As a little girl, Robin Pendleton was fidgety sitting inside when it rained. She wanted to get outside on the softball diamond or the tennis courts.
So she wasn’t always happy with Habersham County recreation officials when they determined it was too wet to play.
“I was one of those kids that whenever they canceled ballgames, my friend Patty and I, we’d get on our bikes and ride to the ball field, and we’d say, ‘We could have played ball,’” said Pendleton.
As Pendleton got older, she stayed close to the recreation department, serving as a lifeguard and a scorekeeper. She graduated from Habersham Central and went to Young Harris, spending time outside of class with the intramural leagues. She then got a bachelor of science degree in recreation at Georgia Southern in 1984.
“I’ve always been involved in recreation,” said Pendleton. “It was kind of a toss-up. Did I want to be a teacher and coach something? I realized at Young Harris that to get that degree I had to take a foreign language. And I had seen my roommate struggle in Spanish.”
Pendleton passed on any “¿Cómo te llamas?” — sticking instead to the language she knew: the RBIs, the deuce, the top of the key.
Dick Perpall, who retired this year as recreation director after 32 years on the job, hired Pendleton in 1984 as a program coordinator.
“He’s been a super guy to work for,” Pendleton said of Perpall. “He lets you do your job.”
Back in the mid 80s, there were bridge classes, flower arranging and photography.
Pendleton also remembers her days on a Snapper mower, cutting the fields. All the full-time employees chipped in on field maintenance when she started. However, the John Deere with gears, well, she was prohibited from using that, Pendleton said.
“Grady (Autry, the department’s maintenance director), wouldn’t let me drive the John Deere because one time I got stuck on the side of the road,” said Pendleton. “Three of us would be cutting the track. And one snapper was slower than the other, so we’d have to circle out and let the other two pass us.”
The new director said her position of athletic coordinator will not be filled. She will take on the director’s duties and continue scheduling for the department. This will reduce the full-time staff at the department from seven to six.
“We’re going to pool our resources there, save the county a little money,” said Pendleton.
She also said she’s not opposed to having office workers do maintenance work at the park.
“I told Grady, ‘I don’t know how it got out from the office people doing maintenance,’” said Pendleton. “But I told Grady, ‘I want you to call me and say, ‘wear work clothes tomorrow, I need you.’ Because as small as we are — and we’re not going to fill the athletic position — we’re all going to have to chip in a little more.”
When Pendleton’s not at the recreation department, she enjoys time with her dog, Juneau, a Samoyed. She also likes to travel. Pendleton is a hiker and has taken trips to numerous state parks around the country, such as Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Rainier, the Tetons, Yellowstone and Zion national parks.
“I’m a day hiker, nothing more than a six-mile round trip,” she said. “I’m afraid of bears. I’ve seen two bears on the trails and that’s two too many.”
But Pendleton has shown a daring side on those trips, too. She scaled Angel’s Landing at Zion National Park in Utah. (For an image, Google “Angel’s Landing”).
“It was named that because the explorer who saw it said the only way you could make it on top was to be an angel and have wings,” said Pendleton.
Pendleton recalls the day her friend talked her up Angel’s Landing.
“We got to Scout’s Lookout, and I said, ‘I’m not proud, this is far enough,’ because you’re walking on a spine and it’s like a 1,200-foot drop here and an 800-foot drop here,” said Pendleton. “And it’s got pinions and chains that you hold onto. I was like, ‘this is good enough.’ She’s like, ‘Robin, there’s a man with a backpack baby carriage.’ The baby was hiking on his shoulders. She’s like ‘we’re going as long as he’s going.’ We got there and it’s like looking out on a cloud.”
Usually, Pendleton’s free time doesn’t include imposing land masses. Instead, she enjoys some other, less stressful pastimes, such as reading Patricia Cornwell novels or watching reruns of old TV shows like Cheers. Pendleton also likes to listen to Toby Keith, John Berry and Jimmy Buffet on her iPod.
“I watch fluff on TV,” she said. “I’m a 2 ½ Men fan. Even though Charlie Sheen went off the deep end, I still watch the reruns.”
Madison County’s new recreation director has already spent 27 years at the department and she prefers to keep her same office despite the promotion, not moving into Perpall’s former room.
She sits in her chair, a photo she took of a snow-covered mountain framed on the wall behind her, and reflects on the changes she’s seen with the Madison County Recreation Department since 1984.
“The growth of soccer has been one of the biggest things,” she said. “It’s our biggest program now. We had over 450 kids this past fall. And you look over a 25-year period. We went with soccer clinics with 10 to 15 kids to interlocking our schedule with Athens Clarke and now it’s just where are we going to put all our kids?”
The county is in the process of expanding its facilities with soccer fields off Brewer Phillips Road. Pendleton said sodding will have to follow the lighting work, because it doesn’t make sense to put sod down, then bring in big trucks and equipment to install lights, tearing up the new grass in the process.
Pendleton said she wants to see some more work done at the county’s satellite parks, such as Diamond Hill, Mize and Colbert parks. She’s interested in having the recreation department maintain Arnold Park in Comer, too, and wants to see lights installed at one of Colbert’s fields and irrigation at both Mize and Diamond Hill parks.
“If we spray those fields now, nothing will come back,” she said.
The recreation director said she’d eventually like to see some sort of indoor facility for the recreation department, noting that the summer day camps are limited to 24 people now, because that’s the maximum amount of children that can gather in the meeting room when it rains.
And Pendleton knows what it’s like to be the kid waiting on the rain.
“Now, the shoe’s on the other foot,” said Pendleton, remembering the days of canceled games. “When we cancel, I’m like how many kids are going to ride their bikes to Diamond Hill and say, ‘We could have played softball today; they canceled too early.’”
