Military category added to MHS HOF

The St. Marys Memorial High School Alumni Foundation recently approved establishing a new category for its MHS Hall of Fame program — Military Service to Country. The category will recognize military servicemen and women who attended and/ or graduated from St. Marys City Schools and served with distinction in the U.S. military.

The Alumni Committee received the suggestion of adding a new category to its Hall of Fame program from 2020 MHS graduate, Rebecca Dominguez.

Dominguez founded the Honoring Hometown Heroes program that has put up almost 500 veteran banners in St. Marys over the past three years.

During that process, she learned a lot about local servicemen and women who performed heroic and courageous acts in service to their

country.

In addition to the veteran banners, Dominguez began a daily post recognizing a different veteran every day on the program’s Facebook page and often researched the veteran’s service to find out more about what they did.

Before leaving for Duke University in August, the committee said in its release that Dominguez wanted to share her idea with the Alumni Foundation and the committee was unanimous in its support and voted to establish the category for this year’s Class of 2020 Hall of Fame in-duction.

To do this, the com-mittee received files from Hometown He-roes with information about local veterans, ranging from service in World War II to current military servicemen and women who have served with distinction.

The Alumni Foun-dation will announce their Class of 2020 Hall of Fame selection soon, as well as the names of other Hall of Fame in-ductees.

The MHS Alumni Foundation established the Hall of Fame pro-gram in 2007, and has inducted 27 persons in the categories of Aca-demic/Professional Achievement, Athletic Achievement and Ser-vice to St. Marys City Schools.

After being idle for a few years, the founda-tion inducted members with a reformed advi-sory committee with a slate of events and sup-port from St. Marys City Schools last year.

The foundation in-ducted Donald E. Thomas, Jr., M.D. for academic/professional achievement, Mr. Rob-ert G. Vogel for athletic achievement and the late Mr. Albert J. “Prof” Kohler for service to SMCS.

Some past inductees include Floyd Keith, El-don Montague, Frank Dennings, Jack Lawler, Ronda Shelby and Galen Cisco. The new category

EL file photo The Memorial High School Hall of Fame Class of 2019 was inducted during last year’s home-opener football game. After a few years’ hiatus, the Hall of Fame made its return last year and will expand this year.