Nine Hilliard St. Brendan Church parishioners who are members of Scouts BSA Troops 859 and 148 have spent hundreds of hours of their own time and recruited others to assist them in completing projects to benefit their parish and school while also enabling them to earn the rank of Eagle Scout, the highest honor in Scouting.
They are among 28 Scouts from St. Brendan Church who have earned Eagle rank since 2019. Nineteen of them are from Troop 859, which is sponsored by the church and in 2022 received the Bishop’s Troop honor from the diocesan Catholic Committee on Scouting, recognizing the unit as the outstanding parish-sponsored troop in the Diocese of Columbus.
St. Brendan’s other Eagles are from Troop 148, sponsored by Hilliard United Methodist Church, and Troop 814, sponsored by Scioto Ridge United Methodist Church.
Young men (and since 2018, young women) can be members of a Scout troop from age 10 until they become 18, so they have eight years to become Eagles, but it takes most recipients until close to their 18th birthday to achieve the honor because of the effort involved.
“I love celebrating 18th birthdays with Scouts, which I’ve done many times,” said Rick Vah, who is in his third year as Troop 859 scoutmaster. “There’s lots of paperwork involved, and that’s generally what keeps Eagle projects from being completed until the last minute.”
Before becoming Eagles, Scouts must attain six lower ranks – Scout, Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star Scout and Life Scout – by earning merit badges for various activities. An Eagle Scout also must be a troop officer for at least six months and complete a project of benefit to the community.
Eagle Scouts must have earned at least 21 merit badges, including 13 in required fields. The Scouts BSA national office says only about 6 percent of the nation’s 1.2 million Scouts reach Eagle status. This makes Troop 859’s record in recent years especially remarkable, because it currently has 24 members and is the home of 19 recent Eagle Scouts, several of whom have “aged out” of Scouting since becoming Eagles.
“We don’t push Scouts to become Eagles,” Vah said, “Our Eagles wanted to earn their rank because they saw that our church had a lot of things they could do as part of the recent expansion which unified the church and school into one building. Others saw areas at Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park, where we do a lot of our camping, and at other parks where they could fill needs.
“We are fortunate to have a group of Scouts who are enthusiastic about being leaders, as well as younger Scouts who want to follow their example and take their turn at leading when the time comes and get good feedback from the older ones. Our accomplishments don’t have anything to do with anything I did, but with what they did.”
The first Scout to achieve Eagle rank recently for work he did at St. Brendan Church was Zane Torbert, who had his Eagle court of honor on July 29, 2021. His project involved landscaping and wall repair at Wellnitz Hall, named for the parish’s first pastor, Father Michael Wellnitz. The building was completed in 1957 and included the parish’s first worship space, located in the basement, with a rectory upstairs.
It was converted into meeting rooms and office space after the current church was built in 1981. The most recent parish expansion in 2020 moved the offices to the church, with the Wellnitz Hall basement now used for storage and a kitchen area and the first floor consisting of meeting rooms.
“I asked Deacon Jim (Morris) for a couple of ideas and took it from there,” Torbert said. “I planted flowers along one fence and repaired a retaining wall.”
Wellnitz Hall also was the site of several other projects. Paul Roginski of Troop 859 renovated the hall’s storage space, painted walls, built shelves and labeled storage space. Troop 859 member Keegan Meloun built storage shelves, and Easton Kernosky of Troop 148 repaired the patio next to the building, in addition to doing landscaping and installing a garden box and two benches.
“I was one of the guys who celebrated my birthday with the scoutmaster,” Roginski said. “There weren’t any real issues involved with what I did. It was just a question of timing, with delays caused by COVID. I converted a couple of old bathrooms into storage spaces, patched holes in the walls and used plywood for the storage. Deacon Jim kept me on track by asking how the project was going.
“The intensive part of what I did on the patio was working with pavers which were about 1 ½ inches thick,” Kernosky said. “I got some leftovers from contractors, which helped. It also was important to reset all the paving to even everything out and eliminate high spots.”
Kernosky’s twin brother, Hayden, also of Troop 148, led a group that built an octagonal pit in the St. Brendan School playground for gaga ball, which is described as a kinder, gentler version of dodgeball. Gaga ball involves throwing a soft foam ball and trying to hit someone below the knees, with the winner being the last person not hit. Any number of people can play, and there are no restrictions on the size of the ball.
Triplets Thomas, Grant and John Rice performed different projects. Grant replaced boards on a railing, stained the railing and a fence protecting the parish’s heating, ventilating and air conditioning unit and built benches and trellises for the DiPietro Garden, named for Father Rodric DiPietro, pastor at St. Brendan from 2001 until his death in 2011.
“Most of the job was done during the summer, and I got it done in September,” Grant said. “Plants in the garden were growing in big pots. Having the trellises enables the plants to climb and makes the garden more attractive.”
John Rice cleared overgrowth, replaced fence pickets and power washed an area around Wellnitz Hall and a statue of St. Francis of Assisi and stained a fence. “The overgrowth, mostly ivy, was pretty disgusting,” he said. “It took from June to August to get it cleared. During that time, I uncovered about 20 boards which needed replaced, and that work was done. Now the ivy is growing back again, so this project will continue as one of constant maintenance.”
Thomas Rice led a crew that built a shrine for a statue of St. Sharbel Makhluf, which was donated to the parish by someone of Lebanese descent and is made of resin. St. Sharbel, who was 70 when he died in 1898, was a Maronite monk and priest from Lebanon. During his life, he gained a wide reputation for holiness and for his ability to unite Christians and Muslims. He was canonized in 1977.
The three Rice brothers are sophomores at Columbus St. Charles Preparatory School. The Kernosky twins are juniors at Columbus Bishop Ready High School.
Scout Graham Houser is a fan of LEGO building blocks and collected 53,000 of them, which he donated to the parish school. “I have a brother who’s an Eagle Scout, and I wanted to one-up him by doing something big and bold,” he said. I asked Mr. (Walt) O’Dell (Vah’s predecessor as scoutmaster) about it, and he knew I liked LEGOS, so he suggested something LEGO-related.
“I was going to send the blocks to a school in Kenya, but then COVID hit, so I decided to keep them closer to home.” The blocks have been separated by age and grade level and are being used by all the school’s classes from kindergarten to eighth grade for STEM-related projects.
COVID also delayed Tyler Engram in his efforts to place tent pads and hammock posts at campsites on the backpacking trail in Battelle Darby Creek Park. “I anticipated the project would take four months, and it took about 10,” he said. “In that period, the cost of lumber for the project went from $350 to $750 because of the pandemic.” Engram is now a sophomore at Capital University.
Other Troop 859 members who have performed Catholic-related Eagle projects include Layne Smith, who led construction of a patio for use at fish fries at London St. Patrick Church; Joseph Hite, whose crew repaired and replaced structures at Columbus Bishop Watterson High School; and Jack Whetstone, leader of a group building picnic tables and food storage shelves at Catholic Social Services’ Our Lady of Guadalupe Center in Columbus.
Alex Myron’s project involved expanding outdoor seating and building a picnic table for use of the congregation at Atonement Lutheran Church in Columbus, where a friend’s father is the pastor. “It’s a smaller church, and they appreciated having Scouts from another church help them,” he said. “They have a large field where kids play soccer and other games, and now there’s a place for them to sit and watch.”
The Eagle project for Andrew Flemming of Troop 814 was building a tower at Prairie Oaks Metro Park for the chimney swifts that fly through the area as part of their annual migration. He said the tower took two months to plan and one month to build, with the help of 13 people who put in a total of 150 hours on the project.
Other Troop 859 members who have become Eagle Scouts since September 2020 are Nathan Jamison, Vincent Cutrell, Gregory McGuire, Smith, Trevor Tarlton, Hite, Timothy Govenor, Malik Tarazi and Jahari Henry. Other Troop 814 members from St. Brendan who earned Eagle rank during that time were Nathan Ashbrook, Michael Bruggeman, Donald Search, Mark DeLeo, Kevin Bray and Jonah Halbisen.
Deacon Morris said Troop 859 was founded around 1993 or 1994, with Jim Dvorsky serving as scoutmaster for its first 10 years and Vic Ferdinand holding the same position from 2010 to 2017, when O’Dell succeeded him. Since its founding, about 40 of its members have become Eagles.
Deacon Morris would like to have those Eagles gather for a reunion twice a year to encourage other Scouts to follow their path. Eagle Scouts from the parish are invited to get in touch with him at [email protected].
