COLLEGE SIGNINGS
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Your Community Press newspaper Serving Price Hill and Covedale E-mail: pricehillpress@communitypress.com
Volume 83 Number 7 © 2010 The Community Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Web site: communitypress.com
B E C A U S E C O M M U N I T Y M AT T E R S
We d n e s d a y, F e b r u a r y 1 0 , 2 0 1 0
Panthers signed letters of intent to pursue collegiate athletics.
kbackscheider@communitypress.com
Most people only think of food pantries during holidays. But the Holy Family Food Pantry has needs all year. – FULL STORY, A4
Scholarship concert
A concert benefiting the Sue Ruehl Memorial Fund will be performed Feb. 12 at Our Lady of Victory’s convocation center featuring the band DV8. – FULL STORY, A6
One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Seton High School art students discovered there is some truth to that saying. Freshmen through seniors in Seton’s art club presented The Junk Fashion Show for the rest of the student body Tuesday, Feb. 2, showing off designs they created from old magazines and newspapers, plastic bags and other materials typically found in the trash. “It’s an annual project,” said junior art student Alli Eberle. “The objective is to create an outfit or dress out of recyclable materials.” Eberle teamed up with fellow juniors Chelsea Boles and Jordyn Klumpp to design and make an evening gown out of plastic bags, coffee filters and newspaper. Boles said they worked on their design for about five days, piecing together all the different aspects of the dress on their own time after school. “We designed ours to look like
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a wedding dress,” she said. Eberle added, “Only more extravagant.” Seton art teacher Margie Metz said this is the fourth straight year she’s asked her students to take part in the recycled dress project. She said for the past three years students have presented their projects at the spring art show later in the year, but this year she decided to have her students put on a fashion show for the whole school during Catholic Schools Week. “This project is solely for extra credit. The students don’t get a grade at all,” Metz said. “It’s all for the fun of it.” She said most of the students started brainstorming ideas and working on the project in November. One student went to the Target in Western Hills before the holidays and asked if she could have their old and expired gift cards. The store saved a bunch of old gift cards for the student and she made an entire outfit out of them, she said. “She was planning this for
TONY JONES/STAFF
Colleen O’Brien, left, makes some final adjustments to her design before Sydney Vollmer models at The Junk Fashion Show.
months,” Metz said. “And she saved a lot of plastic gift cards from getting tossed into the trash.” Boles, Eberle and Klumpp said it was fun to work together as a team and help each other bring out their creativity. “It’s fun to do something that doesn’t have to be on paper,” Klumpp said. “There was a great 3-D element to this.”
Scholarship honors Marine veteran kbackscheider@communitypress.com
Got a clue where this is? We didn’t think so. Time to go hunting in the neighborhood to see if you can find it. Send your best guess to pricehill press@communitypress.com or call 853-6287, along with your name. Deadline to call is noon Friday. If you’re correct, we’ll publish your name in next week’s newspaper along with the correct answer. See last week’s answer on B5.
TONY JONES/STAFF
Andrea Book is dressed in painted plastic bags in The Junk Fashion Show presented by students in Seton High School’s art club.
By Kurt Backscheider
Red eyes
50¢
Seton students turn junk into dresses
By Kurt Backscheider
Filling the pantry
PRESS
Bill Deters said it’s hard to find a better representative of Elder High School’s class of 1966 than Henry J. Mueller III. Deters said Mueller, who goes by Hank among family and friends, is one of those genuinely nice guys who gets along with everyone. “He’s just such a fine person,” Deters said. “Hank always has a real positive outlook about life.” And considering Mueller’s story, one could understand if his disposition wasn’t so cheery. Mueller was a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. He was blinded as the result of mortar wounds he suffered when his squad was trying to rescue other Marines trapped on Hill 881 in Vietnam. A mortar landed at his feet and fragments hit him in both eyes, his chest, his head, his left hand and arm. His squad leader ran through the barrage of mortar and pulled Mueller to safety. The squad leader then ran back up the hill and was killed. Doctors in Vietnam didn’t think Mueller would survive, but he clung to life as he was flown to a Navy hospital in Japan and then to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, D.C. He was still in critical condition in Bethesda when he was awarded the Purple Heart. Mueller said his Catholic upbringing and his teachers at Elder, who served as examples of how a man should act, gave him the foundation and faith he needed to get through that difficult time in his life. “Hank is an inspiration to anyone who knows him,” said Deters, a fellow 1966 Elder graduate who now lives in North Bend. “He’s still the same nice guy he was in high school. That’s just who he is, and you wouldn’t expect that with what he’s been through.” After being medically discharged from the Marines, Mueller went back to school and earned his degree in religious studies. He now lives in Ocala, Fla., with his wife and three daughters and works as a lay minister. Deters said he and about eight other of Mueller’s friends from high school still get together for reunions, at Mueller’s request,
More info Those who want to learn more about donating to the scholarship fund can call Elder at 921-3744. Checks made payable to the Hank Mueller/Elder ‘66 Veterans Scholarship Fund can be mailed to Elder High School, 3900 Vincent Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45205. once or twice a year when he visits Cincinnati. He said this past summer the group of friends decided they should do something to honor Mueller, so they established a scholarship in his name at Elder. “He’s a tremendous fan of Elder and he’s a strong advocate for military veterans,’ Deters said. “We knew Hank wouldn’t accept a gift, so we came up with the scholarship idea. It’s great for him and it’s great for the students who will take advantage of it,” Deters said. The group of friends sent letters to all their classmates and organized a fundraiser at Jim & Jack’s On the River. In only three months they raised more than $15,000 for the Hank Mueller/Elder ‘66 Veterans Scholarship Fund. Mueller was in town this past October and Elder recognized the scholarship being established in his name during a presentation at halftime of a football game in the Pit. “It was a real honor and a spiritual experience,” Mueller said. “I used to live across the street from the Pit when I came home from the war, so it was a real once-in-a-lifetime experience to be down on that field.” He said after the war he would often walk over to the empty stadium, sit down on the concrete grandstands and look toward the school. Even though he couldn’t see the building, he said he could remember the way it looked in his mind and he thought of all he men who graduated from Elder before him. “Whether they became police officers, firefighters, doctors, lawyers or medics, you know they all carried that Elder spirit with them whenever they went out into the world,” he said. “It’s a real blessing to be a graduate of Elder High School.”
PROVIDED
Henry J. Mueller III, center, a 1966 graduate of Elder High School, is recognized by fellow classmate Ken Barnhorst, left, and Elder principal Tom Otten, right, at halftime of a home football game this past October. Mueller, a Marine veteran who lost his sight when he was wounded in the Vietnam War, had a scholarship named in his honor at Elder. Mueller said he’s honored to have been chosen to represent the class of 1966, the veterans who have graduated from Elder and especially his four classmates who were killed in combat in Vietnam. He said he is so grateful to his friends for thinking of him and naming a scholarship after him, and he’s proud the scholarship will give other young men the opportunity to obtain the same foundation he did as a teenager. “It’s a beautiful feeling,” he said. Deters said their goal is to grow the scholarship fund to at least $30,000, which would allow Mueller to designate who the recipient should be. The idea is to award the scholarship to an Elder student who is the son or grandson of a military veteran. Those who want to learn more about donating to the fund can call Elder at 921-3744. Checks made payable to the Hank Mueller/Elder ‘66 Veterans Scholarship Fund can be mailed to Elder High School, 3900 Vincent Ave., Cincinnati, OH 45205.