Dorothy and the late Joe Rogers set to be inducted into Chamber Hall of Fame

Dorothy and the late Joe Rogers of Holton are being recognized by the Holton/Jackson County Chamber of Commerce for their dedication to being good volunteers and community leaders.

Over the years, they contributed to the creation and growth of Banner Creek Reservoir and the Jackson County Historical Society, the continuation of the Chamber’s annual Fourth of July fireworks displays and the expansion of Holton Community Hospital. But as Dorothy sees it, she and her late husband were just fulfilling a necessary role in their community.

“We felt like if we were going to be part of a community, we had to be a real part of it,” Dorothy said. “We would try to help out wherever we could… we thought it was just part of our place in the community to be involved.”

The Rogers have been named to the Chamber’s 11th round of Hall of Fame inductees, and they and their contributions to the community will be honored at the annual Hall of Fame banquet in February. Dorothy said the Hall of Fame honor was “terrific,” but if Joe — who died in 2008 — were here, he might have a different reaction to being named among this year’s honorees.

“I think he would have said, ‘Oh, no!’” she said with a laugh. “But he would have smiled and said, ‘OK.’ He was not the kind of guy who would turn things down. He tried to be helpful. He really did.”

Born in New Orleans and raised in Topeka, Tulsa and Leavenworth, Joe Rogers spent part of his childhood and teenage years dealing with polio, a disease that Dorothy said “took away everything he ever enjoyed — baseball, basketball, everything.” But Joe still knew he wanted to be a farmer, and he attended Kansas State University, where he received a bachelor of science degree in agriculture in 1942.

After graduating from KSU, he joined the U.S. Navy and served until the end of World War II, with some of that service coming under Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Australia. Dorothy said Joe never told his military recruiters about his previous issues with polio — he was able to suppress it, she said, and besides, if he had mentioned it, he would likely never have been accepted into the Navy.

Dorothy Williams, on the other hand, had deep family roots in Jackson County, and from third grade onward, she grew up in Holton and graduated with the class of 1942. After high school, she worked as a department store clerk, in the Jackson County Schools superintendent’s office and as a parts inspector for a Kansas City airplane manufacturer.

The latter job put her to work on the night shift, and Dorothy “didn’t care for that one bit,” she said. Instead, she joined the U.S. Marine Corps as soon as she turned 20 — the minimum age at which she could sign up for duty — training at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and eventually getting called to march in the funeral procession for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Both Joe and Dorothy left the military in 1946, and Joe went back to farming while Dorothy went to work in the office of Holton dentist Dr. Doyle Gilbert. That, she said, is where the two met in January of 1947 — he had come in for a full-mouth X-ray, and the staff at Dr. Gilbert’s office was “delighted” to perform that service for him.

“After he had done that, he came out to the desk and hemmed and hawed a little bit,” Dorothy said of her first encounter with Joe. “He wanted to get to know me, and he said, how about going out to dinner sometime? I said, ‘I don’t know you, I’ve never met you before in my life!’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know of a better way to get acquainted!’ He had an answer for everything I said.”

Less than six months later, Joe and Dorothy were married and settled on a farm near Muscotah, where Joe had planted his first crop since completing his college and military duties.

“When I met him, he said we had to get married before harvest,” Dorothy said. “After I married him, I figured out why — he had to have somebody drive the pickup from the field to Horton, and he needed me to do that, because I could drive!”

Dorothy said she “was not brought up to be a country girl at all, but I didn’t mind” becoming a farmwife to Joe, with whom she had five children, starting with eldest son Jay in 1949. After Jay was born, the young family moved to a Holton farm and began “dairying.”

“Joe was willing to do anything that needed to be done on the farm,” Dorothy said. “He was accustomed to dairying, because he’d worked in the dairy at K-State during the time he was in college.”

As the family grew, so did the Rogers’ need for more living and farming space, settling in to a 10-room house with 240 acres for farming and raising dairy cattle. The family was active in the Lucky Stars 4-H club, and Dorothy was active in a variety of club activities in town, including the Violet Club (she would write the club news for The Holton Recorder), the Home Economics Unit and the Qui Vive club.

The Rogers were also very active in Holton’s First Christian Church, where Dorothy played the organ for a number of years. Joe, on the other hand, served as an elder and a Sunday school teacher at the church.

“Joe said I made a Christian out of him, because up to the time we were going out, he hadn’t been going to church a lot, but after he started going with me, he went to church every Sunday!” she said. “And he was a member of our church for many, many years. He was very involved in it.”

The Rogers also became known for opening their hearts and home to those in need. In the mid-1960s, they participated in a Rotary Club program in which families opened their homes to foreign exchange students, and they played host to Hugo Ramirez, an engineering student from Colombia.

“He was a really nice kid,” Dorothy said of Ramirez. “We found out that he had just gotten married before he got into the program. So he brought his wife up from Colombia to join him, and so we just took them under our wing, and she didn’t know anything about this country. She didn’t know any English.”

But the Rogers helped Ramirez and his wife get settled in, and Joe taught Ramirez whatever he could about farming. His teaching paid off.

“Many years later, he and his wife bought a farm in Panama and made part of it a dairy farm. He used a lot of what he learned up here in Joe’s dairy,” Dorothy said, noting that the Ramirez farm in Panama is a large dairy operation capable of employing several workers. The Rogers and Ramirezes have stayed in touch through the years.

In 1972, the Rogers switched from dairy cattle to a regular farming operation, farming row crops and raising and selling crossbred cattle. Dorothy said at that point, “we weren’t making a heck of a lot of money, but we weren’t starving to death.”

Joe became involved with the Delaware Watershed board in the 1970s, encouraging farmers to build terraces and dams to save water and prevent erosion. It was during his time on the watershed board that plans for Banner Creek Reservoir took root, and he served on a planning committee that helped bring those plans to fruition.

The two of them also got involved in the Jackson County Historical Society, which they thought “was a very interesting thing,” Dorothy said. Joe was active on the society’s board of directors, while Dorothy acted as the board’s secretary, and they volunteered numerous hours at Historical Society events and at the museum.

They also volunteered land they owned north of Holton for the construction of a new Holton Community Hospital in the late 1990s when it became clear that the hospital’s then-current facility was too small.

“We had some land out on Highway 75 that I had inherited from my mother,” Dorothy said. “They were trying to find a place to build a new hospital, and they just needed more room. We thought, well, we’ve got more room out here if they’re interested in that. And they were, so we just turned over 10 acres and told them to go ahead and start building.”

Another cause the Rogers enjoyed supporting through the years was the Chamber’s annual Fourth of July fireworks display. Dorothy said the family owned land south of Prairie Lake, the former home of the annual fireworks display, and it was easy for the family to “just jump on a trailer and go up and watch the fireworks” from their own property.

“We figured the least we could do would be to contribute a little bit toward the show,” she said.

That desire to “contribute a little bit” here and there was a “important” to the Rogers family, Dorothy said.

“That’s why we volunteered like we did — not that we think we can do anything, but if everybody contributes what they can, it helps a lot,” she added.

But as Joe turned 80, they had to scale back their volunteering, primarily due to Joe being afflicted with polio a second time. This time, Dorothy said, it was an even more maddening experience for her husband, who had beaten the disease as a teen.

“He was madder than a wet hen, because he couldn’t believe he had it twice in his lifetime,” she said. “He got so he couldn’t walk at all, and it was a terrible thing for him, being in his eighties. He wanted to live to be 90. He never had a grandfather or anyone in his family who lived to be 90. He said, ‘If I just live to be 90, I’ll be happy.’”

On April 8, 2008, Joe got his wish, turning 90. Twelve days later, on April 20, he died.

“He was a strong personality,” Dorothy said of her late husband. “He really was.”

Since then, Dorothy has done her best to look after her five grown children, all of whom are now doing their part to look after her. She’s been living at the Glenn Moore Meadows assisted living facility since July, but she’s happy to look back and see all of the things that she and Joe have accomplished in the Holton community.

“I never tried for any kind of glory at all,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve been around Holton ever since I was in the third grade,” and I think it’s a great place to live.”