New members, Doug Newell and Anna-Mae Kobbe gave their classification talks. Doug’s classification is Engineering Electronics. His degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park helped launch his career with the Department of Defense’s Naval Ordnance Lab. Beginning as a Co-op student working in the Aerodynamics Testing Division, he worked at the lab for 40 years with five of those years working for Sverdrup/Jacobs Engineering, a government contractor when the Air Force assumed operation of the test facility.
He operated test facilities such as gun ranges, hydro ballistic tanks, and wind tunnels including the development of instrumentation and data acquisition for a 100 foot, 1.4 million-gallon tank. Later in his career he was assigned to work on a new project to improve the security of shipboard nuclear weapons. Doug was head of the Technology Development Group that tested the feasibility of fingerprint readers, hand geometry analyzers, facial recognition and retina scan devices.
Doug retired to be his wife’s caregiver. She passed away in 2013 after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s. He has three grown children and five grandchildren.
Born in Western Massachusetts, he attended elementary school there before his family moved to Oklahoma and Maryland when his stepfather was assigned to Tinker and Andrews Air Force bases. He graduated from high school in Maryland.
Doug has been an active volunteer. For 35 years he spent a week of his vacation serving as a junior high church camp counselor. He has served on various church boards, served as Cub Master and Webelo’s den leader and an AARP Tax-Aide site coordinator doing income taxes for lower- and middle-income senior citizens for 18 y
Doug has been a Rotarian for 35 years, first joining the College Park, Maryland club where he served as club president in 2000-2001. He became the spouse of a District Governor in 2014 when he married Anna-Mae our second speaker.
Anna-Mae Kobbe first joined Rotary in 2000. She served as president of the College Park club in 2008-09 and District Governor of District 7620 (Central Maryland and Washington, DC) 2016-17. During the 2018-19 Rotary year, she served as the District Foundation Chair.
Anna-Mae’s classification is Education-Agriculture. Her degrees in home economics/family and consumer sciences prepared her for a career with the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Land-Grant University System. Following college, she worked with the University of Missouri Extension Service, the University of Tennessee Extension Service, and finished her career at USDA headquarters in Washington. She served as a National Program Leader and at the time of her retirement was the Division Director of the Division of Family Consumer Sciences and Nutrition. The staff she supervised were responsible for more than 400 million dollars in federally appropriated funds for land-grant universities to conduct research and programs. Following retirement, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Kentucky for two years.
She has degrees from Northwest Missouri State University, the University of Missouri, and the University of Tennessee. She is an avid Tennessee Volunteers fan. She has been an active volunteer in professional associations, church, and communities where she has lived.
A native Iowan, she could have been a Pennsylvanian if her great-grandfather had not moved his family to Iowa. Her great-great-grandparents immigrated from Germany to Bradford County Pennsylvania in the 1800s.
Anna-Mae and Doug are Paul Harris Fellows, Paul Harris Society members, and Level 2 Major Donors to The Rotary Foundation. Anna-Mae encouraged club members to support the Foundation and described benefits she had experienced. She served as mentor to three Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars whose scholarships for study at the University of Maryland and Gallaudet University were made possible by Foundation funding. She also described how she had been involved in club projects funded by the Foundation.
Doug and Anna-Mae moved to Fairfield this year and transferred to the Gettysburg club July 1.
