Serving their community
BLADENSBURG — Two men with long histories of service to their community were honored by the Bladensburg Sertoma Club on Thursday. Charlie Hunt was honored with the Service to Mankind Award and long-time Morgan Township Trustee Paul Hunter was named the Sertoman of the Year.
There was plenty of good-natured humor involved in the presentations, but the respect and love the community has for these two men came through clearly.
Hunt was born in Gambier and a graduate of East Knox High School. He has been part of the Bladensburg community since 1971. After a stint in the military, he worked in the oil fields from 1976 to 1989, when he went to work as a mechanic at the East Knox bus garage until retiring in 2018.
He married his childhood sweetheart, Sharon Woodrow, and was active with 4-H and FFA as his children grew up.
He has helped with the community Christmas lights, and has helped many older folks in the community over the years, mowing grass, plowing snow, trimming brush — whatever was needed. He would fix lawn mowers, weed eaters and other equipment and the past three years has been part of the Bladensburg Cemetery Association.
Hunter has been a Morgan Township Trustee since 1983. He was born in Columbus in 1942 while his father was in the service. He started school in the Homer area, then moved north of Utica.
He attended Ohio State University to study animal science. After a stint in the medical corps attached to the Big Red One infantry division in Vietnam driving a medical supply truck, he spent 42 years as a loan officer with the Land Bank and the Department of Agriculture.
He also kept farming, “His land and his cattle were his passion,” said his wife, Sharon, who described how she got to know him when she came to the area as the minister at Owl Creek Baptist Church.
She observed a man who had survived tragedy, having lost a wife of 40 years and two daughters, but who became a father figure to many young people, both boys and girls, who would come to him for advice.
He was a supporter of 4-H and FFA and serves as the township representative on the Knox County Regional Planning Commission.
She said she first saw him as a “phantom,” slipping into the back of the church and picking up a bulletin, but not staying, and she found out he would do that at all the churches, checking to see what was going on in his community.
