things like this?

JUD: I think, for me, and thinking back on your question earlier about the most, you know, the most important things about this project, and what we realized was how much work goes into historical preservation, because for me, I didn't realize the decades and even centuries of work that has gone into preserving these newspapers and documents and these historical commissions for years, and I think my main goal here has been to highlight the work of these people, right, to find the most interesting and significant stories that they've kept safe for so many years, and find a way to make them more public and accessible to people my age, or, you know, involved in the things I am. So, just really getting the efforts of these people out there to tell the stories that they've had for so many years, that's my big reason.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, if anything, like, I feel like it's even easier now to do it, because we, because what we did, we took pictures and, like, edited them to make them, like, look good, and, like, fit with the, you know, digitizing them, and I just can't imagine how hard it would have been to preserve all that before, like, all these programs that we were using for these pictures, you know, like, that is definitely, like, a bit way harder for even back then to save with all these stories and stuff,

JOHN: But how neat that y'all are a part of this preservation of history now.

MATT: Yeah, that's been great, really exciting,

JOHN: So, I wanted to ask this too, you know, yes, we're talking about the collection, obviously, but you two are Â鶹´«Ã½ students, so what are you involved with on campus? I mean, beyond this, obviously, this is work, and you're a part of the Honors College, but anything else you want to bring up about Lamar?

JUD: Yeah, I'm starting this next year as an LU Ambassador, which I'm super excited for. So I'm excited to be able to represent Lamar like that, and doing things like this, where I'm getting into something completely out of my, you know, range of comfort, not engineering at all, is exciting, and kind of helps me, yeah, you know, understand what other things going on, because there's so much going on here, there's so many things to do and get involved with here.

MATT: And then, so we're both a part of the Reaud Leadership Institute, which is like it's a thing that kind of started a couple years ago, and it is like, what is it? She said, like, 1% of the honors college or something? And it has been so much fun, like, we had a class, like a seminar first semester of college, and we just all became best friends so fast, like, because I wasn't even going to take this job until I realized Judd was the other person, because we were already friends. Yeah, and I'm so glad I did. Now, you know, like, so it's.. it's been so much fun, it's been good opportunities to serve the Honors College, and I guess to kind of be like, well, like, like the faces. That's weird to say, right, but like, yeah, that sounds like humbly, yeah, that sounds real, like, yeah, you know, big and bad, well,

JOHN: I mean, you're out representing, so I get it.

MATT: That’s been a good opportunity, and then other than that, I just been kind of really goofing off, like playing intramural sports and stuff. It's been, it's been a good time.

JOHN: Have you been utilizing the intramural field over by Reaud?

MATT: I wasn't over there, I didn't play football like these two semesters, but I would like to. It's so much fun.

JOHN: Yeah, it's a fantastic new space on campus, so we've had it, what, a little over a year now, so make sure y'all utilize it for sure. So, how can folks who are interested in the collection and want to know more, how can they keep up with the Center for Resiliency and the collection as well?

JUD: Yeah, for sure. I think the best ways to keep up with us are to follow our Facebook page, which is the Â鶹´«Ã½ Center for Resiliency, and our Instagram, and our handle is @lamaruresiliency, so we'll be sending out updates on our pictures and little previews of what's in the collection, so as soon as we have a published link, that will be the place to find it.

JOHN: So fantastic, just follow. Easy enough. Alright, well, thanks again to you both for joining me, and shout out to Dr. Gjoci for setting this up. I hope the collection is a great success.

JUD & MATT: Thank you so much.

JOHN: For our listeners and readers, if there are any incoming students for the fall of 2026 please remember to register for new student orientation. There are July and August dates still available to sign up for, and you can do that by visiting lamar.edu/orientation That's a wrap on another episode. To catch the LU stories, just like Jud and Matt's, be sure to search LU Moment wherever you get your podcasts to keep up with the events, activities, programs, and people right here at Â鶹´«Ã½. This is John Rollins, your host. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.