TEMPLE TERRACE — He was well known for his fist-sized chocolate chip cookies, made from a recipe that remained a secret. He loved music, and would listen to songs on his morning runs, pick a favorite for the day and play it in his office. He prayed for people on those walks as well, aloud, and you could hear him a block away.
And he was a hugger, and if your face told him you needed one, he was there to give you one.
That was Keven Woodard.
For nearly a decade, he was the supervisor of the Omar K. Lightfoot Senior Recreation Center, the guy who turned the place into one of the busiest rooms in Temple Terrace and became family for just about anyone who came through its doors.
This week, that family will walk through those doors without him.
The city’s 37th annual Senior Expo returns to the Lightfoot Center on Friday, Sept. 18 from 9-noon, free to attend, with a sellout of 40 vendors offering health screenings, resources and information for older residents as well as their caregivers.
It’s the same event Woodard spent years building into one of the city’s most important, and this will be the first major event at the center since he died on July 12.
He was 61.
“It’s been very devastating,” said Michelle Wilkinson, who worked alongside Woodard for years and has stepped into much of his role since his death. “I’ve been with the seniors for a very long time, and he is missed every day. His name has crossed everybody’s mind and everybody’s lips every single day that he’s been gone.”
What they miss most, she said, are the hugs.
“If your face said something that he thought deserved a hug, then he was he was getting up out of that seat, and he was going to come give you a hug,” Wilkinson said. “They miss those hugs.”
Woodard won’t be there Friday, but much of what he helped build will be.
Generations Club, an adult daycare and this year’s silver sponsor, returns for a second year showcasing its services for seniors with dementia, Alzheimer’s or other care needs.
The popular AARP shredding truck is back, allowing residents to bring documents for a safe and secure disposal — a comfort, Woodard used to call it, for a generation that preferred to guard their paperwork over memorizing online passwords.
Axiom Brain Health will offer cognitive and memory screenings, while USF’s exercise science program will sign up seniors up for a semester of one-on-one training with students at the Family Recreation Complex. As usual, the event will feature a bevy of insurance and Medicare providers to answer questions about coverage, and Sandy’s Daughter, a caregiver support resource focused on dementia, will also have a booth.
“This is our first big event, but I will say that with everything that has transpired and taken place, every supervisor, anyone from the rec center has stepped in, stepped up and they’re going to continue to make this an amazing event,” Wilkinson said.
“He wasn’t the one that created it, but he made it better over the years. We’re not going to mess it up. We’re not going to let him down.”
Woodard grew up in Temple Terrace — his father Robert once served as mayor for eight years — and he carried that hometown loyalty his whole life.
He graduated from King High and met his wife, Kim, met at the University of South Florida during her senior year, when both were in the same engineering program. She confessed to spending many more hours than necessary in the computer lab, to be close to him.
It worked.
This past June, the couple celebrated their 35th anniversary.
Before Lightfoot, Woodard had several jobs, including running a community magazine, and he even ran for public office. But nothing, his wife said, ever felt like what he was supposed to be doing, until he landed at the senior center.
“When he got to Lightfoot, it’s like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ He knew it,” Kim said. “He just loved working with the seniors.”
He nearly quadrupled attendance at the center, according to his wife, by constantly finding new programming and new reasons for people to show up. He didn’t want Lightfoot to be a place where people showed up to sit around and play cards; he wanted activity, which he added with dozens of different classes.
When COVID hit and the county shut things down, Woodard reopened the center as soon as he safely could. He also made sure the Senior Expo went on, turning it into a drive-through event where seniors could pick up the information offered that year.
During the shutdown, he and Wilkinson spent days painting the entire building themselves while listening to the radio.
“He managed to get everything together to get brand new floors through the entire building one Christmas,” Wilkinson said. “There’s so much other stuff he did; with him gone, there’s a bit of a void that will never go away.”
Woodard was a community mainstay. He and Kim were season ticket holders at USF football games, and in the program’s early years, Woodard’s family owned land with a tame bull on it. Woodard and his brother Robby arranged to bring the animal — named Rocky I-AA — to the Raymond James Stadium parking lot for tailgates during the Bulls’ first couple of seasons, at the behest of Lee Roy Selmon.
Around town, Woodard was Uncle Sam at the Fourth of July parade for decades and Santa Claus, with Kim as Mrs. Claus, at the city’s Winter Wonderland. If a microphone needed a steady hand, organizers could always turn to Woodard to introduce mayors, lead prayers and work the crowd, without notes.
His faith played a big role in everything he did, and he treated everyone with grace. Most importantly, he knew how to listen.
“He gave everybody the time of day,” Kim said. “He cared about everybody and wanted to know what was going on with everybody. That’s just what he was.”
His famous cookies were the stars of care packages he dropped on doorsteps during COVID. He and Kim hosted a Christmas party so large that it once forced the city to move the date of Winter Wonderland around it.
He loved the Grand Canyon, lobstering in the Keys and watching all the local sports teams, a love he passed down to his children, Adam and Shannon Rose, as well as grandson “Bobby” Gene Bollinger.
And he loved fish tanks, including the large one at the Lightfoot Center.
Wilkinson jokes that she has now inherited Woodard’s hobby, having to clean the tank he left behind at the center.
“I just know he was looking down laughing at me the first time I tried to clean this thing,” she said. “I know he was.”
But what she will remember most about Woodard is after her father died, he planted a tree at the Lightfoot Center. “When it blooms every year, it just makes me happy,” she said.
Even in death, Woodard was helping others.
He was an organ donor, and on his final night, more than 100 people lined the hallway for his honor walk.
Among them, Kim said, was Willa Powers.
It was 11 p.m., but even at 100 years old and in a wheelchair, Powers insisted on being there to see off the man she had known since he was a little boy.
Woodard’s donations went to eight recipients, Kim said, some of them potentially lifesaving.
“It was really incredible, to see all the people that came that night,” Kim said. “
Back at Lightfoot, Wilkinson now helps run the center alongside Joe Logsdon.
Woodard left behind meticulous records and notes, and had always told Wilkinson that one day she would be running the place. Only after his death, as she began going through everything he left behind, did she realize just how smoothly he had kept Lightfoot running, and how much he had prepared her to keep it that way.
“I think he set me up to succeed,” Wilkinson said. “But there is no one in this world that could ever fill Keven’s shoes.”
Friday, the doors will open.
The vendors will set up. The seniors will arrive. The expo will begin. And the mission at the Lightfoot Center will remain the same on Woodard cared most about.
“The seniors in Temple Terrace deserve to have something great,” Kim Woodard said. “That’s all he would ever want — just to see people thriving and doing and having an active life.
“That’s what he would want.”
The Omar K. Lightfoot Senior Center is located at 10901 N. 56th Street. For more information, visit TempleTerrace.gov/168/Seniors or call 813-506-6635.