MANSFIELD — Judy Villard Overocker said Sunday her greatest memory of her 42 years of work in Richland County can be found in the young people she helped along the way.
“I just think that’s the beauty of the job that I had … that I could just touch people in a way that it just meant a lot to them. Maybe now … maybe in the future,” said the woman who served as the Richland County extension educator with the Ohio State University starting in 1984.
Villard Overocker, who spent much of her career working with the 4-H program, was honored with a reception inside the Fairhaven Youth Hall and Cafeteria at the Richland County Fairgrounds.
Family, friends and many of those whom Villard Overocker touched along the way showed up on a bright sunny day to honor the Wayne County native who grew up on a dairy farm and later earned three degrees from her beloved Ohio State University, including a doctorate in extension administration and leadership.
(Below are photos from a reception on Sunday afternoon at the Richland County Fairgrounds in honor of Judy Villard Overocker. The story continues below the photos.)
Even after more than four decades on the job, retirement was not an easy decision for Villard Overocker.
“I think just the fact that I lost my husband last September and the fact my grandkids are growing up and I want to spend more time watching what they do. When I had night meetings and weekend things, I often had to miss some of their things. They’re getting much more involved in school now and things and I want to enjoy that,” she said.
“And I want to travel. I want to do some things that I always dreamed of and never had time to do. So this is a good time,” Villard Overocker said.
The nationwide 4-H program began around the start of the 20th century through the work of several people in different parts of the United States concerned about young people. Some say a man named A.B. Graham started perhaps the first such youth group in Clark County, Ohio, in January 1902.
Regardless of the official origin, Villard Overocker has seen it flourish — and change — over the past four decades.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes in projects, the kinds of things that kids can take. There’s much more digital and much more computer-focused kinds of things that kids can do now,” she said during an interview with Richland Source that paused multiple times for well-wishers to stop and say “thank you.”
“Even the projects that maybe we had years ago have different components to them now that are more, software-focused.
One of the biggest changes she has seen is an explosion of other opportunities for young people.
“Kids, I used to say, would ‘bleed green’ and they did everything they could in 4-H or maybe it might have been in the FFA or maybe both. Kids now have so many athletic kinds of opportunities. There’s traveling ball clubs and so forth and so kids are just really stretched into other areas,” Villard Overocker said.
“I think that’s a difference that we see with kids. They’re in 4-H because they want to gain the good skills, the leadership, the public speaking and the organizational skills, but then they also move on to other things that maybe they’re excited about … maybe what their friends are doing,” she said.
4-H has certainly changed since her days as a participant in rural Wayne County.
“When I was in 4-H, it was pretty basic. You took livestock, you took home economics or you took some miscellaneous ag kinds of things. That was kind of the choices that we had,” she said.
“Kids nowadays can take all kinds of things, and they can develop their own projects. We didn’t have ‘self-determined’ years ago like kids can do now. I think that’s really good for kids, because their interests keep changing and so forth.
“But it’s also a little bit more challenging from the administrative side because we have to judge those kids and (we have to) make sure we have people that know a little bit about what their topic is,” she said with a laugh.
One project Villard Overocker was known for leading was the annual Richland County Mock Crash Safety Docudrama, which teaches teens the perils of drinking and driving, lack of seat belt use and driving distractions.
Villard Overocker said more than 46,000 Richland County high school students have witnessed the event at the fairgrounds in the spring since she launched it in 1997 after attending the National National Youth Safety Congress.
“There’s no way to tell how many lives that may have saved, but our motto was always if we could save the life or reduce the injury of at least one person sitting up in that stands, then we thought our job was well done.
“That was one of the things that we always tried to do and we focused that on the young people,” said Villard Overocker, who also created the 4-H CARTEENS juvenile traffic offender class.
“I was doing it because I wanted to change those kids’ lives. I just loved it when I could see the difference in somebody.
“I would see those kids (later). They might be working at the drive-through at Wendy’s, and they would say, ‘Oh, you were my teacher’ and ‘I’m doing really good on my driving.’
“That meant a lot to me because it meant something to them. You never know when it’s going to hit them.
“Some people say it didn’t hit them until like 20 years after. That’s the beauty of the job that I had.”