Dr. Kay Decker has a resume to envy. She is a retired professor at the University of Northwestern Oklahoma in Alva, but that was only the beginning. She is now the executive director of Freedom West community Development Corporation.
Her preservation work includes preserving the 1938 Works Progress Administration swimming pool, which was conserved and scheduled to reopen in 2025, after having been shut down for five years. It remains one of the largest outdoor pools in the state and is named after the family who made the first $1.6 million of the $6 million dollar rebuild.
Decker will speak at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Watonga Public Library, courtesy of the educational outreach program of the Friends of the Ferguson Home. This program is free of charge.
She was also involved in the preservation of the Nickle McClure Mansion, the Battle of Turkey Springs archeological site and numerous others in Woods County.
The topic of the discourse is why preservation is important to maintaining a community’s identity and how that identity preserved can add to education and the value derived by tourists. Those can add to increased sales tax revenues to cities and towns.
Decker is the coordinator for the Comanche Pool Prairie Resource Foundation, a member of the board of directors for Preservation Oklahoma and Oklahoma Main Street programs.
Members of the community are invited to come out and hear Decker as well as ask questions on how the fundraising and preservation work done in and around Alva can be applied to Watonga.