A Peoples Person Sandy Peoples has devoted nearly 40 years to the mortgage banking industry, but she has spent more than 60 years answering her true calling: to help others. Sandy, born and raised in Kingston, Pennsylvania, started in the mortgage business right after high school. At age 20, she decided to attend college to study marketing and has had a fascination with the human science behind marketing ever since. “Years ago, it was sell, sell, sell,” she said. “Then it was advertise. Now it’s influence people so they want to buy your product. I like to find out what they want and need.” Sandy specialized in selling things people couldn’t see: loans and mortgages. “I was marketing the invisible,” she said, “but I found ways to help people understand the features of a loan and whether it benefited them or not.” She worked in the Washington, D.C., area and many of her clients were transplants from other parts of the country. The housing market there led to sticker shock for people from small towns, and having moved from southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., Sandy could relate. “Your first duty was to calm them down and help them figure out how to live there,” she said. “I really 14
Fall 2020 Issue
loved helping people and getting them into a home. Sometimes they were staying in a hotel and had a week to find a house, and it was a lot of stress for them. I got a lot of pleasure from making it happen.” As Sandy advanced in her career to where she was managing a region from Maine to Florida, she spent more time in an office and less time with customers. She realized it was beyond her “want and need level.” She retired, and she and her husband of 50 years, Arthur, a retired federal agent, moved back to Pennsylvania in 2000, where she quickly found ways to continue to fulfill her desire to help others. She volunteered with Rotary, the area food pantry, the local library and as deacon at her church, and she worked as a photographer and writer for the “Back Mountain Community News.”
“One opportunity just evolved into the other,” Sandy said. “When I get too busy, I ask myself, ‘Have you fulfilled your dream yet?’” She and her husband officially joined the Dallas Rotary Club 19 years ago, but Sandy has considered herself a Rotarian since age 5, thanks to her father. One of her earliest memories is of her father asking her and her sister to help
