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| For Immediate Release | Contact: Frances Squire |
| May 23, 2008 | Phone: (559) 934-2134 |
Clayton Youree, Tom Stefani honored as WHCC Alumni of the Year
Clayton Youree
When Clayton Youree was a student at West Hills College Coalinga in the mid-1950s, Bermuda shorts were new. As a joke, he and a friend created their own outfits for Bermuda Shorts Day. They wore cutoff overalls with maroon football socks with flip-flop sandals.
At the urging of his girlfriend, he signed up for home ec cooking to help the class meet student enrollment numbers. He took some razzing but it turns out that the class would serve him well during a long career as a firefighter.
“Mrs. Littler (the home ec teacher) was great—like all the teachers at West Hills,” he remembers. “I was driving a school bus when I was enrolled with her and we made biscuits. I gave them to the kids on the bus and they used them for baseballs!”
Youree was honored at WHCC graduation ceremonies Friday night as one of two alumni of the year for the college. His years of service as a firefighter and his leadership in firefighter union issues at the local and state level were cited in his award.
Youree moved to Coalinga after service in the Navy aboard the USS Essex. He served in the Navy fire department and made three trips to Korea and served for over two years in Alaska.
He was a student at then Coalinga College from 1955-57.
He married that college girlfriend, Pamela Ayers, and they were married for 46 years before she passed away in 2006 after a 32 year teaching career.
After West Hills, Youree transferred to Fresno Sate to earn a degree in education. The semester before he was scheduled to graduate, he accepted a job with Chevron Chemical Company and his graduation was delayed until 1963.
He had enjoyed his Navy fire days and when a position opened with the Kern County Fire Department, he and his friend Gil Heriford studied and trained together before testing. They both went to work for the department in 1968.
“It was real late to make a career change,” he noted. “I was 34.”
But that career changed served him well over the years. He started as an entry level firefighter but moved up the ranks quickly and within five years he was promoted to captain. He retired in 1990.
From 1972-1980, he served as president of the Kern County Fire Fighters Union Inc., Local 1301.
He was a principal in writing and negotiating a number of historic agreements and memorandums between the union and Kern County.
He was the first and only Kern County Fire member to hold office on the Board of Directors of the Federated Fire Fighters of California, serving as vice president from 1980-1984. Earlier this month he was voter vice president emeritus unanimously by 26,875 fire fighters from throughout California.
Steven Tom Stefani
Also honored as 2008 WHCC Alumnus of the Year was Steven Tom Stefani, who was killed in Afghanistan last October while serving as a U.S. Department of Agriculture advisor helping teach farmers to produce more food.
A student at WHCC in the late 1990s, Stefani transferred to the University of Nevada, Reno, and earned a bachelor’s degree and was nearing completion of a master’s degree when he volunteered to go to Afghanistan in March of 2007.
Tom’s mother, Barbara, and his father, Steven, who live in Colfax, California, attended the WHCC graduation ceremonies to accept the Alumnus of the Year award on their son’s behalf. His grandmother, Carol Zoll, also attended the ceremonies.
While in Afghanistan, Tom was credited with teaching farmers in the Ghazni Province to heal and renew their wasted soil and to replant denuded hillsides with trees. He helped create a reconstruction plan that included a poultry rearing facility and he had begun construction on a cold storage facility for farmers to use to store their commodities.
Known by friends in Afghanistan as “Big Daddy Ag,” Tom went on 75 missions accompanied by heavily armed U.S. Army convoys to help teach Afghanis good agricultural practices.
He was killed Oct. 4, 2007, in an explosion that impacted one of those convoys.
Born in Lakewood, California, Tom was an Eagle Scout, a 1996-98 State 4-H Club Diamond Star and a 1995 4-H County All Star.
Tom was nominated for the Alumnus of the Year by Dr. Mike Burke, who said, “Tom was possibly the best student I’ve had at WHC. He routinely took 24 units and probably ended with a 3.95 grade point average. He also ran the bull test. Tom made all of us at WHC proud to have him as a student.”
Dr. Barry Perryman, Tom’s graduate school advisor at UNR, said that Tom had been studying the restoration of the salt desert shrub in the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation for more than two years.
“He was a good ecologist and he understood these Western ecosystems very well—especially for someone so young.”
UNR conferred Tom’s master’s degree posthumously at graduation ceremonies earlier this month.
For additional details on Tom’s life and career, visit the National Forest Service website at: http://www.fs.fed.us/r4/htnf/tribute/stefani_tribute.shtml or westhillscollege.com.
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West Hills Community College District serves the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and is part of the California Community College System. Its two colleges, West Hills College Coalinga, which includes North District Center, Firebaugh, and West Hills College Lemoore, serve more than 6,000 students on campus and online each semester.