Back where it all began: Service intertwined with Nancy Sherman’s life
By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus
Nancy Ann Sherman has always measured her life by a simple question: Who can I help today?
It’s the same instinct that led her, as a young teacher of the visually impaired, to dream up a summer camp where children who were blind could go sailing and build bonfires on the beach.
It’s what steadied her in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Lions Clubs from across the country showed up at her battered school with truckloads of desks and books, and it’s what brought her back home to Muscle Shoals, where she and her sister now carry on a legacy of service inspired by Helen Keller’s famous call to the Lions nearly a century ago.
“I have a hard time talking about it sometimes,” she said tearfully, recalling what she considers a defining moment in her involvement between the Lions Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the new Shoals Area Chapter.
She was living in Pass Christian, about a 20-minute drive up the beach from Biloxi, when the 30-foot storm surge of Katrina slammed into the coastal city and left behind total devastation.
“Everything was wiped out. We lost everything. We lost all of our schools, we lost all of our city buildings, and every home was destroyed or damaged,” she said. “When things started opening back up, I remember driving down the beach, and I would get lost driving down (Highway) 90. There were no landmarks left.”
She remembers the wreckage and the deafening silence in the aftermath, but she also remembers the response.
Once the storm clouds cleared, Sherman remembers the Points of Distribution, or PODs, set up around her city, where people brought food, clothing, household items and anything else survivors might need.
“They were run by people in the neighborhood, you know, they manned it for no pay. It was all volunteer,” Sherman said. “I can’t think of how many times I went down there and met Lions Club members from all over the country. They were bringing in things we needed by the truckload. It was just so wonderful what Lions did and what people did. We serve, and that’s our motto.”
To those who learn Sherman’s story, it might almost seem she was destined to become a Lion.
Her father, Frank Campbell, had been a member of the Muscle Shoals Lions Club, which dissolved several years ago, since Sherman was a child.
It also makes sense that the family would be drawn to that particular civic club for its dedication to the visually impaired community. Sherman’s younger sister, Sara Jane Campbell, was born deaf and blind.
While Sherman acknowledges the influence she likely felt from her sister’s challenges, she maintains that she and her father likely joined the Lions Club for the same reasons and with motivations that extended beyond their household.
“I think he joined more for the service, and that’s one of the biggest reasons I do it,” she said. “That’s why I continue to do it. It’s to serve the community, and actually nationally and internationally as well.”
Sherman was born at Helen Keller Hospital and grew up in Muscle Shoals, where she feels grateful to have been raised by parents who quietly modeled lives of service.
Aside from her father’s dedication to the Lions Club, her mother, Jimmie Campbell, was equally committed to community causes. Together they instilled in their daughters the importance of giving back.
“I don’t remember what it was like before Sara Jane was born because I was so young, but my parents were amazing,” Sherman said. “They were huge advocates at the time, and there were no services for children like my sister.
“My parents worked to get the laws passed that are now in place that require school districts to provide services for people with special needs. They traveled to Washington, D.C. and spent a lot of time in Montgomery. They were looking for the best for her, but my Daddy would say, ‘You know I’m doing this for her, but I’m also doing it for other kids who need this.’”
Undoubtedly, those experiences, plus the fact that Sherman comes from a long line of educators, likely influenced her career path as well.
When she was 18, she moved to Mississippi for a summer job and wound up staying. After transferring to the University of Southern Mississippi, she became a teacher for children who were visually impaired — a calling that combined her love of education with her conviction that all children deserve opportunity.
For years, she’s been self-employed as a consultant for schools to help ensure those opportunities are available to students with special needs in the classrooms.
“I contract with different school districts,” Sherman explained. “I go in and do consulting — training with the staff and recommending accommodations and modifications so the students can stay in the classroom with their peers in the school where they want to attend. This ensures they don’t have to go anywhere special.
“The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind is an amazing place,” she added. “It’s perfect for some people, but I like for parents and students to have options. As a parent, if I had had to send one of my children three or four hours away from home to a residential school, it would have been hard. My parents did it because that was what was best for my sister, but I like for parents to have options.”
Hoping to give students more options and opportunities is also what led to Sherman’s eventual induction into the Biloxi Lions Club.
“My husband and I were living in Biloxi by then, and I had a parent of a student who wanted a fun summer camp for her child,” Sherman recalled. “You know, there were educational camps in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, but nothing really in our area for students with special needs.”
As she began searching for a summer camp that would accommodate students with visual impairments and came up short, she began to wonder about starting one herself.
Knowing she’d need the backing of others who were also service minded, she thought back on her father’s involvement with the Lions Club back in her hometown and considered the local chapter might be willing to help.
“This was back when you had to be invited to a meeting. A friend of mine took me, and I sat across from this man. I told him what I was doing there, and he said, ‘If you join the Lions Club, we’ll start a camp,’” Sherman said.
That conversation took place in the spring of 1996. A year later, the first annual session of the Sea & Sun Camp was held in May 1997 with 15 campers.
“We’ve had as many as 30,” Sherman said. Right after Katrina, it dropped down a little bit, but it’s still going strong.”
She said the camp offers children who are blind or visually impaired the chance to experience things their sighted peers often take for granted, from swimming and fishing in the Gulf to soaring along ziplines.
“We’ve been sailing, and we’d fly kites. We went on a shrimp boat, and they’d pull up the shrimp and let the kids feel them,” Sherman said. “We go kayaking and souvenir shopping. They could spend all the time they wanted touching the things in the souvenir shop, and that was always really special.”
What started as a small Biloxi Lions Club project grew into a statewide effort. As the camp’s aims and offerings expanded, it became a Mississippi Lions Project.
“Now that they’ve taken it over, we have volunteers from all over the state to help,” Sherman said. “It’s been amazing to see it continue. I was there this past May, and to see all those kids continue to be served and all the fun they have, it just warms my heart.”
While she still attends when she can, Sherman stays involved from afar as a board member.
After decades of teaching and serving her community in south Mississippi, she returned to north Alabama to be closer to family following the passing of her husband. Sherman settled with relatives on a family farm in Lawrence County before finally buying a home in Muscle Shoals — a place she said had always been tugging at her heart.
Coming home also meant rejoining the organization that had defined so much of her adult life. She became active in the Shoals Area Lions Club, this time recruiting her youngest sister, Peggy Sue Barnette.
“She’s never been in a Lions Club before. I think we both started in April or May,” Sherman said. “Having her by my side has been really special.”
The Shoals Area club, she noted, has been intentional about blending tradition with new approaches. Younger members can join meetings virtually, and the club has partnered with local colleges to involve students in service projects.
“We know to keep thriving we have to be open to new ways of connecting. We want to get students involved early, and there are incentives offered to them as far as dues,” Sherman said. “But at the heart, it’s still about asking: Who needs us, and how can we help?”
As focused as she is on service, Sherman also acknowledges that there needs to be an element of fun to get more people interested, and once they join, they need an incentive to stay.
“We’ve got a project coming up in December with the Shoals Symphony. When we usher at that event, it’s to make a little money for our other service projects, but I’d also like to invite the students to usher with us. Then you get to stay and watch the symphony,” she said.
“When we invite new people, we want to include them in these events. Not just invite them to a meeting. You know, you want to include them in something fun”
Since joining the Shoals Lions, Sherman has remained an active club member, volunteering with projects for local non-profits like Daisy’s Place, the Chadwick Foundation and The Birthday Fairy, all the time balancing that service work with her career and family.
This summer, she joined other Lions in celebrating the 100th anniversary of Keller’s famous appeal at Ivy Green. Standing on the grounds where Keller once lived, she felt the full weight of coming home.
For Sherman, that connection to Helen Keller is more than a piece of local history, it’s a thread woven throughout her life — from being born at the hospital bearing Keller’s name to writing her college dissertation on Keller’s life and advocacy to joining the Lions Club.
“I’ve always felt Helen’s influence,” Sherman said. “She stood before the Lions in 1925 and challenged them to be ‘Knights for the Blind.’ That speech changed our organization forever. To be from her hometown and to live out that mission, it just feels like a calling.”
At every stage in her journey, from growing up with a deaf-blind sister to starting a camp for blind youth to following in her father’s footsteps and joining a Lions Club, Sherman has always honored that mission to help others.
“You know, you’re happier when you’re serving other people,” she said. “I didn’t want to come home and do nothing. All the things I was involved in back in Mississippi, I’m finding those same opportunities here. I think it’s just that desire to serve. That’s all it is.”
LIONS CLUB INTERNATIONAL
ABOUT THE CLUB: For over 100 years, Lions have served with uncommon kindness, putting the needs of their local neighbors, their greater communities and world first. Lions Club International is made up of 1.4 million members in 49,000 clubs who bring hands and hearts to the communities they serve in nearly every country on earth.
ESTABLISHED: June 7, 1917
MOTTO: We Serve
IMPACT: Global causes include fights against childhood cancer and diabetes; providing disaster relief for communities devastated by natural disasters; identifying the world’s crucial needs and providing humanitarian aid where needed; striving to improve food security and access to nutritious food; the prevention of avoidable blindness and fighting to improve quality of life for people who are blind or visually impaired.
WEBSITE: www.lionsclubs.org
JOIN A LOCAL CHAPTER
SHOALS AREA LIONS
MEETINGS: First Thursday of every month at 5:30 p.m.
WHERE: Florence-Lauderdale Public Library
CONTACT: President Dustin Phillips, email Shoalslionsclub@gmail.com or call 256-810-1301
CHEROKEE LIONS CLUB
MEETINGS: Second and fourth Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: The Lions Den, 120 Church St. in Cherokee
CONTACT: President Nancy Vance, email nvance1968@gmail.com or call 256-856-0070
KILLEN LIONS CLUB
MEETINGS: First and third Tuesdays at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: Killen Methodist Church, 201 JC Mauldin Hwy. in Killen
CONTACT: President Don Gray, email dmgray73@comcast.net
TUSCUMBIA LIONS CLUB
MEETINGS: Second and fourth Tuesdays at 6:15 p.m.
WHERE: Helen Keller Public Library, 511 N. Main St. in Tuscumbia
CONTACT: President Bobby Lewis, visit the Tuscumbia Lions Club Facebook page
LEXINGTON LIONS CLUB
MEETINGS: Recently chartered; meeting times and location to be announced
CONTACT: Allyson and Casey Woody, email allysonwoody@bellsouth.net
RUSSELLVILLE LIONS CLUB
MEETINGS: Second Mondays at 6:15 p.m.
WHERE: Taylor’s Restaurant, 808 Ronnie McDowell Ave. in Russellville
CONTACT: Treasurer Linda Spurgeon, email spurgeon@centurylink.net