This week’s Rotarian spotlight is on a member who was raised in Valentine, Nebraska. His first job was working for his parents at their feed and trucking company, but his first paid gig was working in the hayfield on ranches and was paid somewhere around $150 a month.
He graduated from Valentine high school in 1969, with a class of 60 fellow Valentine Badgers. After high school he went on to college at Kearney State, now the University of Nebraska at Kearney. In college he joined the ROTC program and served as an equipment manager for the football team, both ventures in part to help pay for college. Little did he know at the time that his future wife was right behind him at games, serving as a cheerleader. He would later meet her at a fraternity/sorority social gathering at a pool hall in Kearney.
After ROTC he moved on to join the Army Reserves and had he graduated 6 months earlier than he did, he would likely have been sent to Vietnam. After graduation, he went to work for the Twin Platte Natural Resource District (called Conservation Districts in Wyoming). Working in this career led him to live in several communities across Western Nebraska.
In the late 1980’s Brent Lathrop made the decision to pursue a private sector career in natural resource conservation. In 1989, he moved from North Platte, Nebraska, on to Lincoln, to get a graduate degree. While studying in Lincoln he was able to secure a Legislative Assistant role in the Nebraska Legislature for Senator David Bernard-Stevens, whom he happened to know in North Platte.
In 1990, in the midst of his graduate degree studies, he was called up for Operation Desert Storm. This deployment took him to Texas where he served in logistics and was responsible for shipping ~25,000 troops to and from the Middle East.
After his deployment and completion of his graduate program, he went to work for The Nature Conservancy, which he recently retired from. His conservancy work has led to many projects that he is very proud of as they involved protecting several endangered species, and his work to protect them will go on in perpetuity.
Our Cheyenne Rotary Club is the 4th club of which Brent Lathrop has been a member. He had previously been a member of clubs in North Platte, Geneva, and Aurora, Nebraska. One of his most memorable experiences with Rotary has been working with the Youth Exchange program, which he was part of for over 15 years. The Lathrop’s have hosted 7 exchange students.
Perhaps one of Brent’s greatest accomplishments was serving as 2020/2021 President of the Cheyenne Rotary Club during the Covid outbreak. This was a test with many moving parts, but he was able to help navigate those times with a terrific board and officers coupled with patience and a keen eye for implementing creative approaches to maintaining our meeting structure.
Brent and his wife Denise have two children, a daughter in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a son in Augusta, Georgia, and have four grandchildren. He is proud of the World Service Projects that he has been a part of within Rotary International and he considers it a privilege to be of service to mankind through this organization.
And last but certainly not least, his favorite meal was his mom’s fried chicken and gravy ……with a little Nebraska Corn-on-the-Cob of course!
Fellow Rotarians, please stand and honor Rotarian of the Week, Brent Lathrop.
