The 2017 C. Clyde Jones Volunteer of the Year for Manhattan Area Chamber of Commerce is Dixie Roberts. The award was announced during the Manhattan Chamber’s Annual Meeting on Friday, Feb. 17, at Manhattan Conference Center.
Roberts has volunteered abundantly in the community, which includes serving on the board of directors for Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art and as regent for the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Polly Ogden Chapter. More volunteer efforts include Lions Club member and with First United Methodist Church, where she organized and sustained the Manhattan Dance Club for 30 years. Roberts has spent the last 16 years as a member of the Manhattan Chamber’s Legislative Affairs committee.
In 2010, Roberts was the first recipient of the Nancy Landon Kassebaum Kansas Federation of Republican Women Award. She served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1984, and was chosen as an alternate for two other national conventions. She was a presidential elector to the Electoral College in 1980 and 1984, and was named local Republican of the Year in 1986.
Roberts ran for the Kansas House in 1976, then served as district chair for eight years and vice chair for another four years as part of the second congressional district in the 1980s and ’90s.
She first volunteered for Bob Dole in his first district Congressional campaign in 1962, then worked his campaigns throughout the 1970s. Roberts was an active volunteer for Sen. Dole’s presidential bid in 1996, made door-to-door visit in Iowa, organized bus trips to Missouri and Iowa, and made hundreds of voter-directed phone calls.
Professionally, she has worked for Kansas Farm Bureau and Manhattan Recreation Commission, co-owned a business called Creative Crafts, and worked as the office manager for Wheat Quality Council before she started a highly successful career selling Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1985. She is still active in that endeavor.
Roberts is well-known throughout the state and nation for her civic and political volunteer efforts. She is a graduate of Newton High School and has lived in Manhattan since the early 1960s.
The award is named in honor of C. Clyde Jones, who moved to Manhattan in 1960 and served as the first dean of the Kansas State University College of Business. Jones has a long-running record of community service activity in Manhattan to include Shepherd’s Crossing.
