About

Fam­ily

Gary Kespohl is 62 and has been mar­ried to Patty Kespohl for 42 years. They have 2 sons that are both mar­ried and liv­ing in Colum­bia as well as 6 grandchildren.

Edu­ca­tion

Gary attended Ridge­way Grade School, Jef­fer­son Junior High School, Hick­man High School, and the Uni­ver­sity of Mis­souri and Kansas City Col­lege of Automa­tion. Gary has also attended many tech­ni­cal train­ing courses spon­sored by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novel and AMD.

Pro­fes­sional Background

Gary started his pro­fes­sional career in 1967 with Colum­bia Ser­vice Bureau as a com­puter pro­gram­mer. In 1971 he took a posi­tion as man­ager of the com­puter staff at Colum­bia Insur­ance Group. In 1978 he was pro­moted to Vice Pres­i­dent in charge of the com­puter depart­ment where he remained until 1982. That year Gary started his own com­puter busi­ness, Cen­tral Mis­souri Com­puter Cen­ter Inc. and has owned and man­aged that busi­ness to date. Dur­ing his career from 1982 through 2004 he devel­oped com­puter soft­ware for Mutual Insur­ance Com­pa­nies in Mis­souri, Illi­nois, Arkansas and Iowa. When he sold that por­tion of the busi­ness in 2004 he had acquired 70 insur­ance com­pa­nies as clients. Another large por­tion of his com­pany was involved in sup­ply­ing com­puter hard­ware to small col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in 7 mid-western states through the com­pet­i­tive bid process.

Civic Activ­ity

Gary’s civic and vol­un­teer duties include church trea­surer for 5 years, church finan­cial sec­re­tary for 4 years, church elder for 3 years and con­gre­ga­tion chair­man for 5 years. He is a past chair­man of Lit­tle Dixie Kiwa­nis club and recip­i­ent of the Kiwa­nis Hixon Fel­low award. Cur­rently Gary is:

• Board mem­ber of the Down­town Opti­mist Club
• Local board mem­ber of Lenoir Woods Retire­ment Community
• Com­mis­sioner for 3rd Ward Colum­bia Parks and Recreation
• Trea­surer of the Colum­bia Spe­cial Busi­ness District
• Board mem­ber of North Cen­tral Colum­bia Neigh­bor­hood Association
• Mem­ber of the cham­ber of com­merce gov­ern­ment affairs committee
• Board mem­ber for the first Com­mu­nity Improve­ment Dis­trict in down­town Columbia

Lit­tle League Baseball

Gary has been involved in Lit­tle League Base­ball for the past 33 years start­ing as an umpire, coach, man­ager and league trea­surer. The past 23 of those years have been spent as a Dis­trict Admin­is­tra­tor in Mis­souri Dis­trict 4. He has started Lit­tle League base­ball pro­grams in Albany, Lex­ing­ton, Rich­mond, Mex­ico, Mont­gomery City, Eldon, Kansas City and Per­ryville all of which are located in Mis­souri. The past 11 years he has served as an advi­sor to the Lit­tle League Cen­tral Region Head­quar­ters in Indi­anapo­lis, Indi­ana. In 1999 and 2000 he served as an advi­sor to the Pres­i­dent of Lit­tle League Base­ball in Williamsport, PA. He con­tin­ues to be involved in Lit­tle League Base­ball and helped start a new chal­lenger divi­sion in Colum­bia for kids with phys­i­cal and devel­op­men­tal disabilities.