Meet
Ron Hampton.

Ronald “Ron” Hampton, is an emeriti faculty member of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He was the former Director of Executive Education and Chair of the Marketing Department at UNL. His specialty is international marketing and marketing leadership. He was a member of the faculty of the UNL/Gallup Leadership MBA program. In 1984, he joined the UNL Department of Marketing and has taught courses in Retail Management, Marketing Management, Linear Structural Equation Modeling, Marketing Research, The Art of Creativity in Marketing and International Marketing. Ron was also Associate Dean in the College of Business Administration from 1991-1998. He directed undergraduate, graduate and international programs during his tenure as Associate Dean. He still guest lectures on occasion.

Ron is an experienced researcher and has published in various journals including, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Retailing, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, The Journal of Macromarketing and others in the areas of research methods, retailing, marketing spirituality in the marketplace, and human trafficking. His research, funded by the International Organization of Migration, has been investigating the extent of human trafficking in Ukraine. His joint research with colleagues resulted in one of the first empirical studies on the magnitude of the problem in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. This project continues to bring insight and discovery of human trafficking as a marketing system, with research focusing on how to disrupt and/or destruct the system to prevent human trafficking. He most recently conducted similar research for the state of Nebraska and the Governor’s Task Force in fighting human trafficking. He is an author, with his latest work, his memoirs.

Hampton has been involved in numerous grants and contracts in the fields of marketing and business education. He developed an on campus internship course inviting major corporations to participate by bringing real world problems into the classroom. Companies including General Motors, Toyota Scion, First Tier Bank, Union Pacific Railroad, Citibank and Gallup, Inc. have participated. Ron led a team from UNL into Kyrgyzstan in 1993 to start a business school, one of the first of its kind in the former Soviet Union. Today it is called the American University of Central Asia. His work has taken him to more than 80 countries around the world. He taught at Ecole Superior de Commerce in France in 1991 and was a visiting scholar at Senshu University in Tokyo, Japan in 1998.

Four things on innovation and reinvention that I can discuss:

1. Movement of Product/Services.
2. Movement of People.
3. Movement of Information.
4. The movement of Money.

Meet
Dee Hampton.

MY HISTORY OF QUILTING:

My Mother-in-law, Eileen Hampton, was the one who introduced me to quilting. We would often visit them in Flat River (now Park Hills), Missouri. In her home, she seemed to always have a quilting frame set up in her living room. Eileen would use two kitchen chairs with two 2X4 boards sitting on the backs of the chairs stretched across the living room. She would roll up the quilt very tight using the boards and apply clamps on each end to the cross boards. She would then quilt each block as she moved her chair along the quilt. Eileen learned to quilt from her Mother Janey Merryman, who learned from her mother, Mariah Nicey Tucker. Janey would often host a quilting bee (a group of quilters getting together and working on the same quilt) in her home on Culpepper Mountain in Arkansas. Ladies from the community would drop by and they would spend the day chatting and quilting helping each other out on quilts that were designed and quilted by each member of the bee.
Mom Hampton always had quilts made by Thanksgiving which was when we would celebrate Christmas at their house. After a huge Thanksgiving meal, Mom and Dad Hampton with such huge smiles would hand out gifts to each child or grandchild. Often there were quilts, each one with different patterns; No two were ever alike. As a new grandchild was born, a new quilt that she had made throughout the year was given when they were old enough to appreciate them. Over the years she quilted several hundred quilts.

Mom Hampton did not like embroidery, so she would give that job to me over the years. I loved to embroidery new quilt blocks for her. She always bragged about how well I embroidered.

In 2008, I joined a group called the Ta-Da Quilting group at our church. Several of my friends taught me the basics of good quilting including how to cut and set the blocks together. I was nervous about that because I did not have a clue to what I was doing at first. For example, I put together what I called a square within a square, wanting the blocks to be at an angle inside the first square. I called it my Cockeyed Square Quilt. I learned how to do a simple stitch called “Stitch in a Ditch”. This is when you stitch in the seam of the square. Later on I learned to put fancier stitching in my quilts even adding buttons in the center of each block creating new designs. The color combinations became so important to me since I majored in design in college.

Over the years I have painted, quilted, cross-stitched, embroidered, and sewed all kinds of interesting artworks. God has gifted me with such an eye for art!