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Kathryn Sanner | Manager of government affairs<br />
BY klint lowry<br />
“This kid’s going places.”<br />
Yes, that’s the sort of cornball line you’d expect to hear in a<br />
snappy-talking 1940s movie, but it’s the perfect double-entendre<br />
to introduce Kathryn Sanner, TCA’s new manager of government<br />
affairs.<br />
Just a cursory look at her history is enough to see she’s “going<br />
places” in the jazzy sense of the phrase. At 26, she has not only<br />
graduated college and served an internship in the U.S. House,<br />
but after that, while working full time as a legislative analyst at a<br />
national trade organization, she’s already gone back and gotten<br />
her master’s degree in public policy.<br />
Right after finishing that, and just before starting her new job<br />
at TCA in June, Sanner took a little time in between for one of her<br />
life’s passions — going places in the literal sense — this time a<br />
trip to Spain with her family. One of her life’s goals is to visit every<br />
continent.<br />
Both sides of Sanner’s “going places” persona go back to her<br />
childhood in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, a town of about 3,500 a<br />
little over an hour’s drive east of Pittsburgh.<br />
She grew up with her two brothers, Jason and Jim. Well,<br />
she didn’t exactly grow up with them, she explained. They were<br />
15 and 12 years old, respectively, when she was born, which in<br />
retrospect she believes worked out nicely.<br />
As adults, “I really appreciate having them around,” Sanner<br />
said. On the other hand, when she was growing up, Jason and Jim<br />
were already off to college and living their lives, so she avoided<br />
the sibling squabbling and brotherly torment that comes with<br />
being a kid sister.<br />
But when you grow up in a small town, you’re kind of<br />
everybody’s kid sister. The community observes you and<br />
eventually “pegs” you with an identity, Sanner said.<br />
In high school, she hung out with three close friends. Mariah<br />
was dubbed the musical one; Kelsey was the athletic one and<br />
Morgan was the comedian of the group.<br />
Young Kathryn, that was a no-brainer, she was “the smart<br />
one.”<br />
The community’s consensus served to enhance the affirming<br />
environment her parents, Barry Sanner and Lynn Miller, provided<br />
at home.<br />
“If you ask either of my parents they will tell you that from a<br />
very young age, they were telling me that I should be a lawyer,”<br />
Sanner said. That’s because she was always arguing with them,<br />
and to their credit they recognized she was good at it.<br />
“When I was in high school, I did mock trial, and even in<br />
college I was leaning toward being a lawyer.”<br />
Barry Sanner is a high school math teacher. “He teaches<br />
calculus and geometry and all the things I’m not good at,” she<br />
said.<br />
While she lived up to her studious billing, Sanner has always<br />
made it a point to balance work with outside interests. She’s<br />
played piano since she was 5, and she took part in her high<br />
school’s musical every year. She also played basketball and<br />
softball and ran track.<br />
Welcome to a wider world<br />
“When I was 8, my parents took me on a trip to Europe,”<br />
Sanner said.<br />
This started a pattern that has stuck her entire life: keeping<br />
an active, busy, well-rounded schedule but dropping it all once in<br />
awhile to go see some part of the world.<br />
Sanner’s mother is a Lutheran pastor who has always been<br />
committed to organizing youth-group missionary trips to other<br />
countries, which Kathryn often went on.<br />
Off the top of her head, one trip that stands out was when<br />
they went to Juarez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from El<br />
Paso, Texas. They spent a week there, working at an orphanage.<br />
A trip to Peru also came to mind.<br />
It’s one thing to travel on a vacation and enjoy all the<br />
pleasantries popular tourism has to offer, Sanner said. “It’s a<br />
very different experience sleeping on a floor, and spending days<br />
helping build a school or feeding children. You’re there, this<br />
American who has everything, and you’re with these people who<br />
have nothing. It’s a humbling experience.”<br />
Back home, Western Pennsylvania was an interesting place to<br />
grow up, Sanner said. “I had an interest in politics for as long as I<br />
can remember,” she said. “You were confronted with all sorts of<br />
issues, being in that area: employment, education.”<br />
Being raised with an eclectic worldview taught her to see<br />
issues from all sides and nurtured her interest in political science,<br />
drawing her to George Washington University, in Washington,<br />
D.C.<br />
College can have a way of bringing some high school academic<br />
stars down to earth in a hurry. Not so for Sanner; she graduated<br />
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