G Address Service Requested GUNNISON±ALLEY Presorted Standard U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 11 Gunnison, UT ECRWSS aroot eda•teteetAfit Weeudizelfzeti 32296 e Volume 7 • Number 25 Thursday, June 23, 2011 2 Copy Price • One dollar July 4th: 'Our Heritage of Service' ligill11111111:111110.111.1.1111.1.1 Senior Citizen Yard Sale Sat June 25 @ Old Fire Station 9 am to 3 pm FREE BRITISH SOCCER CLINIC! Wed June 29th Ephraim West Fields Just show up with a soccer ball and the British Soccer coaches will be there to run their amazing sessions! 5-6 pm • 4-8 year olds 6-7 pm • 9+ year olds Patriotic Fireside Sun July 3 • 7 pm Gunnison Stake Center the speaker will be LT COL Jay Hess, USAF a Viet Nam POW I Del Mar Higham Dean Malmgren Afton Hanson Sheldon Watts Elwood Sorenson Celebration honors Valley's oldest veterans By JOHN HALES GUNNISON—Gunnison's Fourth of July celebration will call to mind not only those founding patriots of 1776 who set this country on a road to freedom and independence, but also those brave souls ever since—also patriots—who have kept it there. Highlighting the celebration's theme this year, "Our Heritage of Service," the annual parade will feature not one grand marshal, but five: the oldest living veteran from each of the Gunnison Valley's five communities—Gunnison, Centerfield, Mayfield, Fayette and Axtell. "Most of these have served in World War II," said Gunnison City Councilman Larry Jensen, who oversees the city's annual Independence Day extravaganza and currently serves as the city's Fourth of July Committee chairman. Jensen said the committee's idea this year was, "Let's have five grand marshals that represent the whole valley. It's just something to pull the whole valley together." Del Mar Albert Higham (Gunnison), Dean Malmgren (Centerfield), Afton Hanson (Mayfield), Sheldon Watts (Fayette) and Hartley Elwood Sorenson (Axtell) are those grand marshals. Each one is the oldest living veteran in his respective community. Brief biographies of the men's service to their country during the second world war are written below. The idea for five veterans to lead the celebration and its parade came out of a plan to honor each and every one of Gunnison Valley's veterans from the Blackhawk War to the current conflicts in the Middle East. The Gunnison and Centerfield posts of the American Legion joined together earlier this year in a request to update and remodel Gunnison's veterans memorial monument. "Every year we do this auction with a dinner, and somebody comes in and wants to do the auction," Councilman Jensen explained. "It's been the Lions Club, the firemen, or whoever wants to raise money for the community." American Legion officials asked to host the auction this year in order to raise funds for the new memorial. Gunnison City gave the okay. But committee members went a step further. "We thought, "Let's create a theme having to do with veterans and people serving," Jensen said. Our Heritage of Service was born as this year's theme. And then, Jensen said, "We thought, 'Well, the American Legion is doing the auction and doing this memorial, and with all the servicemen serving their See VETERANS, Page 2 John Hales/Gunnison Valley Gazette The Sanpitch dragon went under water last Wednesday when the river went over the top of the river walkway retaining wall. It could be a week or two before the water will begin to recede. Hill receives Influential Women in Scouting award By JOHN HALES GUNNISON—Lucele Hill has four sons. She has several grandsons. And probably, at age 92, a few great-grandsons. But she has a kind of progeny that goes way, way beyond that. Any boy or young man during the last 60 years who has benefited from the scouting program in Gunnison has Hill to thank for it. They can trace their scouting genealogy to the day in 1955 when Hill almost singlehandedly brought local scouting back from the proverbial dead. That contribution, as well as many others over the following five decades, was recognized by the Boy Scouts' Utah National Parks Council last month, when the council bestowed Hill with its Influential Women in Scouting Award for 2011. Talk about "influential"— how does one calculate the lasting influence of six decades of preparing boys to become men? "[Lucele] has been directly involved with over 200 Eagle Scouts. Lucele's love of scouting has encouraged Scouts and leaders for many years. Lucele has lived and promoted the ideals of scouting," stated a citation read aloud at the award presentation on May 20. According to local scouting leader Nancy Peterson, who also sits on the Utah National Parks Council Board, is intended to "recognize women who have served in the scouting program, and maybe haven't been on council committees and stuff like that, but have quietly worked for years and years and years behind the scenes to make sure the boys have a good program." That certainly describes Lucele Hill. In the mid-1950s, scouting in Gunnison had floundered and had been inactive for a while. At the time, Hill said, even the most recent Eagle Scout was by then a grown man. Hill, who had just moved to Gunnison from Hatch, was concerned there was no program for her sons. She, even as a young girl, had grown up with scouting, and knew its value. "When cub scouting first started, my dad got involved," she said. He would ride all day by horseback between Hatch and Beaver to participate in the only scout leader training around. At the time, Hill's father didn't even have his own sons as a reason to be so involved. "He had a houseful of girls. People would ask him why he was involved in scouting when all he had was girls, and he said, `Girls many boys.' It meant something to me because it meant so much to him." Lucele had been involved in scouting—boy scouting, though not cub scouting—in Hatch prior to moving to Gunnison, becoming a registered leader there in 1951. She says she hounded local LDS leaders in Gunnison to get scouting going again. First it was the Boy Scouts, then Cub Scouts She remembers, "They said, 'We've never done cub scouts, we don't know what to do.' And I said, 'Well I've never done it either, but we'll learn what to do.'" She did. Through the years, several Cub Scout dens came and went. A mother with a cubscout son would become a den mother, then would quit when her son "graduated." Mothers of left-over scouts would ask Hill if their sons could join her den. She always relented. "I didn't have room in my house for all those boys," she says, so she asked permission to use a room in the LDS church building. She made sure her 11year-old Cub Scouts had all the skills to skip right past the ourtesy oto Lucele Hill with Utah National Parks Council members at her awards ceremony. Tenderfoot and Second Class ranks to be First Class Scouts as soon as they graduated from cubs to Scouts. "It was a lot of hard work," she says, but it's easy to tell she's proud of it. Not unexpectedly, all four of her sons are Eagle Scouts. Did they have much of a choice otherwise? "Not really," she says with good-natured humor. Nine of her grandsons are also Eagle Scouts. And, she says, "I have kept track of all the boys that I have done Eagle awards for." In addition to being a den and troop leader, she was the secretary for Pack 563 in Gunnison and was a member of the local advancement committee to oversee the awarding of the Eagle Scout rank. She received the Silver Fawn award, equivalent to the Silver Beaver—scouting's highest award for service at the council level—back when the awards were differentiated according to gender (now, the Silver Beaver is given to both males and females). Hill continued with scouting until it wasn't physically feasible because of declining eyesight. "I've just enjoyed the scouting program," she says. "It's been a good experience. We used to have a lot of fun."