JOB: Penny McKinney is a facility attendant at the Varsity Room in Memorial Stadium. She started out as a dishwasher 27 years ago and then worked as a cook. In her current role, she orders and stores the food and keeps the Varsity Room clean and in good order. She and her husband, Don, have two grown sons. The couple lives on an acre near Mahomet, where they keep two does and their fawns in a backyard pen. Both are taxidermists. He specializes in game and fish, and she in birds. He uses the deer for real-life studies. Penny also is licensed to rehabilitate wild animals.
What goes on at the Varsity Room?
We provide the training table for the athletes on scholarship. We feed the football players, the men’s and women’s basketball teams, the volleyball team and the soccer team. And in January when school is closed we feed all the other teams who have sports going on for the two weeks during Christmas break.
You have time off in the summer, right?
I get 10 weeks off. We close the week of finals and open the week that training starts for the football team, a month before schools starts.
What kind of meals do the players receive?
The food is the best of everything. Each night they have a 21-item salad bar and at least two or three desserts to choose from, pasta and sauce every night, two vegetables, a potato or rice or macaroni, and usually two to three entrees. There’s also another table that’s set out with nothing but snacks — granola bars, low-fat chips and bottled juices — so they can take a snack with them.
So athletes on scholarships get all their meals at the Varsity Room?
Once school starts they get one meal a day — the evening meal — and it’s usually five days a week, except during their season and then it’s six.
Since you get to know the players so well, I bet you’re a big fan. Do you go to the games?
Oh yes, I’m a fan. But we work during the games. We feed the Grant-In-Aid donors a buffet-style meal.
Do you like your job?
I love it. For years I worked nights because we feed the players in the evening, but with the taxidermy shop I had to do something because all my customers come at night and it was too much for my husband to take care of the kids and run the shop every night. So we worked it out so I could work 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. And it’s worked out better all the way around.
When did you get into taxidermy?
About 16, 17 years ago. My husband, Don, had taken a course through the mail and taught himself, probably 20 years ago. But he never liked doing birds. I was always interested in it but was busy with the kids then. He got frustrated doing birds because of all the feathers and the skin’s so thin it would tear. So he said why don’t you do the birds? And I did.
How did you learn to do it?
I learned from Don mostly. And I go to all the seminars I can. I’m treasurer of the Illinois Taxidermy Association and have been for 10 years. We have a show every year and bring in judges from all over the world and they do seminars and have hands-on clinics. And that’s the way I got to the level I’m at.
What level is that?
I belong to the “division of excellence” so when I enter competitions I have to enter the master’s division in Illinois. To get there you have to win three blue ribbons in the professional division and a “best-of” category. I’ve done that with waterfowl and with upland game birds.
What’s your highest achievement?
I’ve entered in the World Show three or four times and last year was the first time I got a first place. That was in the professional division.
What do you like about taxidermy?
I like the finished results. It’s very rewarding to have something turn out so beautiful. Each bird is so different and so beautiful.
You must be an outdoors person.
I am. I always have been. My husband and I went on a caribou hunt for our 25th wedding anniversary. It was wonderful. We went to the Northwest Territory, about 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
You said you have a license to rehabilitate wild animals. What have you done?
I’ve raised baby raccoons, baby squirrels. I bottle-fed them all. Raccoons are the most fun. They get into everything. We built a pen outside for them and when they’re old enough to be returned to the wild we put them out there and leave the door open so they can come and go as they please, and then they get adapted back to the wild gradually. So for about three months they come and go and then all of a sudden they go and don’t come back.
You must have a unique philosophy about animals. It seems like you love animals but at the same time you work with dead ones. How do you feel about it?
The thing is I realize you have to hunt and control the animals because if you don’t there’s so much disease and death in the wild. I love to hunt; I love to fish. And I just love animals, period. Dead or alive. [She laughs.]
I can spend all day at a museum like the Natural History Museum on campus. The animals there are just beautiful. God created them and each one is so beautiful. It’s like the turkey. So many people think a turkey is ugly. But me, I think it’s gorgeous.
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