A former Dawes County Commissioner who served 20 years on the Nebraska Crime Commission has died. John Paris was 93 when he passed away a week ago Sunday in Scottsbluff. Services were last Friday, also in Scottsbluff.
Paris served as a Dawes County Commissioner for 16 years beginning in 1964 and was appointed to the Crime Commission in 1970 by then-Governor Norbert Tiemann. Three other governors…Jim Exon, Charlie Thone and Bob Kerrey…all reappointed him until he stepped down in 1990.
He was also president of NACO…the Nebraska County Officials Association…and a member of many boards including the Panhandle Mental Health board, Greater Nebraska Health Systems Agency, Northwest Nebraska Community Action, Western Nebraska Community College, and the Nebraska State Patrol Foundation.
Paris was born in New York City to successful Greek immigrant parents, but told an interviewer in 1968 that he began dreaming as a boy about being a farmer or rancher after reading books about it in grade school.
He spent several summers in high school and college working on ranches in Utah and Arizona, having hitchiked there.
Paris graduated from Adelphia College on Long Island, then joined the Army…which led to his being stationed at Fort Robinson, where he met and in 1943 married a local girl, Irene Reeves. He went on to serve in Europe and earned several honors.
After the war, he worked as an insurance salesman in New York…but only until he got enough money to buy 1,500 acres of grassland south of Crawford and west of Marsland and moved his family out to Nebraska.
Finding money tight, he leased out the land and worked at the USDA Beef Research Station at Fort Robinson for five years, picking up information he would use later when he turned to ranching full time after another successful 3-year stint in the insurance business.
He and his wife then bought a ranch 10-miles southeast of Crawford where they lived until retiring to the Scottsbluff area in 1997.
Paris is succeeded by his his wife of 70 years, 2 sons, 2 grandsons, 2 great-granddaughters, and two sisters.