Almost a dentist, Blackshear chose a life in recreation

While she was an 18-year-old freshman at Northern Arizona University, Anndrea Blackshear, now 49, wanted to be a dentist. Then she signed up for a summer job with the now disbanded Youth Conservation Corps.

“Truthfully, I just thought I’d be earning some cash, some spending money over the summer,” Blackshear, the executive director of Green Valley Recreation, said.

She never expected that the two summers she spent working with high school students making trails on the Fort Huachuca Army Base would inspire her to pursue a career in recreation.

Before living in the barracks with her crew and working as a counselor with the Youth Conservation Corps, Blackshear was sure she wanted to be a dentist. She’d even worked in a dentist’s office while she was in high school.

College recreation program

But her summer experience was enough for Blackshear to transfer to Brigham Young University in Utah, which at that time had one of the first accredited recreation programs in the country.

“That’s when I was converted from dentistry to recreation,” she said. “It was working with people, the excitement, the fun people have,” that made her want to make the switch.

She still has an intense passion for helping people try new things at her job at GVR, where she has worked since 2000. Blackshear was selected as the executive director last year.

Blackshear grew up in Pomerene, which is in the Benson area, the seventh of nine children in a traditional Mormon family.

“We were always outside,” Blackshear said of her childhood in rural Cochise County where she spent a lot of time riding horses with her siblings and cousins.

Her work in recreation has been instrumental in her life. She met her husband Roosevelt while working (as a civilian) for the Army’s Morale, Welfare and Recreation Department, again at Fort Huachuca. After they married 23 years ago, she moved with him to Frankfurt, Germany, where he was stationed.

In Germany, she worked with the Army and took personnel on “adventure trips.” These trips took her kayaking, water rafting, and rock climbing throughout Germany and as far as Austria, France and England.

A call from Sierra Vista

But then she got a call from the city of Sierra Vista, where she was working before she moved to Germany, asking her to come back; the person who’d taken her job with the Recreation Department had left. Right away, she returned to Arizona after only a year and a half in Germany. Her husband, who spent a total of 12 years stationed there, followed just six months later.

She stayed in Sierra Vista until she came to work at GVR as a recreation manager in 2000.

For more than 20 years, Blackshear and her husband have lived in the Kartchner Caverns area, where they’ve raised their son and two daughters. While she has tried many activities in her life, these days, Blackshear said, her real passion is reading everything she can get her hands on and taking long walks out in the desert by her home, where she spots lots of wildlife such as bobcats, mountain lions, and even bears.

She spends most of her free time transporting her youngest daughter, who will be attending college in Wisconsin next year, across the country to softball games.

Blackshear said she and her husband, who has retired from the Army and now works as a contractor, think of eventually moving closer to Green Valley.

“We have beautiful facilities here, in many ways more so than anywhere else in the country,” she said. “And I love the diversity here, the wide variety of people who live here, it makes it fun.”

Tess Martinez | 547-9732 fax: 625-1603