By Jeff Hampton

On the south side of the campus administration building that bears his name is a quote from legendary Baylor President Pat Neff that reads, “The preservers of history are as heroic as its makers.” If that’s true, then Baylor Arts & Sciences alumnae Becky Dinnin (BA ’88) and Shannon Roberts (BA ’86) are heroes in the making.

It’s often said that history repeats itself, but Dinnin and Roberts prove that history sometimes runs in parallel lines. Both women walked similar paths at Baylor, went on to distinguish themselves in their careers, and within a few months of each other in 2015 landed in remarkably similar situations –– Dinnin as the inaugural executive director of the Alamo, and Roberts as the current executive director of the Dallas Historical Society.

Telling the Alamo Story

On a Friday morning at the Alamo, when the shrine of Texas liberty is brimming with tourists, a conservator works quietly inside the sacristy, inspecting the limestone walls for remnants of stenciled frescos dating to the building’s origin as a church. The work is emblematic of what is happening at the Alamo under the leadership of Becky Dinnin.

“A lot of people get the ‘Remember the Alamo’ piece but not necessarily the 130 years before that,” Dinnin said. “To really understand the context of, ‘why did they even go to the Alamo and care,’ you have to talk about what happened before, and what the buildings were.”

For 110 years that story was told by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, but in 2011, the four-and-a-half-acre Alamo site came under the management of the Texas General Land Office. A search for the Alamo’s first executive director led to the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, where Dinnin was vice president of image and communications. She began her work at the Alamo in February 2015.

Coming from a family steeped in Lone Star lore –– her mother taught Texas history and she is descended from Sarah Dodson, who sewed one of the flags carried during some early battles for Texas independence –– Dinnin is well aware of the significance of what she is doing.

“The opportunity and the hopes and dreams that people have for the Alamo is just so encouraging and inspiring. I feel so blessed to be a part of it,” she said.

Dinnin was born in Plainview and raised in Groom, where she graduated from high school in 1984 and left the Panhandle for Baylor.

“I knew from junior high on that’s where I was going. I never considered anything else,” she said.

She majored in music her first year, “but I realized that I really didn’t have the talent or the heart for it.” Dinnin turned to journalism with a minor in business marketing, building on what she learned working on the award-winning student newspaper at her small high school.

Dinnin’s Baylor education included plenty of history classes and a work-study job transcribing interviews at the Institute for Oral History in the basement of Tidwell Bible Building.

“There probably aren’t, in my opinion, better history departments in the state than Baylor’s. The teachers there are just fantastic,” she said.

Upon graduation in 1988, Dinnin worked at several Baptist-affiliated institutions, including Dallas Baptist University, the Baptist General Convention of Texas and GuideStone Financial Resources. She also earned an MBA at SMU in Dallas. She joined the staff of the San Antonio Chamber in 2007 and soon was forming relationships with the business and political leaders that keep San Antonio going.

“San Antonio has a unique personality in its politics and economics and how things get done here,” she said. “It may be the seventh largest city in the country, but San Antonio is still culturally a very small town. Everybody knows everybody.”

That knowledge is proving invaluable as Dinnin builds a team to develop and fund a master plan for the Alamo. Already the state has allocated $32 million and the city has budgeted $17 million, but more is needed.

“We’re going to also raise a significant amount of private money through the Alamo Endowment,” Dinnin said.

One goal of the master plan is to provide more information about the Alamo’s founding as a Spanish mission in 1718 and its role as a military outpost long before the events of the Texas Revolution in 1836.

“That means more interpretive panels, more areas that are perhaps restored or rebuilt to help you see visually what the site footprint looked like,” Dinnin said.

The master plan will include a new museum to display more of the 40,000 artifacts currently in storage, and to showcase the 200-plus items collected by Phil Collins. The pop musician became obsessed with the Alamo while watching a Walt Disney “Davy Crockett” miniseries as a boy in England. He quietly built an impresive collection and gave it to the Alamo in 2014.

Dinnin said she hopes to have drawings and ideas for the master plan on the table by the summer of 2016.

“There’s a lot of work we’re doing right now that’s helping us evaluate where we are.”

Meanwhile, Dinnin leads a staff of 60 full- and part-time employees who keep the Alamo open 363 days a year for 2 million annual visitors. Their jobs range from conserving and maintaining the physical buildings to leading tours to selling mementoes.

“In the end the goal for all of us is to be sure we are doing right by the Alamo and what it stands for,” Dinnin said.

Sharing Dallas with the World

Standing on the steps of the Hall of State at Fair Park in Dallas, Shannon Roberts can see across the grand Esplanade, built in 1936 for the Texas Centennial Exposition, and out toward the glass towers of downtown. The perspective in many ways defines her mission as executive director of the Dallas Historical Society –– to share past, present and future.

“I am a proud fourth generation Dallasite and a seventh generation Texan,” said Roberts, who took the position in June 2015. “I saw an opportunity to have a dialogue with my community regarding the diversity of our shared history. As Dallas continues to grow, I think it is important to reach back into our past and tell the very colorful story of some of our earliest days as a city.”

With an annual budget of more than $1 million, Roberts leads a staff of five full- and three part-time employees who maintain and showcase a collection of approximately 3 million artifacts focused on Dallas and Texas. Their biggest challenge, she said, is to make history relevant to diverse audiences.

“I can capture the imagination of just about anyone by taking them into our collection and finding something from the past that elicits an ‘aha’ moment,” she said. “Unfortunately, that is not feasible. We are continually talking about how to capture that ‘aha’ moment for a broader audience and how to make the history of Dallas and Texas inspiring for future generations.”

Roberts’ journey to the Dallas Historical Society began at the Episcopal School of Dallas where she graduated in 1982. She earned a BA in journalism from Baylor in 1986 and an MBA in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.

At Baylor, Roberts honed her writing skills, which she said have been particularly important as a fundraiser. At the same time, she gained confidence through a required public speaking course that included daily extemporaneous exercises.

“Years later, this proved to be a real-life exercise that gave me the tools to think on my feet in a thoughtful manner,” she said.

Roberts has put those tools to work through executive and development roles at the Resource Center, Dallas Children’s Museum and the Dallas Children’s Theater. Most recently she was executive director of the Santa Fe Children’s Museum in New Mexico. The experience of leading a museum located within a historic district is serving Roberts well at the Hall of State.

“The Society has been the steward of the Hall of State since 1937 and this is a tremendous responsibility to the people of Dallas,” she said. “I take the care and conservation of both the Hall and our collection very seriously and of course, the conservation issues can be quite costly and complicated.”

For Roberts, getting to know the Hall of State has involved some personal exploration.

“I take to Instagram pretty frequently to tell my own ‘backstage’ story of what it is like to work on a daily basis in an art deco treasure,” she said. “Just recently, I took a photo from the inside of my office elevator because the original gates are so beautiful. I did spend one afternoon with a giant set of keys opening doors and passageways. I know I have only scratched the surface but it was a great adventure. The Hall of State is a never ending design inspiration.”

The Hall is also a much-visited landmark, especially for three weeks each fall when some 150,000 people view a special exhibit during the State Fair of Texas. This year it was “Big Texas Music” celebrating the contributions of Texas-born musicians –– from Van Cliburn to Buddy Holly and Dallas native Stevie Ray Vaughn.

On a year-round basis the Dallas Historical Society welcomes researchers working on everything from academic papers to screen plays to personal family histories.

“Since we are housed in one of the most important Art Deco buildings in the United States, we have an opportunity to bring people to our museum for any number of reasons, but I always hope that they walk away discovering something new about both design and history,” Roberts said.