FOTAS has been blessed to have many wonderful volunteers and supporters for the past 13 years. There are still volunteers helping FOTAS who started volunteering on day one. The volunteers form an unbreakable bond and many become lifelong friends. Over time, sadly, FOTAS has also lost some of its volunteers and supporters.
One of those lost was Stephen Briggs who passed away this past September at the age of 85. He was a renaissance man whose interest in and support of the Aiken County Animal Shelter helped save many animals.
He was born and raised in Wisconsin and after graduating college entered the family business of manufacturing outboard motors that his grandfather started. This job had him traveling all over the world including Europe, South America, and the Middle East where he even spent two nights in a Baghdad jail.
In the mid-1970s he left the corporate world when he started an import/export business and expanded it to include a freight company. He beat cancer, married his second wife Doris Teeling, and then retired with Doris to Naples, Florida. Never one to sit still, he reinvented himself once again and, with an old friend, opened the very successful Old Naples Pub and the Village Pub in Naples.
Fun and adventure were always a part of Stephen’s life so he and Doris continued to travel around the world climbing mountains and doing all kinds of crazy things. In 2003, at the age of 66, he took up horseback riding. Stephen and Doris would drive their SUV up and down the east coast with their two horses and 4 dogs when they discovered Aiken and the Hitchcock Woods. They moved to Aiken in 2008.
Stephen became very active in Aiken’s animal community. He had one of his dogs, Serena, receive accreditation as a therapy dog from a very strict therapy organization. Serena became the highlight of his life bringing comfort to the sick and needy at hospitals, nursing homes, and special needs classes in schools. Serena had a gift with autistic children as more than one parent told the Briggs that their non-verbal child would suddenly start talking about Serena.
Stephen became very interested in the shelter and FOTAS. He and Doris adopted and fostered many animals from the shelter. He was staggered at the number of animals the shelter received each year. He made it his mission to help FOTAS attain their goal of never having to euthanize an adoptable pet knowing that, before FOTAS, more than 90% of all animals brought to the shelter were euthanized and most were adoptable.
He realized that not enough pet owners were spay/neutering their pets and there were simply not enough local adopters available for all of the animals eligible for adoption.
Stephen, therefore, took a keen interest in FOTAS’s transfer program which involves FOTAS networking and then transporting adoptable animals to no-kill shelters all over the country. All animals and shelters are carefully vetted and it is a timely and expensive process. But it works.
Stephen recognized this and was one of the program’s biggest cheerleaders and financial supporters for many years.
We will miss him.
By Jennifer Miller FOTAS President
