Bob Josjor

By: Dalton

Who is Bob Josjor? Well he is a resident of Ogallala and a small business owner of Lou Kraus Music. He is actively involved with the Ogallala Community Redevelopment Authority, which is helping with economic development and improving parts of the town that are sub-standard, and also serves on the Ogallala/Keith County Chamber of Commerce board. He isn’t always in the newspaper, and he doesn't strive for the spotlight for every good act he does or helps with. He is truly a Local Anonymous Extraordinary.

When Ogallala built the new hospital, that left an old abandoned one. Mr. Josjor said it was filled with "vandals and ne’er-do-wells," it was also an eye sore. Through the Ogallala Redevelopment Authority, they were able to tear the old building down and turn it into a housing community. Another thing that they were able to do is pave about four blocks of street in a low income area, and if they would have not been able to pay for it, the people that lived on that street would have had to pay for it.

When I asked Mr. Josjor about what he believed his most important job as an activist is, he responded with “Communicating, whether that is communicating with people that you are working with or communicating with the people you want to help. Communicating with people that are against what you are trying to do. You have to pool those people together somehow find a common vision that you can move forward on.”
   
He said that the one thing that he thinks that would draw a couple to this community is the security it offers. He says, “That isn’t to say bad things don't happen here, but it sure doesn't happen very often. The safety and security is just a second paycheck that we don’t think about, and that's quality of life.”

Mr. Josjor told me about some of the things that he would like to change in our community. He said his number one thing that he would like to change would be attitudes. He said “A lot of people have the attitude that we are going downhill and this town is going to dry up and blow away in a decade.” He told me of something called a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you look at a task and say I’m going to fail, then you will. But just because you say that you are going to succeed, doesn't mean you will, but you will have a better probability.

When asked if teenagers could make a huge impact in this community for the better here is what he responded with: “Absolutely! If teenagers spent half as much time doing small things rather than watching Youtube, playing Wii, and on facebook they could really change this community. There is a huge amount of energy and a huge amount of ideas that come from young people. Recently in this last year their has been a thing called the Arab Spring, and that is all these democracies that are springing up in Egypt. If you take a look at the footage that happened in Libya, Egypt, all around in the Middle East, and you watch those people who were implementing change, 90% of them were under the age of 25."