Gene, Gene, helping machine

Gene Williams could have come from Minnesota or Wisconsin. He’s one of those genuinely nice people I’ve been lucky to meet in my life. He projected kind of quiet, unassuming confidence that was empowering for a 25-year-old in his first management job.

Gene was the extension agent for Conejos County – a rural, low-income area in the south end of Colorado’s San Luis Valley. He obtained funding for a summer youth recreation program and recruited students from nearby Adams State College.

I was fortunate to be a graduate student there and was happy to take a short-term job coordinating Gene’s summer program while seeking permanent employment.

He gave me a free hand; I gained practical experience planning, organizing, staffing, coordinating, budgeting, promoting and evaluating a first-year operation. I learned a lot from the experience and am certain that it made the difference when I was later hired as director of a year-around program in western Colorado.

I was kept busy attending to my duties – in addition to spending more than 40 hours each week in Conejos County, I also worked six nights at Radio Station KGIW in Alamosa – so I didn’t have much opportunity to observe Gene at work. But, it was obvious that he was in one of those nearly impossible “all things to all people” kinds of jobs.

An extension agent serves as a resource to farmers and ranchers in his or her region. That means any question related to agriculture and the business of agriculture was in Gene’s purview. One moment he could be tackling a question about nutrition for lambs and the next a query about maintenance and repair of windmills.

I carried a lunch to work with me, and when I was in the office during a meal break, I read some of the hundreds of brochures and booklets Gene kept on hand. These represented only the tip of the iceberg, of course, and the agent was always ordering more reference materials from the Department of Agriculture or various Land Grant Universities.

Fortunately, the world is full of folks like Gene Williams, people who calmly, quietly and efficiently help others for fair, but unspectacular pay and far too little recognition.

Today, communications technology makes it possible to get help from sources far from home and 24 hours a day. But there will always be a need for friendly, patient, responsive and dedicated local experts who are not only willing to go the extra mile, but are trained to realize when it’s necessary to do so.

As I’ve traveled through rural areas, memories of those weeks in The Valley have returned to me. Those memories include the image of Gene, planning 4-H Club activities, preparing mailings, taking calls and spending most of his time out of the office, collecting soil or water samples, counseling farmers and speaking to community groups.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet and observe a range of public officials, including many politicians. I believe most of these individuals truly want to make a difference.

They could learn a lot from people like Gene Williams. He showed me that a good public servant is really little more than a good neighbor who has the time and ability to perform good deeds all day, every day.