Pendleton Round-Up Volunteer of the Year Rick Rohde looks a bag of garbage while cleaning up trash in the grandstands at the Pendleton Round-Up Grounds.

Round-Up volunteers come from all walks of life. Some have flocked to help with Pendleton’s world-renowned event because of family ties. For others, working the Round-Up is a way to continue a life of service. And some volunteers have true-to-life stories of redemption.

Sitting at the Rainbow Cafe, Rick Rohde remembers an officer knocking on his window in 2011 and asking him to exit the car. Parked in his own driveway after a day ofshooting pool and drinking at the Frontier Tavern, Rohde had driven home under the influence. He said he had fallen asleep in his car when a neighbor noticed him there and called the authorities, who used a Breathalyzer test.

“I flunked and spent the night in jail,” Rohde said, a man with sunken features and steel-blue eyes. The 67-year-old sits at the cafe’s hardwood counter. He drinks his coffee black here most every morning.

“I found out jail isn’t a very nice place to be,” he said.

Yet the drunk driving citation was a turning point in more ways than one for the Pendleton Round-Up’s 2015 volunteer of the year.

He is unashamed to talk about it. The citation “kind of changed my whole outlook on life,” Rohde said. Before the DUII, Rohde shuttled Round-Up goers around for some eight years as a volunteer. But he lost his driver’s license for a year and found himself hoofing it around Pendleton more often than not — which is when he noticed refuse strewn about town and the Round-Up Grounds. “One day I was down behind the Round-Up Grounds and inside the Round-Up Grounds, on the back fence, there was all this trash that was blown back in there,” he said. He started picking it up.

For Rohde, cleaning up the grounds has become a daily project. He now tries to pick up garbage there whenever he can and works beer concessions come Round-Up season.

He describes the DUII as a “godsend.”

Rohde checked into an in-patient rehabilitation program through Veterans Affairs that required him to go through a thorough physical. After the visit, a nurse set him up to see a urologist, because she worried about his prostate-specific antigen levels, which can be an indicator of prostate cancer.

“Well, as it turned out, they discovered I had prostate cancer,” he said. The ensuing surgery in Seattle didn’t keep him off his feet, but it did make him ponder how short life really is. “I got to thinking, ‘Shoot, you never know how much longer you’re going to have around,’” he said.

He said he began to pick up more litter in town until the city asked him not to anymore. He said the city requires all workers and volunteers to be covered under workman’s compensation insurance, which required him to turn in the number of hours he worked. Well, a fellow volunteer told him he didn’t have to, so Rohde stopped turning in hours. A dispute between Rohde and the city ensued: Rohde said he was volunteering to save the city money; he said the city told him he had signed a contract to report his hours. It ended in his leaving the city’s program for adopting parks, he said. Now, he focuses on cleaning up the walkway between Stillman Park and the Eighth Street bridge, an area adopted by his Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, along with the Round-Up Grounds themselves.

Rohde is not just a Pendletonian but also a world citizen. His passion for volunteerism goes back to time spent in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. The service took him to Germany, Australia, Spain, Vietnam, Japan and Saudi Arabia — just to name a few of the foreign locales under his belt.

He served from 1980 to 1992 as a cargo loadmaster in a C-141 Starlifter, a massive military plane with four jet engines.

“You go so many places, you see how the rest of the world lives,” he said. “It gives you the feeling you can do a little more than what the world requires.”

How does volunteering continue to shape him?

“I’m much more generous than I used to be,” he said.

Rohde worked with Pendleton High School to award his grandniece — Rohde’s divorced with three children — a scholarship upon her graduation, instead of just handing her money outright. And he didn’t stop there. His newfound generosity is evidenced by his continuing to give $2,000 in scholarships to female athletes with a 3.5 GPA or higher. One for $1,000, two for $500. He said he’ll continue to fund the scholarships for as long as he can.

This year’s $500 scholarships were given to graduating seniors Madison Kelm and Hannah Boozer, with the $1,000 scholarship going to Kiana Sperl, according to Anita Lewis, Pendleton High School’s athletic secretary. Lewis has known Rohde for roughly six years and chats with him at athletic events. “He’s a very generous and caring person,” she said.

Rohde “seems to love to help” student athletes, she said. She’s even seen him cleaning the Round-Up Grounds after football games.

Everyone has a past, but most everyone grows from it. If you spot a tall, thin man in aviators keeping the grounds and city clean, that’s probably Rohde. You might wave and thank him for his service.