Williams will be rodeo grand marshal

Cathy Williams is the first rodeo official most fans meet.

A member of Sisters Rodeo Board of Directors since 1997, Cathy manages the rodeo ticket office. She began selling beer at the rodeo in the 1970s while she still lived in Portland, and became a member and an indispensable assistant in the ticket office in the 1980s.

And this year, she's the Grand Marshal of the 2011 Sisters Rodeo Parade.

"Cathy knows what's going on, and she usually has the answer. She does her best to accommodate visitors," says Gary Woods, a ticket office volunteer.

Her volunteers who sell tickets at the rodeo return year after year to help, a demonstration of loyalty to a highly charged, generous "boss."

The former eighth-grade school teacher is a Portland native. She received a degree from Portland State University with a master's degree from Oregon State. She taught for 17 years before becoming specialized as a career education coordinator. Her skills brought consulting contracts from state and federal career counseling programs, including the Job Corps.

With her husband, Don, Williams raised four children in a blended family. The family began attending Sisters Rodeo when the children were infants. They built a home in what was then Squawback Woods in the 1970s, moving there permanently in the mid-'80s.

Williams is a peripatetic traveler, a habit that started when she was a child. Her father wrote travelogues for The Oregonian, so the family spent vacations camping and touring the west. They were even guests of General Motors at the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco.

Travel was also part of Don's navy reunions with his World War II Seamen Club across the United States, which sparked Williams' lifelong interest in World War II military history. In 1980, during a reunion in Australia, the group was given a rare tour of the Admiralty Islands, where they had been based. After her husband's death in 1989, Williams assumed the job of recording secretary for the group and continued traveling to the reunions.

She toured Taiwan as part of a Sisters Rotary Group Exchange. She has also toured Hong Kong, Thailand, Europe, Malta, Sicily and Russia, mostly with her friend Jackie Gerland of Sisters.

A master of shuffling time, Williams volunteered at the Sisters Area Chamber of Commerce and Sisters Jazz Festival. She was a board member of the Portland State Alumni Association and a volunteer guide at Pittock Mansion in Portland for 25 years.

As a member of Sisters Rodeo, Williams travels over 1,000 miles a year distributing rodeo brochures and posters throughout western Oregon and along the Columbia River in both Oregon and Washington. Each year when she drives to National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, she stops at feed stores and tack shops en route in Oregon, northern California and Nevada to drop off promotional information.

Her hands-on approach has been instrumental in making Sisters Rodeo an annual event for fans. Her experience with other organizations and her own eclectic lifestyle have generated innovative planning in the association, including the hiring of a professional advertising agency. The results of her ideas are evident with the continued success of Sisters Rodeo, while other small rodeos are struggling to survive.

Williams has made volunteerism something like a genetic trait in her family. Her son, Charles, and daughter-in-law, Nancy, work every year, along with her grandsons, James and Will. She is very proud of having three generations of rodeo volunteers in her own family. Her other son, Bruce, teaches at the University of Colorado, where he lives with his family.

Her work in the ticket office begins in earnest in November every year, when she sends brochures to the ticket mailing list. There are days in the winter when she will respond to up to one hundred ticket requests in a day.

She does this, she says, "because I have met a lot of really nice people in the rodeo association. We were relatively new Sisters full-time residents when Don died (1989), and rodeo members were so supportive. Widows used to be dropped from social lists, but that sure didn't happen in Sisters, especially with rodeo friends."

Williams is a very proud member of the rodeo. She sees rodeos all over Oregon, and feels that nobody produces a better rodeo.

"It is such a good show that runs so smoothly because of the people involved," she said.

For tickets and information, call 541-549-0121 or 1-800-827-7522, or stop by 220 W. Cascade Ave.