The Yemm family has been in the automotive business in Galesburg for 65 years. It started in 1951 when Sara's grandfather, Dick Yemm — a Knoxville High School graduate — began selling cars at Jeff Goode Chevrolet. Ten years later, when Jeff Goode wanted to sell, Dick and a fellow employee named Ray Weaver bought the dealership together. People who grew up in Galesburg a generation ago still call it Weaver Yemm. Over the decades, the family expanded into additional brands and franchises, and in 1995, Dick and Sara's father bought out the Weaver share. Today, Sara serves as General Manager — the third generation stewarding something her grandfather built from nothing.

She always hoped to be part of that legacy. She simply didn't know what her own path toward it would look like.

A 2010 graduate of Galesburg High School, Sara attended Illinois Wesleyan University, where she studied business management and minored in religion — a combination she describes as more complementary than it sounds. She had already been navigating a medical journey for years. At twelve, she began noticing unexpected muscle weakness during tumbling and gymnastics. Skills her body had performed easily stopped working. By her freshman year of high school, she had to quit cheerleading and tennis. Doctors eventually diagnosed her with Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy. Walking across campus at Wesleyan grew harder each year. Climbing stairs. Carrying things. The ordinary tasks that most people never think about began requiring deliberate effort and then real struggle.

She came home to Galesburg in 2014, joined the family business, and built her role there while managing a progressive illness that seemed to have no ceiling. Then, in 2019, she attended a Limb-Girdle conference in Chicago. At the welcome reception, she found herself in conversation with a small group that included a Canadian woman named Jenna who had just received remarkable news: after more than twenty years with a muscular dystrophy diagnosis, she had recently learned she actually had a treatable autoimmune condition. She had come to the conference anyway, diagnosis in hand, and ended up in that conversation.

Sara couldn't stop hearing the similarities to her own case. She'd never received confirmation of a specific genetic subtype. A few months later, she pursued the blood test.

The results stunned her doctors. They stunned her family. They stunned Sara herself.

She did not have muscular dystrophy. She had Anti-HMGCR Myopathy — an autoimmune muscle disease — and for the first time in nearly two decades, treatment existed. Insurance approval took another year. When the infusions weren't enough alone, they added medications; that required another wait while the disease continued taking ground. The road since 2019 has not been a clean redemption arc. But the progression has been halted. Strength that would have continued atrophying has been preserved. Sara uses a wheelchair and cannot stand or walk independently. She also receives treatments she spent fifteen years hoping might someday exist.

She's been reflecting on what those years of loss taught her. In a speech to a Women's Networking forum earlier this year, she organized it around three things: hope, gratitude, and resilience. Hope, she says, is a quiet conviction that there is always another move to make, even when the path isn't clear. Gratitude is the reframe — she doesn't love depending on others for daily tasks, but gratitude means she gets extra time with the people who help her, and that she's been forced to slow down and notice small victories. "Even imperfect mobility," she said, "is something I'm grateful for." Resilience is what carries her through when the other two aren't enough: the ability to feel broken and still be building.

What she's realized more recently is that none of this stayed contained to her personal life. "Galesburg, as a community, has been forced to pivot and be resilient," she said. "And I can relate to that. I've been forced to pivot." She sees the same qualities she had to develop — adaptability, patience with incremental progress, willingness to accept that sometimes maintaining is the victory — reflected in the community around her. It's why she serves on the board of the Stone-Hayes Center for Independent Living and the Knox County Area Partnership for Economic Development.

That culture extends into the dealership she manages. People stay at Yemm. Young people are given real opportunities — Brandon, a technician at Yemm, just earned the highest certification available through Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram. When Sara talks about what she's most proud of, she doesn't lead with revenue. She leads with the team.

When she thinks about what she'd tell her freshman-year self — the girl who dreaded people seeing her struggle, who wanted to disappear rather than stand out — the advice is direct. Stop being afraid of your differences. Lean into them. "I've learned that it's given me things that have positively impacted my life," she said. "It gives me perspective."