About Gary Scharrer

Gary Scharrer first experienced the full benefits of roads at a younger age than most. Both of his parents grew up on dairy farms, and Scharrer was eleven years old when he first started driving farm machinery on rural Michigan roads. He enjoyed running tractors cutting and baling alfalfa hay and cultivating navy beans and corn.

He paid his way through college working on Great Lakes freighters that hauled taconite iron ore pellets from the northern shores of Lake Superior to the steel mills in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. He lived and worked as a deckhand on the freighters--some as long as 1,000 feet--seven days a week. Other cargoes included coal, gypsum, sand, and limestone. Back then, he didn't know that limestone could be used in making road base.

For most of his career, Scharrer worked as a newspaper reporter covering Texas politics and public policy issues, and for nearly thirty years, he reported from the Texas State Capitol Bureau for the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, and the El Paso Times. During that time, he won five Texas Headliner Club awards.

Scharrer got his start in journalism as a sports writer and sports editor at Michigan State University's student newspaper and went on to become sports editor of The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction, Colorado) and editor of the Frankenmuth News (Frankenmuth, Michigan). In 1987, he was a reporter at USA Today in Washington, D.C.

After forty-three years as a journalist, he joined the staff of Texas Senate Finance Chairman Tommy Williams (R-The Woodlands), before landing at the Associated General Contractors of Texas. Scharrer's work on Connecting Texas reflects his longstanding interest in highway transportation.

Scharrer presently divides his time between Frankenmuth, Michigan, where he lives with his native Texan wife, Gay, who is a retired schoolteacher, and Austin, Texas, where he spends time with his son, Ryan, and his daughter-in-law, Anne Marie.