The daughter of a food service contractor for military installations, Stanley changed states and schools nearly every year. When asked how that peripatetic childhood shaped her, she says, “I always had the wrong accent. I was either saying ‘y’all’ or ‘youse guys’ when I should have said the other. And we always moved just as quickly as we got settled, so that taught me that if I wanted any friends, I’d better do it quickly. I credit my outgoing personality to all that moving around.” Laughing, she adds, “And that was written on every report card I ever had—‘Judy makes friends quickly!’”

After her first grueling job in food service at the Lubbock State School for Retarded Children where she made $197 a month, she moved into freelancing as a commercial artist, “back when you cut out clip art with an Exacto knife.” She married and embarked on another round of traveling. She gave birth to a daughter, Sally, in Louisiana, and a son, Sam, in Canada.

But Stanley never lost sight of her dream of being a teacher, despite a C average in high school and no family tradition of higher education. A rewarding volunteer teaching experience in a first-grade Sunday school class, coupled with encouragement from her mother-in-law, a veteran teacher, compelled her to enroll at Georgia’s Augusta College. She went to school part time, worked full time as a teacher’s assistant, and raised her children, eventually graduating with a bachelor’s in elementary education.

The family moved to Utah, where Stanley taught sixth-grade science. A career teacher, Xenia Young, was her mentor and, “she would signal me when she was going to conference with a student in the hall because of a discipline problem. She let me into her world, she showed me the ropes, and she taught me how to deal with students by her example,” says Judy.

It was there that Stanley fulfilled her desire to explore astronomy. Science was still text book driven, so she began introducing hands-on activities with tools such as yo-yos to teach scientific method and experimentation. She then used astronomy to further pique her students’ interest in science. Partnering with two astronomers from Salt Lake City, she developed a school-based astronomy club, which quickly grew from 30 to 250 members.

Stanley traveled to Socorro to attend the Enchanted Skies Star Party and fell in love with New Mexico, its star-spangled sky, and its vibrant astronomy community. After teaching special education in Socorro for several years, she became TAAS’s education liaison and, through that connection, was hired to do education outreach for LodeStar.

Reflecting on her career in education, she says her greatest challenge was, “the tremendous, overwhelming responsibility of knowing that I had the charge of young minds for longer each day than their parents, and the fact that a teacher has so much power over those young minds. We’ve all been embarrassed or put down by a teacher. For example, I don’t sew because in seventh grade my skirt was held up by the teacher and laughed at. I won’t thread a needle to this day because of that!”

Through her work at LodeStar and her involvement with TAAS, Stanley brings the universe to countless New Mexicans. When asked what astronomy means to her personally, she replies, “Carl Sagan started me on this path. I didn’t live in one house all my life or have a group of friends from the age of five—I didn’t have any of that, so where do I get my sense of belonging? I get it from the stars. All these atoms that make up my body were forged inside a star. I ultimately belong to the universe because that’s where I came from.”