Marguerite Sherwin Donovan Scholarship

This scholarship was founded in 2012 by Genny & Warren Garst. A little bit about the donors...

Genevieve Sherwin Garst

Born Sept. 6, 1922, on a cattle ranch near Padroni, Genny was the youngest of seven children born to Leonard and Hilma Sherwin. Genny’s education began in a one-room country school before attending Sterling High School, where she graduated in 1940. After high school she received a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Wisconsin and immediately went to work in Hartford, Conn., for Pratt and Whitney Aircraft. She later worked for North American Aviation in Los Angeles where she learned to program a new-fangled device: the computer.

Genny, who also loved to teach, took a job in Wyoming at Douglas High School when the wife of her brother was diagnosed with cancer. While there she met Warren Garst, a wildlife-loving author and photographer.

With Warren traveling to film assignments and Genny accepting a computer-programming job with Martin Marietta in Denver, they sustained a long-distance courtship and eventually married in Douglas May 3, 1958, on her parent’s 50th wedding anniversary.

Genny, wanting to spend summers with Warren on filming assignments, took a job at Colorado State University for half her pay at Martin. She was the first person to teach computer programming at CSU.

When Warren was offered a job filming for T.V.’s Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, he and Genny accepted the job as partners and began an odyssey that lasted 25 years and took them to more than 100 countries.

Retiring in 1984 Warren and Genny returned to Fort Collins. Genny renewed old friendships and made many new ones. She was active in community charitable and cultural projects. She maintained contact with her family and enjoyed research on genealogy.

After a long and interesting life Warren Edward Garst passed away on July 12, 2016, three years and three days after the death of his beloved wife, Genny.

Warren Edward Garst
Warren was born on September 21, 1922 in Douglas, Wyoming, to Joseph Garst and Doris Jensen Garst. He spent most of his childhood in Douglas, then attended Cal Tech and later transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study mechanical engineering. His college career was interrupted temporarily when he enlisted in the United States Navy and served aboard destroyers in the latter part of WWII. After finishing his degree in mechanical engineering at C.U., he was hired by Stanolind Oil Company to work in the oil fields near Rangely, Colorado. As he stated in his tongue-in-cheek obituary written a number of years ago (he was a master at tongue-in-cheek humor!), “A few years in the oil patches convinced him he would rather be a writer.” His mother, whose pen name was Shannon Garst, was the author of many children’s books, mostly about the west. Warren worked with his mother on a couple of books, wrote a couple on his own. He decided he would rather write about wildlife, hunting and fishing, so took up photography so he could take pictures that would help sell his articles. He went to Jackson, Wyoming to meet some people who were successful in wildlife photography. This was a time when cameras were large and clunky, and there was not a large market for animal pictures. He ended up with a job at the Jackson Hole Wildlife Research Station, where the director, Jim Simon, was also engaged in wildlife cinema photography for Walt Disney. Jim became his mentor and within a few months had him working as a free-lance photographer on “Vanishing Prairie”, part of the Disney True Life Adventure series, then “Perri”, a Disney movie about the life of squirrels.

He enjoyed his time as a free-lance cinema photographer, but it was not steady work. He developed a few contracts for short educational films on animals, and was hired to do wildlife films in Jackson Hole and later in the Amazon jungle for the precursor to The Wild Kingdom, the TV series, Zoo Parade. While he was living at home in Douglas between photography jobs, he met a young lady who had hired his father as her lawyer for her divorce, Genny Sherwin. Genny was living in Douglas, helping out her brother with his family of four children after his wife became ill. Warren and Genny were married on May 3, 1958. They honeymooned (with a porcupine named Spinecone) in Yellowstone Park where he worked on an educational show about bears. Genny could only spend about two weeks in Yellowstone, but Warren was there all summer. Again, from the facetious obituary Warren wrote, “When he finally came home he found she was no longer employed as a highly-paid computer programmer on the Titan Missile project, but was now a teacher of mathematics and computer programming at Colorado State University.”

As the spouse of a C.S.U. faculty member, he could take courses at a reduced rate, so, with no photography job immediately available, he took courses in zoology, and eventually received his M.S. While he was gearing up for his Ph.D., he got a call from Don Meier, who had been the director of the Zoo Parade TV series. Don had a new series called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and he needed a photographer. He persuaded Warren to take the job, which, with luck, they thought might last three years. Warren and Genny spent the next 25 years traveling all over the world to develop and film the shows. The program was successful and could be said to have had more influence than any other single entity in opening up the environmental movement. Not only was this type of TV production pioneering, the research filmed in the field was cutting-edge scientific work. One of the greatest pleasures for both Warren and Genny was to work with these field scientists. They traveled to more than 100 countries and filmed in about a third of them. When the show went off the air in 1987, they retired and moved from Chicago back to Fort Collins.

After retirement, Warren spent his time writing his reference book, Zoolexicon, and the weekly Rotary Club of Fort Collins bulletin, Rotogear.