By Heather Lusk

Meg Julien, inducted as the first woman in the Zionsville Lion’s Club in 1994, will be this year’s Fall Festival parade grand marshal.

“I was the one who broke the ice,” she said. “The first person to design a car, it wasn’t complete. It was the people who designed cars after that have made them great.”

Julien said she initially joined to help her husband, Eran, who was legally blind, find a seat at the meetings.

She moved to Zionsville in 1957 with Eran and their two children and has a long history of volunteering in the community.

Julien worked in the Zionsville school system for nearly 30 years as both a teacher and librarian. In 1994 she was on the board of the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library during the transition from its location in a Victorian house on Hawthorne Street to its current home on Fifth Street. She served as president of the board “from the time they started building until it was complete,” she said. “I signed the check that bought the land (for the new building).”

Julien was one of the original founders of the Zionsville chapter of Tri Kappa in 1973. She was initiated into the organization in 1942 in Delphi, Ind., where she grew up. She also served on the board of the Sullivan Munce Museum as the Zionsville Woman’s Club representative.

She was previously in the parade when her husband was president of the Lions Club in the 1980s.

Fall Festival chairman Tim Reinhart told her about the honor after a Lions Club meeting.

“He said, ‘Meg, if you’ll do it, we’ve chosen you to be the grand marshall.’” she said. After asking him to repeat it, “I cried,” she said.

Receiving the honor of being the grand marshal puts her in a long line of distinguished locals, according to Julien.

“Tom Carnegie, Otis Burris and all those people, and people from around the area,” she said. “But it’s honoring the women, and they really have done a great deal for this Lions Club.”