Debi (East) Vincent grew up on a small farm outside Martinsville with a Marshall address, a Marshall telephone number, and a Martinsville school. She couldn't call any of her friends growing up because the phone lines ran through a different exchange. Her community was technically on one side of a boundary and emotionally on the other.

She is, as she puts it, "very tomboyish" — played tackle football, rode dirt bikes, raised herself on summer softball and dirt roads. The 1987 graduate might have played organized girls' sports at Martinsville if those programs had existed. They didn't.

So she found other ways. By 15, she was catching for a women's fast-pitch league out of Robinson; cousins who played for a Marathon Oil company team needed a catcher and called her up. She was intimidated. "There were some really big women," she said. She caught anyway.

When Lake Land College started building its women's softball program, one of her teammates knew she needed a catcher. She called. Lake Land offered Debi a scholarship. Then they also asked her to play basketball — something she'd only ever done with the boys, using the boys' ball.

The detail that followed is almost too good: she didn't know there were two different sizes of basketball. The girls' ball was lighter than what she'd trained with. "So guess what? I can shoot really well. Three pointers." She played college basketball, got the bills paid, and eventually graduated with a criminology degree.

She had been planning on joining the military. When that didn't work out, the Lake Land opportunity filled the gap. "Things work out," she said.

After college, she followed her husband, an Illinois State Trooper, to the Chicago suburbs, then back down to Clark County when he transferred to Effingham. A neighbor got her into the sheriff's office part-time. She worked corrections, helped Clark County stand up its 911 system, became a jailer, and then the administrative assistant to long-tenured Sheriff Dan Crumrin.

At 34, a new sheriff — Terry Parsley — asked if she would go out on the road.

At 34, with three boys at home and a husband still serving as a state trooper, she went to the police training institute in Champaign for ten weeks and became Clark County's first female deputy sheriff.

For more than two decades, she patrolled over 500 square miles  — most nights, alone.

The methamphetamine epidemic was at its peak during much of her career, and a significant portion of her work involved surveillance at anhydrous ammonia tanks, watching for thieves who needed the chemical to cook meth. The stories are numerous. The most memorable ones fall into two categories.

One involves finding herself alone at night with a gun drawn on a woman whose boyfriend had just run into the woods — waiting 20 minutes for backup to arrive, knowing the boyfriend was still out there. "I am going home tonight," she told the woman who kept trying to distract her. "And I couldn't care less if you do."

The other involves falling slightly asleep during a midnight shift surveillance while watching old Westerns on her laptop and looking up to see a car pulling right toward the anhydrous tank she was supposed to be watching. "You have got to be kidding me," she thought as she shut the computer. The lookout they eventually caught hadn't noticed the squad car. Said the responding deputy: "You weren't very good."

She retired in 2021; held on through COVID longer than she'd planned and was surprised with a small party from her own crew and family.

Twenty-five years of service. She's seen a lot.

She's also seen what happens when the institutions meant to hold communities together fail, or are absent altogether. As a deputy, she went into broken homes and talked directly to kids whose parents were lost to meth. She told them the same thing every time: "You've got to graduate. To make your lives different or better, you have got to get a high school degree."

She believes Martinsville does that work well — better than it gets credit for. She acknowledges its limitations, too. She was asked to try out at Eastern Illinois University. She said no. "I am not smart enough," she told herself. "I hate that," she said years later, "because I felt like I couldn't do it because I came from a small school."

She came from a small school and became Clark County's first female deputy. The confidence came after.

All three of her sons graduated from Martinsville. Her stepson, whom she considers fully her own, served 20 years in the Army, deploying three times as a Black Hawk medevac crew chief. Her middle son is a union crane operator in Terre Haute. Her youngest earned a petroleum engineering degree from Missouri University of Science and Technology through ROTC.

Her eldest son is now raising his three children in Martinsville, largely on his own, after a painful family fracture a few years ago. She watches the school community hold that family up… teachers, counselors, the whole village, and feels something close to proof.

"The school has been just phenomenal with those kids," she said.

It's the same school that raised her. It's still working.