Scott Swanson
When this year’s Oregon Jamboree ends this weekend, so will the volunteer careers of two local women who have been with the festival for well over a decade.
Judy Markert and Kathi Collins, both longtime supervisors of the corps of volunteers who have built the Jamboree into what it is today, will call it quits as managers.
Markert, 64, supervisor of the Clean Team since Day One of the Jamboree, said her family has been urging her to call it a day because of a bad back.
“It’s been very, very difficult,” she said of her decision to resign. “There were lots of tears, lots of sadness, but I have to respect my family’s wishes.”
Collins, 57, supervises the banding crew, which makes sure festival-goers are properly identified as they enter the event. She and her husband Ken have been involved on and off for 13 years and she said she’s quitting to help him with other activities.
“I’m hoping to retire,” she said. “That’s the plan, though I’d like to be around to train somebody.”
Collins said she has been involved in a variety of positions with the Jamboree since she got involved in 1993 – the year Brooks and Dunn were headliners, she noted.
She covered a number of areas, including the scouting of Oregon performers for the concert line-up, organizing a dance stage and dance competition, and her current job – “helping coordinate patron entrance and egress ensuring quick and safe movement of the thousands of patrons to the event and then to their cars and campgrounds via streets, sidewalks and shuttle buses.”
She said the scouting that she and Ken did was particularly memorable.
“That took us to some interesting places,” Collins said. “We watched different acts and watched contestants compete in the Jimmy Dean Showdown. We got Alexis from there. And we saw Davaigh Chase, who was a little gal of 9 or 10 at the time.”
Chase, who was raised in Albany before moving to Los Angeles to pursue acting, later won the lead role in the Disney animated film “Lilo and Stitch,” performing as the young girl Lilo Pelekai.
“It was exciting,” Collins said.
She said she started with the Jamboree in 1993 in the Information Booth with Sweet Home Drug Free, a community action group that worked to reduce drug use, sales, and manufacturing in the local community.
“Different community groups have always been part of volunteering in different ways,” she said. “We didn’t have 700 volunteers at the time. They were looking at community groups for help.”
She said she got interested in volunteering after talking with John and Nancy Slawson, who were involved with the festival, and with Keith Gabriel and then-Police Chief Gary David.
Gabriel was an influence in both women’s involvement they said.
“He was everywhere. He did everything. He was a wonderful example,” Collins said.
Markert said she and Gabriel and some others used to pick up trash in the downtown area years ago, before the Jamboree started, so the Clean Team was a natural fit for her.
She has worked as a bank teller in Sweet Home, where she’s lived for 60 years, for the past 31. She got involved after talking to Marge Geil, one of the founders of the festival, who mentioned it to Markert when she came into the bank.
“I was working at the bank and Marge was a customer. She came in and gave me this crazy thought she had, to get Wynonna Judd to come to Sweet Home. She wondered if I thought it would work. I said we should give it a try.
“I was amazed we pulled it off. We got Wynonna to come to Sweet Home.”
Markert and her husband Bill became co-supervisors of the Clean Team at the first festival and she’s been there ever since
“That’s the only thing I’ve ever done,” she said. Bill moved over to the site setup crew in 2004 and retired from the Jamboree last year.
Markert and her team begin on the Wednesday before the Jamboree, giving “a good cleaning” to 18th Avenue, where festival-goers will stand in line, waiting to get in for the choice seats.
“We want it to be as nice as possible when people are standing out there,” she said. “One year we found a dead cat.”
On Thursday they get the field ready, distributing barrels and other trash receptacles.
Markert is very proud that plastic water bottles and other drink containers that used to be tossed – often on the ground – are now being recycled.
“I just hated to throw hundreds and hundreds of bottles in the trash,” she said.
She and Larry Johnson, who supervises the students who staff the water crew, came up with separate receptacles for bottles and cans.
“We encourage people to throw their plastic bottles in the recycling bins instead of on the ground,” she said.
The Clean Team works from sunup to sundown – and beyond – during the three days of the festival.
“As people leave we follow them out and pick up the trash they leave behind, until the stage lights go out. Then, early in the morning, we come back in to finish cleaning.”
The Jamboree produces “truckloads of trash – piles and piles of bags,” she said.
The day after the festival, the crew is back in action.
“Monday is a big day for us,” Markert said. “We make sure the field looks like nobody’s been on it before we leave.”
Markert’s co-supervisor since 2004 has been her daughter, Sheila Keenon, who will also call it quits this year, she said. She’s appreciated all the people she’s worked with.
“I love every single person who was on my team,” she said.
Her 15 years with the Jamboree have included some interesting experiences she said. The most memorable was the cleanup following one festival – she doesn’t remember the year.
“We were taking the stage down and we had a huge thunder and lightning storm,” Markert said. “Everyone’s hair was standing straight up. I was begging everybody to get off the field. I was afraid somebody was going to get killed. Everybody was just laughing. I was sure someone was going to get hit by lightning.
“A lot of crazy, funny things happen on the field.”
She hopes to retire from banking next spring and plans to do a little traveling with Bill, who retired “seven or eight” years ago.
Collins, a teacher at Holley School, plans to continue there. She says she loves Sweet Home “because of the loving and supportive people who care about one another,” and she plans to continue volunteering.
“We will probably spend that three days doing some kind of volunteer service in another way,” she said.