Get to know Dennis Clary, government affairs director, Realtors of South Central Kansas
Dennis Clary figures he's "either the oldest Millennial or youngest Generation Xer" around.
“I probably have good and bad traits of both generations.”
By that he means his professional career doesn't fit neatly into a box and pursuing it is never going to be his only consideration.
A military kid, Clary moved around quite a bit as a youngster before his parents settled in Colorado. He majored in mechanical engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, playing his way into an athletic scholarship as a wide receiver on the football team.
Clary went to work at Boeing in Wichita three months before 9/11 and was in the first wave of employees laid off afterwards. Before getting called back to work there the next year, he picked up a part-time gig as an emcee in an Old Town nightclub.
He worked as an engineer at Boeing – designing a circuit breaker panel for Air Force One among other jobs – then moved into the marketing and sales side of the business. That got him so heavily involved in the community that, when Boeing left town, he stayed put. Clary has served on the boards of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Leadership Wichita and Kansas Hispanic Education & Development Foundation.
“As great as Boeing had been to me, this town had come to mean a lot to me.”
Clary worked as senior manager of public affairs for Cox Communications from 2014 to 2016. He went to work for the Realtors organization in October. It represents about 2,000 agents in Sedgwick, Butler, Harvey and Cowley counties.
Clary sees his job as "protecting and promoting property rights" at the city, county and state levels of government, but also working on issues such as education and transportation that affect the region's quality of life.
Clary and his wife, Tara, have a son, Daxton, who's 2. He still emcees occasionally and has been part of two championship flag football teams in Wichita's parks league. "We enter a team pretty religiously," he said. "That's a fun thing to do in the spring and fall."
Joe Stumpe
This story was originally published December 8, 2017 at 11:06 AM with the headline "Get to know Dennis Clary, government affairs director, Realtors of South Central Kansas."