Patt Behler has been active in serving the Jefferson City community since she moved to the area in 1974, but she said she owes much of her ethic of service to her time in the Peace Corps in South America.
The Peace Corps was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, and Behler joined the corps the next year.
She'll be 90 years old Friday. She joined when she was 35 and an elementary school art teacher in Kansas. She said she was inspired by Kennedy's words, had a sense of adventure and didn't have any family responsibilities. She's never married or had any children.
She's an only child, and her parents were both from Pennsylvania; she was born in Washington, D.C.
She thinks much of her sense of adventure came from her father, who had a saying about how a rolling stone doesn't gather much moss, "'but it sure gets a really good shine.'"
For her Peace Corps service in Peru - two years, including three months of pre-deployment training elsewhere - she was placed in the country's second most populous city, Arequipa. Back then, she explained the Peace Corps didn't assign members particular positions or job descriptions before their arrival in-country; they were all just "community developers."
She taught art for children, sometimes using paint brushes she made out of pigs' hair. She and other Peace Corps volunteers also helped create a furniture catalog, complete with display items to demonstrate to local people on limited incomes how they could make homemade pieces that would be far cheaper than imported metal furniture; a lot of residents' furniture had been crushed in a recent earthquake.
She took children to get smallpox vaccinations, taught English and shared delivered books with children, too.
From that experience, "all of a sudden" libraries were on her mind.
Once she got back to the United States, she "decided because of what I had experienced in the Peace Corps, I would look for a different kind of work, which became library work. I had never thought about it that much before, but that's one of the many things I did while I was in the Peace Corps."
She worked at a public library in Kansas City, and then received a grant to obtain a degree in library science. After that, she worked for 18 years with the Missouri State Library, before retiring in 1993.
Retirement is a loose word given her activity since then. She's been a tour guide at the Governor's Mansion for 24 years, has helped organize money for South Elementary School and has worked with Project Homeless Connect for three years, among other activities, including being part of group to practice speaking Spanish.
Faith has also been an important part of her life; she's a member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. "We treat individual human beings and any living thing with the dignity of their life, and the Peace Corps and UU have put that together for me, as best as I could do; I'm certainly not perfect," she said.
She said her mom used to say, "'It takes all kind of people to make a world,' and every once in a while I find myself saying that."
"As far as Jeff City is concerned, I have found it to be a really friendly (place)."
She cared for her mom in Jefferson City until she died, and has lived in her former home since. She thanks the spirit of the community and the tangible actions of friends and other people for helping her get through that.
"I wouldn't have had it any other way," she said. "Jefferson City has been good to me."