Sarah Sebring Binder ’77: Author, educator, lifelong adventurer

Sarah Sebring Binder ’77 loves children’s books. The former elementary school teacher has been reading them all her life and writing them since she attended Cornell.

These books are often the pathway for children learning to read, a process Binder calls  “magical.”

“I love seeing their interest in stories turn into the desire to read, then slowly, sound by sound, word by word it happens, until suddenly they can read; they can read almost anything. It’s thrilling.”

When she was growing up in Colorado and California, Binder always wanted to work with young children. She studied sociology and Spanish at Cornell, but wrote her first picture book in a children’s literature class. The instructor told her she would one day publish her work.

She kept writing throughout her career, which culminated with 25 years as principal and superintendent of the elementary school in the central Iowa village of Stratford. She found that job when her late husband, Brad, a research entomologist for USDA, took a position in Ames. 

“I had grown up and worked in large school systems, so I enjoyed being in a place where you seemed to know everyone. It was like Cornell: small school, small town,” said Binder, who endowed a scholarship at Cornell for first-generation students.

After retiring in 2017, she began writing more seriously and has published five books, with two more in the pipeline. They feature such creatures as a pack rat with a taste for earrings, a stow-away kitten, and an escaped parakeet. (For more, search Sarah’s full name on Amazon.com) She visits schools to read her books to young audiences, then donates her collection to the school.

Binder’s academic life is only part of her story. She has always been vigorously involved in sports and other activities. She met her husband when they were lifeguards at a community pool. She taught him to ski and they became weekend members of the ski patrol at resorts in Southern California. They skied, biked, hiked, rafted, and camped all over the West.

Binder has run more than a dozen marathons and half marathons. A breast cancer survivor, she has participated for 17 years in the grueling 60-mile, Three-Day Walk for the Cure, raising more than $40,000 for research. She’s one of 20 cancer-survivor paddlers on the dragon boat Life is Bliss, which has competed in races as nearby as Fort Dodge and as distant as New Zealand, taking home the gold a time or two.

She learned to play the fiddle at age 50 and now performs regularly at barn dances and weddings with the Onion Creek Band. When not fiddling, she dances: country dances, folk dances, and clogging.

She and Brad became certified master gardeners. When he died in 2016, she took over a public flower garden he had scratched out of the hard dirt in Ames. Prominent among the annuals is a scarlet plant called Red Hot Sally. “That’s his nickname for me,” Binder said. She calls the plot “Brad’s Garden” and always includes the Red Hot Sally. 

Dan Kellams ’58 is a former member of the Cornell College Alumni Association Board of Directors. His career spanned nearly 50 years in public relations in New York City, where he worked as a corporate and agency executive and, later, as a freelance writer and editor. He has written two books set in his hometown of Marion, Iowa.