New meaning to ‘business promotion’
Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel of the U.S. Army will speak this morning as part of Hampshire High School's Veterans Day celebrations. He'll have to hurry back out of town by mid-afternoon. But it will be just a taste of his Hampshire-visiting this season. His father, John Fenzel, says "the kid" will return some time over the Christmas holidays and will be promoted to full bird colonel during a ceremony in his father's Hampshire car showroom, with his brother, Col. John Fenzel III, doing the honors.
Michael Fenzel entered the service in 1989 after graduating from Johns Hopkins University and its Reserve Officers Training Corps program. A combat vet of Desert Storm, Liberia, Bosnia, Iraq 2003 (where he dropped into the desert by parachute) and two tours in Afghanistan, he's now studying national security and counterterrorism at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
"He didn't even want to stay in the Army at first," his proud dad says. "But as he was approaching college age, my mom and dad were sick, and Chrysler was going through some tough times. I said, 'You need a scholarship.' So he went into ROTC. I said he should at least stay in until he became a captain, because that would make it easy for him to find a job."
Sounds like he did find a job — helping people "become all they can be" in the U.S. Army.
Slugger speaks
Speaking of HHS speakers, 2006 Hampshire High grad and future Major League Baseball star Jake Goebbert will be back in the area Sunday to give a talk about "The Role of Faith in Sports" at Cornerstone Church, on Russell Road just east of Muirhead Road in Plato Center. He will speak at both of the church's services, at 8:45 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.
The son of the folks who run Goebbert's Pumpkin Patch, Goebbert attended college before being drafted by the Houston Astros in the 13th round of the 2009 major league draft. Last summer, he played Single A ball for the Astros' Tri-City Valley Cats in Troy, N.Y.
Police not moving
When the Hampshire Police Department moved into the industrial park along Industrial Drive in 2004, that arrangement was expected to be just temporary until a new village hall/police station could be built on former Crown property near the southwest corner of State Street and Allen Road.
But with practically no village fees coming in from the used-to-be-booming home builders, construction of that municipal building is nowhere in sight. So last week the village board extended its lease on the Industrial Drive space for another three years. The cops are tenants of Northwest Contractors Inc., which occupies the other half of the building. The village will pay $3,640 a month in 2010, going up 3 percent a year after that.
