Deb Newell joined the Lakeside Community Club for the same reason women have sought out the social and community service organization for 105 years. She wanted the social interaction.

“I didn’t know anyone in Lakeside,” she said. “My social life had been in the show arena.”

Newell — known in the textile industry as Deborah Hird for much of her career — spent decades producing nationally recognized, award-winning apparel that was handwoven and handpainted. Her business, Panache, operated in Kalispell for many years before she relocated to Lakeside.

When she closed Panache six years ago largely because her supply of domestic yarn dried up, Newell had more time on her hands.

It wasn’t long before her enthusiasm for Lakeside bubbled over and she found herself involved not only with the Lakeside Community Club but also the Saving Lives on the West Shore group that uses a decoy patrol car featuring “Lucky” the patrolman to dissuade speeding along U.S. 93.

The annual fundraiser for Lucky wrapped up last week, and now Newell’s attention is on the 25th Lakeside Community Fair to be staged in grand style on July 12.

As president of the Lakeside Community Club, Newell is at the helm of event planning for the fair. It’s a position she didn’t necessarily aspire to have.

“I was not elected to be president; no one else would do it,” she said with a smile. One active club member nudged her into the top role, saying “someone has to put on their big-girl panties and step up,” Newell recounted.

So she stepped up, but is standing on the shoulders of a corps of seasoned volunteers.

“I’m in awe of these women who do what they do,” Newell said.

This year’s Lakeside Community Fair will have all kinds of new events, among them a 10K run and a swim across a portion of Flathead Lake.

The recently organized West Shore Visitors Bureau is “piggybacking” on the fair, she said, adding other events to bring more exposure to the Lakeside area. 

The “Attic Treasures” sale of used items is a big part of the fair, but a silent auction, duck races, watermelon-eating contest and bake sale are other popular events.

Newell estimates the Lakeside Community Club has given well over $400,000 to area nonprofits through the years.

“We don’t get any attention,” she lamented, though she’s been working to make the club more visible to the public.

During her time as club president, membership has increased from about 100 to 144 members.

“We made it more fun,” she said. “I like people ... now they’re lobbying me to stay another two years” as president.

Newell may be drawing from her cheerleading days as a teenager as she rouses her Lakeside ladies into action.

She grew up in San Jose, Calif., one of seven children under the tutelage of a father who took them on all kinds of adventures as he applied his engineering and geology expertise to their life lessons.

“We were like the Waltons,” she happily recalled.

Newell was a better-than-average student because her father always insisted that his children “never come home with a C because that’s mediocre.”

Her real forte, though, was social networking, even as a youth.

During her college days at Humboldt State University she learned how to weave and became fascinated by looms. An aptitude test revealed her passion for art and mechanics. Weaving had both of those elements.

Newell graduated with an art history degree and minor in English.

“I was the first art graduate to have weaving accepted into an art show,” she recalled. “I loved weaving. It always felt like it was instinctive to me.”

She began designing her own yarn. It was milled in California, dyed in South Carolina, and woven into yarn in Philadelphia and Trout Creek, Mont.

“It took two years to get the yarn right,” she said.

Newell taught classes about textiles and weaving for a decade at Cerro Coso Community College in the Mojave Desert, where she started a weavers guild. She later moved to Alaska, where she taught the same subjects at the University of Alaska’s Sitka campus.

She and her ex-husband, a wildlife biologist, relocated to Kalispell in 1984 and she set up a studio, first in her home and later downtown. Over the years she nurtured her artistic eye, color selections and textile combinations.

Her work blossomed, and between 1999 and 2004 she won five awards from Niche magazine, a high-profile crafts magazine. Also in 1999 she won an honorable mention at the annual Smithsonian Institute’s juried crafts exhibition, the Academy Awards of the craft-related arts.

She was at the top of her game.

“I had fabulous clients and was good at sales because I’m honest and straight-forward,” she said. 

Famous people began buying her garments — Mary Tyler Moore, Aretha Franklin and Maya Angelou, to name a few.

The turn of the 20th century was a pivotal time for Newell not only in the awards and show arenas but also in her personal life. She moved into her renovated home on Lakeside Boulevard in 1999.

Some time after that Newell, by then divorced, reconnected with her college sweetheart, Jeremy “Jere” Newell, during a trip to California. They hadn’t seen each other for 33 years but both of them knew they were destined to be together.

“He was the guy I hadn’t married,” she said. “He wooed me ... we’ve been inseparable.”

Jere joined her in Lakeside and they bought and renovated a building that’s now the Lakeside Mercantile Mall. Newell operated Panache there until closing the business in 2008.

Newell has two grown children from her first marriage, and two grandchildren; Jere has three sons.

Injuries Newell suffered in a head-on car accident several years ago left her with lingering headaches and the need to still see a physical therapist regularly. It ended her ability to sit at her loom.

She shrugs it off, though, choosing instead to squeeze the best out of each day.

“The gift I’ve gotten is I’ve met so many people and have so many stories,” she said.

Someone once gave Newell a copy of Lillian Hellman’s book, “An Unfinished Woman,” a memoir of an independent-minded woman finding her place in life. The gist of the book, she summarized, is that one doesn’t want to get to the end of their life and find they haven’t really done anything.

Hellman says toward the end of the memoir “I’m not going to be unfinished.”

Newell has embraced that sentiment and has every intention of finishing strong.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.