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Barnesville Area Education Foundation announces HOF inductees for 2020

Editor’s note: This article originally was published on June 3, but a portion of it was inadvertently omitted. We republish it here in its entirety.

BARNESVILLE — The Barnesville Alumni Banquet for 2020 has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the Barnesville Area Education Foundation’s Hall Of Fame inductees are being recognized for 2020.

This year the Hall Of Fame inductees are Agnes Amos Timmons, who taught and coached at Barnesville High School for 32 years, and Sally Johnson McKenzie, a 1969 graduate of Barnesville High School.

Timmons, aka “Aggie,” graduated from Scio High School in 1942. She attended and graduated from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1946.

She also completed a bachelor’s plus, with special education emphasis, at Ohio University (Belmont Branch, the current Eastern campus). She was a celebrated and admired teacher, coach and resident of Barnesville.

Those who knew her say Timmons was determined to be successful in any activity she became involved with. As an example, she worked diligently and championed equal sports opportunities for high school girls, until Title IX was enacted in June 1972.

She was popular and admired by the girls she coached, many of whom became lifelong friends. Timmons was very involved with volunteering at Barnesville Hospital, singing in the choir, serving as a deacon, as a trustee, helping at nursing homes and senior centers. Timmons retired from coaching in 1991; however, even today, she remains a legend in Barnesville and within the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference.

Timmons started coaching pickup girls’ basketball teams at Barnesville High School in 1946 when there were no school-sanctioned girls’ programs for member schools of the OVAC.

She was a girls’ physical education teacher and considered it part of her job to organize whatever athletic teams she could because she wanted the girls to have some competition and experience the fun of playing organized sports. She would join with teachers from other schools in the area interested in doing the same thing to schedule games.

They also had to hire their own officials and provide transportation to the game sites.

Timmons left teaching after 1948 to begin raising a family. After having four children, she returned to her teaching and coaching career at Barnesville in 1962. She coached volleyball and basketball even though it wasn’t until June 1972 that Title IX was enacted, demanding equal sports opportunities for girls. She was asked by then-OVAC Executive Secretary Sam Mumley to host and serve as director of the first OVAC volleyball championship tournament, which was held at Barnesville High.

Timmons coached basketball and track until well into the 1980s, but continued her duties with the volleyball team until her retirement from teaching in 1991. In addition, she co-coached the Ohio University Eastern volleyball teams when she was well into her 80s.

Timmons died June 16, 2018. She was preceded in death by her parents and her husband of 62 years, Kenneth W. Timmons, and her brothers. She is survived by four children, Michael D. (Gail) Timmons of Davisville, West Virginia; Thomas P. (Tyra) Timmons of Steubenville; Susan T. (Bruce) Busler of Maryville, Illinois; and Shelly J. (Louis) Richardson of Colorado Springs, Colorado. In addition, she has 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

McKenzie has been a leading edge innovator within the dental industry. She has provided leadership by evaluating, identifying improvements, developing successful ideas and implementing new concepts for the dental community for over 50 years. She was adjunct professor in the College of Dentistry at Ohio State University and has been a guest lecturer at many colleges and universities, including more than 400 domestic and international presentations. Her writing and ideas have been published in major dental journals, she has started her own successful businesses and she has written seven books.

McKenzie began her work career in a dental office in Cambridge, Ohio. After two years she began working for a dentist at the Watergate Hotel Complex in Washington, D.C. After a year of fighting the rush-hour traffic she moved to Dayton, Ohio, to be near her brother, Thom Bennett. In 1973 she moved to Columbus, where her long-term career began to take shape.

She began teaching for Columbus City Schools in a high school vocational program focused on dental assisting.

There she became president of the Columbus Dental Assistants Society and created the first in-office, expanded duty, dental assistant program and took the state board exam to become one of the first dental assistants in Ohio to place restorative material in teeth.

McKenzie built her first business, Dental Personnel Placement Services, gaining a state employment agency license specializing in the placement of dental personnel. She sold four franchises in Ohio, wrote a program teaching others how to start their own agency, and then sold 350 of those programs. At the time, Sally was also doing contract receivables work for Columbus dentists while she was teaching. She was encouraged by those dentists to begin helping their colleagues as a consultant, thus extending her client base.

In 1980 she started McKenzie Management, an international dentist consulting firm, which is now in its 40th year. She has written for all major dental journals, been a featured speaker for every major dental meeting, written seven books, published 50 live webinars, published a weekly e-Newsletter since 2002, has been endorsed by the California Dental Association, and featured as a Dental Consultant Leader by Dentistry Today since 1990.

She was owner and publisher of the New Dentist magazine from 2009-18 and also owns the Dentists’ Network, an electronic publication, since 2006.

In 1999 she moved to La Jolla, California where she continued her business for 19 years. She now has offices in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Her business has employees in Florida and California, with five field consultants serving across the country. She lives full time in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

The Barnesville Area Education Foundation (BAEF) provides funds for local education systems and students that might not otherwise be available through public funding. Each year the foundation evaluates and votes on worthy nominations for the BAEF Hall Of Fame.

For more information, visit baefonline.org.

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