The Gardens Assisted Living in Jefferson recently announced their own Bell Tower Festival King and Queen.

This year’s queen is Carole Fisher of Jefferson and the king is Chuck Deery of Rippey. Each year, the residents at The Gardens vote on their royalty to represent them at the Bell Tower Festival. Fisher has a whirlwind of a life spent on the road. The Jefferson native moved to California when she was four because her father built airplanes that were used in World War II. After the war, Fisher says her family moved back to Jefferson, where her father started a cement block business that later included tiles. 

Following that, Fisher notes that she received money from a family relative that she never met and she used that to go to college at Iowa State University. She then moved back to Jefferson and worked for one year before moving up to Alaska to marry her fiance who served in the military. Then, after spending 14 months up north, she returned to Jefferson and lived in the same house for 40 years, where she developed a love for gardening. Fisher talks about where she went next.

“I moved to Arizona where my parents had retired. My dad, well he had Alzheimer’s and mom was taking care of him. And I thought, ‘I’ll just go and be there for them.’ That was seven years. Then I moved back to Jefferson (and) had a house. I planted 40 different varieties of Iris that my mother gave me. She had a commercial garden in Arizona.”  

As for Deery, he grew up in the Rippey area and spent his life farming, while spending four years after he got married living in Perry in a house that they built. He describes his involvement with baseball and a fond memory from that.

“I did get to (play) catch(er) the first game that was, high school game that was played underneath the lights on the field there in Rippey. It was quite an honor. There was a foul play that went up so high, it disappeared above the lights. It was kind of hard to find it when it come back down. It was kind of an experience.”      

Both Fisher and Deery will be in the Jefferson Rotary Parade this Saturday starting at 11am during the Bell Tower Festival.