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Face to Face: Tonganoxie’s Kris Roberts

By Shawn Linenberger - | May 19, 2015

Name: Kris Roberts

Born: Michigan’s upper peninsula

Family: Husband, John Walter; grown children Ben Jefferies, Flagstaff, Ariz., and Emily Jefferies, Lawrence; stepson, Luke Walter, Osawatomie; and stepdaughter April Jefferies, Cary, Ill., and her three children.

Occupation: Retired commercial construction project manager. Roberts is active in the Tonganoxie Community Historical Society, Kaw Valley Fiber Guild, First City’s Performers and Story Tellers and occasionally helps her husband with his herd of beef cattle.

Dream job as child: In elementary school, she wanted to be president of the United States.

Interesting fact: Roberts spends one week each year as a counselor with 12-13 other adults at a camp for 55-60 youth in grades 7 through 12 in northern Minnesota.

Digging deeper: Roberts went to high school in Nevada, Mo., and from there earned a bachelor’s in sociology in 1975 from Bethany College in Lindsborg. After five months in a box factory, she worked for five years with developmentally disabled adults in the late 1970s in Parker and McPherson, as well as Kansas City, Mo., before moving to New Orleans.

Roberts examined her career choices and enrolled at the University of New Orleans, receiving a bachelor’s in civil engineering in 1985. She spent six months with a structural design firm before “stumbling into a job” with Turner Construction.

“I loved it and spent 25 years with Turner in Chicago and Kansas City,” Roberts said.

She moved to Tonganoxie from the Kansas City area in 1999 while her husband built their house.

“That first year was the first time the kids were able to walk to a grocery store,” Roberts noted. “We moved out to our land the next school year, where we spent one full year living in the basement while John finished the house.”

Living in 600 square feet in the basement was the family’s “log cabin experience,” Roberts said.

Not that she’s retired, Roberts and her husband play Scrabble almost every day, and she especially loves Thanksgiving because it’s the holiday all of the children are home.

She also loves being involved in the historical society and stresses that the organization always is looking for volunteers.

“I learn something new every day, and I am meeting the most amazing people who have volunteered for years to create and maintain the museum and historical society,” Roberts said.