The Homewood Star | July 2012 |
www.TheHomewoodStar.com
neighborly news & entertainment for Homewood
Volume 2 | Issue 4 | July 2012
A Vietnam love story - pg 12
Distinguished Young Women- pg 8 All Star Baseball - pg 21
Ministry serves the pediatric cancer community
By CRAIG KLEIMEYER
January 6, 2009, forever changed life for the Thrower family. That day, 16-month-old Anderson was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. He had an enlarged stomach and a limp in his left leg, and later, he became completely lethargic. With his diagnosis, the Throwers found out that the cancer had spread to his spleen and his liver. Still, his parents Andy and Jan, and his older sister, Avery, kept faith. “We never really asked why,” Andy said. “We just said, ‘Let’s take care of this and get back to normal.’” During Anderson’s treatments, Andy and his family, Birmingham residents since 1999 and members of Shades Mountain Baptist Church, began to see the needs of
July Features July 4 events
7
Summer wines
9
Helen Cockrell
11
Les Nuby
13
Homewood Happenings
14
Business Spotlight
15
Food
16
The Bridges Studio
18
Lauren Denton
19
Sports
21
School House
22
Calendar of Events
26
families who found themselves living in the same difficult circumstances. “There were families around us with no support, so we tried to reach out and do things for them,” Andy said. “We asked ourselves, ‘How can we do more?’” And they definitely did more to help and inspire other families. Andy and Jan bought laptops for the oncology floor at Children’s Hospital of Alabama in order to help families have easy access to paying bills and keeping in touch with their families through a partnership with Legacy Community Credit Union. The computers also make it easier for kids to do schoolwork.
See aTEAM | page 19
Andy, Jan, Avery and Anderson Thrower have grown stronger as a family through Anderson’s battle with leukemia and through their Homewood-based ministry, aTeam ministries. Photo by Heather Durham.
Cycling to London
Paralympic cyclist Jennifer Schuble rides through Homewood from her Edgewood home to start her daily practice route. Photo by Madoline Markham.
By RICK WATSON
Pre-Sort Standard U.S. Postage PAID Birmingham, AL Permit #656
www.TheHomewoodStar.com
Jennifer Schuble is the fastest woman in Alabama on a bicycle. The International Cycling Federation agrees, and that’s why the Homewood resident was one of only five women in the world awarded a personal invitation to compete in cycling events at the 2012 Paralympics in London this summer. “This is by far the greatest honor of my life,” Schuble said. “This gives me the right to enter every race.” Other cyclists
who want to compete in the Paralympics must go through tryouts before earning a chance to compete. The U.S. Cycling team is rated the number one team in the world, but other countries hope to unseat the Americans. For the games, England has built a new velodrome, a fast indoor track that resembles a giant bowl with steep banks. It is supposed to be the fastest in the world, and Schuble can’t wait to get on it.
A Father and Sons Operation Mon-Thur: 7-7 Fri: 7-6:30, Sat: 9-4 1915 Oxmoor Rd. • 871.6131 hunterscleaners@gmail.com
Schuble wasn’t like some kids who began preparing for the Olympics at a very early age, though she was involved with sports for most of her life. She was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in Houston, where she played soccer, ran track and rode bicycles in high school. It wasn’t until much later when life threw her a curve that she took a turn down a path to the Paralympics. Schuble actually wanted to become an astronaut and decided to attend West Point. She didn’t have a congressional nomination out of high school, so she had to attend the service academy prep program at Marion Military Institute in West Alabama to qualify for West Point. But not long after she arrived at West Point, she sustained a traumatic injury to her brain during hand-to-hand combat training. “I did a flip and hit my head against a log,” she remembered. She spent the summer at Walter Reed Medical Hospital doing rehabilitation. After she returned to training, she sustained a second, career-ending head injury. There was a mysterious lesion on her brain they couldn’t identify, and she wound up with a medical discharge. Several years later in 2004, she discovered that she had multiple sclerosis. Looking back, she realized the lesion on her brain was probably MS-related. The medical discharge allowed her to go to college. She wanted to do something
See Cycling | page 9
We Love Homewood Hunter Payne and sons Winston and Collier