She testified before Senate, organized festival, built ‘Maize Quest’

It was a serendipitous meeting; a foggy spring night in the early 1970s, when their vehicles happened upon the same car crash on Route 24 near Stewartstown.  It was 1 a.m. They were both heading home from dates with other people, and they both stopped to see if they could help the driver of the wrecked car.  Gail Spory was a 5-foot-1 English teacher at Kennard-Dale High School.  Paul McPherson was a fourth-generation farmer who was taken by her positive, outgoing personality; she was full of vitality.

She took his name in 1972, and from then on, Gail Spory McPherson’s life was dedicated to agriculture.

The former teacher, mother and agricultural activist died of lung cancer Saturday at the family farm house in New Park. She was 59.

She was widely known in the state’s agricultural circles, and the fruits of her labors are immortalized in the numerous programs and organizations she helped create, from National Agriculture Day to the American Agri-Women organization.

One of her favorite phrases was one she invented to describe herself and women like her: professional farmwife.

Wasn’t a farm girl: Gail McPherson wasn’t a farm girl; she grew up in the Hanover area.

But she quit her teaching job and used her “people skills” to manage the Maple Lawn Farms’ office and farm market. She handled personnel, advertising and public relations.

She edited two newsletters, organized a peach festival and published a peach cookbook, “Passion for Peaches Cookbook.”

“There are lots of apple cookbooks, but not peaches,” Paul McPherson said.

It was part of her personality to take on a challenge, so she compiled the book herself.

Gail McPherson wrote local news, covered municipal meetings
and wrote columns for The York Dispatch in the mid ‘70s, but resigned after “feeling swamped” at the birth of the couple’s third child. Paul McPherson recalls stories of his wife conducting interviews with one of the youngsters strapped in a child carrier on her back. The youngster would pull his mother’s hair when he became bored at the interview.

She focused on the farm, which grew over the years to include “Maize Quest,” a giant corn maze, and other outdoor activities.

Her work reached out: But a lot of Gail McPherson’s work was done off the farm.

She worked with the Penn State Cooperative Extension to push for education about agriculture, including a public school program that teaches children about how food is grown.

“Statewide, the Pa. Peach Association, the apple people, they all knew her,” said Shrewsbury Township resident Anthony Dobrosky, retired director of the extension service. “She was well-known across the state.”

Dobrosky said Gail McPherson “was always so gracious with everyone she met. She would always talk to you, no matter who you were. And she never lost her cool. ... I certainly will miss her. Agriculture will miss her, too.”

She testified before the U.S. Senate, when legislators were planning to outlaw several pesticides, Paul McPherson said.

But much of her work was not that visible; several of her successes came through incessant phone calls “bugging” local lawmakers to see her way, he said.

Happy as ‘professional farmwife’: Gail McPherson, who had a master of arts degree in teaching from Colgate University, might have been able to make more money off the farm, her husband said.

But she was happy being a “professional farmwife.”

“If you have a job and even if you get paid well and at the end of the day you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything, is that fun?” Paul McPherson said. “It comes down to; ‘Did I make a difference? Is the world a better place because I was here?’”

That, he said, was the challenge that motivated his wife.

-- Reach Christina Kauffman at 505-5434 or ckauffman@yorkdispatch.com .