Lewis To Be Featured Speaker At Sports Banquet

Reitz High School Football coach Tony Lewis will be the featured speaker for the West Side Nut Club's annual Sports Banquet on Tuesday March 2nd at Kokies. Lewis is a graduate of South Putnum High School and went on to play quarterback at Ohio Northern University. Lewis' career was cut short when he tore a muscle in his throwing shoulder, but football was in his blood and as his playing career ended his coaching career started. "I started my coaching career my senior year in college when my old high school coach asked me to volunteer coach at Indianapolis Pike.

Ron Ryan Executive director started off his presentation by saying that “you guys (West Side Nut Club) are the best”   In December of 2009 The Boys and Girls Club of Evansville celebrated their 52^nd year of existence.  “For 50 years we warehoused in an 1894 school house”  Ryan went on to talk about how the West Side Nut Club helped with the old gym by repairing the floor and providing new basketball goals.  “Before we tore down the old building, the basketball goals you put up in our old facility are now at Mater Dei.  There were a lot of people who did things at our old building and we didn’t want those things to go down with the ruble so that is why the goals are now at Mater Dei”

Over the years the West Side Nut Club has donated over $75,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Evansville and the Nut Club members hve donated thousands of hours fixing and sprucing up various items at the Boys and Girls Club.

While planning on a new building for the Boys and Girls Club of Evansville Ryan says that they “ran a five million dollar campaign to build this facility and put some in the bank to sustain this facility.  We didn’t go out and hire outside people to tell us how to run our campaign which a lot of organizations do, we just did it!  We went knocking on doors, sitting down with CEO’s of companies.  We did not have to borrow one penny to build our new facility.”

With the expansion of Berry Plastics, The Boys and Girls Club was in a good position to build a new building at new location.  “With Berry and Deaconess and all the building they were doing there were more and more kids that had to rely on being dropped off and for a lot of our kids, they cannot rely on anybody at their house, they rely on our staff.  So we looked at where we needed to go and where were the most kids.  We had three different options and we chose to go across from Lincoln School and we looked at the census and there were 2800 more kids within a mile of our facility than there were at the Illinois St. location”

Did you miss the Main Parade sponsored by Proliance Energy or just want to see it again, well now you can.

As soon as the signal to close down was given, members of the west Side Nut Club went into action.  It started with the electrical committee working through the night disconnecting the 126 food booths that lined West Franklin Street.