Campbell hopes to use unique talents in District 25

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By JoANNE Young / Lincoln Journal Star

The test showed this: Kathy Campbell creates alternative ways to proceed.

“I’m very fascinated with options,” she says. “I don’t like just one.”

In five Gallup Organization  buzz words: Strategic, arranger, achiever, futuristic, intellection.

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Kathy Campbell

Kathy Campbell

She’s an organizer, but flexible.

She has stamina for hard work.

She lives at 50,000 feet, inspired by the future and  thinking about what could be. 

She appreciates a good intellectual discussion.

Only one in 33 million people, she’s heard, share the same unique key talents in that order on the Clifton Strengths Finder test that shows patterns of thought, feeling and behavior, that can be used to a person’s productive advantage.  

Those traits, she believes, have served her well over the decades in her roles as a Lancaster County Commissioner, board member for Lincoln Electric System, other organizations and state commissions, Cedars Foundation vice president and Campbell’s Nursery manager.

Campbell hopes to add one more bit of service: to replace Sen. Ron Raikes in the Legislature’s District 25.

The candidate and her husband, Dick, president of Campbell’s Nurseries and Garden Centers, live in a 1979 English Tudor home on family property in southeast Lincoln that has recently become a subdivision called Village Gardens.

“I have loved the time we’ve spent here, the happy times with the kids,” she said.

In 40 years of marriage, their tradition has been to sit together at the end of each day, talking  about how their days went.

“We’re both really involved in the community, and it’s lots of fun to share those experiences,” she said.  

Luckily she’s married to a “wonderful gardener,” she says,  because she has a brown thumb.

“The Campbell family is very nervous about me being out on the streets (campaigning) and being asked nursery questions,” she said. “I either overwater or underwater everything.”

Campbell grew up in Norfolk.  Her great-grandparents settled in Nebraska after leaving Germany.

“I’m very German on both sides,” she said.

She comes from  political roots, with her paternal grandfather serving on the Stanton City Council and her father having run  for Stanton County surveyor.

She began by serving on the Norfolk High School student council. When she came to Lincoln in 1965 to attend the University of Nebraska, majoring in English and minoring in political science and history, she became an ASUN senator.

Her interest in politics grew as she got to know Gov. Norbert Tiemann, governor from 1967 to 1971. She changed her voter registration from Democrat to Republican to vote for him.

She and Dick married in the middle of her senior year and he headed to Vietnam just short of their first anniversary. She turned her attention to education, teaching literature at Lincoln Southeast High School and attending graduate school.

It seemed surreal, she said, to have a husband up to his armpits in the Vietnam war and her in Lincoln studying the nuances of Shakespeare.

Time passed, the couple had a boy, Andrew, and a girl, Carrie, and by the late 1970s and early ’80s Campbell found herself involved in children’s issues, mainly through the Junior League of Lincoln. During that time, she also became a volunteer lobbyist  at the Legislature and was appointed to the Child Abuse Prevention board of directors and a foster care planning board.

“I was building quite a volunteer career around children’s issues,” she said.

In 1986, friends talked her into running for the Lancaster County Board, once she understood county government was more than roads, and that human services took a good chunk of the board’s attention.

A close-knit group of friends practically ran her successful campaign  — from a bowling alley, said Cathie Petsch, Lincoln Community Learning Center co-coordinator.

The group of five did a lot of campaign and Junior League business on Thursday mornings at Parkway Lanes, Petsch said.

One thing that stands out about Campbell, she said, are the beautiful thank-you notes she received from her over the years. Each one was gracious, authentic and special, and she wishes now she had saved them all. They would have made a beautiful book, she said. 

Over the years, Campbell — who calls herself fiscally conservative and socially moderate — has built up an eclectic following of conservative Republicans, liberal Democrats and independents, she said. Two-hundred fifty of them showed up last month at a campaign fundraiser.

“I’ve built up a lot of relationships over the years. I’ve worked alongside so many people,” she said. 

As important as those relationships are, Campbell needs her solitude to recharge. For that, she goes to her “Kathy” room, upstairs in her house where she sits in her flowered BarcaLounger, feet up on a tuffet, and reads British murder mysteries, like “Careless in Red,” by Elizabeth George. Or she  watches Netflix movies, series like Masterpiece Theatre’s “Prime Suspect,” or listens to classical music or old-time rock and roll on her iPod.

The room suits her INFJ Myers-Briggs personality type. She’s really an introvert, she says, although you wouldn’t knowing it by watching her.

“I have to work hard to be extroverted,” she said.

Reach JoAnne Young at 473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com.