The elderly elite of Kansas City share their life journeys, what motivated them along the way, the lucky breaks and tough times, and advice for staying active and relevant in their later years.
Written by David Hodes
Interviewed by David M. Block, David Hodes and Pete Mundo
Audrey Wegst
Birth date: September 5, 1934, Age: 90
“If an opportunity comes to you, grab it and make the best of it because it won’t come again, and that’s often what makes your life interesting.”
The youngest person profiled in this section is a woman who has devoted her life to the movement of charged particles. Her infectious energy and impressive knowledge of nuclear energy put her in the right place at the right time throughout her life, generally working as the only woman in a field of men.
It was submarines that figured into her various life experiences.
“When I was a child, it was wartime,” nuclear physicist Audrey Wegst says. “Wartime was a totally different time than we have now. As a child growing up in that, you had a different philosophy, which was when things got better, you knew it and you enjoyed it and you took advantage of it. I think maybe people are more hesitant today to just jump in and do things, and I think that’s a mistake.”
Beginnings
Wegst was born in Connecticut in 1934, a time of economic disaster that quickly led to the beginning of World War II. “I remember my father had to patrol the beach at night, and we couldn’t have any lights in the house because of German submarines. My father actually ran into a submarine on the beach. I think it was after that that he said we were getting out of there.”
The family moved to a rural part of Pennsylvania where Wegst’s grandmother had immigrated from Sweden. The town had about 50 people.
“It was a complete change of life,” she says. Her dad was a chemist working for a company that made steel. His job was to make sure that the batches of steel were of the right high-grade proportions for periscopes.
Wegst’s uncle helped her get into Mount Holyoke, an Ivy League girls school, where she majored in physics. She graduated in 1956. Once again, her connection with submarines surfaced. “Women didn’t go into physics then,” she says. She went to Bell Labs to look for a job, and they talked up the social parties and the available single men and the possibility that you could find a husband. “I thought to myself: This isn’t why I worked so hard and majored in physics. So I found a graduate program that was sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, and they were supporting kids to go to graduate school so you could be a radiation specialist on one of the new nuclear submarines. I thought that sounded like fun.”
There were 27 boys and two girls in her class. After she finished, the Navy chased after her because they knew she was properly trained to handle radiation accidents. She didn’t think a submarine was a good choice for her, so she found a hospital that was just starting to use radioactive materials in diagnostic tests at the University of Michigan.
They had an isotope lab and were treating mainly thyroid disease with radioactive iodine. That got her into the base level of the specialty that’s now called nuclear medicine. “That was the beginning of it,” she says. “So I was at the ground floor of nuclear medicine.”
Next Steps
Wegst worked there for eight years, watching how radioactive material helped image the organs inside the body and improve diagnosis. She met her husband there, Walter, who was working on his Ph.D. at a nuclear reactor in Michigan and later got a job at CalTech. They moved to Sierra Madre, California. The marriage didn’t work out—she divorced Walter in 1971—and found herself with two kids and no job in California.
“So I visited Cedar Sinai Hospital and they hired me on the spot,” she says. “I ended up not liking it.”
That’s when the University of Kansas offered her a job to come and work in nuclear medicine as she studied for her Ph.D. She worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, traveling and giving lectures, then began working full time for them.
The IAEA is a United Nations agency based in Vienna. They offered Wegst two years of working with them. “At that time, my older son, Greg, went to college, and my younger son, Andy, was in high school,” she says. Greg stayed in the U.S., and Wegst and Andy went off to Vienna. Andy graduated from high school in Vienna.
While working for the U.N., Wegst traveled everywhere. “My job was to encourage nuclear medicine departments in developing countries, and it’s a worldwide thing. So I would just take off and go travel to some good places and some pretty awful places.
“I was always traveling alone,” Wegst continues. “I had a lot of incidents where I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was traveling in these terrible places, but I always ended up okay.”
Wegst has always worked with men in the field, many highly educated who acted forceful with colleagues. “But I always stood my ground when needed,” she says. “I felt that it was important to be able to hold your own and do your part and be looked at not as a lower kind of individual. Some of the places I traveled, it wasn’t the custom for women to do that. I found that very rewarding to myself, that I could be respected. I told them what to do and they would follow my suggestions.”
She came back to Kansas City after her U.N. stint and started her own nuclear medicine company, Diagnostic Technology Consultants, where she works to this day.
On Being Older
“When you think of yourself as being 90, you think about what more you want to accomplish,” she says. “I’m thinking of writing a book because I think I could have a fun book to write. I want to do some more traveling.”
Wegst says she has been exceedingly lucky with her health. She walks her dog for a mile every morning. “I think feeling good is really important and you have to keep going,” she says. “It’s also about your general attitude, which to me is about getting out and being interested in people and what they’re doing.”
Being older and just joining the 90-plus crowd has created a moment of reflection for Wegst. “I think we (elders) have a lot of wisdom,” she says. “I think a lot of times people downgrade what you could offer them because they think you’re old and, well, that’s it. You’re old. I don’t get treated that way very often. I think you should respect older people and listen to them because I think they have a lot to tell you. You have to keep doing things. If you just sit and ignore everything, you’re not going to be relevant.”
“I think maybe people are more hesitant today to just jump in and do things, and I think that’s a mistake.”
“I think we (elders) have a lot of wisdom.”
