Carolyn Hardy marked her 40th anniversary as a member of the Worth County Alumni Board Sunday. She has emceed the event for many years. There are four board members, Mary Kay Hunt, Carolyn Hardy, Rosa Williams, and Edith Miller. The board is looking for new members. Contact any board member if interested.
The school is looking to give away dozens of old trophies from the 1960’s to the present. The school tore down the storage shed at the southwest corner of the school and the trophies are located in the science room of the school for the present. Contact the school during regular business hours.
Ms. Hardy told a story in relation to the giveaway. Her husband, David, started up a computer program at the school in the 1980’s. In its first year, the school competed at a computer Olympiad against much bigger schools and won the whole thing. She found the trophy from that event among the many trophies the school had.
The association has been trying to keep track of graduates who passed away. Three that were noted were Troy Saville, Susan Hall, and Pat Swift.
Instead of the usual black and gold décor for the meal, the event was decked in patriotic colors for the country’s 250th anniversary.
This year, the association gave scholarships to Brayden Murphy and Sawyer Thurman. Last year’s honorees were Makenzie Walter and Eliza Corey. The association voted to raise the scholarship from $250 to $300.
There was $2,508.12 in the account at the start of last year. There was $306 raised from collections last year, $243 in alumni directory sales, and $750 given out in scholarships, leaving a balance of $2,237.02. There was $10,357.60 in the CD, with $220 being earned in interest.
The Family Circle Singers began one day in 1989 when the Hardy children, while riding in the back of their family’ s van, suddenly started singing, “Going to the Chapel of Love” while coming home from a family reunion. They tried their hand at it and won the talent show at Old Defiance Days that year and then the Worth County Fair. They sang at nursing homes in Worth County, Albany, Mount Ayr, King City, at weddings, and Veterans Day gatherings. They are now semi-retired. They have performed everything from Glenn Miller songs in the 1930’s and 1940’s to 1980’s. They sang “Fernando” from ABBA, a popular group in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and Lee Greenwood’s patriotic song, “Proud to be an American” in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary.
Doug Gabbert of the Class of 1976 spoke at the gathering. He wanted to go to Saudi Arabia and work in the oil fields there, but didn’t know how to make the connections. A friend introduced him to beekeeping, and he took after it and was a migratory beekeeper, moving periodically from Missouri to Florida until 1986, when he enlisted in the Army.
At one point, Mr. Gabbert went to North Dakota to the Badlands, near the border with Montana, where he heard it was really good for bees. His first year brought about a bumper crop, but it took four years for his next one. The weather was just as unpredictable as Missouri, as rainstorms would miss him and hit somewhere 50 miles away.
He noted that Theodore Roosevelt lived for a time in the Badlands and that he credited it with the skills that led him to becoming President. “I’ve embraced the strenuous life,” said Mr. Gabbert, although it almost backfired on him once. He and a friend were moving to Florida, when the alternator quit on their Ford F-600. This was in the days before cell phones and roadside assistance services. They got the alternator fixed, but then the truck wouldn’t start, and they were on level ground. They rigged up a ramp and tried to push-start the truck, finally doing so right as it got to the end of the ramp.
In looking at one of his friends who got a job right out of high school and stuck with it, Mr. Gabbert said, “I wasn’t ready to give up my childish things.” He said that he joined the Army because he watched World War II movies as a kid and always wanted to be a soldier. But he didn’t fit in well at the Army, as he was 10 years older than most of the other servicemen.
On the other hand, it was one of the easier jobs he ever had. It was during the height of the Cold War, he was stationed in Germany, and, “Our job was making things dirty and cleaning them again.” The Army pushed recreational activities because, as Mr. Gabbert said, “It was better than having solders being drunk on the base all the time.” A local German sports club let him play sports with them, and he learned he had talent as a singer and as an actor. The local theatres were always short of men, and they were always glad to have him.
Mr. Gabbert met his wife, Ellen, who worked at the Department of Defense. “She keeps me from flying too close to the sun,” Mr. Gabbert said. When she was transferred to Panama, he went with her and took up beekeeping again. Beekeeping was a boom or bust proposition; when the weather and the markets were good, they were really good; however, one can go a few years without turning a profit.
In the late 1990’s, changes came to the industry. Invasive pests meant that the bees he was using had trouble with disease, and at one point, the market fell through the floor as demand for honey cratered. So Mr. Gabbert went back to school and learned computer programming, which he still does to this day, although he still does beekeeping on the side. His job involves programming equipment for the railroad industry and then training operators how to use it, which requires a lot of travel on his part. It isn’t his first time working on the railroad; a chance encounter at Fern’s Drive-In led him to a job working on the railroad shortly after he graduated.
While most of his work is on the continent, Mr. Gabbert has worked in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and has had friends from all over the world. “Egypt has some of the friendliest people in the world,” said Mr. Gabbert. While hard at programming software for large machines, Mr. Gabbert and one of his best assistants, Niaz, fixed them up as well, which led one of his Saudi friends to say that he couldn’t believe a “softie,” which is a nickname for a computer programmer, could fix things up. “I was a farmer long before I was a softie,” said Mr. Gabbert. “If we saw things that needed fixed, we fixed them.”
Mr. Gabbert said that kids were lucky at Worth County to be able to participate in everything. In the school where he lives at, it is bigger than all the schools in the GRC combined and students have to choose a single focus. “I was able to try out everything and see what I was good at,” he said.
This year’s gathering collected $212 from the plate. They received a $50 donation for the scholarship fund. There were 33 graduates and three guests at this year’s gathering. The oldest class member attending was Clark Stabe of the Class of 1955. The Gabbert family had the most members present with three. The farthest away was Doug Gabbert from Florida. There were five members from the Class of 1965, five from the Class of 1971, and four from the Class of 1976. The Class of 1976 had a reunion at the Golf Clubhouse Saturday.
The next Alumni Reunion will be Sunday, June 27th, 2027 at 12:45 pm at the School.
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