Dennis "Boog" Highberger, Commissioner
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Dennis "Boog" Highberger Phone E-mail |
Dennis Highberger was born in Garnett, Kansas, in the year that the first man-made object crashed into the moon. By the time he graduated from Garnett High School in 1977, he was known to most of his friends and colleagues as “Boog.”
In 1975 he suffered a broken neck while diving into a snowbank and was paralyzed from the neck down. With a great deal of help from his family and many other people, he regained enough mobility to walk out of the KU Medical Center, and since that time he has been fortunate enough to get just about every place he wants to go, with a little help from his friends.
Boog moved to Lawrence in 1977 and his lived there ever since, with the exception of several months of his idle youth spent wandering around Mexico in a Volkswagen bus. He has been a resident of the Oread neighborhood since 1988, and has also lived downtown, in the Centennial, Barker, and Pinckney neighborhoods, and in Hashinger Hall at KU.
He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Kansas in 1985 and graduated from the KU School of Law in 1992. He is currently employed as an attorney with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, and he has also worked as a Salvation Army bell ringer, a proofreader of scientific journals, and an assistant manager of a credit union, and has answered questions about everything as a staff member at the KU Information Center.
In 1984 he was elected Student Body Vice-President at the University of Kansas as a member of the Costume Party and served several terms as a student senator. In 2003 he was elected to a seat on the Lawrence City Commission and served as mayor in 2005/2006.
He has a strong commitment to cooperative economics and has served on the boards of the Community Mercantile Co-op in Lawrence and the Ozark Cooperative Warehouse in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Since the death in 1997 of his father, Clarence Highberger, Boog has served as president of his family’s farm implement dealership in Garnett.
Boog’s other interests include mail art, local currency, West African music, history, urban design, and bad puns. He enjoys riding his three-wheeled recumbent bicycle (from the Farnsworth Bicycle Laboratory), collects translation dictionaries, and has what must be one of the world’s largest collections of rubber stamp lips.
