Ty Kelso likes to downplay his contributions to the community, but members of the Greenbrier Chamber of Commerce aren’t fooled.
Kelso, 72, has been named Volunteer of the Year by the chamber. He and other honorees will be recognized at a banquet March 12 at the Greenbrier Junior High School cafeteria.
“I thought there were way too many people out there doing things to be picking me,” he said, laughing.
Kelso, a member of the Greenbrier City Council and a former assistant fire chief, was born in Greenbrier and has spent most of his life there, except when his family lived in California for a period when he was 9 to 14 years old.
His roots run deep in the Faulkner County community.
“The farm I’m living on was homesteaded by my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Glenn,” Kelso said. He said raising beef cattle is a part-time endeavor for him.
He describes himself as a carpenter. Kelso’s father was a homebuilder, and they worked together.
“At that time, we did everything — framed it, roofed it, built cabinets, everything.”
When his father retired, Kelso was a general contractor in Little Rock for a few years. He sold the business and started Kelso Cabinets, which he operated for about 20 years, he said.
Kelso is a volunteer with the A Bookcase for Every Child project, in which Faulkner County children are given bookcases filled with donated books.
“That works out real good with the cabinet shop; I’ve got the equipment. There’s not just me; a lot of people help with that. We build [the bookcases], finish them and carry them up to the school to give away,” he said. “It makes me feel good. … All the kids don’t benefit, but if we just get a few of them, that helps a bunch.”
Kelso’s love of antiques complements his volunteerism with the Faulkner County Museum in Conway and the Faulkner County Historical Society.
He said he grew up with the father of museum director Lynette Langley-Ware of Greenbrier.
“I collect antiques and do a lot with the old things, which fits right along with that,” Kelso said. His carpentry skills are again useful in his work as a museum volunteer. His latest project is to help repair the dogtrot log cabin on the property.
“I sawed cypress lumber to put a new porch on the log cabin. That’s one of our projects coming up in April — to tear off the floor and put a new one on,” he said.
“I’m mostly into the carpentry and blacksmith tools,” he said. Kelso said he inherited the items from a former blacksmith shop in the Republican community and plans to give them to the Faulkner County Museum when space is available. Before the original blacksmith building deteriorated, Kelso said, he took photos and constructed a building on his own property to set up the items “as close as I could to the original.”
His dream is to have an “original-type building” on the museum grounds, but space there is limited. He said at least a 30-by-30-foot building is needed.
Langley-Ware said Kelso has volunteered with the museum since its inception in 1992.
“He’s just such a neat guy. He’s a fountain of information; he knows everybody. He’s just very interested in history,” Langley-Ware said. “If I need something, I can call him, or he comes in and I say, ‘Do you know how to fix or do XYZ?’ The next thing I know, it’s done.”
Kelso has used his talents for the Greenbrier School District, helping build lockers for the first Greenbrier football team too many years ago for him to recall, he said. Kelso said he helped build the library shelves in the former Dean Martin School, which has since been torn down. When his son, Sam, was in school and participated in band, Kelso said, he built a podium for the band director.
Kelso’s contributions didn’t stop there. He said that a few years ago, he was asked by a teacher at Eastside Elementary School to create an “outside pavilion where he could teach the kids.” The business people in Greenbrier furnished the concrete, he said, “and we built a pavilion with all-volunteer labor.”
One of Kelso’s main volunteer labors of love was the Greenbrier Volunteer Fire Department, which Kelso helped form in 1972. He was a member of the Jaycees at the time, he said, and members manned the station.
“Greenbrier got their first fire engine from the [Arkansas] Forestry Commission and didn’t have anybody to operate it, so the Jaycees volunteered that they’d be the firefighters,” he said. “I stayed on it 24 years. I’m still a lifetime member. When I quit, I was assistant chief.”
He said the most memorable fire he fought was when Greenbrier’s department assisted the Conway Fire Department during the 1994 AmTran fire in Conway. In Greenbrier, “we had pretty good grass fires that we had to have a lot of help with,” he said.
It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to work for the fire department.
“I received quite a bit of training. I was in the Navy, and I went to firefighting school. … They put everybody through it,” he said. He spent nine months in Vietnam, he said, “building air bases and roads, mostly.”
Kelso has been a member of the Greenbrier City Council for the past several years, and one of the projects approved was to buy a church and set up the senior citizens center. As a member of the City Council, he has also been involved in “keeping infrastructure up, keeping the roads up, keeping the sewer upgraded to meet all the state standards,” he said.
Audreya Cole, president of the Greenbrier Chamber of Commerce, said Kelso exemplifies what a volunteer should be.
“Mr. Kelso is a true champion for our community,” Cole said. “His work on the City Council and the Fire Department have a far-reaching impact in making Greenbrier a great place to live. He is the picture of hard work and dedication.”
Kelso and his wife, Mary, are members of Springhill Baptist Church as well. Their son, Sam, and his wife, Mandy, of Greenbrier have two children, Preston and Reagan.
Being Volunteer of the Year is an honor, Kelso said, because it involves the city he loves.
“It’s the best place in the world I know of; it’s not perfect, but it’s close,” he said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.