By Guest commentary Monday, March 31st, 2025

By Amber Hair

For this year’s Top Women in Business, I wanted to recognize the women who came before us.

Specifically, I want to recognize my grandmother, Marie Elizabeth Geis Hair.

Marie Elizabeth Geis Hair was born February 21, 1914 in New Philadelphia, Ohio. She was an only child, like me. She died February 1, 1994, the year I was born.

I am her only grandchild that never got to meet her.

Everything I know about her is second-hand, told to me by either my father, my mother or my aunt. She had an incredibly dark sense of humor, a gift she passed down to most of her children — which then spread through her grandchildren, too. She was eminently practical; towards the end of her life, instead of using an ambulance service to take her to and from her appointments, she found a senior bus service that would do the same thing for a dollar.

She was also brilliant: while family history had long established that my grandmother attended a semester of college during the Great Depression, it wasn’t until this year that I found out the name of the college involved, Bethany College. It’s still open, and some of its old yearbooks are available online.

Including 1931-1932, the year Marie Elizabeth Geis attended.

But until I found that yearbook, I had never seen a photo of Grandma Marie that young. I’d never seen her before she got married to my grandfather, Wayne Scott Hair, and I’d never seen her before she had children. 

Most of the pictures my family has of her come from much later in her life, when the entire family is lined up together for a group shot at a holiday or when she was in church.

And so, I’d never seen how much she looks like me.

The information about her in that yearbook is incredibly sparse. There’s no record of her being in any of the listed sports, choirs or clubs; while she might have been in the Young Christian Women’s Association, the group photo is pixelated and hard to sort through. 

There’s nothing that says what she studied, or what her goals for her education were. She was attending college in the middle of the Great Depression; for a young woman from a very rural part of central Ohio, even getting a semester was a great accomplishment. 

What I do know is what her life was like after she left college. 

She got married on October 17, 1935, just a few short years after she attended college, and had her first child, my Uncle Tom, less than a year later. 

She raised five children in total, and when my father was young, they moved into a house with land attached, where they had a Christmas tree farm and a very large garden that she kept the family fed with.

She was a woman of strong faith and conviction. I have her final Bible, with her name scrawled in cursive on the inside cover; it’s remarkably close to my own style of cursive when I slow down and take the time to write it out.

In her lifetime, she was never formally recognized as a businesswoman, and she never went back to finish her education. But of her children, almost all went to college. (Uncle Tom served three tours in Vietnam, and continued his career with the Army after he came home). 

And most of her grandchildren went to college, too — with my master’s degree, I’m not even the person in our family with the highest education. That honor goes to Beck Banks, my cousin, who has a Ph.D. 

So while we’re honoring the incredible women in this section, I also wanted to give a shoutout to the women who paved the way for generations they never got to see.

Thank you, Grandma Marie. I’ll take it from here.

Amber Hair is the co-managing editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times.