Deb Ferguson, EAA 1247485, says she doesn’t just volunteer at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh. She helps to “save people’s vacations.”
Originally from Ohio but now residing locally in Waupaca, Deb is co-chair for First Aid and is part of three generations — including her and her husband, their children and grandchildren — who volunteer there. Her husband has volunteered in First Aid for about 30 years and Deb for about 25 years.
It was inevitable for Deb to catch the aviation bug since her husband got his private pilot certificate the week before they married. But soon, the aviation bug spread throughout their family. Deb started attending EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in 1984 with her husband Carl Ferguson, EAA 380128, and their oldest two children.
As a large family of history buffs growing up in Ohio, Deb’s children visited the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, where they immersed themselves in the history of aviation. And, of course, they visited AirVenture every summer.
“I think my boys’ interest in the military grew out of their experiences at EAA,” Deb said. One son just retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Army, another is still serving but in a consultant role, and a third works in the cyber division for the Army Reserve.
“My boys always said, ‘They served so that people who didn’t want to serve didn’t have to.’ They just wanted to serve so that the draft never had to come back.”
After a few years of attending AirVenture, Deb realized she could also volunteer. Starting in 1989, she volunteered one day out of the week as she was a nurse with a growing family. But as her passion grew, she started volunteering the entire week, bringing along her four children, including the youngest who was still a baby.
Deb said she has also grown very close to the other First Aid volunteers, creating lifelong friendships that you can’t find anywhere else.
There is a lot of variety when you volunteer at the First Aid building, including a lot of minor things.
“We get bike accidents, we get people [who] twist their ankles, we get people [with] rashes,” Deb said. “We get people that have nose bleeds [or who are] overheated.
But over the years, they have also saved lives, she said.
Her children are grown now with kids of their own, but AirVenture has always been the one place their family can reunite.
“It’s just one thing that we’ve always done as a family,” Deb said. “And no matter how far apart we’ve been at different times, they all come home to do EAA.”