After a 38-year Exchange Career, Associate EEODI Officer Valerie Wagoner Prepares for a New Chapter

In 1986, Valerie Wagoner’s best friend, who was gay, joined the military and was a student at the Defense Language Institute. Wagoner learned that there was an effort at the institute to out gay people, and her friend had not gone public with his sexual orientation.

“At that time, his father didn’t know he was gay,” said Wagoner, the Exchange’s associate Equal Employment Opportunity & Diversity Inclusion officer. “His father was retired military, and if his son had been dishonorably discharged or given a general discharge, that would have forever changed my friend’s life, because his father didn’t know.”

So Wagoner married her friend.

“He asked me, and I said, ‘Sure, we’ll get married’,” she said. “And we did. We got married and moved to Hawaii, where he had his first assignment, and I stayed there for a few months. He was at the listening station north of Schofield. And I worked at Schofield as a department supervisor.”

This is just one of many stories that illustrates Wagoner’s passion for diversity and inclusion, which has been reflected in her career at the Exchange, where she has worked in EEODI for 28 of her more than 38 years with the organization.

She remembers being bullied when she was 9 years old because her two best friends were Black. She had a brother who was disabled and a cousin who was paralyzed in an accidental shooting. Her current husband and daughter both have disfluency, or as it’s more widely known, stuttering.

Wagoner herself has thyroid disease and lives with pain every day because of injuries to her back. She was once sexually harassed by an Exchange associate she had to pick up from an airport, someone who didn’t last long with the organization.

“I live diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,” Wagoner said. “It’s my passion. I stayed in EEO even though there were those who told me I would never make the Executive Management Program (EMP) if I stayed in EEO for my career. When Susan Simone, one of my mentors, was getting ready to retire, she said to me, ‘You know, Valerie, you did it your own way’.”

Wagoner said the Exchange has been good to her and that she is proud of what she has accomplished. “But every good thing comes to an end, and it’s time to move on,” says Wagoner, who is retiring in November after having been with the Exchange since 1981—and having known it all her life.

Growing up military

Wagoner was born a year after her father enlisted in the military. “I was born into this man’s Air Force,” she said. “I went from having a dependent’s ID card to having an AAFES ID card. I have never not been able to shop at the Exchange.”

Her father’s Air Force career took him all over the world, including to RAF Alconbury in England and two tours in Guam.

“We relied on the Exchange for everything, pretty much, that you couldn’t get out of a catalog,” she said. “At the time, the bookstores did not belong to the Exchange, but when we lived in England, my parents allowed me to get one book a month because I was an avid reader. I treasured those.”

Another place her father was assigned was K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, which no longer exists, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

“It was in the middle of a forest near Marquette,” she said. “So we relied on the Exchange for necessities there, even though we were in CONUS.”

The early Exchange years

In the early ‘80s, Wagoner attended the Florida State University College of Law, but she had to drop out in 1981 for health reasons. After her father retired and began working in civil service for the commissary, her parents moved to  Upstate New York and she moved there to join them. She was a trained paralegal, but the 1981 job market was so tough that she couldn’t get a job.

“Our next-door neighbor worked for AAFES in HR said that the Exchange was hiring for on-call associates,” she said. “You had to stay by your phone every morning to see if you were needed for work. If you were, you got called in. I got hired and did that for a short time at Griffiss Air Force Base.”

Before long, she was hired into Loss Prevention at Griffiss. Her paralegal background was a plus. She was also good at catching shoplifters. When her father was reassigned to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, she resigned from Griffiss and moved with her family, reapplying at the Chanute BX, where she once again got a job in Loss Prevention.

At both installations, she ran into a glass ceiling. She applied for management positions but kept getting turned down—because she was a woman.

“One of the reasons I do what I do now is because I didn’t get a management position in Loss Prevention,” she said. “Women were not hired into management positions in LP at that time. I had a wonderful area manager, Ruth Pierce, the area manager for the Great Lakes Exchange. She called me into her office one day. It wasn’t a visit, it was more of an order. I thought I was in trouble.

“She pointed to the wall and said, ‘Valerie, when you get tired of banging your head against that brick wall with LP, let the area HR manager know that you’re interested in a retail management position.’ And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”

The next time she was turned down for an LP management position, Wagoner took the area manager’s advice. Within a month, she received orders to go to her first retail position, at a Military Clothing store at Fort Sheridan, which was just north of Chicago. Despite initial challenges—she started without much training at a store where the manager had just left—she enjoyed the job.

“I was called an assistant manager but really I was a shift manager,” she said. “Outside of EEO, it was one of my favorite jobs, because of the people we were serving. The store’s primary role was to fill Reserve orders for Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. We would get orders from Reserve units and fill them.”

She worked in Military Clothing for a year. It was about that time that she married her gay friend to keep him from being outed and moved to Hawaii with him. But she was only with him about six months. Her parents had moved to Offutt Air Force Base, so she went back to join them in December 1986. She reapplied at Offutt, where she worked as a sales associate, then returned to Loss Prevention, and then became a sales area manager.

That led to another, much longer-lasting marriage.

An Exchange romance

While Wagoner was at Offutt, she attended an electronics seminar in Dallas in late July/early August 1988, after her first marriage had ended. It was there that she met Ralph Wagoner, who was a buyer for the Exchange—but she didn’t know that at first.

“The moment I saw him, I was very interested, but I thought he was a vendor,” she said. “That meant nothing could happen because you don’t have relationships with vendors. But the second day of the conference, I saw his badge and realized that he wasn’t a vendor. We had drinks that night and met for breakfast the next morning.”

After less than three months, they were married. They celebrated their 35^th wedding anniversary in October. Before the marriage, she traveled to Alabama to meet him and his children. “It was like the TV show ‘My Three Sons’—when I married him, I got my husband and three sons.”

He worked for what was then the South East Exchange Region, so she left Offutt and moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to join him, getting a job in Finance & Accounting. Ralph, who had worked in Japan for eight years before coming to South East Region, was asked if was interested in going back.

“He came to my desk, knelt down and whispered in my ear, ‘They just called and asked me if I wanted to go to Japan,’” she said. “And I looked at him and said, ‘Can we go tomorrow?’”

Going where you go—and going back

Ralph moved to Japan in October 1989. Valerie moved there two months later. In 1990, they had a daughter. Valerie applied to the Exchange again and became a reorder assistant and then a sales area manager.

“In October 1990, after working an 18-hour day, I went home, fed my baby, took a shower and wrote my resignation note,” she says. “I was 32 years old, I had my first daughter and I didn’t want to work long days.”

In April 1991, she began teaching at a high school in Japan, staying in the job until they returned to the States in 1994. Once again, the Exchange beckoned. By that time, their daughter was 4½ years old and ready to start kindergarten.

“We made the decision that I should come back, because I love AAFES,” she says. “I refer to it as ‘Mother AAFES.’ Mother AAFES provides everything for us.”

She applied in January 1995 but there was a hiring freeze. She did manage to get a contract position in Procurement. And then a job opened up in EEO. She applied and was hired for it in March 1995. She’s been in EEO ever since.

“My passion for it is because we’re all the same, regardless of how we look, who we are, if we’re differently abled, if we’re abled,” she said. “I’ve been given a lot of opportunities, but I have worked every day to make sure that EEO is what it should be. I made sure that every person who filed a complaint was given a fair opportunity to make their claim. I’m a firm advocate of mediation, because most issues that come to my lane are the result of a series of miscommunications.”

She also has a passion for professionalism, and was instrumental in centralizing the EEO counseling function, which was formerly done in the field. “This ensures that everybody is getting the quality and the professionalism they deserve when they began an odyssey of contact and complaint,” she said. “We ensure that we have a trained team that can do what I call a cradle-to-grave process, so that the team is trained to be able to go from the beginning of counseling to the end, which can take two or three years.”

A career highlight happened in 2009, when she deployed for six months to Iraq, where she was the contracting officer’s representative and helped implement the Manpower Associates Bill of Rights.

“It was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and not just at AAFES,” she said. “Being there, making a difference in people’s lives. Because I was the go-between for the third-country nationals, the Manpower Associates, and the Iraqi associates and management, I was able to make a difference in their lives.”

One of her cousins was deployed to the same location at the time. “He was a platoon leader,” she said. “It was rewarding knowing that I was making difference not just in Soldiers’ lives but in the life of one of my family members as well.”

Family Serving Family

Wagoner says her plans for retirement include enjoying her family. She and Ralph have their four children, six grandchildren (a seventh passed away 10 years ago) and 11 great-grandchildren. She also has two sisters. An avid cruiser, she has a cruise planned in January with one sister and her family, another planned in February with the other sister, and one in July with many of her children and grandchildren.

“I can’t be on a cruise ship all the time,” said Wagoner (who has three other cruises planned), “so I plan to delve more into our genealogy. I’m sort of the family historian. Three-fourths of my lineage comes from before the United States was a country. The other one-fourth came from Italy, in 1910 and 1912.”

Italy is important enough that she is in the final stages of becoming a dual Italian and U.S. citizen. “That’s thanks to my great-grandmother,” she said. “Because she never learned English, she could not become a U.S. citizen. If she had, I wouldn’t have been eligible for Italian citizenship. I plan to spend time in Italy and experience what my great-grandparents experienced before leaving in 1910 and 1912.”

“Family serving family” means a lot to her. “My first and second husbands are both Army Veterans,” she said. “My father retired from the Air Force. My son was an Army Reservist. I have a brother-in-law who is an Air Force Vet, another who is a  Navy Vet and another who was an Army Vet. I have a grandson who’s active Navy, another who’s a Navy Vet and a grandson who’s a Marine Vet.

“I have never left the military world,” she said. “I think many of us make a conscious decision to stay. Like with me and the Exchange, they keep coming back to it. I will tell you that when I enter a military installation, I’m home. And I’ll miss that.”