Jennifer Reekie worked at Lakeview Farms for only three months in 1999, but still deserves special placement in our Hall Of Fame.
Jennifer was a likeable teenage girl and a dedicated worker who did quality work, but whatever the assignment, she would work at about ½ the pace of any other new employee. I had her work at activities like tying up raspberry canes, picking pumpkins out of the field, spreading straw on the strawberries -- the end result was the same. We all concluded that she was nice but just "slow". When she mentioned that she was trying out for cross country / track, I tried not to raise my eyebrows too much.
In the succeeding years when her mother, Sheila, would visit the farm picking raspberries she'd tell me how well Jennifer was doing running. I have to admit that I was still more that a little bit skeptical and it was not until her name and photograph started appearing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch Local Sports pages that I realized that Jennifer was a lot faster than we thought! As a senior at Ft. Zumwalt South, Jennifer was probably one of the top cross country runners, milers, and speed walkers in Missouri. If you were to "google" her like Christiana you would get about four pages of web stats on her achievements.