Laurels and barbs

Laurel: Johnstown City Council passed a resolution to name the AAABA baseball field at Roxbury Park after well-known local coach David “Dee Dee” Osborne. Osborne, 74, managed Johnstown AAABA franchises to a combined 267 regular-season wins and four tournament appearances. At Greater Johnstown High School, he coached baseball for 25 years and notched 239 wins, including an upset of State College for the 1998 District 6 Class 3A title. He was a longtime scout for Cleveland’s Major League Baseball franchise. A list of former Osborne players includes many who went on to succeed at the collegiate and pro levels. “Dee Dee is baseball in Johnstown,” said Tom Walter, an MVP on Osborne’s Johnstown Junior League Pepsi-Cola team who now is the baseball coach at Wake Forest University.

Laurel: Bedford Area School District will honor six people – David Baer, William Creps, Douglas Kuhns, William Masterson, Norma Pyle and Mark Tennant – at its Hall of Excellence event on March 30 at the Bedford High School auditorium. Baer is a 1971 Bedford graduate who has worked as a family doctor in the area for nearly 40 years. Creps is a 1956 graduate and U.S. Army veteran who taught math in the district for 33 years and coached track, wrestling and football. Kuhns, a 1972 graduate, works at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research and frequently talks to students in Bedford’s AP Biology classes. Masterson, the first man to teach at Bedford Elementary School, created the school safety patrol and refereed basketball and football games for 25 years. Pyle, a 1953 graduate, worked for many years as a third-grade teacher and in the gifted education program. Tennant is a 1979 graduate who created The Arrow Child and Family Ministries foster care and adoption organization.

Barb: A survey of of western Pennsylvanians who live near the site of a Feb. 3 toxic train derailment just over the Ohio state border found that more than eight in 10 respondents have reported experiencing at least one adverse health symptom since the accident. The most common symptoms are headaches, anxiety, and ear, nose and throat issues, Dr. Debra Bogen, acting secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, said on Tuesday during a joint public hearing of the Pennsylvania House Democratic and Republican Policy Committees in Beaver County, about seven miles from the derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio. Bogen said 143 people had completed the survey as of Sunday. While survey data will be studied for patterns to further explore, Bogen stopped short of drawing any scientific or medical conclusions.

Laurel: Julie Beall- McKelvey, owner of Miracle- Ear hearing aid franchises in Richland Township, Somerset, Ebensburg and across Pennsylvania, is preparing for a two-month climb of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. If she succeeds, Everest’s will be the sixth summit that Beall-McKelvey, 54, of Camp Hill, Cumberland County, has reached in her quest to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. So far, she has conquered Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, Mount Elbrus in Europe, Mount Aconcagua in South America, Mount Vinson in Antarctica and Denali in North America, and she’s already planning a post-Everest trip with her family to Mount Kosciuszko in Australia.

Barb: The Bishop McCort Catholic High School hockey team’s season ended abruptly when team leaders discovered that a player who skated in the Crimson Crushers’ March 7 Penguins Cup quarterfinal win over Greater Latrobe was ineligible to play. Principal Tom Smith said that the player was listed in team statistics as appearing in 10 regular-season games, the minimum required to be eligible for the Penguins Cup playoffs, but later it was found he’d only appeared in nine. Smith said the Crushers would forfeit the game to Greater Latrobe.

Laurel: Northern Cambria early childhood education center Small Town Hope has earned a third Keystone STAR – the state’s quality rating and improvement system for care centers through its Office of Child Development and Early Learning. Founder and CEO Mandi Paronish saw the recognition as validation of her employees’ hard work. “We’re finally able to prove the good work that we’re doing,” she said.

Laurel: Bishop McCort Catholic High School wrestlers Alyssa Favara and Jordyn Fouse won state titles in the girls’ 170-pound and 130-pound weight classes, respectively, on Sunday in Harrisburg. The Crimson Crushers finished second as a team. It came shortly after Greater Johnstown’s Sayona Harris-Haye captured gold in the girls’ 135-pound bracket on March 5 at the Pennsylvania Junior Wrestling Junior High State Championships in Johnstown.