During almost 22 years as Glen Ellyn’s village manager, Gary Webster guided the town through scores of capital improvements, residential developments and commercial projects.
He also ushered the village into a period of greater professional management of its community services.
But his greatest professional achievement was bringing the village together with various units of local government to create world-class community facilities, said a close friend, Cory Atwell, executive director of the Glen Ellyn Park District. These units included the Park District and the village’s three school districts.
Mr. Webster, 64, died Friday, Aug. 14, in Tucson, Ariz., after a long battle with sarcoma. He retired as village manager slightly more than three years ago.
Born in Detroit and raised in Birmingham, Mich., Mr. Webster earned an undergraduate degree from Kalamazoo College in 1967. At Kalamazoo, he met his future wife, Karen, whom he married in 1968.
“Kalamazoo was big on foreign study, and we met while we were both studying” in Spain, she said. “It helped shape Gary’s worldview and my worldview, to have to live in another culture and speak another language. It always made Gary more sensitive to his own culture.”
Mr. Webster started his career in 1968 as an intern for the City of Pontiac, Mich., and remained at Pontiac’s City Hall until 1979, eventually becoming deputy city manager. In 1979, he took a job as city manager in Wood River, Ill., where he worked until becoming Glen Ellyn’s village manager in 1984, his wife said.
Over the two decades, Mr. Webster would work with six village presidents and 43 trustees. With each election, Mr. Webster was pleased to educate newly elected trustees on the intricacies of village government.
“Gary was an outstanding village manager,” said Joe Wark, Glen Ellyn’s village president from 1997 to 2001 and a village trustee from 1990 to 1995. “He was less concerned about his own image and more interested in whether a certain project would give the village a good image.”
Atwell, a Glen Ellyn Park District veteran who became its executive director in 1997, called Mr. Webster “a steady guy” who “really respected loyalty and friendship most.”
“It was never about him being the man upfront taking bows — he cared about working together, and he cared about his team as well,” Atwell said. “Gary and I must have overseen eight projects together between the village and the Park District, like improving Lake Ellyn’s water quality, the Wingate Basin sewer-improvements project, and buying the former Maryknoll Seminary for open space.”
Atwell credited Mr. Webster’s managerial skills and service-oriented nature for his ability to bring different groups together to improve the community.
“His biggest achievement was making all these groups work together,” Atwell said. “He cared so much about this community.”
Karen Webster said her husband “lived and breathed” his job.
“He’s the only person I knew in college who actually did the thing they said they were going to do,” she said. “He went to college expecting to … become a city manager, and that’s what he did.”
In 2006, shortly after retiring and moving to Arizona, Mr. Webster was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer of the connective tissue, his wife said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Webster is survived by a son, Adam; a daughter, Jordan; a brother, Roger; and two sisters, Ellen Goff and Barbara Coombs.
No services have been held. Mr. Webster’s family is planning a memorial event this fall in the Midwest, his wife said.
