Last week’s meeting of the Putnam County Board of Commissioners marked not only its last of the year but also the retirement of Chairman Billy Webster.
To be accurate, the brief ceremony after the meeting represented Webster’s third retirement from public service – the fourth, if one counts the two-year hiatus before he was elected chairman in 2018.
The first for the Alabama native came after 20 years in the Air Force; the second, after 18 years as a civilian employee at Warner Robins Air Force Base.
In 2005, Webster was elected to the first of three four-year terms for the District 4 seat on the Putnam County Board of Commissioners.
Of his time on the commission, Webster quipped he had attended “354 meetings, 50 budget sessions, and 20 called meetings, all in all, 454 meetings.”
Jeff Wooten, who eventually would take the District 4 seat, personally thanked Webster for taking the time to drive around the district with him to point out events or problem areas that might come up.
District 2 Commissioner Daniel Brown cited Webster’s guidance to newcomers on the board as being something akin to the board’s institutional memory.
“He guided us through areas we hadn’t even thought about,” Brown said. In an informal conversation a few weeks earlier, a staff member’s appreciation for Webster came down to: “He always did his homework.”
To mark the occasion, the commissioners and staff presented Webster with a framed montage of 13 shoulder patches from NASA’s Apollo program.
As a young Air Force officer with a degree in mechanical engineering (later adding another in aeronautical engineering), Webster had been assigned to work at NASA during both the unmanned Apollo 5 and manned Apollo 8 missions in the late 1960s.
His claim to fame there came as the physically similar stand-in for Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman during abbreviated training sessions.