Merrell — From modest roots to Delaware County Commissioner

By DUSTIN ENSINGER

For The Sun­bury News

Delaware County Commissioner-elect Gary Mer­rell knows the value of hard work.

Grow­ing up in the rural out­skirts of Okla­homa City, he and his fam­ily did not have a lot. His father was a butcher and later a laborer. His mother washed dishes for a liv­ing. Both were prod­ucts of the Great Depression.

“We didn’t know we were poor,” Mer­rell said. “Our life was basi­cally what we made of it.”

Mer­rell made the most of it, going to work at 15, sav­ing up enough money to buy his first car at age 17.

His fam­ily lived close enough to the Uni­ver­sity of Okla­homa that he could attend and avoid pay­ing room and board. Still, he often­times held three jobs to pay for school.

“I knew that was the only way I could afford to go,” he said. “I take a great deal of pride in that I did it myself.”

While in col­lege, Mer­rell met his wife Cathy. Despite the fact that she worked at a bank, she would come to the gro­cery store he worked at to cash her checks, Mer­rell said.

“That was her way to stay on my radar,” he said.

After grad­u­at­ing with a major in mar­ket­ing and minors in finance and account­ing in 1971, he applied to law school and was accepted. Instead, he accepted a job at the Daily Okla­homan work­ing in the adver­tis­ing department.

“At the time, I thought it was only going to be a year,” he said.

Fif­teen years later, Mer­rell was still at the news­pa­per, ris­ing to the sec­ond high­est posi­tion in the clas­si­fied depart­ment, when he was approached by a head­hunter for Mid­west­ern news­pa­pers about a job at the Colum­bus Dispatch.

He accepted, becom­ing head of the clas­si­fied depart­ment there.

“When you live in Okla­homa, you do not con­sider Ohio the Mid­west,” he said.

In 2002, he left The Dis­patch to become the pub­lisher of a group of news­pa­pers in south­east­ern Ohio, includ­ing the Athens Mes­sen­ger. Five years later, he was hired to run of chain of news­pa­pers that included The Delaware Gazette and The Sun­bury News.

In an own­er­ship shakeup, he was let go in 2011.

“It was ulti­mately clear that they would be bring­ing in their per­son,” he said.

It was around the time of his depar­ture from the Gazette that he seri­ously began to con­tem­plate his first foray into elec­toral pol­i­tics. About a year later, after sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions with fam­ily and friends, he decided to throw his hat in the ring.

He won a hard fought three-way Repub­li­can pri­mary in March to gain his par­ties nom­i­na­tion by going back to his roots.

Dur­ing the cam­paign, he knocked on more than 5,000 doors and made about 2,000 phone calls.

“I had to make sure I did every­thing cor­rectly,” he said. “To me, it was my job.”

He cruised to vic­tory in the Novem­ber gen­eral elec­tion and will replace Delaware County Com­mis­sioner Tommy Thomp­son next month.

Despite his hard­scrab­ble upbring­ing, Mer­rell has a soft side. Mer­rell and his wife have adopted two chil­dren. Another child was born biologically.

“It allowed us to make a dif­fer­ence in somebody’s life,” he said.

Mer­rell said his soft side often shows when par­tic­u­larly poignant movies move him to tears, which his old­est son finds funny.

“My son likes to catch me in those moments and make fun of me,” he said.

But as he pre­pares to take a seat on the board of com­mis­sion­ers, Mer­rell is focused on seri­ous business.

“It’s extremely impor­tant to me that I do this job the right way,” he said. “I’ll do what I think is in the best inter­est of this county.”

Posted by Gary Henery on Jan 2 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.