“ I thought I had resigned myself to live with my dog and be by myself. Then in walked Derek.... Watching him around kids, I knew he would be a good partner.”
— Sara Clifford
didn’ t cross paths until they were in their early 20s. Sara was working as marketing and development director there and Derek took a job running the camp’ s food service program.
“ I was struck by her beauty,” Derek said,“ but I thought someone that pretty was probably not the easiest to get along with.” After he introduced himself to her in 2001, he was pleasantly surprised to discover he had been wrong about Sara’ s personality.
“ I had just moved to the camp,” Sara said.“ I thought I had resigned myself to live with my dog and be by myself. Then in walked Derek. He was about my age, loved camping and nature. He was hard-working. Watching him around kids, I knew he would be a good partner.”
Derek was laid off from his Ondessonk job in 2002, and soon after, Sara decided to pursue a job in journalism.
Sara moved to her great-aunt’ s old farm in Carlisle, Ind., just north of Vincennes, and was hired as an associate news editor at the
Vincennes Sun-Commercial. Derek got a job with a grocery brokerage handling sales and grocery shelf resets, and Vincennes was the center of his territory. Their relationship grew, and they were married in 2003. Though they had little time together because of their job schedules, they took turns planning weekend trips around Indiana. One of those trips was to Nashville, Ind., and they remarked on how“ cool” it would be to live there.
Another trip was to French Lick, where, in 2005, they saw an advertisement in the Bedford Times-Mail newspaper, looking for a manager to live at Rawhide Ranch in southern Brown County. They discovered one of the partners for Rawhide Ranch was from Paris, Ill., and knew members of Sara’ s family. Another was a DePauw graduate.
Derek took the job and Sara began searching for a job near Brown County. She interviewed with Mike Lewis, then editor of the Bedford Times-Mail, and found he used to live just a few houses away from the Rawhide Ranch property.
The couple saw all these coincidences as signposts helping to point a direction for their life decisions.
Sara took the job as lifestyle editor in Bedford, and spent five years there, commuting from Rawhide Ranch. She took the editor’ s job at the Brown County Democrat to be closer to home as the Clifford family grew.
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Henry, Samuel, Caleb, and Victor, an exchange student from Spain.
Jan./ Feb. 2024 • Our Brown County 17 courtesy photo