Volunteers of the Month: Gary Foster and Sherri Smith

by Dorothy Murray, Senior Writer and Editor, Bergan et al., Inc.

We are honoring Gary Foster and Sherri Smith, former presidents of the Houston chapter, as volunteers of the month for June. Gary was president in 1987–1988, and Sherri in 1980–1981. We are privileged that so many former presidents maintain their membership and attend our meetings. We are especially grateful when they actively participate by managing a project or committee.

Gary is our Employment Committee manager. He organized the employment table, where you can visit him before the program meetings. He supervised the highly successful Employment STK workshop held in March. (We hope to make the workshop an annual event.) With Steve Cunningham, Gary revitalized the employment web page. With April Cooper and Steve, Gary created the innovative online job board. We are fortunate that Gary has agreed to be the Employment Committee manager again next year.

Gary received a BA degree in vocal music with a minor in piano and instrumentation from Northwestern State University of Oklahoma. He was manager of technical publications for Baker Hughes INTEQ for many years before joining Weatherford International as senior technical writer.

Gary’s hobbies are woodworking and horseback riding. He makes pens, pencils, lamps, bowls, and plaques. He rides horses in competitions, such as team penning and western pleasure. Gary says that he enjoys “helping people” and that he takes “personal pride in seeing them achieve their goals.”

Sherri did a superb job organizing the STC international judging events that our chapter hosted in April. She also secured the donated printing of our programs for the Region 5 Conference, held in October 2001.

Sherri received a BA degree in English and a BS degree in Secondary Education from Louisiana State University. She taught language arts to seventh graders in the Pasadena Independent School District and worked as a technical writer for Brown & Root before starting her own company, Saba Communications.

She joined Compaq in 1987, where she manages technical publications for Access Business Group (ABG) products. During her career at Compaq, Sherri helped with their first corporate identity guide, their first corporate style guide, and their first WinHelp–based online user documentation, which shipped preinstalled on a computer hard drive. She also played a key role in developing their current strategy of maintaining a small permanent staff for long-term assignments and integrating a pool of independent contractors for quick-turnaround assignments.

Sherri manages this group of permanent and contract technical writers, which has won a number of STC Houston Technical Publications competition awards. Sherri owns four poodles (Rocky, Chloe, Tessa, and Tango), which she shows in competitions. According to Sherri, “This is the perfect antidote to everyday stress and the monotony of staring at a computer screen for hours on end. Dogs don’t ask stupid questions, cut budgets, or dream up unreasonable deadlines.” She is also an avid reader of mysteries, especially Patricia Cornwell’s novels.