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The Granville Historical Society Oral History Project 2001 - 2002
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23) The “Moving Together” Campaign
Raising Funds for a New Track(Debbie Farrar) I wasn’t even [ Athletic ] Boosters president yet, and I’m thinking I would like to do a new fundraiser and start earmarking that money to build a new field. Because the kids have never had a home track meet. The old track was so poor that we could not host a track meet at Granville. Our friends had kids who were track players, and gosh their kids wouldn’t get home until 10:00 at night and they were doing homework on the bus coming back from an away meet. So we put together the golf tournament, the Granville Cup, and my husband, who is an avid golfer, helped me do that. And the first year [ 1992 ] we raised $15,000. After that I went to the Athletic Boosters and suggested starting a separate fund for a new track. Eyebrows went up – what, is she crazy? Does she know how much a track costs? So, they said we really don’t think we could do that, we’ve never done that in the past. I said, “You need to consider this because I don’t think I want to give you the $15,000 [ from the golf tournament ] unless we can do this. It’s in my freezer along side the ground chuck and it can stay there!”
Later Jim Cooper came back to me and said we could do it. So the next year we did another tournament and we raised, I think $13,000. By 1995 we had a total of about $60,000, and we decided to go public. I made a presentation to the school board, asking them if they would be prepared to maintain the facility if we raised the money and built it. And they said, ”If you think you can do this, go for it!” So who do we need for a full campaign on raising money -- Bobbie Falquet! That’s her job; that’s what she does. We’re going to need a lot of press coverage -- Gail Myers. Perfect!. We’re going to need somebody who really knows how to oversee everything. Doug Plunkett was right there! Bud Farrar and Bobbie Falquet headed the campaign to raise the $500,000 to $600,000 that we needed. Gail Myers came up with the name "Moving Together". We began a fund raising campaign and we said okay, give us ten people that you think would contribute a thousand dollars. And you know everyone in the community that we went to, probably 98%, had children in the school system. It was an easy thing to do. It was individuals, like Roger Kessler, who made all the signs for free; and sponsors like IGA and Park National Bank, and businesses like Shelley & Company and Layton Excavating who all gave their time and materials. I think because it was a small community everybody helps one another. The bigger the ‘Moving Together’ project got, the more people would call and say, "I really can’t afford to do the thousand dollar brick but I would love to give you my time." So we went back to the drawing board and figured out a way to have those volunteer work hours go towards the brick. One of our stupider things (there’s a word) was we were going to move the bleachers ourselves. We’ll take it down one weekend; we’ll put it up one weekend. That thing took six weeks to move! But we look back on it and we did have a lot of fun. The whole "Moving Together" project took three years from the time we went public. But it was just such a wonderful experience for the whole community and I know that there were a lot of people that didn’t think it would get done. We never thought anything different but I think that was naive. Looking back on it, to even think that we could move those bleachers ourselves was ridiculous, but somehow we got it done. It took the whole community. It was a huge undertaking!
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