She’s ready to retire once and for all.
McClain thinks back to how she took on the task in the first place. “A lot of jobs I’ve had over the years, my volunteer jobs, I got because of Bob,” she says about her husband.
He and Frank Kozarec, a fellow German Twp. trustee, were instrumental in the formation of the Germantown Senior Center.
Back in the mid-1990s, they began discussing the idea of gathering all the local senior groups under a single umbrella.
When that actually came to pass, they began looking for someone to write group’s by-laws and the constitution. McClain, who had done that for other organizations, just happened to be attending that meeting.
“I was working for the (Germantown) Gazette when we had our office on Market Street,” McClain said.
“Since it was a convenient location for the seniors to stop in while they were out and about, I got to taking the money for those different (field) trips and things like that,” she said.
But the connection with the Gazette would serve another purpose, too.
They were one of the first area newspapers to compose each edition on a computer. It’s a skill that Rachel still uses when producing the Senior Moments newsletter.
“That’s where I started to learn a great deal about layout, pictures and that sort of thing,” she said.
Each issue is composed on a Macintosh computer using a program called Pages.
“Actually, Margaret (Phelps, director of the GSC) writes a lot of it,” McClain said.
Timely topics, pictures, schedules and columns are added before a single copy is printed at McClain’s home.
Then, a color copier at the GSC is used to produce about 300 high quality copies each month.
McClain was also a business teacher for 35 years.
Now she thinks it’s time to retire.
“I’ve gotten into some other things,” she said. One of them is music.
“I grew up with a lot of music in my home,” she said.
Her father was a barbershop music aficionado and it’s an interest she’s following today.
She’s part of a female barbershop choir called Bella A Capella which practices in Springboro.
The group has sung at Dayton Dragons’ games and offers concerts to residents in nursing homes and similar venues.
McClain came to Germantown as a freshman in high school. She attended Capital University, Miami University and other schools.
McClain and here husband have one son, Matt, a lieutenant with the Dayton Fire Department.
They also have two grandchildren.
Contact this columnist at (937) 696-2080 or williamgschmidt@ frontier.com.
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