The late Doreen Wilber of Jefferson won the first gold medal in Women’s Archery at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany. The statue of her (shown above) sits near the Greene County Community Center. She spent many years teaching the sport to local citizens, including Don Orris of Jefferson.

Orris has spent more than a quarter century as a coach of the local archery team “Gang Greene” and seven young archers from that team recently went to the Iowa Games in Ames and six earned medals (three gold, two silver, one bronze).

With the Olympic Games in Tokyo Japan going on, we asked Orris, who learned the sport, from Wilber and her husband Skeeter (Paul), to talk about her. “Doing all the things she did with the kids, she valued that as much as she did the gold medal. I never, in all the time I spent with her when she was teaching me how to shoot, I never heard her brag once about winning the gold medal, ever! She just didn’t brag about it. It was just a fact of life for her that she accomplished, she was happy she accomplished it, but she didn’t think it was any greater than you accomplishing something at work that was good, or vise-versa. She was just so humble about it.”

Wilber was inducted into a staggering nine Halls of Fame, including the Archery Hall of Fame and Sports Illustrated Athletes of the 20th Century, plus the Jefferson High School Hall of Fame, and receiving the Bell Tower Festival Tower of Fame Award.