Scott Swanson
Lin Gagner was named Sweet Home’s Distinguished Citizen for 2015 and Kristen Adams was named First Citizen Saturday night, March 12, at the Chamber of Commerce’s 72nd Annual Awards Banquet at the Community Center.
Gay Byers was chosen as Patti Woods Woman of the Year and Amy Wingo was honored as Jr. First Citizen.
The three-hour event included a silent auction and some live auctioneering of donated wine by emcee Dale Johnson. Those sales raised more than $2,000 for the chamber, he said.
The event drew 234 for a pork tenderloin roulade dinner provided by little town catering and served by high school Key Club members and Sunshine Industries personnel.
Chamber Director Katrina Crabtree said things went well.
“I heard positive overall remarks,” she said. “The auction was just awesome. We made a lot more than the raffles we normally have. I do believe that the silent and live auction was was a big success.”
Distinguished Service Award winner Lin Gagner was introduced by last year’s honoree, Ben Dahlenburg, who said he “talked to many people,” who told him Gagner is “a giver, dependable, hard-working, community-minded, the first to volunteer – an example of a Sweet Home volunteer at its best.”
Gagner has been an active member of Sweet Home’s PEO Chapter FA since 2000, serving as president four years and currently on three different fund-raising committees.
Gagner’s Riggs Hill home, Dahlenburg said, “has been used so much by this organization that it is known as ‘the PEO House.’”
Gagner has served as church organist at St. Helens Catholic Church for more than 40 years and serves on the church Finance Committee, Women’s Scholarship Committee, and as an active member of the Women’s Club.
“That’s true dedication,” Dahlenburg noted.
Gagner also organizes and operates the sponsor hospitality area at the Oregon Jamboree, providing food, drink and conversation for sponsors and their guests.
When she moved to Sweet Home in the early 1970s, she took a job with a local dentist, who left her in charge in the first month while he went skiing. During 36 years there, people thought Gagner was her boss’s wife.
“She got tired of telling them she wasn’t his wife and just went with it. When people would ask about the dentist’s sons, she would just answer as if they were her own.”
Gagner, Dahlenburg said, could call patients by their name as they walked through the door, “which amazed the rest of the staff.
“She never forgot a name or a face.”
Gagner and her husband owned and operated the Riggs Hill Nursery in the 1980s and 1990s, and she served as treasurer for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity when it opened, working on “many fund-raisers” for the organization.
In 2006, Gagner joined the South Santiam Sweet Potato Queens, donning a bright green sequined dress, high-top Converse tennis shoes, a red wig topped with a crown, bling cat sunglasses and a hot pink boa.
The group has posed in calendars, which were “sold for years” to raise money for Habitat. Later, she organized a Bras Across the Bridge event at Weddle Bridge to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer.
She and her husband Duane have seven children, 12 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren between them, he said.
Gagner responded to the award by crediting others who’ve helped in her efforts.
“This is unbelievable,” she said. “I don’t do this alone. There’s a whole lot of you who volunteer and who make this community the wonderful community it is.”
First Citizen Kristin Horner Adams was introduced by Nancy Ellis, with whom she shares an office at Sweet Home High School.
“I have the privilege every day to work with her,” Ellis said.
She said Adams provides “a steady hand, a wise and reasoned voice” in the community as well as being “a loving wife and mother who wants the best for the family she adores and the community she loves.”
Adams, a 1988 graduate of Sweet Home High School – “some 80 years after her great-grandfather had accomplished the same feat,” Ellis noted, she has been very active in the community since she was young. According to Adams’ husband Mike, she is “always interested in helping others, sometimes to a fault, and is genuinely concerned about others,” Ellis said, adding “she is well-respected by her co-workers and is sought out for advice by others.”
Adams has been involved in “numerous” community activities, including school PTFs, the Oregon Jamboree, coaching soccer, leading music and serving in the backpack program at Harvest Christian Fellowship church.
Adams’ “greatest passion,” Ellis said, are “her four beautiful children, Bret, 22, Jarid, 20, Ryan, 17 and Kenzi, 17, and husband Mike.”
Adams is also committed to high school and junior high students in the community through the Gear-Up program, which introduces them to college campuses and provides a multitude of scholarship opportunities, Ellis said. Adams herself earned a bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University “a week before the birth of her first child,” Ellis noted.
Adams also helps students with college applications and financial aid packages, and oversees the Access College Today program through which “several hundred” SHHS graduates have been able to attend Linn-Benton Community College for free.
“I see her work with students and make them feel like they are the only student in the world,” Ellis said.
Responding to the award, Adams recalled how, after being named Jr. First Citizen in 2004, “I was going to kill my family,” and how they had difficulty convincing her to attend Saturday’s awards event.
But, she added, she loves and is committed to the community. She said three of her four children are away at school, “but they want to come back and get jobs and raise their families here in this community.”
Junior First Citizen Amy Wingo was introduced by last year’s winner, Robert Shamek.
Wingo, he said, has volunteered in the community “for years,” through the SAFE Committee, teaching Bible classes, selling Girl Scout cookies, organizing and working at the concessions stand during the last several track and field seasons and for the Meet of Champions in Salem, which Sweet Home helps to host, and chairing the Police and Library Services Political Action Committee.
“Just saying all that stuff wears me out,” Shamek said.
He then broke out a unique piece of knitted headgear, noting that Wingo “also can create things with yarn like no other person I know and is the owner of Amlowi Hat Creations” in addition to mothering “three wonderful children” with her husband of over 22 years, Chris, along with two dogs, four cats, seven chickens, a fish, a bearded dragon and “a pet Chewbacca.”
Wingo was clearly surprised by hearing her name called, and could only respond, “I would have thought of something if I’d known.”
Patti Woods Woman of the Year Gay Byers was introduced by last year’s honoree, Jane Moran, who may have left some heads spinning with her list of Byers’ accomplishments in the community.
Byers, who has resided in Sweet Home for 11 years with her husband Jay, works full-time as an aide with special-needs students at Hawthorne School, raises llamas and manages two apartment complexes in town. She is also a naturopath.
Byers has been an “active volunteer” with the Sweet Home Police Department since 2010 – “even before SHPD had a volunteer program,” Moran noted.
Byers has been an active Neighborhood Watch Council member, helps with traffic control during parades, volunteers at the Jim Bean Memorial Safety Fair, does facility maintenance and yard work for the department, assisted with SHPD’s Downtown Trick or Treating effort, assists with the Citizen’s Police Academy and the Teen Sharing Tree, coordinated last year’s Shop with a Cop program at the local Bi-Mart, and helped organize last year’s Law Enforcement Memorial Ceremony.
She also spearheaded and coordinated the new Downtown Business Watch program by personally visiting all the businesses in town.
She and Jay are “very active” in their Mennonite church, serving on the ministry board and helping with Vacation Bible School.
Byers is also a member of the Adopt a Park program, for Clover Park, and she and Jay are judges at the Sweet Home Sweet Ride Charity Car Show. She makes sandwiches for homeless people, and has taken several elderly neighbors under her wing, making sure they are taken care of and taking them shopping as needed.
Byers didn’t have much to say: “I’m sorry. I’m speechless,” as she received her award.
Crabtree presented the Business of the Year award to Rio Theater owners Ericka and Thomas Baham for working to improve the interior and exterior of the theater since they purchased it in 2015. She said the theater has been “a Main Street staple since the 1950s” and is considered by many to be “a cinema treasure.”
Thomas Baham thanked the community for supporting the theater, telling the crowd they’re only “10 percent” into the planned renovations, which prompted a “What?” from his wife. “It’ll be Vegas pretty soon,” he added.
Roseanne Lupoli, executive director of last year’s Organization of the Year, Sunshine Industries, presented this year’s award to local PEO Chapters DD and FA, citing their work to provide educational scholarships to local women.
“More than 90,000 women have benefitted from this organization’s educational grants, low-interest loans and awards,” Lupoli said.
Crabtree presented recognition plaques to the chamber’s “first-ever” Cornerstone business members: Sherri Gregory-Keller Williams Home Team, Samaritan Health and local real estate agent Wendi Melcher.
Boys and Girls Club of the South Santiam Board President Tom Oliver presented the organization’s Member of the Year Award to Scott Melcher, who was a key figure last year in helping to rouse local support for the Sweet Home branch, which was in dire financial straits.
He said Melcher “does a lot of work behind the scenes” for the club and has been “instrumental in raising funds” to keep the club operating.
Melcher said he appreciated the award and the “support” of the organization. He emphasized that he loves the Sweet Home community, which, he said, “every year steps up” to support the club.
VIP awards were presented by Robert Snyder and Brian Hoffman. Honorees were:
n Vicki DeLong, who has volunteered at The Oregon Jamboree since its conception in 1992 and has since assumed the role of volunteer supervisor of the hospitality area, where she runs a crew that feeds more than 500 volunteers each day during the festival. She also is a food unit leader during major fires for the Oregon Department of Forestry, feeding anywhere from 150 to 3,000 firefighters. DeLong has also been involved in Make-A-Wish since 2010, granting wishes to a number of children, including three from Sweet Home.
n Cassie Richie, “a busy mother of five – ages 6 months to 12 years” was honored for her involvement in a wide variety of activities throughout the community, including assisting with programs at Community Chapel, volunteering at the Oregon Jamboree for 17 years and supervising the Crowd Management Team for 11, and serving as a volunteer EMT for the Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District, where she also is active in the Sharing Tree program.
n Sean Morgan, who, Hoffman said, teamed up with a mutual friend to teach a teenager who lived in Morgan’s neighborhood to read. Morgan, who is a staff member at The New Era, also has been active in the Sweet Home Auditorium Remodel Committee and has served for some 20 years as a stagehand at the Oregon Jamboree.
n Gilbert Muñez, a retiree from the U.S. Forest Service, spends significant time each week groundskeeping at the Community Center, the Hope Center, Evangelical Church and homes of individuals unable to do their own yardwork. He’s also active at the Senior Center.
n Corbitt Sanders, a junior at Sweet Home High School, was honored for volunteer work that includes the Key Club, Red Cross blood drives, monthly “sweet streets” clean-up activities by high school students, leading children’s activities for the city’s summer parks program, helping at SHEM and more.
n Karlene Stutzer has volunteered at Sweet Home Pregnancy Center as a board member, grant writer and fund-raiser.
She was a private counselor for six years, predominantly working with victims of child abuse, often free of charge. Stutzer also volunteers at the library, helping with crafts for the preschool and toddler story time on Fridays.
A former high school drama teacher, she’s also directed dramas in a number of local churches and is currently working on an Easter story for Cornerstone Fellowship, where she attends, teaches Sunday School, works as a lay counselor and helps with the youth ministry.