Three out of four isn’t bad.
Donna Grigsby knows the top key secrets to aging well include a good diet, regular exercise, healthy relationships, and plenty of sleep.
Scratch the last. She’s a night owl who sets her alarm at 4:30 a.m.
Which is why people still look to the 78-year-old when they want things done. She’s a doer.
“I’ve worked harder since I retired than when I was working full-time,” she semi-joked Thursday. “I guess it’s because I get things done.”
Among her current responsibilities, Grigsby is secretary of Rotary, a substitute organist for Humboldt United Methodist Church and president of the United Methodist Church’s SEK District of Great Plains.
She and her husband, Stan, also read to Iola Elementary School students five mornings a week; she’s trying to step down as treasurer of the National Grigsby Family Society, a genealogy society, after a 20-year stint and has stopped taking on new clients as a Mary Kay Cosmetics associate.
“I’m beginning to say ‘no,’” she said.
Grigsby’s manner is quick and to the point. Her words clipped short, as if in a hurry with a thousand things to do.
It’s a facade.
Get her to sit down, and she opens up.
Grigsby and her husband are what the Kansas Department of Commerce likes to call “Boomerangs” — former residents who have returned home, though they may not be the targeted age the Department has in mind.
After decades of living on both coasts, the more recent in northern Virginia, the couple returned to Southeast Kansas; he in 2010, and she in 2012, when she retired from a 30-year career with what is now called BIA Advisory Services. As director of research, Donna’s responsibilities included overseeing the maintenance of newspaper, radio and television databases.
She grew up in Moran, the daughter of Ruth and R.S. “Bing” Dougherty. Stan grew up in rural Prescott. They married one year out of high school in 1965 and moved to Pittsburg where he attended university, and Donna was the breadwinner.
It was then that “Uncle Sam said we need your presence,” Grigsby said. “That was 1968. Stan was 22. They were just closing out the Vietnam War. I’d just become pregnant when he went to boot camp.”
Stan’s “stint” with Navy lasted 20 years.
