Main Street Association adds members
Peabody Main Street board member
Three new members of the Peabody Main Street board are Kelly Penner, Susie Schmidt, and Patricia Ketchum.
Kelly Penner owns A Little Off the Top beauty salon and Tan Your Hide tanning salon, both on Peabody’s Main Street.
Kelly has lived in Peabody for several years, is married to Mark Penner, and has two sons, Travis Pohlman, and Bailey Penner. Outside of work, Kelly is a cowgirl and says her family is a cowboy family. She does barrel racing and she and Mark are learning how to rope. On Saturday nights, they practice roping.
Last year, during the Christmas festivities in Peabody, they taught kids how to rope. “Mark taught them how to swing a rope,” she said.
Kelly stays in shape by walking three miles every morning and working on their place in the country where they have animals and sometimes steers. The steers make roping even more exciting and fun. Her business experience and friendly ways promise to make her a valuable addition to the Main Street board.
Susie Schmidt grew up in Peabody, and she and husband Tom raised their three sons here. Inquiring minds would like to know what vitamins she takes to give her the energy to do all the things she does.
Susie is a professional seamstress, well-known for the wedding dresses she has made for area brides, and the costumes and sewing she does for the Victorian Revival Society. Tom Schmidt is a Civil War re-enactor, and though Susie doesn’t take part in the war games, she does sewing for the group.
Other activities also are tied to her skills. She quilts and has taught classes in quilting, especially Victorian crazy quilting and crocheting.
Susie and Tom live in one of Peabody’s “painted ladies” on Walnut, and have furnished their house Victorian-style and with antiques. She wants it to be comfortable for her four grandchildren to visit and enjoy.
Since two of their grandchildren now live in Texas, Susie and Tom are out of town more, and she is thinking of cutting back on some of her work.
But instead of cutting back, the Schmidts recently formed POPPs, the Partners of Peabody Parks organization that is responsible for many of the flower beds, landscaping, and maintenance in public places around town. Recently POPPs partnered with Peabody Main Street, hosting the first of the Sleepy Creek Concert series in Santa Fe Park. A second concert in the series will be Oct. 26.
Patricia Ketchum has lived in Peabody nearly one-half of her life and her three children went through local schools. Pat is one of those women who went back to school to finish a degree.
A major difficulty in her life in Kansas was that she did not drive, and had to learn to drive on the family’s old, dull-red VW bus. Classes at WSU were a breeze after she got her driver’s license. From then on, Pat spent a great deal of time on the road, teaching at El Dorado and then at McConnell Air Force Base for Butler Community College. She spent many hours inching along ice-packed roads in one decrepit car after another, and owes many thanks to good-natured Samaritans who dug her car out of ditches along “back way” roads.
One of her favorite things during those years was writing the “Mayesville News” for the Peabody Gazette-Bulletin. Pat was one of the original members of Doyle Valley Farmers Market where she sold muffins, then later, pies.
Becoming worried when she read of the slump in population in Marion County, Pat enticed an old friend to visit and two years later, she married him. Folks shook their heads when they heard Bill was moving to Kansas but he seems to like it here, and so they plan to stay.
Last modified Nov. 5, 2008