Published: October 02, 2009 06:41 pm      

Lifetime award — 10/05/09

Local ATF retiree honored

Like the baseball player elected to the Hall of Fame after his retirement, Betty Kearns of Ashland has received her most prestigious career award four years after she retired from the Ashland office of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even more impressive, Kearns, 72, is the first “worker bee” (her term) to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFT. She retired as an investigative analyst for the AFT at the end of 2005.

Kearns began her career with the AFT as a secretary, but over the years she acquired the skills to be much more. “I’m just a high school graduate, but I got a college education with AFT,” she said of her 30-year career with the federal agency.

As the sole secretary for the Ashland, Lexington, London, Pikeville, Pineville and Somerset field offices, Kearns worked with many young agents who later became group supervisors, division chiefs and assistant directors and who credited her with furthering their careers, saying they were “trained by the best.”

“It was the best job in the world and I worked with the best people in the world. I worked all over the United States with ATF and many agents — they all know Betty,” she said, later adding, “I did everything but carry a gun.”

In her role as an investigative assistant and later an investigative analyst, Kearns worked on some of the bureau’s most important and high-profile cases, including the Olympic Games in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, a church fire investigation in Knoxville and a major arson investigation in Indianapolis. She handled all of the evidence and testified in a 55-defendant explosives investigation and actively worked to keep the Ashland field office open. She also worked with informants, handled public concerns, kept track of cash used for undercover buys, maintained vehicles and acted in any way possible to support the agents assigned to her offices.

So how important was she to the agency? Well, Todd Willard, special agent for the Ashland ATF Field Office, said four years after her retirement, Kearns still is “terribly, terribly missed by everyone here.” He added that Kearns being the first woman to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award “speaks volumes about her value to this agency.”

He’s right. We congratulate her on the honor that, from our perspective, is the equivalent to being elected to the hall of fame, if the ATF had one.