Editor’s Note: This article is the third part of a three-part series profiling the torchbearers in Ellettsville’s part of the relay. Parts one and two appeared in the Aug. 17 and Aug. 24 issues of The Journal.
Of the more than 2,000 participants in the Indiana Bicentennial Torch Relay, three will make their way through Ellettsville: Smithville CEO and Chair Darby McCarty; Co-founder of The Ellettsville Journal Maurice Endwright, represented by Diana Choate; and B.G. Hoadley Quarries CEO Pat Fell Barker.
McCarty’s great-grandparents founded Smithville Fiber 90 years ago in Ellettsville as a telephone company, and it remains today, though the communications business has changed.
Though her family moved out of state for a while so her father could teach in Iowa, they moved back to Ellettsville when her grandfather was hurt in an electrical accident. After that, McCarty stayed in Ellettsville.
“I was a town kid,” she said. “My friends lived in the country. There was a definite separation there because where all the houses are now used to be fields. I liked Ellettsville, and I liked school. I had some good memories here and a lot of friends in junior high and high school. It was a good time.”
She has seen Smithville Fiber progress from telephone lines to fiber-optic cables since starting her first summer job for the company at 14 years old working in customer service.
“It was a much simpler time back then,” she said. “That would’ve been the late ’50s. It wasn’t as complicated as it is today.”
She did not stay there, though. For two and a half years, she went to college. She got married and did not work for a while, then she worked at her husband’s company. Eventually, around 1969, she made her way back to Smithville and became a manager of its data processing department. The company was just getting into computers.
“I was here through that migration into newer IBM systems and then newer IBM systems,” she said.
As time went on, the computers got more powerful and smaller.
“Now they’re pizza boxes, so to speak,” McCarty said. “They’d probably make a small oceangoing vessel a nice anchor at that time.”
While McCarty knew she would one day be an executive in the company, she was not that involved in executive decision-making until that day came in the early 1990s.
She said she became aware that she was selected to be a torchbearer for Ellettsville when county selection committee member Kenny Williams told her.
“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity and I’m very honored to be able to do it.”
“(Smithville’s) been in existence for 90 years and pretty much here, within the town of Ellettsville,” she added. “I’m very pleased (to be selected), very pleased.”
She sits on the board of governors of Smithville’s charitable arm, Smithville Foundation, which has given around $6 million to causes in the 17 counties in which it does business over the last seven and a half years.
“Smithville has always been generous to the communities we serve, and this is just another continuation where we can even have a greater service to the counties that we serve,” McCarty said.
McCarty will be the first to carry the torch in Monroe County when it is handed off to her at the main gate of Bybee Stone Co. in Ellettsville. She will hand it off to Choate on Matthews Drive.
The relay will begin in Monroe County on Sept. 20 around 3:40 p.m. at Bybee Stone Co.
Originally published in Ellettsville Journal, 2016. Republished here for archival and portfolio purposes.