Congratulations to the participants of the 7th annual Ambridge Rotary Club district wide 3rd grade spelling Bee held at Economy Elementary School.
Each third-grade classroom in the three elementary schools held a spelling competition then sent their top two spellers  per class to the district-wide spelling bee held Wednesday at Economy Elementary. 

To prepare for the competition, the Ambridge Rotary donated personal dictionaries to each student in third grade.  

A total of 16 students advanced to the district-wide spelling bee and all spellers who participated received a medal.  The top tow spellers received trophies along with metals. 

First place took home two additional prizes: a gift from Kasper Hahn Funeral Home and an invitation from the Rotary 7300 District Governor to attend the  Rotary regional spelling bee held at Seven Springs Mountain Resort in June.

Congratulations to Highland Elementary's  Benjamin Francis on winning the spelling bee and Lauren Mealie who placed second.

...to Donna Durick and her entire family on the passing of her mother, Florence DiClemente, on Feb. 14

 and

...to Debbie Kmit and Dick’s entire family on his passing on Feb. 18. Dick was recently one of our Honorary 

Members but had been a very active member for many years.

(mostly for the benefit of our newer members-we oldies remember some of these things)...about how our 

club started to make and sell funnel cakes. More than 30 years ago, when we still met for Monday evening 

dinners at the Ambridge Country Club, then member and perennial song leader, “Big Joe” Rosenberger, 

(we sang several songs at every meeting and had lot’s of fun doing it), suggested that we start to do funnel 

cakes as a fundraiser. For years, we had been packaging apples and selling them but they got too expensive 

and the profit was no longer there. 

Joe and his wife went to Manheim, PA, quite often and saw the Pennsylvania Dutch folks doing their funnel 

cakes. His idea caught on and he brought back cases of two pound bags of Funnel Cake Powder mix for us 

to use. Nationality Days was our first venture and we used a tent and three borrowed tabletop deep fryers 

(the kind you can make French Fries in at home). As you can imagine, production was rather slow.

For the following year it was decided that we needed a booth of some kind. Under the planning and 

direction of our member, Jerry Steinmetz, we constructed, inside a building at Ohio Valley Lumber Co.

(thanks to club members, Jim Schell, Sr., and his son, Bill Schell), a wooden booth in which we could do 

our Funnel Cakes. It was designed so that we could put it together and then take it apart, after the event, for 

storage. We did that one time and realized that it way too much work. For the next year we put wheels on it 

and pulled it away instead of hauling it away in pieces. 

We used that for several years and then Whitey Mikush and several others, including Phil Trapold, came 

up with the idea of getting a custom aluminum trailer built (the one we still have). When that was completed 

and in our hands we decided to give the wooden booth/trailer to Crime Solvers of Beaver County. They 

were very grateful and used it at events for a number of years.

The tabletop fryers went away when Whitey stepped in and came across the bigger, much deeper ones that 

we used for many years. Whitey also found that we could get ready-made, powdered Funnel Cake mix, in 

50 pound bags, locally. No more two pound bags of mix or trips down East. 

As we all know, we are still making Funnel Cakes at six or more events every year but now you know the 

rest of the story as to how this all came about.​​

Written by PDG Walt Sickles
​
As has previously been reported, there were only 359 new cases in 2014 and only 74 new cases in 2015 (54

in Pakistan and 20 in Afghanistan). So far, as of Feb.10, only 1 new case has been reported - in Pakistan. 

We must, however, keep up the inoculations in order to completely end this horrific disease.