Tuesday, December 19, 2000

Kay Irby helped tout both Abilenes
By Bill Whitaker

If you think historians, journalists and civic leaders have a tough time succinctly articulating Abilene’s subtle charms to skeptical or confused outsiders, try putting yourself in Kay Irby’s high heels.

When, that is, she’s wearing them.

For the better part of three decades, Irby has been entrusted with that very mission. In the beginning, touting Abilene was incidental to her other duties, but in time her responsibilities came to include handling outsiders moseying through town and tourist groups anxious to explore the Old West.

And when those tourists discovered they were actually thinking of Abilene, Kansas — not Abilene, Texas — the pressures on Irby only mounted.

To this day, the people-savvy, dry-witted Abilene Convention & Visitors Bureau director of visitor services still finds tourists stopping off to see the famed Dwight D. Eisenhower Library & Museum — even though the museum is in the other Abilene.

“And they’ll say, ‘I thought Eisenhower was born in Texas,’ and I’ll say, ‘Yes, he was born in Denison but he moved to Abilene, Kansas, when he was pretty young.’ And then I try telling them about our two presidential museums in Texas.

“But it doesn’t matter,” she sighed. “They always want to see the Eisenhower Museum.”

Irby’s knowledge of our town and state — plus what folks visiting expect and want — has proven invaluable for more than 28 years. But, alas, a few days after Christmas 2000, Irby will step down from her post into retirement.

Although she remains enthusiastic about her duties — after all, she more or less developed the Abilene Convention & Visitors Bureau’s Visitors Department — she nevertheless found this year an unusually daunting one.

For one thing, her mother died. For another, Irby’s husband of 35 years has undergone five surgeries in six months. The result, Irby says, is that she has been “trying to work while worrying greatly about my family.”

The time, she says, is right to slip off down the road a spell.

Family needs may well be draining, but touting Abilene’s assets hasn’t always been a picnic, either, especially in the 1970s and early ‘80s, before downtown revitalization became a rallying cry and civic leaders became more aware of the need to promote Abilene as a tourist stop.

Irby still remembers the challenges that arose at travel trade shows she attended around the country.

“This was a terribly hard sell, convincing people they should come here,” she recalled. “I mean, in 1980, Old Abilene Town was still here, but barely. We had the zoo and old museum in Rose Park, but motor coach tours didn’t always jump to see them back then.

“Fortunately, we have much more now, including several things downtown for dining and shopping, plus the Swenson Mansion, the linear air park at Dyess Air Force Base and flight-line tours when we can get them. And Buffalo Gap Historic Village is popular.

“And we have more coming on-line all the time.”

Even so, battling misperceptions demands time and patience.

For instance, Irby had to gently set a family straight when they informed her they wanted to take lodgings in Abilene for a week “and do day trips from here to Houston and El Paso — and, of course, I tried to tell them these would not be day trips.

“People just do not realize how large Texas is.”

While Irby says the job of touting Abilene is much easier today — no doubt a relief to her successor, the self-described “terminally effervescent” Donna Duncan — Irby admits she ponders what Abilene might’ve been like with a bit more luck.

“I think sometimes about what we lost, or didn’t even get, particularly the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame,” she said, referring to local efforts to lasso the institution here several years ago. “That could’ve helped us so much more than it did Fort Worth, where they eventually went.

“Now they’re just sort of lost in the fabric of Fort Worth. It’s almost an afterthought there. And how we could’ve really promoted that, because so many people come to Abilene thinking we still ride horses out here. They come here expecting to see the Old West.”

Of course, the Abilene they’re often thinking of is, again, the one in Kansas. But it doesn’t hurt to try rising to the occasion.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to do so without Kay Irby. She figures it’s high time she contemplate travel to new horizons — and leave the touting to somebody else.

A farewell for Irby is planned for 4-6 p.m. today at the T&P Depot, 1101 N. 1st.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com. Check out Bill’s previous columns at www.brazosbill.com.